# Bitcoin Dominance, Tokenization Catalysts, and Macro Risks

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-05-04

## Transcript

There's just tons of these major bullish catalysts in the near future.
I think that this is something that people are discounting right now.
for the next leg up.
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Where's John?
John, get in here, man.
What's up?
Happy Monday, dude.
We're 80K, 80K.
We made it happen.
We made it happen.
We're talking about we did our little like a witch circle last week and it happened.
Look at us now.
Yeah, it happened.
It's happened, I think, three or four times so far that we've gotten to 80K, lost it and recovered it.
So that's a good sign.
The market seems to be holding its ground here.
We never touched 80.
We didn't touch 80 in any of the previous attempts at 79.
In the last like 24 hours, 48 hours.
Oh, like that.
Okay.
I thought you meant the last couple of weeks, man.
I thought you meant the last little bit.
Because if we just hit it, touched it, and then dropped to 75k immediately, that's a really strong rejection.
But the fact that we keep hitting 80k and keep touching it, we just touched it again recently, that's a strong sign that Bitcoin is pushing higher and not getting completely rejected outright on this retest.
So I'm cautiously optimistic for the moment.
I like to hear that.
A lot of people, I think like a couple of weeks ago, were painting this pattern, right?
Of like, look, like when we went down to 80K in November, right?
And people were doing these kinds of lines, right?
And then they would do it and they copy paste it for people on audio only.
I'm just showing the last, what do you, is this a bear flag?
Is that what people call that shit?
Where it like goes down and then goes up to the right.
Does this 45 degree angle to the right and then drops again.
Right.
So people were like, look at this, look at this shit.
Look at this thing.
Oh, it's going to be the same thing.
The same thing, the same stupid thing is going to happen after we, after we touched like 76 K back in like at a mid March, people were like, same thing.
And then it almost did went all the way back down to 65 K at the end of March, which I don't know, that was some more like war news or whatever the hell is going on.
But then it didn't happen.
And now we're kind of breaking out.
So would you say that we are John, would you say we're safe?
from like an extreme drawdown for the short term if you're doing your best ta no no i wouldn't say anything so far oh come on people want your opinion you have to tell me something i am telling you something i'm telling you we have not broken out of the range yet we are still just range bound we're trending higher we're going longer than most people thought where's the range bullish to me where's the range what's the range it's just this thing we're just this this zone i'm just cutting you off i'm asking you a question and just It all depends on how you draw your lines.
We have come through a couple of key resistances.
We just haven't, in my view, completely flipped bullish.
I will post...
a lot of crazy stuff when we actually do flip bullish if we do flip bullish but right now this is still a retest of the bear market resistance band this is still a bounce off of the low this until proven otherwise we're still in a bear market the rest of crypto the rest of digital assets are not following bitcoin higher others three hasn't broken out a lot of other things haven't broken out ethereum keeps hitting resistance at 2400 i'm Tilting bullish.
I think there's a lot of things in the near future that are catalysts for crypto, for Bitcoin that could push us into a bull market.
But for right now, we still haven't seen that major breakout come.
That could change.
But for right now, I'm just paying very close attention.
We're getting closer and closer to a decision point.
Like I said, I'm very encouraged by the recent strength of price action we've seen.
But until we actually break through some key levels, see some real momentum and volume come through and like a broad participation.
from other things in the asset class, it's still just retesting the highs.
And I'm not going to tell everybody to go nuts if I don't think we've completely broken out yet.
So that's just kind of where I am right now.
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Here's another chart I've been watching is the Bitcoin dominance chart, which is now well above 60%.
I think it closed.
Yeah, the last couple of days, like in the last week, it's closed above 60% for the first time in months.
Now might close.
If it closes here, if it stays around here today, then that'll be the highest close it's had since August in terms of Bitcoin dominance.
John, is that surprising to you that Bitcoin is outperforming here?
We had a discussion about this earlier in the short term, but that in this.
I guess kind of like long term, months long here, that Bitcoin is reclaiming dominance.
I guess you could spin it.
I think that's generally what you're going to see coming out of a bearish period in a bear market like this is that Bitcoin's dominance will rise because Bitcoin generally will lead the market or rise first.
So this isn't really surprising to me.
I think it's kind of a question at this point of like, do we kind of top out here around these levels or, you know, 61, 62?
Or do we go up to 65?
Because like I would like to see Bitcoin show some strength and then see.
the rest of the market begin to participate and outperform and see Bitcoin's dominance retreat a little bit.
But if we go back up to 65, you know, that means that maybe Bitcoin's doing well, the rest of the market's not doing so great.
So I wouldn't really necessarily love to see that, but I'm kind of okay with anything that happens that involves the prices going up at this point.
And that's usual, right?
Like that you see after like a bearish range, right?
And even you're looking at it, I guess kind of here last spring where you had this.
kind of crater and this is we're looking at bitcoin dominance i guess i gotta overlay this with um actual price action but if you look last april just over a year ago we're down here in the 70s mid 70s again right during the tariff crisis and then you've got a huge pop back up to all-time highs in the span of like 20 weeks uh and then I guess I got to overlay these.
I got to figure out how to do that.
I'm a very bad TradingView guy.
Anyways, what I'm just saying is that the Bitcoin dominance talked out well before it got to all-time high, which is clearly then, I guess you're telling me that all other coins kind of lag behind Bitcoin, but then once Bitcoin starts to move, maybe after a month or two, and I'm just reading the pattern from last year, if that bullish trend continues, then maybe the other tokens follow a little bit.
Correct.
That's the general flow of the crypto markets.
That's been the general pattern.
That'll hold until it doesn't, basically, is what I'll say about that.
But for more on Bitcoin dominance, I'm just going to refer everybody to Ben Cowan.
He is the Bitcoin dominance OG quant.
No, no, no, no.
We're going to put him out of business, Ben.
Listen to us now.
No.
Ben is the guy to go to for Bitcoin dominance analysis, for sure.
But I do think that that's generally what happens.
But see, in a bear market and a bull market, Bitcoin dominance can go up while Bitcoin is rising or falling.
It's all circumstantial.
You can't draw a clear distinction around these things.
But in general, I'm expecting Bitcoin dominance to show some strength if Bitcoin is leading the market higher.
And then hopefully we'll see Bitcoin dominance fall off as the rest of the market follows it higher and that goes up.
Now, Bitcoin dominance can go down while Bitcoin is still going up in nominal terms.
It just means that the rest of the market is kind of outperforming it.
But we'll see if that comes back.
Here it is.
I figured it out.
I figured out the chart, okay?
LG learns how to use TradingView for the first time.
He's six years in crypto.
He's never learned how to use, how to overlay a chart on TradingView.
Right.
So even, oh, look at this.
This is interesting.
Even last December.
Wait, listen.
Hey, listen, man.
Other than Bitcoin going up, we have to talk about something else.
But listen, last November when you had.
a massive massive pump in the bitcoin price dominance oh no no sorry i'm looking at the btc usd yeah okay so blue is the is our price chart um and then and then the actual candles are bitcoin dominance should kind of be the reverse but um when bitcoin dominance was at a low the prices were actually at an all-time high here uh which is pretty fascinating that's back in december 2024 josh is looking at this being like this is so irrelevant what you're saying you just let me know when you're done you let me know when you let me know yeah you gave the you gave the monkey a chainsaw and you're like yep keep trying to cut the tree man don't cut yourself though and then let me know when you're done i'll cut it down for you john okay well let's talk about this because you know what triggered me this morning is in our in our creator huddle and then even just a few minutes ago and i said look we got to start recording because you you started talking shit you were telling me you're like eth has outperformed bitcoin and you meant like a time frame of like 24 hours which i don't even know if that's true uh but clearly at the recent pump that's all if we look at your portfolio though john in milk road pro milk pro so sick pay a dollar you can see john's portfolio um in milk road pro you you your purchase price for bitcoin is like 66 and now it's up to 80 and for eth you have um wrap steak teeth it's like it hasn't even moved it's been like the same price since you bought it so i would say that in the last like two months bitcoin's a clear out performer store of value store value thesis there uh yeah look i'm i think what you're describing is exactly what we just talked about on the bitcoin dominance chart right bitcoin is going up right now because it's leading the market That eventually changes, I think.
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't really know if there's a question on all this.
My view on this is that I'm extremely bullish on both Bitcoin and Ethereum.
They're both long-term buy and holds for me.
There's different theses behind both of those assets and they're both strong.
And so I'm kind of patient with both of those.
um i'm i'm i think curious to see what happens with the eth btc ratio from here because it's um kind of in the middle of of an oscillation range that it has been in before so i'm curious to see if it drops down to the lower end of that range or if you know we kind of see this um hold its value against bitcoin and turn around and go oscillate back to the top of that range But we'll see.
Either way, I'm still kind of long-term bullish on both of those assets and comfortable to wait while the thesis plays out.
How do you feel about Caleb Franzen's tweet, who's your buddy, Caleb Franzen, who's been on this show and I think on the macro show a few times?
I'm just going to read it out.
So let me get this straight.
Bitcoin is making a new multi-month highs, making new multi-month highs, but ETH isn't, XRP isn't, SOL isn't, Silly isn't, BNB hype link, others are not.
Don't you find that interesting?
I guess we just talked about the last 10 minutes.
Yeah, I agree.
This is a very valid observation.
And this is kind of what I'm looking for.
I would like to see some additional breadth in the market to say that we have a crypto bull run as opposed to a Bitcoin bull run.
But for the most part, my view is that we've only seen a Bitcoin bull market, not a crypto bull market for the last four years.
gave me crap about this last week.
But I think that that's kind of what we're continuing to see here is that the market still is bullish on Bitcoin and for good reason, but the rest of crypto right now is not getting a lot of attention or investment of capital.
And that's okay, that'll change.
But like Caleb's just calling out for the moment that this rally is just a Bitcoin rally right now, but that can change.
Is Caleb, last time you spoke to him, is he bullish or bearish in this current period?
We're seeing some strength, and I think he's noted that.
And he bought, I think, a little bit around like $66K, I believe, somewhere in there.
But this is what I'm telling you, too.
I'm very bullish to see this recent strength of price, but we haven't seen a breakout.
So nobody's flipped outright bullish yet.
Well, not nobody.
Some people are.
Some people are always bullish.
But I think that's where Caleb is.
He's still waiting for Bitcoin to prove itself and get back above some of these resistances and moving averages that it just hasn't yet.
So we're just all watching at this point.
Okay, my last question for you as I kind of like pepper you with alt-season hints, questions about alt-season.
If we did, I kind of feel like, or at least some analysts I've read, are saying like this is a pretty big decision point and this week is pretty critical i mean obviously people trying to drum up some engagement but that basically now that we are on the precipice potentially of breaking out of that range what bitcoin does from here even if it holds in this this spot for a long time is going to give you a lot of information about what's to come in the market uh john let's play out a few different scenarios if we were to hold here for a week or two and then do another big leg up through the summer to 100k would you then expect a pretty big rally in alts?
Would that be something we should expect, or would it just be Bitcoin's dominating and everything else sucks?
I think it'll start with just Bitcoin, but then it'll move into other things.
That's always the way this goes.
Bitcoin breaks a new all-time high or breaks a new key resistance, a new price level.
It brings back in a lot of attention.
There's this guy, Ansem, who's pretty well-known in the DGen communities in crypto Twitter, who went on a podcast recently saying that...
basically he's done went on a podcast or he started his own podcast either one the point is he was basically saying he was done with crypto and then bitcoin went up to 80k and he tweeted out what are we buying last night again so it's like it just brings a lot of attention and investment and capital back if bitcoin shows some strength i really think you're bearing the lead here though there's a lot more things going on in headlines right now than just bitcoin at 80k or like bitcoin dominance like To me, this is kind of like fastidious in the weeds, like academic stuff.
Like there's real things happening that are really, really moving the markets a lot right now.
Just a couple of things that are top of mind for me, the DTC Clearinghouse, which has, I think, around $110 trillion of assets under custody, announced that they're going to be piloting a tokenization plan platform in this summer.
I believe July is when they're targeting.
So this is like this migration towards tokenization that people have been talking about that's going to happen.
ostensibly in two years is actually starting to happen the new york stock exchange is also talking about tokenization projects and moving forward with that so there's trillions of dollars of capital that are going to change what rails they run on where they settle and they're going to do this through tokenize So that brings a lot of capital and attention to digital assets, validates the thesis, and is going to result in a lot more products and services and just economic activity and capital coming to crypto.
I think that there's been now $10 billion of Ethereum staked by Tom Lee.
He just bought another 100,000 ETH.
There's all kinds of new products and services launching from...
from Wall Street firms and bringing money back into crypto into Bitcoin.
So all of these things are happening.
They're all playing out.
There was an announcement at Bitcoin Vegas that there's an it's an announcement of an announcement.
But the strategic stockpile of Bitcoin, the US strategic Bitcoin reserve, whatever you want to call it.
They're going to be making some kind of an announcement related to that, which means that there's some kind of buying or like budget neutral accumulation going on by the United States.
That hasn't been announced yet, but that's basically what they said is happening.
So you can read between the lines on that.
So there's just a lot of other things, major catalysts that are going to come into the markets that have moved this forward.
There's been a compromise reached on the Clarity Act, which will come through and give clarity.
And it's really more clarity for banks than it is for crypto at this point.
But in any event, that's going to give clarity for investors, for products, for new things, new capital, new innovations.
There's just tons of these major bullish catalysts in the near future.
I think that this is something that people are discounting right now is that everyone expects the calendar to drive when Bitcoin bottoms.
And I think that there are a lot of macro factors at play here that are going to be driving much more capital into Bitcoin and to the digital assets overall than people realize.
or that we have experienced in prior bull or bear markets.
So I think that those are the kinds of things I'm watching here as opposed to just looking at wiggles on Bitcoin's price or on the dominance chart.
To me, all of this is just kind of like some retail speculation and some shorts getting squeezed a little bit while they expect Bitcoin to drop.
But the larger things, the bigger macro drivers of this market and of Bitcoin's price action are really positive and getting stronger, and we should see some major market moving catalysts soon.
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John, would you expect that to be a sell the news event potentially when it does happen, if it does happen like this month?
Or would it be a super bullish catalyst like we're never looking back?
Possibly, but it's kind of difficult to say in either direction because it depends on, I think, some other circumstances around that.
Say the Clarity Act passes and the same week or whatever, they announce that the United States is buying Bitcoin or something like that.
You kind of have to see how these things shake out.
Personally, I would say just look through all that.
Don't think of it as buy the rumor, sell the news, but just say, hey, look, last time we had this interview last week, I was tilting bearish on the Clarity Act ever passing.
It seems like now, they have rapidly reached an actual workable solution coinbase has said yes who was kind of like one of the big holdouts and so it seems like this is going to go forward and it seems like there's a now mounting realistic possibility this becomes law i think that the the regulatory clarity and legislative um let's say certainty that this gives like the codification of digital assets as a legal thing that you can do and interact with in the United States is a huge long-term bullish catalyst.
And I don't think you should worry about trading around that event.
You should just make sure that you're allocated properly for the future reality, which is that, you know, hundreds of trillions of dollars are going to settle in tokenized versions on crypto rails.
And you need to have some kind of allocation to that in your portfolio in order not to miss out on basically the next century of finance.
You also mentioned this morning, John, that when we were talking in our Creator Roundtable, and zooming out to the broader market, which we always have to talk about on this, you mentioned that it looked like we might be setting up for a blow-off top, despite the S&P being at an all-time high, hitting almost 7,300 last week, down a little bit today, but still at levels not seen since five days ago.
And the earnings last week were generally very good for a lot of these big companies or the Mag7 that are leading the way, and a lot of people expect that.
Or some people say that's a bubble that's going to pop at some point due to AI and all the money they're spending and revenues they're getting.
But you also did say today we're looking at a potential blow off top that would include crypto as well.
I think that the risk of that still exists and has for a while.
I'm not sure exactly what this looks like.
Look, the problem is that history...
it doesn't repeat but it rhymes and if you look at prior market cycles to predict what's going to happen in the future it's not like past performance is not indicative of future results but i am saying that what we have seen from u.s equities and from a lot of equity markets right like korea like it's around the world like there's a lot of um very frothy bullish momentum in a lot of the equity markets and just like you know extended valuations and so forth i'm not saying that can't keep going But I am saying that a violent move like the NASDAQ adding $6 trillion of market cap in a matter of days is unusual, right?
Like in a month, I think it was like 29 trading sessions.
It's up 22%, $6 trillion of capital added.
It's just really strong, bullish and violent, really bullish movements from a lot of these equity markets.
If that, you know, corrects and maybe normalizes, maybe it's sustainable.
But if it keeps going like this for another month, like just up only basically.
That, to me, is symptomatic of a blow-off top and just over-speculation in the markets.
I don't know if that will happen or not, but when you see the markets move this violently and this strongly in either direction, you call it a crash, you call it a blow-off top, you call it whatever you want.
I'm not saying that we're going to drop 80% on any of these equities, but we're seeing a lot of frothy price action, and I don't know where that stops.
you know, flips out into support, not resistance, and then goes up to a hundred K.
You could see a lot of speculation come back into crypto and you could see a blow off top there.
And that would, you know, if we make new all-time highs this year, that would basically put us near levels that I was expecting to get to in the prior bull run.
I'm not saying these things are going to happen, but.
we'll have to see how this plays out.
But I think a blow-off top looks different in every market.
It looks different every time.
You could call what we saw in gold and silver, a version of a blow-off top.
You could call what we're seeing in stocks, depending on where this goes or what happens to it from here.
You call that a blow-off top.
So I don't know.
It's just a term.
It doesn't mean anything specific, but it's a very violent price action.
It just means things keep ripping a little bit.
So here's a question for you.
Why are we at all-time highs?
We talk about this so much, but zooming out from everything, forget crypto for a second.
And yes, I just want to know from you, why at this point in time is the S&P, NASDAQ, both seems like every week or two, there's a new potential all-time high, despite various factors I could tell you that it should correct or should come back a little bit.
And why now?
What is making this happen?
I don't – I think it's just that we're still in the midst of a raging bull market.
Like we are in a secular bull market that has not broken or slowed down.
The war in Ukraine didn't do it.
The war – the conflict with Iran hasn't done it.
Like it's just – we're in a bull market.
So like nothing has changed.
All us being equal, things continue unless acted upon by an outside force.
You know, the Trump administration made all this big talk about Doge and cutting government spending.
They're still on record pace spending for this administration.
So they haven't reduced government spending.
They have passed a big, beautiful bill, though, that has given a lot of tax incentives and rebates to people that has put a lot more cash back into people's pockets and encouraged corporations to do a ton more CapEx.
So that CapEx spending drives the economy, stimulates economic activity.
That's why we're seeing manufacturing.
surging to, you know, overvaluation or extended valuations above 50, the economy is growing, the economy is booming, they're running it hot.
So when you run it hot like this, basically encourage and stimulate economic activity, you get a stimulated economy and overvaluations of risk assets.
So I think that's kind of been the norm that we've seen.
And I think that's just a continuation of the trend.
It's not so to me, like, I think your question is also kind of like, why is this happening?
To me, it's just like, a continuation of what's been happening and sort of a bit of a reversion to the norm, right?
Like the S&P 500, if you look at it, it looks like it's going up an asymptote.
So does the NASDAQ.
But if you put it on a logarithmic chart, it looks just like a straight growing line.
And it's kind of corresponding to the fact that it's not really...
any real value that's being added its nominal value meaning the dollar denomination of the s p 500 is what's changing and the dollar is what's getting obliterated we just saw the dollar cross um 39 trillion dollars or the we saw the national debt cross 39 trillion dollars yeah yeah so like the united states is still spending itself out of its mind a lot of governments are and that's so all these things are just continuations of things that have been playing out and there's such big macro trends this is this is why i think this is important and why i think the milk road macro channel is so important there are such large macro trends at play that little things i mean they're not little but like things like a war or like a 20 drop in the supply of oil globally are just not big enough to change like tectonic centuries-long macroeconomic trends that are playing out so that's what i think is happening here But I don't know.
We'll see, man.
We just got to hang on tight right now.
I mean, you did just write a pro report last week.
John's first pro report for macro about how basically about how the oil disruption will be and will continue to be worse than many of us are thinking.
And I feel like you kind of tackle these themes in this report, John, both both painting a like positive picture because it's like on one hand, it's like, well, the market seems unfazed by.
what you are describing and the major disruption that's coming we've talked about this every week we were doing the show together last month or two um that the shortfall of oil is not something you can just magically replace overnight and that that the consumers are going to feel that and the economy will eventually feel it as well if you look at the stock market um but that on the other side on the other hand like despite that we're pushing all-time highs um anything else anything else in this report that people should know in case they want to go check it out I mean, I just try to cover some of these things in here.
The two things that I tried to cover in that report, I'm just talking about how scarcity of two major things is driving most of the economic activity we're seeing, scarcity of energy and scarcity of compute.
So that's why you're seeing this huge bull run in semiconductors and this unprecedented price action in semiconductors that's now lifting the rest of the MAG-7 and the rest of the S&P.
And then this energy shortage.
Part of that is due to the energy demands of AI, but it's also due to the supply constrictions that we've seen due to the conflict in Iran.
So that's driving a lot of bullish momentum in the markets right now as well.
These narratives will shift and evolve.
We're going to see, I think, a rotation of commodities into agriculture.
But this is kind of down in the weeds for macro stuff.
But I just want to kind of give some context around that.
I don't know if the size of the economic shock from these prices, this like...
loss of supply of oil is actually going to be that severe like it seems like the market is going to absorb this like yes food prices will increase energy prices will increase but for the most part i think that you know in the west like civilized nations are going to just like pay more for those things and it's going to be a headwind but it's not really going to break anything it's not going to stop anything and there's going to continue to be sort of this just large-scale secular bull run Would you say as well, John, and I'm just thinking about even local news here up in the north, that this almost like force majeure style event, which is not exactly that, but similar to COVID, it's something that's like, well, this isn't something that happens normally, guys.
This is like a hopefully this doesn't never happens kind of thing.
There's no way for us to plan for this if you're a company.
What ended up happening there is...
despite there being a lot of disruption to supply lines and profits and all that kind of stuff, in the subsequent years, you've seen a lot of companies post all-time highs in profits, right?
And despite their prices going up and consumer, the CPI going berserk and things being way more expensive, these companies are still making more money than ever before.
And to me, I also see it this way, you know, and that might be a reason why the market is also going up that it's like, listen, last time this happened, which was recently, and it's not the same as apples to oranges, but it is a similar event of like, listen, everybody, the price of everything is going to get fucked up because of this other, this thing that happened.
I feel like a lot of companies in our beautiful capitalist society take advantage of that to inflate the price beyond even the extra margin that they have to absorb for their oil price or supply disruption as it was in COVID, that they naturally double the price when it only needs to go up 30% so they can pocket margin, but blame it on something that has nothing to do with them.
That's just my anti-capitalist side talking for a second, but it's also something that we saw play out many times.
I'm not going to wade into the details of what you just said.
If that's the way you view things, that's your opinion.
You're forced to do the show with me, man.
You have to do the show with me.
Economics is never what it looks like.
Everybody is able to spin.
Somebody's gouging and somebody's doing this.
The gist of it is we don't have enough oil.
This morning, the ceasefire is over.
This morning, Iran struck the Fujihara.
oil refinery, oil reserves of the UAE.
The UAE pulled out of OPEC to be able to increase their production so they could try to recover economically from the effects of the strait being closed.
Iran just hit their largest oil reserves and refining facilities.
So I don't know how badly that's damaged.
I don't know how badly that's going to impact things.
That could deprive the world of another million and a half barrels of oil a day.
That makes this shock even worse.
This is just going to continue.
This could just continue to escalate from here, and that can make things a lot worse than we've already forecasted them or than they have already been.
And you can say people are price gouging.
I don't know even how to begin to assess that in this situation because there's so much uncertainty and there's so much force majeure and there's escalating and ongoing conflicts.
continuing to drive down the available supply and, and put the economy at further risk of, of economic and just resource in general, resource shock, energy shock.
So yeah, there's, there's just a lot that I don't, I don't really know how to, I can't like just like outright refute what you're saying off the top of my head here, but like, I don't know, there's a crisis.
You know what I mean?
Capitalists love crisis, man.
I'm just going to put it that way.
That's true.
It's true.
That's the, that's the things that get fucked up.
You get to blame.
That's how an economy works, bro.
But that's, if you intervene with that, it's like, look, if, if everybody wants a gallon of water and there's only a gallon of water, well, yeah, it's, it's, it's anyway, this is a hotly debated thing in economics.
But I think in general, you know, we're going to have to give the jet fuel to the, to the countries and the companies that are willing to pay for it.
John, one last question that was.
And this was the lead of the show today, so maybe I'll have to change the intro because it took us 30 minutes to get around to it.
I meant to ask it earlier, but I just love talking to you so much and giving you all my conspiracy theories, my retail conspiracy theories that I shout on Facebook every morning.
It's not true.
I put those on threads.
Anyways, and speaking of threads, Melvin, who is our AI writer analyst, he asked this morning what would you hold for the next 50 years when we're having our creator round table um and you said you know and this was hotly debated right because it's like listen you know crypto people were getting absolutely dragged in the streets because we're holding assets that haven't uh if you zoom out and you look at nothing else haven't moved in five years uh meanwhile people playing stock market people playing semiconductor stocks memory stocks are have been laughing if you've been hard in there for the last like six to 24 months um and he asked you kind of a lot on that premise what asset would you hold for the next 50 years if you could hold anything?
Just so you guys know, before he answered, John paused for like 20 seconds.
He had to take a couple deep breaths and prepare to unload on Melvin.
He's not even here.
Melvin's not even here.
Look, I don't like these kinds of questions because there's a camera and a microphone that are on me.
I haven't thought carefully about what I would hold for the next 50 years.
That's a very arbitrary and long time horizon.
So the answer that might make sense is real estate or gold, right?
But another answer that might make sense is Bitcoin, but it also might not make sense in 15 years.
So I don't know, basically.
I don't really invest on a 50-year time horizon.
But on a five to 10 year time horizon, I prefer Bitcoin and Ethereum.
On a 50 year time horizon, maybe real estate or gold.
But I don't know.
I know this is the problem.
I don't know if I can invest on a five week time horizon in the equities markets because so many of these companies are.
leapfrogging each other in this ai race and there's basically not a winner take all but at least like a winner take most um kind of like schematic being laid out here and the game theory on this is like eventually somebody's going to go bankrupt or get absorbed or bought by somebody else and whoever does that is likely going to have a massive advantage on the other players left in the the race and could squeeze them out and so it's very risky making any kind of long-term investments around ai in my opinion because So many of these companies view this as existential to their businesses, and they are playing all out to win, and they can't all win, right?
Like Sergey Brin of Google has said this, Mark Zuckerberg said this, down the line, right?
So yeah, I think that there's a lot of opportunities that don't exist on a 50-year time horizon, and that's more realistic and more what I think about.
So yeah, I don't really have an investment thesis for 50 years, but for 5 to 10 years, I prefer Bitcoin and Ethereum.
That's fair.
I guess it is conditional.
I think every investor has to, I guess 50 years, yeah, you're looking at more like really long historical things like housing and gold.
I mean, if you asked this question 20 years ago, Bitcoin didn't even exist.
So it wasn't even something that was possible.
So maybe in 10 years, it'll be another asset you don't even know about that you want to hold for five or 50 years.
You don't even know what that'll be.
Great.
Well, John, thanks for answering that question.
I'm sorry for people listening to the intro and thought the whole...
the whole episode would be about that, that it's only the last three minutes of the show about that part.
John, what are you watching this week?
What's what, what is on your radar this week, both macro and crypto side?
There's a escalating conflict in Iran.
I think that's going to be driving a lot of headlines.
And that's, that's basically, I didn't know that part.
That's it.
Well, I don't know what else to say, man.
We had a ceasefire for a while.
The ceasefire is over and they're shooting again.
So that's going to drive a lot of things, I think, this week.
Earnings reports were last week.
There's some earnings this week, but they're not going to be as market moving.
The Japanese have been intervening in the markets to try to support the value of the yen.
If they're not able to successfully do that, we might see rate hikes, which could unwind some of the carry trade and be a headwind on markets.
I'm watching that.
I don't know.
Yeah.
But basically to me right now, the big things to watch are the big thing to watch is the current thing, which is the Strait of Hormuz and the conflict with Iran.
Actually, you know what?
There is one thing I wanted to do before we signed off.
That was a bit of a fun, fun little game, which I previewed right before we John loves this part.
So, okay.
So John and I are doing more of these shows together.
There's a lot more to come on that side.
But one thing that I was asking him before we started recording was.
I was expressing to John that I can't believe some of these tokens are the top 100 market cap for crypto.
Sure, there's a couple of memes in there, memes, whatever.
There's some in the top 30 that shouldn't be there.
The things you barely even know what they are.
But in the top 100, there's definitely some that I have never heard of.
And every time I scroll through this list, I'm like, I'm not even going to click on that because I don't even know what the hell it is.
John really covets himself as some kind of buff of these companies.
told me that he used to be able to name the founders and the teams and the tokenomics for each of these, but I did stump him a few times.
So I figured we'd need to do the show live while recording.
So John, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to name you a company, a token that's in the top 100 and you have to.
you have to tell me if you know what it is and what it does.
Okay.
Okay.
And if you don't listen, if this is your company and John doesn't know what the hell it is, come on the show.
If he, if he says your company name and you don't know, and if I say your company name and John's like, I don't know what the hell that is.
You're, you're welcome.
Your founder, whoever you are, you can come on the show.
The top 100 has changed a lot since I was deep in the weeds on this stuff.
When were you deep in the weeds?
When was this?
I mean, I was mostly really deep in the weeds on this in 2021 and 2022.
But since we've been in a bear market, there hasn't been a huge market incentive to really do a deep dive on a lot of altcoin projects for me recently.
So I haven't refreshed in a while.
And there's been a lot of turnover since then.
So things have changed a lot.
Let's just put it that way.
I mean, there's things like WorldCoin on here.
There's a lot of interesting projects, let's say.
There's a lot of good stuff.
I will also say, and I'm not just saying the top 100.
token list is total dog shit.
That's not what I mean.
For anybody listening, there's a lot of great tokens on here, a lot of great debate to be had of some of them that are overvalued, undervalued, due to rip.
We'll do another episode or another big chat about Chainlink at some point soon, because John really wanted me to talk about Chainlink, so maybe we'll save that for next Monday.
But let's go.
Okay, are you ready?
I'm going to give you a few random ones here.
All right, fire away.
Siren.
I'm not familiar enough to say what they do.
I've heard of it, but I don't know what they do.
Let's pull it up.
The logo is like the cartoon woman who I guess is like a siren, like a mermaid.
Is this the content that people want to see?
Yes.
Listen, it's a long week and at the end of your Monday.
Okay, so this is a meme coin on Binance.
Great.
And it has a market cap of $574 million.
Yeah, I don't know.
Your excuse for that one.
Bill Don.
Well, this is definitely another Binance meme coin.
There's no way this is a real token.
I think you're just picking stuff that you've never heard of before.
Yeah, of course.
It's called Build on Galaxy.
It's from USD1 Launchpad.
So from the World Liberty team, from their affiliated Launchpad.
So that has a $455 million cap.
John hates this.
All right, we're going to wrap it up right there.
John can't stand what I'm doing right now.
It's a total destruction of everything that he believes in.
I just feel like, look, here's my feeling on this is that there are a lot of things that are being tried as experiments and prototypical things and just entertainment, frankly, in this asset class and in this space.
However, there are a lot of things that are happening that are going to change people's lives for the next foreseeable future and in really meaningful ways and in the near term.
And so I think that that's the important thing to talk about and for people to pay attention to and to educate themselves about.
attacking the Siren meme coin community in any way.
But I am saying that I think that Chainlink, for example, will be an essential part of global...
just like infrastructure, information infrastructure and various other kinds of infrastructure related to digital assets for a long time.
I think that's extremely valuable.
It's extremely misunderstood, extremely underpriced.
And I think we're seeing the first efforts by institutions like Bitwise, Grayscale to go out and educate people around what this asset is, what it does, what the value is there, the value that it adds.
That I think is something that's important to do and something I'm passionate about because a lot of people are, you know, suffering under the problems of financial illiteracy and this is an opportunity to try to get ahead of this and well not We all suffer under the problems of financial illiteracy in one form or another, LG.
But I think rather than chasing pumps on meme coins, educating yourself about some of these things that are so important to so much economic activity and infrastructure for all these things that are happening in tokenization and just changes to the global financial ecosystem, that's really valuable right now.
And that's what I would like to focus time and attention on.
And so that's kind of, yeah, that's where I am on this.
I think that that's important.
and i agree okay i'll just put it i agree people people want this people like the show because it's professional and they get a lot of good information from it i totally agree i just don't i don't think you can discount that kind of stuff when you have a dogecoin that sits at a market cap that's seven billion dollars more than hyperliquid i think that's just you have to understand that it's like there is still there's a cultural element to crypto i agree that is a huge part of its entire lifespan And I don't know what those other two tokens were.
Those are just bullshit tokens.
But I still think that maybe there's a day where the top 100 list, everything here is at over a trillion dollar market cap or it's at least 500 billion.
There's that much value.
The total market cap for crypto is at 150 trillion.
So the top crust there is all really great, valuable tokens.
Or maybe there's a day where a bunch of companies in the S&P 500 are crypto companies, many more.
Coinbases and Robinhood's not really like that, but circles, other companies like that, galaxies, whatever, crypto affiliated companies as well.
And then all that other crap still stays the same market cap, but it gets kind of bumped down lower on the list.
I feel like we should do, I feel like we're due for an episode about altcoins.
I feel like as, let's see if this trend continues, John, if we continue to see some Bitcoin dominance and we see a Bitcoin steadying of price and we stay in this range and go higher.
I feel like it's going to be a good time to go through altcoins, not just to get insight on what you like and talk about Chainlink and other stuff and get the other guys on as well.
Maybe that's what we'll do this Thursday with our team episode.
But I think also to understand some of the stuff on this list, man, because I think a lot of people, they're looking at their altcoin picks and thinking like, okay, we're going to do a bounce back.
Maybe we'll go to all-time highs this year, next year, the year after.
And they look at it and they're like, okay, well, I just don't understand why Cardano's here.
at number 12 you know what i mean and i think like breaking that down and nothing against cardano people that's not what i mean but i'm just saying i think as you have another kind of shuffling from bear to bull and whatever i think it's always worth understanding like what where the value is holding in a lot of places in crypto and what is propping up a lot of these tokens that that people see on the list and that maybe some days they get frustrated their tokens go down five percent and the the other ones go up ten percent so um and again no knock against cardona it's not what i meant i'm just saying it's something that we don't we don't discuss it very much on the show um and maybe we should So anyways, I'll leave it with that, John.
Yeah, I look, I agree that financial entertainment is a big part of the market.
And I think it's important to pay attention to that.
But I agree with you as well.
There's a lot of other value in a lot of these other projects.
And I do think that that would be worthwhile to spend time and attention on that, especially Cardano.
So I'm bullish.
Yeah.
I'm down.
There you go.
Yeah.
He's a Cardano bull, a secret Cardano bull.
All right, John, thank you, sir.
And let's have a great week.
A lot of great episodes coming up on the, on this channel this week and on our macro and AI channels.
And again, if you want to take a look at John's portfolio, you can pay just a dollar to check it out.
Go to milk road pro should be in the link below.
You can see his portfolio, Kyle's portfolio, Martin's portfolio, everyone else's see what they're buying and selling.
Cause there's a lot going on these days.
There's a lot of people adding things to their watch list.
John doesn't do anything, but everyone else.
that makes moves.
And if you want to see what those are, what those moves are, you can go see it.
All right.
Thanks, John.
We'll wrap it there.
Thanks, LG.
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