# Bitcoin Range, AI Agents, and Crypto Moats

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-10-13

## Transcript

I think that the intersection of digital assets, tokenization, artificial intelligence, agentic finance, all of these things come together to form one of the strongest bullish outlooks on any markets that has ever existed, right?
So there's a huge, huge opportunity here.
What's up, everybody?
It's LGG said here and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show that celebrated Thanksgiving a little too early because this is just how we do it up here.
Today is October 13th, 2026.
I am back to host the show and we got John in the studio to talk through what is going on.
with Bitcoin price action, which alts he kind of likes?
What's going on with the macro?
Are midterms going to go the way everybody expects?
Or does he have a bit of a different theory on that one?
And then at the end of the show, unexpectedly, I actually asked him about crypto security.
Is quantum a threat?
Is AI a threat?
After Justin Drake wrote another little Twitter post about.
our cryptographic addresses and the risks that may come with that.
So John is going to give us his take on that at the very end of the show.
And if you want to see John's portfolio, we're going to discuss that in Milk Road Pro.
After Hours, which we record right after these episodes every single time we do them.
And that's only for pro members, which you can join for just a dollar at the link below.
And of course, see everything that he's holding, including his very juicy alts and his very big positions.
And a reminder that our podcast today is free and that it wouldn't be possible without our partners at Nexo.
The digital asset platform lets you trade, earn and borrow all in one place.
Keep an ear out for more information about them later in the show.
John, happy Canadian Thanksgiving.
Happy Thanksgiving in advance.
It's not for another six weeks for you.
Welcome back, LG.
I hope you are full of turkey and ready for a great podcast.
We don't eat turkey Canadian Thanksgiving.
Okay.
Well, what else is different about you guys?
We eat polar bear.
You know, not all Americans.
We finally caught one.
We caught one.
The whole village got to eat because we got our polar bear this year.
Sometimes we don't.
We just starve for a whole weekend.
Let's move on before PETA sends his angry email.
Speaking of bears, John.
Excuse me.
You're right.
We're making fun of the polar bears.
Hold on.
We've got this part where I'm dying.
No, we're going to leave this in.
This is great.
This is quality TV.
This is why people, yeah, this is, this is what all those views on YouTube are.
John, speaking of bears, I think a lot of people, like I said in the intro, we're kind of victory lapping a little bit this past weekend with a few pretty big dips coming into almost, I guess, kind of the middle of the range that we've been in for a little while, but I don't feel like you're, I feel like you're the last person who's panicking about that.
I'm not panicking.
I think that what we've seen over the last couple of weeks here on Bitcoin is Bitcoin just resuming ranging, which is like ranging price action.
If you look back over the last couple of years of Bitcoin's history, there have been several periods where Bitcoin has more or less gone sideways in a tight range for a period of six months or more than that sometimes.
It gets kind of frustrating at times.
But that's kind of what we're seeing right now.
And I think that it's difficult, especially as somebody who makes content, to get all excited about this nearly $2 trillion asset that's just, chopping in a pretty tight price range.
But that really is the exciting opportunity right now is accumulating on the dips.
And the fact that we are holding these levels and finding the support means the bulls are in control.
I'll go back to what I started saying, which is in the last week or so, Bitcoin has come down and tested 81K as support twice now.
So the bears have kind of like flexed on the bulls and like put them to the test here on this price action we've seen.
And the bulls both times have very quickly stepped in to buy the dip and have reclaimed the key point that I've been watching personally is $83,000.
The reason that's such a key level for me is that that is the high that Bitcoin set back in May of this year.
And so getting back above that price level and holding it seems to imply acceptance of a new higher high on Bitcoin, which is a confirmation of this bullish breakout that we've seen and a confirmation that the bearish market structure has been broken.
So holding on to this level is really important.
And so we got a flash crash last night, which I attribute mostly to a bunch of people getting liquidated on Sandisk and the KOSPI, the Korean stock market exchange, having their circuit breakers thrown and stop trading because of the sharp.
cascading liquidations on longs there.
And so because a lot of people use cross margin, they get liquidated on their sand exposition.
They are forced to sell whatever else is in their account.
If that happens to be crypto, they sell the crypto.
You get some forced selling pressure.
But again, the takeaway is that the bulls stepped in very quickly to buy that.
And now we've reclaimed that $83,000 level.
So even a long time, you know, not bearish, but like, let's say an analyst who'd been calling for a lower low on Bitcoin, Ben Cowan, tweeted out this weekend that the bulls remain in control.
And that's the takeaway here is that.
We haven't broken out past 90K.
We've still hit our head on this $87,000 resistance here, but the support is holding.
The bears have tested 81K.
The bulls have defended it aggressively twice.
And the bulls, I think, remain in control in this market.
So that's kind of like my overall outlook.
But you look, you're seeing this chopping in this range.
It's easy to get bored by that.
It's easy to get skeptical and think we're going to, you know.
run out of steam and crash.
I think the RSI on Bitcoin is resetting.
We're kind of building a new base here.
And the way I read this is that we're just kind of like laying the foundation for the next move higher.
Whenever that comes, I can't tell you the time and date, but that seems to be the market structure that we're building here.
And this is all just very positive, bullish, and what you want to see at the early stages of a new crypto bull market.
This pullback on Bitcoin is scaring a lot of people, and I am not one of them.
So if you want to see what I'm not selling and why, what's on my watch list, and when I'm going to be deploying more capital into these.
markets you can join milk road pro today it's just a dollar the link is in the description i answer questions day and night in discord i'll see you there do we do we dip down you were saying that that around this range like in the kind of like the the low from ever since that big move back in august which is about 75 on the dot roughly um you were saying earlier before we started recording that like breaking below that level basically uh would would invalidate a lot of what you just said that if we dip all the way down to that that that would be probably bad news and maybe ben count's prophecy below or low does does in fact come to pass yeah that's kind of the level that i've been watching because that would mean that we've broken out of this range right and i don't i think this is important thing to say too and you know ben talks about this as well You want to look for acceptance in a range, not just a wick.
So what do I mean by that?
Right.
Like the chart can trade for an hour or four hours, you know, in a certain range.
But do we get accepted there for a longer period of time?
That's that's kind of the important thing.
So, like, obviously, we move 10K in a given direction, like whatever I would call that acceptance.
However, if you just like kind of like.
dip your toe over a line and come back like that.
That can just be a retest.
It can just be, you know, a fake out, basically a bull trap, a bear trap, whatever the case may be.
But if you see one or two weeks of price action above or below a certain key level that you've been watching, that would be market accepting into that new range.
And that's like a change in market structure.
So what I've been watching for is just like you said, the 75,500 level on Bitcoin.
as sort of the bottom of this range, sort of the relative floor that we've put in since August.
And this is two months of price action.
So if we went below there for a week or so, I would say that, you know, you could then revisit the bear case here and say that the bears may be back in control.
There may be a case that we go retest the old lows.
I still would be skeptical that we would ever see a new low, like a lower low overall for this bear market here, or early bull market, whichever way you want to look at it.
But for me, that's the level I've been watching.
So as long as we're above that, I think we're in a good place.
There are other key levels of support above that, though, that I've been watching.
Obviously, the bulls have defended 81K, so that, I think, is now a place you should watch for support because the bulls have stepped in there twice.
Another place, if you're into Fibonacci's on this move, you could look at 78K.
There's a lot of analysis you can do on this.
But the point is that the bulls have shown support at 81K.
Until we lose that long range of two months of price action at 75.5, though, I think the bulls remain in control and the bear case is something that keep in mind, but it doesn't seem to be the most likely outcome here.
And what's amazing, John, is that...
even what you just said the two-month range is that it's kind of hard to believe it's already been that long since this move out of the like the low 60s range right because we dipped into that uh let's see early june is when we kind of lost lost out on this kind of this rally kind of failed right this past rally i guess from like may the spring rally the q2 rally and then we dipped into this kind of final bottom range we dipped into the 50s um and then that popped there and again i don't even know what else to call that rally other than when trump said hyper liquid at a press conference this is that's just my name for that these couple days of green candles um but it's amazing that we've been up in that level ever since And that we actually haven't, the last time we saw a price below 80 was already almost a month ago, was September 18th, right?
So I agree with you, or at least I hear what you're saying, that it's like we are holding really well in this range, which is very encouraging.
What are the two paths forward from here besides CHOP, John?
So let's say, what's the bullish case that like the bulls are defending?
80, 81.
And that means what?
That we're going to kind of, that they're going to hold it and break out of this range?
Are they going to be successful?
How do you think that's going to play out?
So my strong case right now, I mean, well, look, this is what I think is most likely, but this is a little bit of like, you know, reading tea leaves and like, don't.
Take this with a grain of salt because nobody can tell you what is going to happen in the future.
To me, the way I'm looking at this is that it seems like Bitcoin has made two moves here.
And if you look kind of like on this after the August, you know, hyperliquid squeeze, we chopped a little bit.
Then we went up again and we tested the top of that range at 87K.
We came down from there.
We tested 87K again.
Now we've tested twice the bottom of this range of this new range of 81K.
It seems like the next thing to do would be maybe to go test the top of the range.
But I could be wrong on that.
We could retest 81K.
Maybe it doesn't hold this time and we go lower and keep exploring deeper into that range.
But regardless of what happens here, it seems to me like the most likely outcome is that in a couple of weeks here, we're going to get some CPI data tomorrow.
That could be bullish or bearish, we'll have to see, but it could be bullish.
And then we're in a few weeks, you're going to get through the US midterms.
And as we get closer to that, I think once the market feels more certain that like, Let's say we got the next Fed FOMC meeting behind us, which is later this month, and then we get closer enough to midterms that the market feels like they have certainty about that, and they're kind of looking through that.
I think towards the end of October, towards early, mid-November, the macro backdrop that's been sort of presenting some headwinds to a lot of things in the risk asset markets starts to clear up.
Some of them start to flip in a more bullish direction.
And I think that the next thing to expect is that we retest and break 87K and go to take a shot at 90K and start to really confirm out of the bear market.
That seems like the most likely outcome to me.
A lot of people are in the other camp who are saying that as long as bond yields keep rising, as long as the Federal Reserve's monetary policy doesn't remain accommodative, that's going to present headwinds for Bitcoin and all risk assets in the week.
could still see struggles and chop throughout Q4.
Or maybe even, you know, some people are still calling for a lower low in a bear market or like a re-entering of a bear market.
I just don't think that's the most likely case here, but I think that you have to weigh all these things and come up with what makes sense for you.
I think a lot of these macro headwinds are temporary.
I think that a lot of them clear up sooner than later.
And eventually the bull market momentum here continues.
But that's just like, you know, how I see this.
I think that right now, all we've really seen Bitcoin do is sort of revert to the mean.
really, right?
We haven't broken out into wild levels of overvaluation.
We've sort of seen it get back to the one-year average price, and it's sort of rejoined the rest of the market where its average fair value is.
But I don't think that there's a lot of capital right now that wants to go chasing risk assets and speculating because of these macro headwinds and uncertainty.
So that's kind of how I read this.
I think the bulls are in control.
I think a new bull market has started, and I'm expecting us to eventually move higher and continue from here.
I have a question on kind of risky liquidity that we'll get to in a second.
But if you guys like everything that John just said, he posted something very similar today in Milk Road Pro.
I know we always tell you guys about Milk Road Pro, but you can get these updates almost more in real time, John, because you're doing the show five days a week.
You're usually the host or getting this analysis from other people.
And we only hear your analysis on the show once a week, usually.
But for people in Milk Road Pro, you'll get John's updates.
He posted last night about this kind of.
pretty much exactly what you just heard, this Bitcoin analysis.
You'll also have been posting about your alt picks, John, as well, which we're going to talk about in Milk Road Pro After Hours, which comes at the end of the show for pro members only.
So we'll get to that in a little bit.
But just a reminder that you guys can get all this kind of info.
you know, first before hearing it on the show.
John, let's jump over to, I guess, you already kind of alluded to a lot of the macro stuff that's coming this week and in the coming weeks.
Earlier, I asked you about midterms.
And again, one thing that I've picked up doing the show in the last year from you and some of our favorite guests is that, you know, Bitcoin is just kind of like an early marker of liquidity, right?
That it's something where it's able to sniff out liquidity problems or bullish liquidity conditions ahead of time.
How does how how with the midterms in a few weeks, to me, something like midterms is something where it's like whatever Bitcoin is doing now is the reaction to the assumed mid midterm outcome, which is still now swings largely Democrat.
So is this and that's that's just my assumption.
That's just from my learning.
How do you think the bulls and bears are kind of pricing that in right now, given that, you know, you look at prediction markets, which have been the beacon of truth in this in this era of elections?
How how accurate do you think the prices is reacting to that right now?
Like, is it reacting and is it is it going to have further reactions if those outcomes change or stay the same?
That's a very complicated question.
It's not easy to answer.
But basically what I would say is my guess about what happens in midterms is I think I think the Republicans will keep the Senate.
I think that the Democrats will get the House.
I think we will have a split government.
And I think that that is largely bullish for markets because it means that.
For the most part, we're not going to see a lot of major legislative changes come out of Congress.
We're going to see a lot of the executive branch get sued into knots.
And then we're probably just going to see a status quo emerge where investors get a little bit more certainty just from the standpoint that for the next two years, it's unlikely that anything is majorly going to change in the landscape out of the governmental side of things, regulatorily or legislatively.
However, The SEC, the CFTC are very clear, very vocal about their commitment to bringing a clear regulatory framework to market for the digital asset industry and opening that door, giving safe harbor, giving innovation exemptions, making perpetual futures contract platforms like Hyperliquid Lighter and others able to do business in the United States.
That's going to go forward.
There will be, I'm sure.
legal disputes in conversations about this right now.
A lot of these prediction markets, it looks like are going to end up in front of the Supreme Court.
There's disagreements between them and the gaming industry and all kinds of things are going on.
So there's going to be a lot of that that happens.
But while all that is playing out in the courts, that kind of does give a little bit of clarity.
It'll give us some sort of certainty about where we are.
And then I think investors can allocate accordingly.
And the thing about these innovation exemptions is that while all this is getting settled in the courts and whatever else, people can still do business.
They can bring new products and services to market and they can keep doing a lot of very bullish things and bringing TradFi and DeFi together, integrating them.
So it's just Fi.
AI is not going to slow down or stop either.
The Trump administration made it very clear that they're not going to pump the brakes on that.
bullish momentum that we have seen there, I expect will continue or will return.
And I think that the intersection of digital assets, tokenization, artificial intelligence, agentic finance, all of these things come together to form one of the strongest bullish outlooks on any markets that has ever existed, right?
So there's a huge, huge opportunity here.
And I think whatever happens with this election, we'll get some certainty about it and the markets will move forward and allocators and investors will start to bring their capital back.
And so it's just, I think it's going to be bullish no matter really what comes out of this.
As long as As the Democrats don't win both houses and like impeach Trump and like, you know, try to run him out of the country or something.
Because that I think would be disruptive for markets.
But I don't think that's what's going to happen here.
I mean, that's kind of what Polymarket's saying, though, John, and not to flip totally into politics, but how do you, I mean, I definitely want to hear your opinion, right?
Because we've been looking at the same, very similar chart here on Polymarket, and I'm sure it's similar on Calci and a lot of the other markets where you've got a 64% chance Democrats take the Senate, 91% chance they take the House.
So let's do a little geopolitical pit stop here.
In what situation do you think that this would result differently?
I think that a very large number of the Senate races are well within the margin of error and the polling data isn't that.
accurate on some of this stuff.
So people see a lot of these things with the Democrats in a slight lead.
They think the Democrats are going to win.
I think it's much more of a toss up than people realize.
And I just I just don't think that the Democrats are going to win the Senate.
That's just my read of a lot of these races.
It could go other ways, like if Michigan and Texas both go blue.
OK, you know, cool.
But like, well, we'll just kind of see how this plays out.
But I really do think this is the important thing about this.
That is too close to call right now.
I don't know.
The pollers don't know.
Polymarket doesn't know, right?
So it is too close to call.
And I think that you just have to kind of wait and see.
But I think that the Democrats get the House.
I don't think they get the Senate.
But we'll see what happens with all of this.
But they're not going to have like a super, super majority of these things either.
So we'll kind of see how it plays out.
But I'm not, I just don't put a lot of confidence in that right now, because all that is within the margin of error.
And people are, you know, kind of getting confident about things that are very, very much still uncertain.
Are you usually right or wrong about these things?
I grew up in D.C.
I worked in Washington on Capitol Hill for a few years.
That doesn't mean anything.
That doesn't mean anything.
The last couple of major elections were you a couple of weeks out.
Were you right or wrong with your assumption?
I was right.
I'm I guess like better, better than average on these things.
Let's put it that way.
Okay, that's very encouraging.
John, I mean, there's a lot of other kind of random crypto news we could discuss, but I think one thing that I really wanted to ask you about was Nier.
And again, we're going to save some of your portfolio talk for after hours, so I don't want to give everything away.
But you did talk to Bitwise last week about Nier.
You had them on the show.
They launched their ETF, I think, two weeks ago.
It's a very trendy pick at the moment, of course, Nier being kind of one of the trendy alts in the basket of alts.
And you did post a Milkroad Pro update about it, I think, yesterday or in the past couple of days.
I mean, I guess I just want to kind of hear your thesis on it, or at least like what you, if you learned anything new from Bitwise in the interview, if there's anything that surprised you.
And also, do you think like, like, is that, is that for you something where the broader market is going to catch on that more retail is going to come into that through an ETF?
Or is this something that's going to remain like just a crypto crypto person kind of thing?
I think that the way I'm going to answer this question is just with what's on top of mind for me right now.
So first.
um near i think right now is trading around five dollars it's been swinging around quite violently a little bit actually but in a pretty tight range just like a lot of other ults that have performed very strongly um so it's not breaking down it's just consolidating and there's going to be volatility when you have a start of a new bull market in a lot of mid-cap cryptocurrencies that are are bullish and performing well there's going to be people taking profits because they've been bag holding for a long time and are just finally happy to be you know above water again So that volatility is to be expected.
That was the big thing I was trying to communicate to the pro community last night in my update was just that the volatility is expected.
The volatility is the price you pay for performance.
It's not a bad thing.
Nothing is broken.
Things are going to go up and down on you 15% in a day or in a week.
Sometimes first up 15%, then down 50%.
It's going to be like that.
But that's part of an early bull market and it's not something to like...
get too keyed in on or to react emotionally to um near protocol so the the way that the bitwise guys framed their thesis on near is that if it got from where it is today to be roughly parity in market cap with ethereum um right now which is like you know just coming out of a bear market uh then that price is near at around 155 160 dollars per near, which is like a 3040x, whatever it was, I can't remember exactly, you got to watch the episode is pretty good.
But their bull case on that was much higher, they said $500 was their bull case on year.
And where does that come from is the thing that's interesting.
So the way I'll kind of explain this, if you look, this is something I saw on Twitter this week, there's really interesting, which is the date call center volume is dropping a lot.
And the reason that people are not calling call centers so much anymore, and that volume is coming down for the first time and maybe ever, is that now people are interacting with their AI agents to get questions answered, to get things solved, that otherwise they couldn't use the UI on a website or whatever.
They would have to call in to get support.
Now they're just having their AI agent figure it out for them.
So you're starting to see the impacts of these things.
Meta launched Metamuse, which is a personal AI agent.
launched a new suite of models specifically targeted at personal agendic use cases.
What does that mean?
So a lot of what OpenAI and Anthropic have been focused on has been on what we would call knowledge work and trying to help people who do knowledge work jobs like coding and software and Excel spreadsheets and stuff like that.
They have focused their models on training.
to that and doing that really well.
Meta has focused on how can I be the most intuitive and easy to use personal agent on the market?
And that's what their new set of models that they released this week are about.
That's what Metamuse is about.
And so Metamuse has gotten millions of downloads, millions of new users and millions of people using Metamuse to help solve some of these things that they would ordinarily be calling in for.
Why do I think this relates to Nier?
because it shows the strengthening thesis that Bitwise has that many other people have on NIR, which is NIR is trying to be a sort of interoperability solution, chain agnostic solution.
They have something called NIR Intents.
And what it is, is that rather than having to figure out which chain, which protocol to use to get the best price, to accomplish whatever it is that you want, you kind of express an intention.
And then NIR protocol uses all these different...
you know, abstracted back end things to arrive at that outcome and achieve that goal.
And they're doing like huge amounts of volume.
So the product market fit they found on this has been very strong.
And it seems like as more people start to use agents, you know, you're going to verbally speak in plain text, like, hey, I want to do this, right?
So it's kind of like the way I would describe this for people to think about this idea is it's kind of like getting into a car or like a taxi.
And instead of saying, I want you to take Fifth Avenue up to Central Park and then go over to the west side and go up from there and then turn left and describing the exact route, it's saying like, hey, take me to John Rockefeller's Cathedral on the Upper West Side.
And then the taxi driver figures out how to get you there, but you don't have to think about that.
This is a long, rambling answer, but it's basically saying that Near is very well fit for this intersection of AI and crypto, and it has found product market fit, and it is kind of like… really staked out a lot of the market here.
So the thesis on that is strong.
If they continue to maintain this market dominance, they continue to generate revenue and volume and perform well, the upside on Nier is pretty strong.
That's sort of the Bitwise thesis.
That's kind of the thesis for me and a lot of other people.
But the fact that we are seeing in a real meaningful way after Meta's move, right?
Like these new models and new products specifically for just personal.
agentic assistant use, that sort of strengthens a lot of what the future that NIR is building for.
And their founder, Ilya, wrote this paper, Attention is All You Need, which is sort of like the foundational, one of the foundational papers on this whole movement towards agentic finance.
So they've been seeing this future coming for a while.
They've been building products for it and seems to finally be starting to materialize.
So that's been a big driver of a lot of attention on NIR.
There's a lot more you could say about this, but that's sort of like some general thoughts on this and takeaways.
I really recommend watching the whole episode because the conversation was great.
But yeah, that's sort of some thoughts on here.
You know, one of the weird things about crypto is that the longer you're in it, the more accounts you seem to end up with.
You buy in one place, trade somewhere else, earn yield somewhere else.
And if you actually need capital, you end up having to sell something that you probably wanted to keep.
That's why we at Milk Road are partnering with Nexo.
These guys keep the whole thing under one account.
You can buy, trade crypto, earn interest on what you already hold, and even borrow against your capital without having to sell it.
All in one spot, all in one account, all on Nexo.
So if you need liquidity, but you don't want to give up your position, or you're already holding crypto and you want to be able to do more with it, I think Nexo is worth your time.
We love working with them.
I think you will too.
Tell them Milk Road sent you.
What is the moat for NIR?
Like what makes them unique?
Why them?
Like, why isn't this something that somebody else could replicate?
And even one of the hyperscalers could replicate as well.
Or no, hyperscalers.
Like one of the agentic producers, right?
Like a meta.
Why couldn't they just build this whole stack if they needed it or build this kind of service or have an app store where people can build something similar without using blockchain?
Or with using a blockchain but not using Nier?
So I think that this is a really interesting question.
MOTES themselves are becoming...
Really difficult to define or defend or in many cases like project out three to five years in the future.
The moat that they have right now is that they are first to market with something.
They saw this coming for a long time.
They built for it and they got situated.
and set up well for it.
And so they're capturing it right now.
I don't know how they continue to defend that moat three, five years into the future.
They don't know.
But one thing Nier, I think, has done very, very well is adapt and pivot.
They started as an L1 blockchain.
They pivoted to something called Nier OS.
Then they pivoted to this different kind of strategy here.
But they've adapted many times.
That is the thing I would point to as their moat.
And I think that is the only moat that's left because of the rapidity at which the advancement of technology and finance.
it's just increasing and it's going to keep going because it's gotten so like breakneck pace at all of these things, all levels of the stack and all products and services that that competition is always going to be there.
They're always going to have to continue to iterate, to improve, to adjust, to move with the market.
But they have, like I said, for the moment, locked in pretty good product market fit.
That's the moat that they have at the moment.
If that thesis changes for them, you know, you have to either bet that the team will adapt and evolve to continue to find ways to.
adapt their product to fit the market and continue to maintain that market share dominance or someone else will come and eat their lunch.
But this is true of almost everybody in the business right now.
Like Adobe had like this lock on that niche of the software market of like their creative suite.
And then last week, somebody reverse engineered all of Adobe's products and then open source them.
And now what is Adobe's mode, right?
Like anyway, I just think that this is a question that the answer to this is going to change.
But the thing I think is appealing about Near is that they have.
seen this coming, built for it, and captured it well for the moment, and they've proven that they're able to pivot and adapt, which I think is the only actual moat, because everything is going to be adaptive at this point, because the changes are going to come faster and faster, and the prize to play for is going to get bigger and bigger.
Right, so you're basically saying that the only defensible moat in this new agentic AI world, whether it's crypto or other companies, is adaptability.
Basically, it's a big one.
There are very few products you can build that cannot be replicated in this kind of advanced, you know, because they don't you don't need as much money or scale to build products now as you used to.
And it's easy to kind of pick apart what how a product's been built and how to recreate it.
And that agents and other users of the Internet will be looking for cheaper alternatives forever.
And that.
you know, it's going to be a race to, to race to the bottom for a lot of products in terms of their costs, because it's getting so much easier to build them.
And that adapting and continuing to build new products for your customers is the only way to kind of stay, stay afloat.
Exactly.
Right.
Because what the market wants, the product, the market wants is going to change much more quickly now too, I think is the other part of that, right?
It's not just that other people can come to market and compete with you.
It's that because so much is changing so fast and things are different week to week or day to day in some cases, the product that has market fit is going to change very rapidly.
So it's not enough for Nier to just like build what they have and say, okay, here's Intense and just like set it and forget it.
That doesn't work anymore.
You have to keep evolving and your product does too.
And that I think is just like the nature of being in business these days.
So what's Ethereum's moat in that world?
Ethereum is presenting.
So all value.
I've said this before.
I'll say it again.
I think that this is something that sounds silly when you say it, but it is extremely important.
Ethereum's moat, Ethereum's value is.
the crops acronym.
It's credibly, credibly neutral, censorship resistant, open, permissionless, secure.
And it's, it's a framework that you can build monetary, financial, economic, and governmental infrastructure on top of for anybody in the world.
The all of value is downstream of faith.
So everything is faith.
Near is not private.
It is confidential.
So there's trust that you are placing in near, and that is not a perfectly distributed trustless.
system.
Ethereum is striving for that trustless state, that trustless system.
That is, I think, the big differentiator, the special property of Ethereum and the value driver of it.
And I think that is something that everybody who is in finance, particularly institutional finance, understands.
They understand the language of risk.
They think in the language of risk.
That was like the whole business that I was engaged in when I worked at BlackRock was around this language of risk.
So they think in those terms, they understand those terms.
And DGens who are trading meme coins for 15 seconds at a time back and forth don't really care so much about who's running the platform that they're transacting over.
But if you're managing trillions of dollars, you need to understand your counterparty risk intimately and intricately.
I think it matters a lot more when you're talking about assets and infrastructure of that scale.
You need to have that censorship resistance and that permissionlessness.
And that's the value proposition is Ethereum's most important financial product is truth, not trust.
It is truth.
And that is the difference.
And nobody else can offer you that.
Everybody else can offer you trust me.
Ethereum can offer you the truth.
And that's, I think, the big differentiator of Ethereum, of ETH asset, and a big value driver that is still misunderstood and underappreciated.
But people are beginning to catch on to this, and Ethereum is going to gain a lot of economic and capital gravity.
My last question that's kind of topical these days for you, John, is about AI security and blockchain.
And I feel like we could do a whole episode about this.
And maybe this I'd love to see.
Maybe you've had guests recently or have some lined up about this.
But that definitely seems to be kind of the creeping narrative.
We talked earlier this year, there was the quantum risk that was heavily discussed after I forgot who.
I think it was Google that warned that they might be able to basically like break Bitcoin within a couple of years.
I haven't heard about that in a while, but I definitely see regularly on the timeline that we're seeing more hacks.
And there was a scare last week to remind me what it was that basically EVM addresses weren't as safe as they were previously thought because of AI.
What's your take there?
This to me more than anything seems like a legit threat.
And I'll also tell you why is that, again, I'll go back to one of our favorite guests, Matt Hogan.
A long time ago, one of the last episodes I had done with him, I asked him, what do you think is actually like?
if you had to single out one major threat or risk to crypto and Bitcoin, what would it be?
And he was like, quantum, that's the one that would worry me the most, if any.
So I want to get your take on this, John.
And I feel like we should revisit this pretty often because it is, depending on how risky you think it is, but it definitely seems to be something that a lot of professionals in the industry are starting to get worried about.
All right.
Well, you just opened a very large can of worms here.
So I'll try to take this one step at a time.
So big breath in.
This is we always are.
You think that just when you think the podcast is over, John is like, I'm just going to start talking.
Yep.
That's what's going to happen now.
So the paper that you referenced from Google and the scare on the timeline that you saw last week about bunker mode, crypto going into bunker mode are both from the same guy.
And his name is Justin Drake.
And he is a cryptographer, a researcher and a very smart person.
I don't say this with any shade of like, you know.
I don't know, disparagement at all.
Justin is a very smart and very important researcher.
And when people, when he talks, people listen and they should, he is somebody who is somebody you should pay attention to.
And what he is saying, things like this, you should take him seriously.
However, I think he doesn't have the best track record of predicting the future or the timeline of some of these things.
And so I think that's something to take into account too.
He's doing his best and that's important, but he's not perfect.
He's not Nostradamus and that's, you know, he misses himself, I'm sure.
So, okay.
What, what, what do you need to know about this?
So, So quantum computing is, all right, I gotta organize some things here.
So in the history of cryptography, there is always a contest between the power of computers and the strength of algorithms.
And it's sort of like a cat and mouse game.
As the algorithm, as the computer gets stronger and computational power gets stronger and Moore's law comes into effect and like these.
computers get stronger, faster processing power, smaller chips, stronger computers, the ability to break the algorithms that we're using for encryption against them gets more viable.
And so they keep having to move the algorithm and make the algorithm stronger, more complicated, so that the computers can't break them.
The thing about quantum computing is that it is much worse than classical computing, linear computing, on many different sorts of computational problems like merge sorts or bubble sorts or just any kind of like generic use case for computation.
However, on certain kinds of computation, quantum computing is able to beat classical computing over a long enough time horizon.
And so from a business perspective, an applications perspective, quantum computing is pretty limited in its applications, and it's not really better or more useful than high-powered, powerful classical computing.
However, there are certain things that quantum computing can do better in certain times in certain ways.
And one of those things is potentially breaking what they call lattice or elliptic curve encryption.
And so elliptic curve encryption is a lot of what the signatures of.
digital assets ecosystem wallets rely on for their cryptographic security.
So what Justin Drink was saying was we need to go into bunker mode because not only is quantum a potential risk on the horizon, but now swarms of AI agents are also a potential risk because they solved a millennium problem called Navier Stokes, which is a hundred year old problem about fluid dynamics.
Anyway, they took like 10,000 agents and applied them to this problem and they were able to solve it.
And then OpenAI also said that they'd solved 100, I think, other different frontier mathematical problems and proofs.
So the point that Justin was making was like, hey, AI is kind of like...
finished math.
And because a lot of our industry relies on encryption and mathematics, that makes a lot of this at risk.
So his proposal of bunker mode was to just move your crypto from an address that has a visible or an exposed public key to a new address and not spend out of it.
And the reason for this is that if you move it to a new address and you don't spend out of the address, then you don't expose your public key and your private key stays private.
And that's much harder for quantum computers or for a swarm of AI agents to break that encryption than it is if you have spent out of your wallet and your public key is visible.
This is something that he said before.
This is not a new recommendation from him.
It was just sort of a reminder of him saying like, hey, I think this risk is real and people should start to do this.
Vitalik tweeted back right away saying like, I don't think we need to panic about this.
And I kind of agree with Vitalik on this.
And Justin has said this before.
So it's not like new from him necessarily.
But I just think it's a very scary time because we haven't seen Frontier mathematics gets conquered so quickly by anything ever.
And people are very uncertain as to what this means for a lot of different disciplines and cryptography and encryption is one of them.
I'm not super concerned about this right now, because like I said, throughout the history of the last century of computational complexity and development, the algorithms have always been at risk of getting broken by.
improving computational power and they always just keep making the algorithm harder and more complicated and you just keep the mouse ahead of the cat basically so i feel like that is what's going to happen here too i'm not super worried about that i think it's a valid concern for justin to be voicing it's something we need to take seriously and to solve but i do think it is a solvable problem i do think it will get solved and i don't think people should panic or start shuffling around all their wallets um just because i don't think it's a real and serious threat yet and i think that You are seeing a number of hacks happen.
Japan has had a bunch of these happen recently.
I've heard reports that a bunch of refrigerators at restaurants were hacked into by hackers and their food thawed and rotted and stuff like this.
Just all kinds of stuff is going to start happening.
But yeah, I don't think anybody's going to be like, oh, let's go steal the $200 that so-and-so has in their MetaMask wallet.
There are a lot of other things you could point that powerful level of cryptographic power.
at or computational power at before you wanted to just start breaking somebody's hot wallet on on phantom or something anyway i know those are some thoughts on that i don't know if that was an answer to your question but that's i kind of blacked out there and started getting into public and private keys but that's something of what's going on You put some shade on the pores in crypto, man.
You and your $200, your MetaMask.
Don't give a shit about that.
Or Phantom.
Whatever crap you use in your browser, nobody cares.
Don't worry.
Your $200 is safe, LG.
That's what you're saying.
That's what you're trying to tell me.
I mean, it wasn't $200, but the last couple weeks have turned into $200.
Put it that way.
But what I've really taken away is that we should just buy gold bars and hide them in the backyard.
That's the only safe thing.
That's not my perspective.
No, I'll hide them in my subject tank.
I think that you're going to see an increasing need.
Look, the real thing I think is a thing that people miss about all of this is that digital assets, blockchain technology has been spending decades, like many, many decades working on the problem of how do you create alignment between separate, uncontrolled and untrusted.
users and counterparties in a network.
The whole problem we're trying to solve with AI is what do we do when we have trillions of agents acting without human supervision?
And how do we make sure that they don't act in malicious ways?
How do we make sure that they are properly incentivized and constrained by code, by law, by incentives in the networks in which they operate to behave in ways that are mutually beneficial and constructive and collaborative?
The whole purpose of blockchain technology is to provide the structures and rules and frameworks and technologies and assets necessary for that kind of an economy to exist where you don't have to trust other people, but you can and other agents, human or agents.
actors, but you do trust the system because you don't have to trust it, right?
That's the whole truth, not trust.
This is Charles Hoskins has said something about this at the UN just last week or the week before, but he's been saying this for a long time.
He's saying Google used to say, don't be evil.
Blockchain and crypto is about can't be evil.
And that means can't be evil applies to nation states, individuals, AI agents.
It doesn't matter who wants to use these systems.
If you can't be evil, then you can be trusted.
And it doesn't matter if you're AI or human.
Now, there's other things that we have to figure out to deal with, like reputation and so forth, et cetera.
But just laying down that as a base foundation solves a lot of these concerns and should put a lot of this to rest.
So bringing these two major, major.
drivers of value in the market and themes that are happening of AI and crypto, bringing them together as a natural partnership and marriage.
And I think it solves a lot of the problems that both of them are facing right now.
That's what's happening.
People know this.
They've started to figure this out.
Investors are starting to figure this out.
companies are trying to figure this out.
So I think those technologies will come together and help each other both a lot.
And the beneficiaries of all of this is going to be everybody else who is benefiting from the fringe benefits of all this advancement that's happening.
And that's, I think, the thing not to get lost in this is they're not going to destroy each other.
They're going to help each other.
They're going to...
unlock a lot of the potential that each other has.
And they're going to solve a lot of the problems that each other has.
And the benefit is going to be to everybody who is a user and everybody who's in these markets.
And so it's just, it's a very bullish time.
I know this is a little bit complicated.
So if you have questions, let me know.
But that's kind of what I see happening here.
And I just think all of this is bullish.
It's not a time to get afraid or to sell your bags or go bunker mode, but it is a time to lock in and educate yourself because all this is going to move quickly.
And there's a huge opportunity here and you shouldn't miss it.
Wow.
I think you just summed up the whole, milk road thesis right there about having a crypto and a stocks channel and with the stocks channel largely being focused on ai stuff anyways uh john uh excellent rant to end it i i didn't even think i was asking you this total whole black hole question but that's where you went anyways um let's jump into after hours and actually look at your portfolio otherwise uh thank you for the great chat man thanks for listening to milk road If you enjoyed the show, make sure you like and subscribe.
And if you're struggling to find winners in the market, that's exactly what Milk Road Pro is built for.
Our analysts have called some of the biggest winners early and Pro lets you see what they're buying next, every trade they make, and the research behind every position.
Check out Milk Road Pro at the link below.
Everything you hear on Milk Road is for informational purposes only.
These are our personal opinions, not financial advice.
And we may own some of the investments we talk about.
Always do your own research and make the decisions that are right for you.
See you next time.