YouSaid · the spoken record

Allen Farrington

lines on the record: 56
first: 2024-10-16
most recent: 2024-10-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I just swear, I think, is fines A-L-E-N-F32. I'm trying to think of anything else. Nah, because I put everything there anyway. So that's a good start.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I probably need a bit more time to think about the derivatives point. It's not immediately obvious to me what the implications of that are. BNY Mellon, I think, is huge. I'm surprised I haven't heard that. Maybe I just haven't paid enough attention on Twitter lately. It's huge on the basis that, again, I don't like I'm not within the halls of power that would give me direct access to the people who are having these thoughts. So it's more like, again, I can imagine this being true that this relieves a lot of Anxiety around needing to associate with Coinbase.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think because it's actually news, like this is interesting new information to me, whereas, oh, the Fed did a thing. That's like great.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably the second one on the basis that the first one I kind of don't care about, like the extent to which I have indulged thinking about this was seeing it and then tweeting, breaking new price of everything just dropped and then just moving on with my day. So I really don't think I have anything to say beyond that. The second one, I actually didn't know most of what you said in the second point. So if you first explain it to me as well as the audience, I would be interested in diving into that.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it relies on Bitcoin in a way that Bitcoin doesn't really rely on anything else because itself is money. Hopefully that made some sense.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then you can choke off all of the tech infrastructure that's built on top of them. So this isn't even really a technical point. It's not like, oh, I expect the protocols to become internet. Like, I don't even know what that means, but I'm sure some people have said that at some point. Like tighter technical integration between the protocols, that I'm not the right person to speak on whether that even makes any sense or whether there's anything to expect there. What I do think is super relevant is more, I guess you could say it's political. It's almost, I think it's kind of deeper than that. It's like as paranoid as you can possibly be how resistant is this to physical violence, right? Which is like everyone's used to having gone through that thought process with Bitcoin. I think it's as essential here.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And shot their sedire and being violent, and so on. Like, how does it hold up? I think for Noster, were it ever to get to that point, you need the payments to be as censorship resistant as the speech that the infrastructure is supporting and trying to also make censorship resistant. I think basically untangle that a little bit. If you had everything, basically, here's a good, right? If you had an Oster but you didn't have Bitcoin, eventually if it really succeeds, it obviously pisses people off because people want to censor things, right? They don't want this like uncensorable free speech, whatever, blah, blah, blah. It's very, it's probably, I think, very easy to stifle its use on the basis that all of the infrastructure still has a cost to run. And if you can choke off the fiat payments that support that.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even really micropayments, no, it's more. Let me just finish that point and then I'll go straight into answering this. I think that it's not just that it was invented by Bitcoiners and not even just that a lot of the use so far is kind of commingled with Bitcoin use cases and that back to the point about we don't even really know what it's for necessarily. A lot of the emerging non-social media use cases are finding ways to plug it into making various ways of using Bitcoin better. So there is all of that. But I think that's kind of coincidental to the real point, or my real point at least, about the very long term for Noster, which is that in order to live up to any of these hopes, no matter how you want to categorize it, but if you want to be like as bullish as possible, probably something like, you know, uncensorable free speech on the internet, whatever, in order for that to be viable in the long run, in order for basically to kind of like mimicking the sort of discussions that we're all used to having had about Bitcoin, like in the worst possible case of everybody trying to.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Consumer facing apps, platforms, whatever, realizing this is actually cheaper for us if we don't need to support, you know, you don't need to have an infrastructure for like managing user accounts because we just outsource us outsource that to Nolster. That would be, I think we're probably a long way away from that being any way normalized, but that would be a very, very good sign. The link to Bitcoin, I think is pretty tenuous to be honest. I'm totally open to like a bull case here, but I think it goes far more in the other direction. I think it's that Bitcoin is significantly more important to Nostra, let's say than Nostra is to, I mean, even that's probably pretty, I don't think that's controversial. That's obvious on the face of it. But I'd maybe just push a bit further just on the Noster side in that I basically don't think Noster is possible without Bitcoin, at least not in the long run.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Use case for it. I kind of feel like it'll end up becoming one of many. I think the far bigger picture view of like, what is the primitive that we get here? That's a lot more interesting than like, oh, you know, Twitter's just censoring all my friends or whatever. The relationship to, I just finished that point. I think that primitive is probably best thought of as something like standalone identities. So like identities that aren't attached to any given service, but that you can port into any like app, say, I don't know, maybe the best way of putting app platform, whatever, that decides to turn on, oh, yeah, we'll accept people using their nostril profile with this. And then if anything, we don't, I think that's the, maybe not even that long-term, but like medium-term vision for accelerated adoption is various.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like there's a lot of this may be past now that I'd say a year ago or so, there was a lot of back and forth about basically noster being like better than Twitter. Clearly not in some ways, but potentially yes in other ways. And that sets up a really kind of straightforward, almost binary debate about whether you prefer Noster or Twitter. And it's an easy stick to beat Noster with because there's clearly ways in which it sucks compared to Twitter or compared to any kind of social media. I think that was probably, I don't think I'm not trying to come across as like judgmental of the way people had the conversation or anything. I think it probably was helpful in terms of generating interest and like sucking a lot of people in. And I think the first way that almost everyone at least so far has used Noster is trialing it as a Twitter alternative and then realizing some of the ways that it is cool and it is potentially better than Twitter in the long run. I'm just honestly not sure that that's even that interesting.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's a really interesting way of putting that. I don't have a super strong view on the basis that I don't want to get too excited too early. Like the main thing I tend to think about Noster is just appreciating how early it still is, really. And I guess pushing that a bit further, I'm not sure we really know what Noster is for yet.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you're probably right. I think so far I don't have any of the relevant numbers off the top of my head, but probably to date the impact has probably been negligible, but that it's clearly growing exponentially. And we sort of covered this already, right? For the purposes of making this point, the easiest way to think of Tether is as an unofficial broker of treasuries. Funneling demand to the Treasury that wouldn't otherwise exist. I can't help but make inflation at least of the dollar worse, which is good for Bitcoin. So sure on”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, as if this isn't real. And unfortunately, it is real. But I think the way that I, like my personal brand of cope is that it's not a reflection of like Bitcoin having failed or failed, even fail to achieve something yet. It's just a completely different use case that is frankly better than fiat because legacy fiat sucks so much that this can't help but be better.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On Tron, even for the life of Safe Argument, Tether on Tron is superior. As you say, as far more saleable, it's far easier to send it, which is basically the only thing you either send money or you don't send it, right? So if you're, and actually that's a really good way of framing it, right? If you're going to not send it, Then you want Tether because it's fully backed. If you're going to send it, you want Tron because you just do it right away. Like you don't need to deal with US banking rail. So on both the properties of money that you would want the most. I can't believe we've spent so long with me just shilling crypto and stablecoins. But at this point, I think it's worthwhile because if you want to be, this is something I've seen. I've spent years actually seeing Bitcoiners kind of tie themselves in knots trying to explain this away”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They don't bail them out. I think the only way you could honestly at all possibly disagree with that assessment is if you're basically conspiratorial on Tether. I can see there being kind of unknowable risk trade-off or unknowable from the outside, let's say, and the person making this criticism has some insight knowledge of this. But from the outside, unknowable risk trade-off of, oh, well, how? You're going to get nothing versus being more confident in the US, like the FDIC, basically, like what you'll end up getting back from them. I think that's the only dimension on which you, not even that I would, but that one could prefer dollars in a US bank account, like that form of having dollars in basically any other way you would actually want to use dollars.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For literally all of those people. For like, again, it's kind of political, but it's sort of for technical reasons as well. They can't access, I mean, they can't access cash, right? But that's not super useful if you're not in the US. So it's basically for technical reasons and even in like a fiat context. It's weird what that even means. But these are technically superior dollars for almost everyone who uses them than dollars in a bank account with a regulated US bank. So it does have that going for it. But all that really tells you is that Fiat itself is even dumber than this. Not that this is all that smart.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just one thing that I do want to mention this before moving on because I don't want to be quoted out of context on this that Even though I'm claiming this is stupid and pointless, it's still better than real fiat. That's what I think ties it all together. So there is some technical merit, if you want to think of it that way. And this, I think, is the gist of the product market fit, right? What I'm saying is like dollarizing emerging markets.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On behalf of the Treasury. And so it's, yeah, even that is like, it gets the more you think about this, the more weird and incestuous. And I think just to come back full circle, like quite uncomfortable in terms of how much exposure to this you won, because basically the more you think about it, the more you realize it's completely political. Like there's very little economic or technical rationale here. So like economically does anything we've just said really make, I mean, the dollarization component, maybe, yeah, like you can see why this stuff is popular, but even that, like, it's so wrapped up in politics that I would say the politics takes precedence. And then technically, it's just a joke. We covered that already. It may as well just be a database. So I don't know.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, yeah. That's pretty easy to glean and that the role, it seems obvious to me at least why Tether is tolerated, which is that I don't think it makes the most sense to see Tether even as like, to me, Tether is an intermediary, basically, right? Tether's like. Effectively an outsourced, like an unofficial broker of treasuries that is sucking up dollar demand that wouldn't otherwise exist at all because it's basically just dollarizing emerging markets.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Genius because they're pretty much just printing money to the extent. But this is where it gets kind of weird again, to the extent the US government lets them enables this to continue.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I really don't know because I don't have any experience within the politics of running a bank or even working within a big like I've never done that I'm just again my insights on this are just derived primarily from posting on Twitter I can certainly imagine them being envious of the basically the business model that Tether has kind of wriggled itself into, which is basically just because it's an interesting trade-off, right, between the big banks are not fully reserved, right? They're gigantically fractionally reserved and they can't ever go bust anyway. So it doesn't really matter. So like they have their own weird arbitrage of fiat that's kind of the almost the essence of fiat, right? It's how they work. But in particular in a high rate environment, which is high, okay, high relative to what, but like relative to the past 10 years, let's say the past maybe two years has seemed high rate. Tether suddenly looks”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I don't think it's this is one of the things about dealing with these kind of people. To be clear, I don't have any experience of this, so this is basically just me living vicariously through whatever Caitlin puts on Twitter or whatever, right? But it seems very Hafka-esque in the sense that it's not a conspiracy. It's just bewildering nightmarish incompetence, right? There's no adding Memo that's gone out being like at all costs stop Caitlin Long. It's just like no one within this system can actually do anything useful. Here we are tethered $100 billion and custodia is wherever they are now.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of blows. There is no concern. Digging into this is the interesting part, right? That Solana or Toronto or whatever it is is basically just like rails for this. The actual value of the asset that you allegedly own. Is Tetheth's good will. Basically, it's like Tethers. The full faith and credit of Tether. And so, I mean, Tether's, I'm not saying this to not tether. Like, Tether's clearly an amazing business model, but it's basically just like a full reserve bang. It's actually, you mentioned before, you mentioned Kayla Long before. Be interested in what really probing her in this and kind of whining her up, because I'm sure she's furious about this in private. It's just custodia, but like offshore. It's like a Euro dollar custodia.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Solana is like they kind of pretend, but it's a bit more obvious. And then the Ethereum people are like really religious about, no, this is the future of decentralized computation. Whereas John's just like, no, we're basically just database. That's kind of the crux of it that you don't like what you need for this is a database. You can do this even more cheaply than on a blockchain”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But then even meaner and more snide is that when you think through the mechanics of it, it doesn't need a blockchain. Like this is where I get really confused, but it's worked with quote unquote blockchains because I guess basically regulators are just confused by all the buzzwords and all the hype. And they could just shut it all down tomorrow, but they don't, I think for that reason, I'm not entirely sure. But that's why for me it's so funny that like how overrepresented Tron is with this and seemingly not in any other thing within crypto that people seem to care about. There's far more Ethereum and Solanocentric because Tron is like not really pretending not to be a database. It basically is just a database in a way that”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like that thesis is strongly well understood. It doesn't need, you know, you and I and whoever else on Bitcoin, Twitter harping on about it. But stablecoins have worked, right? There's like off the top of my head, I don't know. I think over $100 billion worth of issued stablecoins and that I did hear this. I maybe heard it because the Nick's report, but I'm pretty sure that Tether on Tron just obviously isn't even all of Tether, but Tether on Tron does more volume in like a dollar denominated, not individual transactions. does more volume than Visa. I'm pretty sure that that's. True. Sorry if that's just fake, but I'm pretty sure that's true. So, like, obviously, people use this and it kind of works. So mean snide bit part one is this is the only good thing to have actually come out of crypto.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, all right. I'll pass them for you. I'll be like, yeah, please express some of these So, with all that said, my take is probably more, I mean, this is very in keeping with my personality anyway, but it's far more philosophical that like I don't really know what's actually happening, but I can opine on it anyway. So I'll start off with the meanest, probably also funniest thing that I have thought historically about stablecoins, which is that on the one hand, they're clearly basically the only real product market fit in crypto outside of Bitcoin in the sense of there's real world usage. I think that's actually necessary for like market fit as opposed to just prices bouncing all over the place and quasi bankers and head funds taking a cut of the flow, but it's just all going in a circle and ultimately, you know, retail users are being scammed.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, yeah. I mean, I'm certainly not an expert on this. I'm not going to put myself forward as like, oh, everyone should come and listen to my stablecoin thesis. There are other people I would go to, like if I wanted to learn more about this. And actually, I'm pretty sure this feels like it was very recent that Nick and Castle Island pretty, it's one of these things where like I have the PDF, I haven't read it. I haven't had time to read it because it's so long. So maybe point people to that if they do want a more in-depth review. And I'm pretty sure, if I remember correctly, had a hand in writing that.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whereas I think maybe that's an interesting milestone to keep in mind at what point is it just demonstrably cheaper to borrow against Bitcoin to do this trade, basically, right, to execute this over collateralized working capital relief or however it ends up being characterized with actual Bitcoin versus having an ETF on your balance sheet. This could be 10, 20 years away before anyone thinks about this, but it's fun.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I see this is sorry, we're jumping around quite a bit here, but the reason I was so excited about the topic we were on previously is that. I'm very bullish on that becoming a legitimately massive market. Like that'll become something that's just globally liquid. I mean, you even alluded to this yourself, right? That it's the way the logic would work at a certain point of this market having grown and it being sufficiently deep and liquid and so on is that. Part of the rationale for choosing to do it as a tool of corporate finance is how easy it is, right? It's like you can just do it directly. You don't even need to go to a bank.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, this is super interesting though, right? So see, if they do it through iBet, they can't do what we talked about a few minutes ago. They can't borrow against it. They can't do any kind of funky finance, which you would think they would. I mean, maybe they haven't, they just don't know about that yet. Like they haven't thought it through that much yet. That's also, in my opinion, actually, that's a good reason to be bearish on the ETFs and like the super, super long run that once it becomes normalized enough, people are like, wait a minute, I don't want an IOU. I want an actual Bitcoin.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something that I really miss, but like regardless of his individual motivations, Mike actually has to admit they're doing this, but private companies don't. And it's, yeah, it's better for that, not that any individual private company is like going to move the price with this news, but obviously at the margin it's just always in their interest to stack sats at the lowest possible price. So like, why would they ever tell anyone?”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's funny about that though is that everyone who is doing it is very strongly incentivized to hide the fact that they're doing it.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was it similar scientific, I think? But these are like tiny, tiny companies. It'll be interesting when people do finally start to follow this. Yeah, it's kind of disappointing. It hasn't happened yet. But I don't know.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe honestly, I don't know, frankly, even that much about micro strategy. I mean, to the extent that everybody in Bitcoin, Twitter can help but know something about it. My impression of what he's done, though, is basically, this isn't original in any way. I think it's just like a clean way of looking at it, is he's arbitraging the preferential access to like bullshit fiat finance that micro strategy gets by virtue of being listed in the US. Public. And he's the first and probably so far the only, at least at any meaningful scale, CEO and therefore company to have really exploited this. That also, I think, will become super common. I think if anything, I'd be interested in your take on this too, that I'm surprised he's still the only one because they started doing this. Feels like a long time ago now. Like, I want to say four years ago, maybe more. No one's really copied them at massive scale. We have these like meta planet and then.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess the philosophy of how they are running the business in the interest of shareholders and therefore borrowing against the stack to cover whatever pops up as a corporate finance tool. I think that'll become a lot more common too”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Way of meeting this is borrowing against their Bitcoin as opposed to, say, selling their Bitcoin so they immediately have less or selling some other asset that they own, but that impairs their ability to generate a return so as to then buy Bitcoin. Basically, I think that this will become a corporate finance tool provided the business in question is, well, two things, I suppose. provided they have a lot of bitcoin that's obvious because you need that to do it but probably the philosophy behind that is more important that they actually conceive of their primary responsibility being to accumulate bitcoin and they're they're obviously related right because why would you end up with so much bitcoin in the first place if you didn't think roughly that you probably would just sell it or distribute it or whatever but that i think is a more interesting thing that i can see this becoming more and more common as something that businesses or management teams say actually articulate as the purpose of how they're or purpose isn't quite the right word yeah full”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe some people can. I can. Well, not only I can't because I don't believe anybody can. So I don't really have much more to say on that. It's just gambling, right? It's like if you win at gambling, obviously you feel really smart, but then you lose and you feel really stupid. And this is kind of, for me, removed from any worthwhile investment or business analysis. But the more interesting angle, I think, is, you know, as a, I'll maybe say it in the business context because I think it's more interesting. And I think it's going to become significantly more common as well that businesses reorient their corporate goal, I guess, to being over the long term acquire as much Bitcoin as possible. But they could still end up in a situation where because they have a whole bunch of Bitcoin, but they also have shorter term, like significantly shorter-term dollar costs or liabilities, however this need for capital might arise. And they may think that the lowest cost of capital.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think it goes back to the point I made a few minutes ago about how if you do put this in a solely in an investment context, right? You assume there's no personal considerations, no broader commercial considerations. It's just like, how do I grow my stack, basically? This is just a convoluted way of going levered long Bitcoin, which may or may not be a good, I mean, it's a good idea if it works and it's a bad idea if it doesn't work, but even that just reduces to like, can you time the market, right?”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have to give up custody. It's just not possible not to do that. Or if you came up with such a way, no one would enter into the trade with you. So that's another point worth thinking about here. Like basically, in summary, this is all very nuanced and probably none of it's that good an idea. At least for investment purposes. I think there's lots of interesting ways you can drive this for like, you know, we mentioned personal circumstances. I'd say business circumstances as well. I think that will become more of a thing. Maybe that we can go into that if you're interested, but not purely for the sake of like maximizing risk adjusted returns.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or whatever, but you are still trusting something. And that's completely unavoidable. This is the thing I think people really need to understand. That's unavoidable because fiat itself can't be trustless, right? There's no such thing as self-custodying fiat. And so if you want to enter into a trade where you're reducing the counterparty's risk by letting them, at least in terms of how the contract is structured, be able to liquidate your Bitcoin and make whole.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But you can never do it in such a way that it is literally riskless in terms of who has custody of the Bitcoin. And so you're always signing up to counterparty risk that the Bitcoin will be rugged, which is, as far as I can tell, unless we had something like, and just to be clear, I don't want to opine on this. I'm just kind of throwing it out there, unless we had something like some ZK roll-up ecosystem with native stablecoins. And you'd also need like, they need to be somehow algorithmic, like they couldn't just be issued, but they couldn't be basically a bank. And I'm not sure if that's even possible. I think it probably isn't in that environment. Maybe you could construct this in such a way that you can actually fully audit the technical risk of the custody. But for now, no such thing exists. It probably won't ever exist. And so you're basically trusting, you know, it's reduced from like, oh, you're trusting JP Morgan and you're trusting the US legal system.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You don't want to say, you want to avoid capital gain stacks. Like, this stuff doesn't come into some investment calculation necessarily. If it does, I mean, I guess you could do it. I've heard of this happening where, you know, you do it in order to effectively leverage your own position, but where you're far more comfortable with where the leverage is coming from. So as in you borrow against a Bitcoin and then you buy more Bitcoin and you do that when you think the market's at the bottom and then when it goes up you just round out your loan and that you end up with more. But it's kind of it's only interesting in terms of the mechanics like economic.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In which case, it doesn't really come into a risk calculation. It's just like you want to, you know, you don't want to sell.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the borrower is necessarily the Bitcoin holder. And so the question there, if you're assuming as a starting point that your opportunity cost is just holding Bitcoin or like your default investment position or whatever is just holding Bitcoin, what are you doing with this incremental fiat that beats that return? I don't think there's a single answer to that.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it certainly liquid enough that for any sub 100 million dollar or whatever position, you will be able to liquidate it right away and you'll get the price that you want. And that's relevant to the risk calculus there. Even that's kind of interesting from, I don't know if Saylor meant this or if they talked about it in a part of the conversation I didn't hear, but that also can only work because you can print like it's ultimately just downstream of fiat being printed endlessly and you're you really are just arbitraging Bitcoin's monetization there. But that's from the fiat lander's point of view. It's not from the borrower's point of view.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is the framework stupid things? I might just forget as we're going through. Any of these are interesting. You want to go further on them? Just interrupt or let me know at the end when I've run out of ideas. I think the most important thing to be clear on is how do I put this something like from whose perspective are we looking for yield in the first place? So the idea of an over collateralized Bitcoin back loan is it's the provider that I guess the lender, but the provider of fiat who is assuming the essentially riskless position on the assumption, and this is a separate point to come to actually, but on the assumption that Bitcoin is the best collateral for this loan because it's basically the most liquid, even some qualifiers there, I guess. But it's certainly one of the most liquid assets in the world, the most relevant way in which it's liquid is that you can always liquidate it, right? So the market for it is never closed. There's always a price.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Print isn't even the right, but create reserves. That's what's propping all of this up no matter how complicated the mechanics are in between. And obviously you don't have that on Bitcoin because nobody can print more Bitcoin. So you mentioned before, it's like if you have a Celsius or a blockfire, whatever, they go bust. There's no central bank of Bitcoin to recapitalize them. Like they actually go bust and the logic you would think is that at least, maybe not it's kind of obviously disproven by those examples. But once this has been normalized, right? So again, post-typer recognization, people just don't do this in the first place because one, it's too risky to try it as a business, but there probably isn't even an opportunity because every one of the, like there's no marks anymore for this scam, basically, because everyone's aware of how stupid it is. So nobody.”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it can only exist because of basically money printing. I mean, we can go into a bit more detail, like what the exact mechanics of that are, but if anything, I'd probably rather not, other than alluding to the fact that it's very technical and complicated, I think in large part to confuse people and to stop them probing too hard as to what's happening. Like just calling it money printing is basically fine, right? The bulk, if not the entirety probably, of the 5% in that example that Saylor wants to get from JP Morgan is ultimately coming from riskless money printing and hence that's how it, you know, that's how you arrive at it being risk free in the first place, that to the people doing it, they're just stealing purchasing power from all other savers. And it's not risky to them. Hence, they can pass it on and have it not be risky to the holder of the instrument receiving the yield in the first place. So you strip all of this away because it relies on ultimately central banks being able to”
2024-10-16 · We Study Billionaires · BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT