YouSaid · the spoken record

James Butterfill

lines on the record: 60
first: 2021-12-07
most recent: 2021-12-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“investing in bitcoin but um you know i i think you know again i i you know i talked very early on about bitcoin being a learning journey and that really is that it's not something you can just understand overnight and you know from initial client engagement for us to investment it i reckon is on average about a year that it takes them that long to get accustomed to it and understand it well enough to decide to to make that investment and i think that's why we've seen a lot of kind of reluctance in the space or institutions be quite slow to react and investing in cryptos”
2021-12-07 · Forward Guidance · A Little Bitcoin Goes a Long Way | James Butterfill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I can't tell you how many times I've been at client meetings with a large institution and they said, yeah, I own Bitcoin in my PA, but I've not bought it for my fund yet. And there'd be several reasons for that. A year ago, it would have been, I think, I'm not sure it has enough fundamental value for me to, I might lose credibility in buying it. I think that's going away now, but there are still a lot of corporate restrictions that prevent people from buying. And there's a lot of regulatory concerns too that prevent people from buying in the institutional space. I do think institutions are still very way behind on that, but I kind of understand that. This is a brand new asset class. And, you know, there's a lot of reputational risk even now, I think, through owning Bitcoin. It feels like that story is changing, though, that there's reputational risk in not buying Bitcoin. But it depends who you speak to on that one. There's still a lot of clients that think we're lunatic.”
2021-12-07 · Forward Guidance · A Little Bitcoin Goes a Long Way | James Butterfill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But also on the flip side when there's inflation. And I think Bitcoin's a little bit like that. But perversely, it also has some growth elements to it too. It's born out of the internet. The internet is growing very rapidly. And as a consequence, you'll probably see Bitcoin grow too as people discover more uses for it. So, I mean, where does Bitcoin sits? It probably sits right bang in the middle of the economic cycle, which is actually a really unique. And as well, I've done some scatter plots in some of my reports looking at CPI to inflation versus Bitcoin. And what we found, although I don't think it's statistically conclusive yet by any means because there's not enough data points. But I think I'm encouraged by the fact that we see an increasing kind of R-squared, increasing relationship between Bitcoin and inflation.”
2021-12-07 · Forward Guidance · A Little Bitcoin Goes a Long Way | James Butterfill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that sort of investment cycle, which as you come out of a recession, the economy starts doing quite well. It's then companies and equities tend to tend to do quite well. And then quite often in the economic cycle, perhaps where we are right now, a little bit of overheating in the economy, commodities tend to do quite well. And then at some point the Fed or whoever it is, the central bank decides to start hiking rates to temper inflation. I'd say that's probably where we are right now. And then that inevitably leads to an economic downturn, which is then where more defensive equities tend to do quite well or government bonds tends to do quite well. And then you can lead into the end of that is the end result is probably a recession. At that point, that's when things safe havens like gold tend to do quite well. So gold, funny enough, can do quite well in kind of quite, you know, it's a weak economic period.”
2021-12-07 · Forward Guidance · A Little Bitcoin Goes a Long Way | James Butterfill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“something like bitcoin i think it's uh what's the best way to put it perhaps you know a ownership in a distributed ledger system and its investment objective is perhaps a non-sovereign store of value with a diversification merit and a kind of growth component to it which sets it apart from gold in that respect”
2021-12-07 · Forward Guidance · A Little Bitcoin Goes a Long Way | James Butterfill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Particularly if you look at compared to something like oil, oil is consumed every year and so the total amount of oil in supply versus the total amount produced every year is quite big relative to the total supply because it's consumed where something like Bitcoin, that's the total amount that's produced every year is becoming smaller and smaller both obviously programmatically but also just for the fewer pure fact that all of the Bitcoin that's created is still in existence today And I think when you look at it like that, you realize actually it's not a commodity. And if I think about asset classes and think very philosophically about asset classes, which is easy to do, I mean in a very simple term, they just represent an asset class is a group of assets with similar characteristics. And for equities, that's ownership of goods, ownership of a company essentially. And for commodities, that's ownership of goods within end use.”
2021-12-07 · Forward Guidance · A Little Bitcoin Goes a Long Way | James Butterfill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think the initial reaction is to say it's a currency. And then when you start looking and you think, okay, well, it's mined, then maybe it's a commodity. Actually, technically a currency is not an asset class. It's just a thing in between asset classes. And I think actually what's money, what's a currency quite vague, you know, gold has been both or is both. It's used as a medium of exchange, but not a particularly good one. I think when you start to look at more deeply into Bitcoin, you realize that, well, it's not an equity. It's not the ownership of a business. Something like a commodity is ownership of goods with an end use. And I'd say that Bitcoin doesn't quite fit that, although it does have some end uses.”
2021-12-07 · Forward Guidance · A Little Bitcoin Goes a Long Way | James Butterfill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, I think Bitcoin was probably my first love in the space like many. But no, equally perhaps with Ethereum as well. I think what drew a Bitcoin specifically was its uniqueness as an asset. And I really felt very early on that we weren't witnessing the birth of a new asset class, albeit early on back in 2016, a very new one and a very volatile one, even in today's standards. But I really thought it could catch on. You know, this idea that the internet has transformed many industries from particularly banking and commerce. I think in many ways it's only right to expect that it will transform money too. From Ethereum perspective, I just really like this concept, this world computer concept, a bit like Amazon Web Services, but with the currency rolled into it. But in this kind of...”
2021-12-07 · Forward Guidance · A Little Bitcoin Goes a Long Way | James Butterfill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's how I got into it. And then we started speaking to CoinShares quite a lot because there was a bit of, there was a few synergies between Coin Shares and ETF securities at the time. And then eventually I started working for Coin Shares.”
2021-12-07 · Forward Guidance · A Little Bitcoin Goes a Long Way | James Butterfill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've always been a bit of a tackie. I've always loved building computers over the last 20 years. And in about 2016, I started having a lot of clients saying, hey, you guys run a really big gold fund and you are the pioneers in that. Why aren't you building a Bitcoin fund? And I was a bit late in that respect. It was the first time I'd really heard about it. And I thought, well, I was head of research at ETF Securities back then. I thought, well, the best way probably is for me to build my mining rig and that will help me understand it better. So I built a few Ethereum mining rigs. And I have to admit, I think my understanding then of how it all worked was quite low. But I like the concept of it. And I made quite a lot of Ethereum that way and have not sold any of it yet. So my wife thought I was crazy, but she doesn't anymore.”
2021-12-07 · Forward Guidance · A Little Bitcoin Goes a Long Way | James Butterfill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT