YouSaid · the spoken record

Matthew Sigel

lines on the record: 80
first: 2024-09-10
most recent: 2024-09-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, so in the liquid token strategies, we are definitely underweight, the projects that still have like 80% of their tokens left to mint. I kind of described our Ethereum L2 positioning as being underweight for those reasons. I think it's kind of an incentive situation where huge percentage of crypto investment has come into VCs and not into liquid token strategies. And the VCs therefore kind of encourage projects to have this model because they know that they'll be selling their tokens after a year anyway into retail. So I think it's just a quirk of bad incentives that is somewhat a result of the regulatory issues in the space. As to how our VC strategy, I'm going to punt on that and let you interview the manager once he is live in a month or two.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The world needs all kinds of investment offerings from various We've kept our efforts separate. We have two liquid token strategies. We are launching a venture strategy later this year, but you will not see that venture strategy owning 30% of its assets in tokens. That's not the core competency. So that's our observation is the liquid token part of the market. The inflows in general have been somewhat disappointing because the regulator makes it hard for those funds to get distributed to the usual buyers like wire houses and bank-owned asset managers. So they've gone the venture route. Instead, we think as the asset class matures, the liquid token category will become a bit more differentiated.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That energy can be used for lots of different things. Fair, but some of these governments this year Argentina, Kenya, and Ethiopia have decided to divert at least part of that energy stranded energy into mining Bitcoin. And that makes it very unique. So I think Ethereum will be the tokenization platform. Solana will be a tokenization platform. There may be centralized issuers who issue tokens on those platforms, but when it comes to like what the central bank is doing and what very large institutions are doing, they're going to start with Bitcoin.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interesting, you should mention Nigeria because literally 48 hours ago, they just gave licenses to the first two crypto exchanges. One of them is Busha, which we're indirectly invested in through a venture partner. And Boucha is going to list all manner of tokens and people are going to trade what they want on that platform. And that's kind of the regulator giving the citizens what they want, which is access to a crypto exchange. But when it comes to the government itself allocating capital, that's where I feel like even the regulators are very smart and you summed it very well in your kind of fiat spectrum. They also understand that. And it goes back to the AI conversation that there's only one crypto that actually takes real world assets, i.e. energy, and turns it into something digitally scary.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And Matthew, one of my final questions is bridging the conversation at the beginning to the end. Bitcoin being used as a reserve asset by countries who are tired of the United States perceived fiscal profligacy. And then a lot of meme coins on the end. I think the term fiat means let it be so and you can just basically print money. The spectrum of Bitcoin is extremely not fiat and solon and meme coins are quite fiat in terms of just being able to print tokens out of nothing. All of that spectrum is called crypto. How does the central bank of Nigeria, how do you get them on board? Do you just focus on the Bitcoin part and how do you stop them from looking at a lot of meme coins and the speculation that goes on and paint? The Bitcoin reserve asset with that brush.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, and you can't even do that because the regulator doesn't let you, right? If you try to make a project that actually accrues value, regulator is going to tell you it's a security. So there's much less friction to just put out a meme coin and have some fun”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I understand your argument. It goes back to what I was saying about the news article. It would be great if people would read thoughtful pieces at the top of the market or at the bottom of the market. But the reality is revealed preference people want super bullish content at the top of the market. And at the bottom of the market, they want super bearish content. And that's what people want. And just my own personal opinion, I'm not saying salad on meme coins are a good thing, but I actually kind of have more respect for just saying, hey, yeah, we are a meme coin. Invest if you want to trade if you want to than saying we're going to revolutionize supply chain finance, which is a $3 trillion total addressable market, and then just having no technology or plan or implementation to back it up at all.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think it'll just take some time to kind of digest that before we can move on. But I mean, this is the revealed preference. This is what people want to do. So why do we have to hate on it too much? It's all fun and games.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Speculation is the lifeblood of crypto, and this has also been the reality on Solana, which almost 50% of their DEX trading has been in meme coins over the last couple months. And it's becoming clear to many that Solana meme coin trading has been rife with some fraudulent activity. There's coins that have market caps of, you know, less than a million dollars that are doing daily trading volumes of $10 million plus and a lot of retail traders have lost money on meme coins. We estimate that less than 1% of the wallets on Solana's top meme coin platform are profitable. Basically at the peak of the Meme coin froth a couple months ago.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mentioned Solana meme coins, for example, dog with hats. Some of the bull markets over the past year has been in these meme coins on Solana. There's a big debate whether this is good for crypto or bad for crypto, good because it gets people involved, bad because it's speculation and if those people get hurt, they might not come back to crypto and it's not supporting a decentralized application or something like that. Where do you fall on that spectrum of the argument?”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Content or the keys to attend some event. That's all progressing, right? The number of people interacting with Ethereum smart contracts, that's at an all-time high. The number of people interacting with Solana smart contracts, all-time high. And when we look at the collectibles market, it's very vibrant and growing. We saw some data that the average ultra-high net worth investor has a 5% allocation to collectibles. That's pretty high, right? 30% of them have more than a 10% allocation to collectibles. So we do think the digital collectible market is going to grow. Some of those digital collectibles may be tied to real world assets, the actual bottle of wine, the actual Rolex watch.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So NFT volumes are down 90% since the peak and the NFT art market turned out to be 99% fluff, but there is kind of a core group of NFT art projects that have created a very cohesive community and engaged community. But the volumes are down a lot and some of the NFT characteristics have kind of been subsumed by Solana meme coins. They share certain things and similar, which is easy to create, easy to trade, and low effort. But the underlying utility, which is if you own this thing, then you can unlock ownership to this other thing. And the other thing might be a JPEG, but it might also be a subscription to some piece of”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think his personal views towards crypto are evolving. If I were president, it'd be very tempting to say I believe in the dollar hegemony as well, because tough to put yourself in that position to totally rework a system based on some unknowns. But he's obviously become more receptive to it. He owns more than $5 million of Ethereum. He's had some very successful NFT projects, which I don't think they're jokes, right? I've read some firsthand accounts of how much time he spent with the NFT holders at the dinner that was held earlier this year. The round four of these Trump NFTs just came out. I think it's a good community, and I think that's a reasonably good NFT project. His DeFi project that just came out, that I'm not so sure about. We have to wait for more information about that. Don't love the idea of putting out a Trump DeFi project right ahead of the election.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think under Kamala Harris it is more of the same until we hear differently. Some optimism about a pivot I haven't seen anything. The personnel that are in place are pretty anti-digital assets. So I would expect just more enforcement actions and no legislation. Trump is elected, I think we see an immediate pause in the regulation by enforcement. And then I think we see a kind of long negotiating period where the Republicans and Trump put out some proposed legislation that is a non-starter from the DEMs, like maybe it even has a Bitcoin as a reserve asset. I don't think that would happen in 2025. And then maybe they compromise on something which eventually gets us some regulatory clarity. Hopefully in the first year of that administration, but maybe not. But just stopping the enforcement actions would change the tone in the US.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They kind of already are a little bit. There's like JPM coin, like a dollar in my bank account technically is kind of a stablecoin. But I don't think banks are at the leading edge of any of this. It hurts them. Stablecoins are not deposits. So when a bank loses a deposit, they might have to cut down on $9 a loan. It makes a tricky situation for banks. All of crypto is basically the anti-bank. I don't think that you'll see banks adopting them unless the regulation in the US is a lot of regulatory capture in it. And as the stablecoin bill was written, originally it kind of does. It makes a stablecoin issuer into a bank. So then your question doesn't really. Makes sense.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Provide like a loyalty reward directly to the customer. I think that's the most interesting use case for these stablecoins. It requires some more regulatory clarity and some brave Fortune 500 companies to either launch an L2 or to use something like an Agora. But that's basically how I see it is that people are just getting tired of these extra fees and eventually the lower cost and the cutting out the middleman will bear fruit.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, so I just observe in my personal life that the number of merchants that are attacking an extra 3 or 4% onto the bill, if I want to use my card, has grown dramatically. And people are tired of it. And they're literally making payments at the bodega using Zelle and Venmo instead of their credit cards. That's tax evasion, I think, in many cases. I think that that's not above board. That 3% just gives an opening for someone to try to undercut on price. And why can't a large merchant, a Walmart or a Target or someone like that adopt a stablecoin and enter into a one-on-one relationship with their customer that can save their customer the interchange fees and gives them the ability to”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so if you go and trade on Binance, you're going to find hundreds of pairs of tether pairs, right? Tether Bitcoin, Tether ETH, Tether Polkadot, whatever it is, I don't think that Tether is sharing part of their interest income with Binance, right? Why couldn't Binance say, you know what? We're not so into this Tether thing. We're just going to do all USDC pairs, go F off tether. In that case, Tether might be like, you know what, actually, we'll give you 1% of our income, but that hasn't happened. So what Agore is going to do is from the start, hey, exchange, offer some Agora pairs. We will rebate you some of our interest income from the underlying fund.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's a B2B to C model. If you mint an Agora dollar, the dollars go into a Vanak short-term bond fund and technically Agora earns that interest. But they will pay part of that interest to the exchange, the market maker, or the DAP who makes Agora available on their platform for end users. So the end user doesn't necessarily get the yield, but the partners do, the businesses who are facilitating the distribution of Agora.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whether it's exchanges, market makers, applications, anyone who wants to integrate Agora Dollar, and that should make a more valuable proposition. Now, the yield won't go to the retail investor because that's illegal in the US, but on a bilateral basis, there is the ability to share some revenue with partners in return for distribution services.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we don't own any stable coins in our private strategies, right? Because we're looking for number go up technology there, like which coins are going to outperform. But we are launching a stablecoin. Agora. Agora, Jan Van Exon, Nick has launched Agora, which is a dollar pegged stablecoin. Vanak is managing the reserve assets of that fund, which is T-bills and overnight repo. And Agora is basically starting a price war with Circle and Tether. Tether is over-earning, not returning any of the yield to partners or holders. Circle is returning some of the yield, but mostly to Coinbase, who owns an equity stake in them. And so we see an opportunity to be more aggressive about sharing the underlying yield with partners.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Easier so that the application can put that little small bit of ETH into your wallet so you don't have to prefund your wallet in order to make a transaction. But that's a relatively new innovation and I think it's just taking time for the builders to hit on the exact model that drives users, not in the tens of thousands but in the tens of millions.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's the implementation side. Once one of these applications truly goes viral, whether it's a messaging app or a game, payments app, I think the winning DAPs will make it seamless to onboard such that the end consumer doesn't really know their interacting with a blockchain. We're just not there yet. Part of that is the regulatory uncertainty whereby like Fortune 500 companies can't and won't really deploy to an L2 outside of Coinbase. I think that'll change if Trump wins. But a lot of that has to do with literally building stuff that has just been enabled. So Ethereum had a soft fork, maybe it was like a year ago that enabled a function called account abstraction. And that makes the wallet onboarding much.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We wrote a piece with Ethereum discounted cash flow model and some of our assumptions around how that coin can act. And we were pretty straightforward that the economic model of the Ethereum L2s is not very attractive. Too many tokens that have not yet been minted. And for me personally, that's a huge variable. When you have 80% of the supply that has not yet been minted, some people say, oh, well, it makes it illiquid. And so in the upmarkets, it can go up a lot. Yes, it's true, but the downdrafts and the drawdowns are just much, much bigger. And we're not seeing any kind of winner-take-all characteristics in that space because the friction of starting a new L2 is so very low, anyone can do it. So kind of waiting for more consolidation in that space. And that would probably be our biggest underways.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so where are my other biggest overweights? I'd say as a shop, Vanak has made a number of investments in decentralized physical infrastructure projects like Hive Mapper, which is a mapping application that aims to compete with Google Street View. It's built on the Solana blockchain. We're investors in Helium, which started out as an IoT network and has now pivoted to a 5G mobile network also on Solana. There's another couple that are smaller, and I don't want to mention their names necessarily, but in terms of our weighting in that sector versus the overall market cap of that sector probably stands out as overweight. I'll probably answer the other question, which is where the underweights are. And that would be L2s, especially Ethereum L2s. So”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Instead of Android and iOS. Anatoly, founder of Solana, he worked on Brew during that period. Qualcomm ended up embroiled in a huge number of kind of regulatory and antitrust issues and it kind of became clear that their legacy customers like Verizon are not software builders. So the telcos aren't going to build the next generation of software and totally left Qualcomm and started Solana. And we can really see in Solana this kind of a contrasting philosophy in that Solana is optimized for hardware. And you code on Solana thinking about what is the hardware going to be in five years, whereas in other words, the throughput of the chain is more dynamic and more kind of continually improving. So of course it takes a lot of”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we've been, I think, very vocal and early bulls on Solana. So in terms of your specific question about overweights and underweights, that's an obvious one where my weighting to Solana is much higher relative to ETH than the market caps would imply. I have a kind of long history with Solana from the sense that when I was in equities, I was a large Qualcomm holder and kind of watched the evolution of that business where for a moment in time, Qualcomm really had the possibility of being the mobile operating system that everyone used, right? They had this product called Brew. They were integrating like location-based services against it. There was a possibility that you would have been selling ads against Brew.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Large share of the economic value accrues to Bitcoin plus one or two L1s. And then with riskier capital, we go hunting for the DAPS or whether it's gaming or deepen that have the best chance at mass adoption.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Investment advisors, broker owned asset managers who have been slower to adopt Bitcoin and digital assets who are still in the kind of Bitcoin ETF 101 stage and maybe doing a little bit of due diligence on Ethereum. There's just much earlier in there adoption path. So what we suggest to them is maybe 50 to 60 percent Bitcoin and the rest in one of these private diversified strategies or else like 70 Bitcoin and then 30 ETH and we've done some quant work that kind of arrives at that ratio as providing the best risk adjusted returns between BTC and ETH. So sorry I can't answer your question as to exactly how it's going to play out. My hunch is that an overwhelming”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other approach, which my colleague manages, is to go kind of down the market cap spectrum and try to hit on, of course, you know, the L1s and L2s, but what are going to be the killer dAPs? Who has the great docs team building the product that is better than its TradFi analog where the token can actually accrue some value? There's very few projects that hit on all three of those, but by properly position sizing, we can make portfolios of comprised of those types of assets, kind of daps and smaller caps. And then we have a different strategy, which I'm more involved in, which is kind of the layer ones and large caps. Now, when we talk to our clients who traditionally are more kind of institutional money managers,”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I should say that we have differing opinions here. There's an investment committee, which Jan Van Eck chairs. We have a number of different strategies. So, you know, no one can be totally confident. And we're diversified in case one of us is wrong. My view is that digital platforms have extreme winner take-all characteristics that one to three kind of layer one blockchains are likely to take 99% of the economic value that's created in the space and that we are still so early that kind of a simple strategy of buying and if you can staking the majors majors meaning like btc and solana will get you very attractive exposure to the growth of the overall ecosystem”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, that I can recall has made that type of 180 where they're abandoning Bitcoin miners. A lot of these management teams are quite Bitcoin maximalists actually. And the financial arbitrage here is just so compelling that if they can get a hyperscaler to lend the money at 12% or something in order to build one of these facilities, it just smooths out their entire operations and makes the core business that much more attractive too because they now have the financial wherewithal to fund upgrading mining machines, etc.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Profits. That's how profitable this market can be. And there's very little risk of oversupply in our view because in aggregate, the Bitcoin miners just don't control that much power to be relevant. So I think it's early.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everyone else. So you could argue that for those who are obstinate on this point and want to be hodlers, if Bitcoin goes up, they're likely to outperform. But we think it's very early. And in terms of the math that we've done, if you look at the cumulative net income from all of these 12 or so Bitcoin miners that we track, they are loss making. Cumulatively, they lost almost half a billion dollars over the last 12 months. And we estimate that simply by repurposing 20% of their power capacity to AI, and we include the millions of dollars per megawatt in extra CapEx that needs to be done in order to make those facilities suited for AI. These stocks could still more than double, even with no change to their Bitcoin mining.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't think it's very well understood at all. Many investors have no idea what it takes to build a data center, what the economics are, and are unaware that power is often the single greatest line item in their OPEX. The Bitcoin miners are aware. So we're tracking about 12 of these names. five of them already have some type of working kind of high performance compute capacity. Four of them are in pilots or exploring opportunities. And then there's three big ones who have are kind of taking another approach, right? And to be fair, that other approach, for every miner that disconnects their mining machines and pivots to AI because of the Bitcoin mining algorithm and the difficulty adjustments, it actually becomes more profitable for”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The cooling, the fiber connectivity, that is a legitimate capital expense that needs to be done before you can put the GPUs in. And then they just sell that space to a GPU company like Coreweave, who already has the relationships with NVIDIA to get the chips and who has the relationship with the end customer. And then it's a simple revenue split between the Bitcoin miner and the cluster hoster. And that second one is the more common model.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The two choices that they have to execute on this vision. The first is to repurpose part of their facility to AI and literally buy a bunch of GPUs, install them in that physical space, and then sell the GPU computing power. That is a much more capital-intensive approach. It's billions of dollars in just GPUs alone, and these companies do not have the balance sheets to fund that, nor do they have the expertise or the Salesforce. So a small minority of the Bitcoin miners that we highlight in the piece are doing that asset heavy model. What most of them are doing, including core scientific, is a simple hosting model. So they take out the Bitcoin miners from X percent of their facility, they invest capital to upgrade the power, the wall.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“50%. So it's a huge dispersion in performance. And like, you know, the listeners will have to make up their own mind on whether they want to buy the companies that have kind of already done it and been rewarded and maybe they'll do more. Or if they want to make a bet that one of these miners, which has huge amounts of energy but so far has been reluctant to brace the market eventually will capitulate because the investors are all in their ears, right? If you do this, you don't have to issue more shares. We will lend you money. Your cost of capital will go down dramatically. Your profits will be smoothed out. Your equity will have a much higher valuation. It's the very simple thesis and just day after day more and more of these miners are announcing these pivots.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You look at data center companies, their valuations are often north of $30 million per megawatt. So that's a 10x difference in valuation. Why is that? One, investors have no idea that these Bitcoin miners can actually serve the AR market. And two, the core business of the Bitcoin miner sucks right now. Hash prices at an all-time low. And so these stocks, they're fundamentals are very challenging. And what we've seen so far year to date is that the miners who have been most aggressive in repurposing their facilities to serve the AI market, those stocks have done the best, notably core scientific and Terawolf. Those stocks are doubles this year, up more than 100%. The Bitcoin miners like Marathon and Riot, who are saying no thanks to this story, their stocks are down.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To AI. And from our perspective, it's a very simple synergy. AI companies need energy and Bitcoin miners have it. And as the market is valuing the growing AI data center market, it's the access to power, especially in the near term, is commanding a premium. We are hearing from utilities and grid operators that if you want to connect Bitcoin ASICs into serving the GPU market instead. The math becomes extremely compelling. And you can see that with the valuations in the public market. So we measure Bitcoin miners by the number of megawatts, how many megawatts of power do they control. The average Bitcoin miner, its market cap, is roughly $3 million per megawatt.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think you correctly observed some of the headwinds that Bitcoin miners operate under, which is their revenues go down by 50% every four years. their mining machines become obsolete every three to four years and nobody wants to lend them any money because of those factors so they constantly have to fund themselves with equity in other words new shares into the market and it's a very volatile business you basically want to buy the miners when bitcoin's going up and no other time what bitcoin miners are now doing is realizing the synergies between their business and the high performance compute market we speak to many investors who are still unaware that bitcoin miners now have significant exposure”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Produce gradually goes down over time per the same cost because of the halving. That's the reason why there's only going to be 21 million of them is the having. So that sounds like a challenging business. The price of Bitcoin needs to go up for the business to kind of really work. And if the price of Bitcoin is going to go up, why should I buy Bitcoin miners? I'll just buy Bitcoin. So that's the old narrative. I'm simplifying it. I'm sure there are upsides to the business that I didn't share in that simplification. Now there's an added twist. And another piece that people should read, what is that twist?”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it's technically possible if there was broad community agreement. I don't have as my base case Bitcoin becoming the global monetary standard for any nation. I agree with you that nations really want the ability to print money during a downturn in order to absorb some of the economies cyclicality. But that just having Bitcoin exists at a very small allocation will absorb some of the entropy that inevitably results from money printing. And in that way, it kind of prevents violence because people who get disillusioned can kind of demonstrate their disillusionment by buying an asset instead of lighting something on fire or something worse.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I did pay for surfing lessons in El Salvador using Bitcoin with a Lightning wallet. And it's a more pleasant experience than changing dollars at a physical money changer.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's see what else was in that question of yours. Oh, the chances that Satoshi Nakamoto comes back and suddenly there's more Bitcoin, right? Like Gary Gensler has floated that idea. I don't have any particular edge on that topic. Coins have been dormant for very, very long time. And we do think not to wade too much into the controversial topics, but if you extend the time horizon of Bitcoin for a hundred years, right, there will have to be either some change to the monetary policy or else more innovation of Bitcoin layer twos such that paying for a $5 cup of coffee is at least possible, even if it's not ever the preferred payment rails for an American who already has PayPal, Zell, Cash App Venmo, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sorry to interrupt, there's these great charts on it's a time series of how much gold has been lost at sea over the years. And you'll see these huge spikes. It kind of looks like the charts of blockchain hacks”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fraud is fraud, whether you're paying in Bitcoin or you're paying in dollars if you are working off of some type of contract. So I'm not too worried about that as a hurdle, but I do think that Bitcoin's divisibility, its kind of global nature and the digital aspects will make it appealing for someone like Argentina who wouldn't have to charter an A330 just to get a stamp of approval on their Bitcoin.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, a lot in there, but I think one comment that you made, which is if you own gold, you own it. And I saw a story yesterday that Argentina is shipping 62,000 kilograms of its own gold overseas because it needs to be certified before they can use it as collateral. The payload capacity of an Airbus 330 is roughly 70,000 kilograms. So this is what this country has to go through, spending tens of millions of dollars probably just to be able to use their gold. So there is a lot of friction. And when you're doing a billion dollar transaction, you need someone in the middle, right? A lawyer, some type of escrow agent. And I don't think that's terribly complex. I think existing laws kind of handle transactions that have an escrow or someone in the middle.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That the U.S. Treasury used to issue where if you could have it and hold it, you literally owned it. So that's why it was very, people were incentivized to steal it. And that's what the plot of the movie Heat, a great film. I think Bear Bond treasures are much less common now. But as you said, Bitcoin is a bearer asset. If you have it, by definition, you own it. If Matthew, if you have a flash drive of a ton of Bitcoin and you drop it in Central Park and I pick it up, I am the owner. But just how rock solid are these claims of if you own it, you own it. And number two, that there's only going to be 21 million of them. Like, how decentralized is it? Just how serious you take the risk that Satoshi comes back or actually becomes a lot more centralized and you actually”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, like, hey, we're going to help you build this new oil refinery. Here's $5 billion, and as a result, we're entitled to X percent of the output from that. So that would be evidence to the contrary because that's what they're doing so far. But in my world, just to use Bitcoin for a small percentage of those large commodity transactions would be intuitive.”
2024-09-10 · Forward Guidance · Bitcoin's Path To $3 Million Dollars | Matthew Sigel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT