Navigating 2025: Bitcoin, Innovation, and Market Dynamics

Welcome to the new year, happy 2025. I'm Phil Larmon. And I'm Douglas Borthwick. And this is Old Men New Money. Please like, subscribe, take a look at us also on Spotify, on iTunes and all major platforms. Give us a follow, give us a like, and check out our new merch store, very, very exciting. We're going to introduce a new member to the Old Men team, and we'll talk about that at the end of this show. But I think what we really want to talk about in this show is what's happening currently. And I guess our thoughts for 2025, what do you think, Phil? I think that's a good place to start. There's a lot that's happened through December.

And I think there's a lot of excitement rolling into the new year for many aspects in regards to policy, in regards to hitting that $100,000 mark that Sampson Mao had spoke about. But let's start with Michael Saylor and infrastructure strategy. He's been quite aggressive and obviously been hitting the media very, very hard going into the new year. Can you tell the listeners a little bit about what's he doing and why is he doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on his strategy? Michael Saylor is a financial engineering genius, and he's someone that understands capital markets very, very well.

He understands that there are pockets of investors all around the world that want to invest in Bitcoin, but because of the mandates they're given within their company, within their fund, within their firm, they're unable to access Bitcoin directly. And so he's creating vehicles to allow them access to it. He'll sell equity to folks that want access to Bitcoin. He'll sell convertible notes to folks that are purchasers of convertible notes. He'll also do preferred stock that he's just suggested lately, all with the aspect of raise all at very efficient prices, he's doing his convertible notes at 0% so he can get assets to then buy more Bitcoin.

And he talks about when he sells equity and the equity is trading in multiples over the net asset value or the Bitcoin under management. And so he's doing it at, he's selling the equity at a premium and then buying more assets into the company and he's borrowing at 0% to add more Bitcoin to the company. And I wouldn't say he's tripling down or quadrupling down on his thoughts, rather what he's doing is he has a view, it's a strong view and he's maximizing it as much as possible at the lowest price as possible. So I think he's an absolute financial engineering genius who understands volatility very, very well.

So this is, and he took a lot of heat during the bear market, right? But he stayed steadfast on his stance and I'd love to get your views. That's someone that's very cemented in his stance. He is with this through and through and actually he's predicting it's going to be 3 million more than what Sampson said. He says it's going to hit 13 million per coin. Yeah. I think everyone that's in Bitcoin and has been for a while receives grief in a bear market in a bull market. But the reality is if you have this view, you stay with it.

Folks in real estate have always said, if I buy real estate, it's going to be worth a heck of a lot more in the future. And no one questions it. And when real estate collapses in New York City, like commercial real estate prices, or as you're seeing in Chicago with some buildings, everyone says, yeah, real estate was a loser investment. But over the long term, as you pull the magnifying glass out and step back a little bit, you see that there's actually this upward momentum in price and it's because it's an inflation hedge.

And I think sailor and many folks in the Bitcoin community, including myself, see Bitcoin as being that ultimate hedge for inflation, for money debasement and sailor. What he's doing is he's saying, look, you know, I love it. I like it. And he's the largest shareholder in micro strategy owns a heck of a lot of Bitcoin himself. He's taken this view and he's taken it strongly. He wasn't always like that. At first he dismissed Bitcoin and then he got totally behind it and made micro strategy that pivotal player within the industry. OK. So is it fair to say with Bitcoin it's more of a long term strategy?

So if we have the new folks that are coming in, want to buy some and they're looking at the movement and it scares the heck out of them, this is more of a long term holder, right? Because literally I saw the other day there was a meme going around of a financial guru on Instagram shorting Bitcoin and he's like, three, two, one, watch this. And boom, it went from ninety two K or ninety four K up to ninety seven K and he's just getting blasted all across social. Is this something that's going to be the norm? Right. Because if someone's just entering now, they may get very scared.

They bought it, say ninety nine or maybe they bought when it hit one hundred and now it drops down to ninety four. Is this kind of top them through this that this is something that's normal not to freak out? Well, volatility is normal in any asset class. If you buy Nvidia, you're going to see a lot of movement up and down. It's not always a one way move from the bottom left of your chart to the top right. I think that what we call tourists are the folks that come in, they leverage, use leverage to purchase something because they believe it's going in a one way bet and then it hits them in the face.

And we're seeing that a lot where you see leverage positions getting taken out. The true hodlers, those that are holding it, putting it back in their ledgers, these guys, they're not looking at the day to day price action, rather what they're looking at is the future. If you looked at the day to day price action or real estate, well, you wouldn't. Right. It's just be a stupid thing to do now because this trades on an exchange and you can buy it and sell it easily. You find that there's lots of volatility and people want to be screen watchers.

But I wouldn't say in the long term, if you think this is a five, 10, 15, 20 year type position, then why on earth would you look at it on a day to day basis? It would make absolutely no sense whatsoever. Now, volatility also is reduced as more and more larger players come into the equation. You know, currencies would always move around a lot and then you'd hear that central banks were involved and volatility would collapse. And so as you see larger players get into this, you'll find volatility starts to drop. Volatility was very, very high in the olden days when it was folks with metal hats sitting in their mother's basements trading Bitcoin.

And that's because there weren't many players in there. But now as you see corporations getting involved, you see funds getting involved, you see nation states getting involved, then that means there's larger and larger players that are getting involved that can soak up liquidity. And so you see volatility start to move lower. Now, volatility is very high right now. This is not something that I think is for the leveraged player and if it is leveraged, then good luck. I really think this is something that you sort of add to. And I think that El Salvador has done a very good job where they just daily cost average.

They buy a single day regardless of what the price is. And if you dollar cost average into something that has higher volatility, well, the odds are that's going to work out for you better than putting everything on black with one trade. I think that's a great segue into what we're looking forward to with Trump and Bitcoin coming and having pro stance on cryptocurrencies. Now, how does it impact the price when we're looking at having strategic Bitcoin reserves as a country? And then you're also talking about these nation states doing this. Is this where this massive potential jump comes in?

Because the big players that would buy very large reserves would huddle this and it would make obviously supply and demand, lower supply, higher demand, and the price goes through the roof. Is that kind of how that happens? Well, if you look at the amount of Bitcoin on exchanges right now, it's collapsing. So there are fewer and fewer Bitcoin in the open market to be able to purchase. As folks start getting involved in this of a larger nature and they're looking to buy a billion dollars of Bitcoin or 2 billion, whatever it could be, well, if there's a shortage of supply, then obviously the price is going to rise higher.

Now, there will be some hodlers that come out of the woodwork when prices get to certain levels, but if they're being dwarfed by the numbers and the sizes that are coming in from nation states and others, well, that becomes largely irrelevant to the price action or to supply demand. But just in December alone, the Bitcoin ETF, I think it bought 51,500 Bitcoins across the board, but the miners only made 13,850. So there is a huge supply demand imbalance and folks are taking their Bitcoin off their exchanges and they're putting it into their wallets, which means there's less and less supply out there.

And the only new supply coming to the market is by Bitcoin miners and they're not producing enough right now for the demand that we're seeing in the market. So I think that it's all interesting. Now, what does a Bitcoin strategic reserve mean? I think that folks are excited because they've seen Senator Loomis' paper where she wants us to buy a heck of a lot of Bitcoin. I think that's unlikely from day one. I think what's much more likely is we set up a strategic Bitcoin reserve, or Trump does, by taking the Bitcoin that's already held by the US government and placing it in that reserve.

Now, just by doing that and saying, "We see this as a reserve asset," we'll then get other countries to get involved as well. And they'll sit there and they'll say, "Well, we want to have a strategic Bitcoin reserve and they'll have to buy a new product." And so we're already seeing this from a number of nation states around the world. And you can go into Twitter spaces every single day and hear about the new nation or the new state that is proposing this in front of their legislation. Canada obviously just is having a change of leadership right now. And the new chap, Pierre Poliev, it looks like he's a big Bitcoiner.

He's bought food with Bitcoin. He talks about wanting to have Bitcoin's price as a commodity. He sees Bitcoin as a true saving from inflation. And Canada has certainly seen inflation right now. And so having someone that's pro Bitcoin on our Northern border, as well as Trump, obviously, for the United States, is going to see, I think, tremendous growth in the Bitcoin and crypto arena. It's not just about Bitcoin, I mean, that's certainly, I guess, our greater interest.

Certainly, I think that you're going to see a relaxing of the operation choke points that we've been seeing for quite some time, where you've seen banks stopped from going into the crypto arena and others in a very forceful nature that some say was against the law. And as those relax, then you're going to start seeing a heck of a lot of building in the United States on crypto. And I think that that's going to be very exciting. Well, do you think that also one of the things that will accelerate that is the bank's ability to lend on crypto holdings? Yeah, well, it would be great.

These niche companies that are lending, and in some of those instances, they actually want to take custody of some old school folks that they're not going to be very happy with. Well, if you want to borrow money against your Bitcoin, you're not going to hold it in your own wallet. You're going to have to hand it to someone else's collateral. If you take a mortgage on your house, you don't own the house until you pitch. So that's just the expectation.

I think that most Bitcoiners are looking for a way whereby they can earn carry, sorry, they can earn yield, some sort on the Bitcoin that they already own without selling, because if you sell, obviously there's a tax event. Now, holding Bitcoin until the tax has changed so that maybe if Bitcoin has seen as money, there would be no tax. That's one way to do it. Another would be to take some of your Bitcoin, to put it up essentially to lend it out to someone else, and then receive interest on that. Now, the earlier folks that did that, and I guess that would be the Celsius of the world, ended up being an absolute disaster.

And so yes, regulation in that space would be great. I think that there's a great demand for it. But if you want to earn carry on your Bitcoin, you're going to have to essentially take the Bitcoin out of your own wallet and put it somewhere else. To the pessimist, it says, well, if it didn't work the first time lending on it, why would it work this time? Because the first time with Celsius, it wasn't lending. You weren't lending on your Bitcoin, you were handing your Bitcoin to Celsius, who was then doing whatever they wanted with it. That's a problem. Okay. So you brought up a topic around mining. How does this impact mining?

Because I've tracked Mara, which is one of the largest mining companies out there in the space. How does this impact them? Well, the miners are getting into a lot of different businesses. They're getting into Bitcoin, obviously, but if you've got a heck of a lot of computers sitting there and using a lot of energy, you can also turn that around and use it for AI. But also what you're seeing from the Bitcoin miners, from a number of them, including Mara, is the borrowing of fiat, fiat dollars, just like Michael Saylor is doing, and then using that to buy more Bitcoin.

I think that if you're in the mining business, you're in the mining business because you believe that you can manufacture Bitcoin for less than what the market price is, or you believe that the market price is going to be much higher in the future. And so if you believe that the market price is going to be higher in the future, you borrow at close to zero, then you may as well start getting your balance sheet much, much larger by borrowing to buy Bitcoin today, so you have it for the future. But where Bitcoin miners have been genius is that, and this isn't reported very much, but Bitcoin miners have been very good in finding very cheap energy.

Now, who else wants very cheap energy? Well, folks that are in AI. And so the Bitcoin miners have captured a lot of cheap energy through either these programs on the energy or contracts that have captured that price. And so they're in a good spot there, because this is something that they can use as well. Got it. So obviously, Bitcoin is always throughout the news. But now we're hearing XRP again, because it went on quite a run. How does the adoption and Bitcoin being in a positive view these days, how does that impact XRP? Is that going to extend over to them in a positive view? Or how different is that looked upon as versus Bitcoin?

So in 2018, I did an interview at Delmonico's with Wall Street. And in that interview, which I just actually posted on our Twitter and on our Facebook, in there I was talking about XRP and Ripple, actually using the terms back and forth. But it's XRP now, but back in 2018, we called it all kinds of things. Back then, in 2018, it was the, I would say it was the darling of regulations. They were signing deals with very large banks, broker-chouses, funds, and it really looked like they were going to take off. And then the SEC stepped in and said, listen, guys, how you raise capital wasn't the right way. And they were almost stained by that.

And they were taken off of a lot of exchanges because it was seen as being sort of an illegal security now. They're now being put back on exchanges. The SEC has pulled back somewhat because they've been very good in pushing back against the government and with the new administration coming in, I think there's a lot of love right now for XRP. And it's obviously been showing that in the price action. So I think that it's gone from the darling of regulators to the pariah and it's coming back into being the darling. So it looks to me like it could have quite the year ahead of it. And I think we're all very excited to see what happens with XRP.

Now, do you think the folks in the SEC have more people that understand the impact, either the positive impact of moving this forward at accelerated rate versus what was there before? I mean, now we've actually, I think, announced that we have a specific unit for digital securities and crypto that they've actually named within the government. I don't know if that was there before. I don't think it has anything to do with the understanding. I think it has everything to do with the last administration, the Biden administration turning around and saying, we want to stamp all of this out and do everything you can to slow it down or stop it.

And regulation by finding folks and not actually giving any direction didn't help the industry whatsoever. This wasn't about understanding the business. This was about just stopping the business at all costs, using taxpayer money to stop everything that was happening. So obviously that's going to change and the new SEC commissioner will change things aggressively. The CFTC will change things aggressively and the administration will change things aggressively. So where I think a stop sign once was, there'll be a big go sign now and a lot of excitement. But I think that folks still have to stay within the regulations.

You know, there are meme coin sites like Pump.fund that you can sit there. You can create a meme coin, stick it out into the universe and see it rallied tremendously with names like FART, the FART coin. These types of things are funny, but they have to make sure that they don't cross any regulation. Unfortunately, there really isn't that much regulation for this market today. Not a lot of direction, but that lack of direction was never because of a misunderstanding. It was because they were just told to shut it down. Got it. So with the positive administration coming in around crypto, let's talk about tokenization of assets.

Now, is that going to also speed up the tokenization of real world assets? Because these digital avenues are becoming more mainstream. You're reading in the paper again. People are getting a little bit more understanding of the liquidity opportunities that are brought to more illiquid assets like real estate and such. Tokenization to assets is what fracking did to oil. So there are pockets of assets all around the world, private assets primarily, that are inaccessible to the average investor. Either they're too lumpy or they're regulated to such an extent that the retail investor can't buy it, but the accredited investor can.

What tokenization can do is it can take that illiquid asset, it can fractionalize it, and then it can sell it in a vehicle to either retail inside or outside the United States and accredited investors accordingly. So there's a tremendous demand, I think, right now for private equity, for example, or for pre-IPO stock. These are assets that are currently held by companies like private equity firms or VC firms. Now, maybe they've been holding them for quite some time, waiting for that exit that just hasn't happened. And maybe they'd like to take it off their balance sheet.

Well, there is a huge number of investors that want access to that sort of thing, but just don't have access. And so there are companies that are springing up that want to create those vehicles to take private equity and make it so that the public can invest in it. And one of these companies obviously is Distributed Brokers, it's a company that I'm affiliated with under dibscapital.com. But what we believe is we've found that way to frack private equity. So with one click, essentially take something that is illiquid and make it liquid and make it seeable to investors. So I think that tokenization is going to take off.

I've been saying this though for five years, so I could be very, very wrong. But tokenization feels like it's at that cusp. If you see Larry Fink, every single time he does an interview these days, he's either talking about Bitcoin or he's talking about how every asset is going to be tokenized and trading on the blockchain because of the efficiency that it brings to asset investing. And so I think that we're going to see a lot of that. Now, do you think with the digital securities, will it be 24/7, 365 days through the year trading? Yes. Okay. So how does that impact... Well, think about trading right now. How much of it is actually human?

Right. Not that much. And with the advent of AI, we can automate so many different things. That is the human needed, maybe. But I think that if you can trade Bitcoin and Ethereum and 8,000 meme coins, 24 hours, seven days a week, 365 days a year, then why on earth can't you trade equities that much? Now, the rules that come into the New York stock exchange that go back hundreds of years when it opens, when it closes, maybe they came about because it took an hour to take a horse and cart from New Jersey to get to downtown New York City.

And everyone wanted to have their breakfast at home and then get into the city, work there in the New York stock exchange, and then leave at four o'clock so they could be... So that was my next question is, does that pressure them into turning into a 24/7 exchange? Well, absolutely. I think it does. And you know, ICE, who owns the New York stock exchange, obviously bought T-Zero a while back, or bought into it, took a slice of it, and T-Zero at the time had an ownership in the Boston stock exchange. It was going to be a 24 hour 365 digital exchange. BSTX then closed down, but ICE still owns T-Zero.

I think that there's obviously going to be a move for public equity to move on to the tokenized blockchain. There isn't that much of it, right? If I think about native public equity today, the only one would be My Old Shop INX. That's a public token raised using a prospectus, a full prospectus. But otherwise, there's not that much out there. There's BUIDL that's trading, that's the BlackRock money market fund that's trading over at an ATS securitize. But again, not that much volume going through, certainly nothing like what we're seeing in the equity markets today. It's not just about moving the assets over.

You've also got to make sure that the pipes are there as well. The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq are fantastic and superior because they have the pipelines already built into every single shop that wants to buy an equity or an asset. And so you can start up a new exchange today, but if it doesn't have those pipelines into the distribution channels, then it's useless. You could have the best asset on an exchange that has zero pipelines built and it's going to go nowhere. So were they making the investment into, you said T0, is that a hedge against, you know, maybe getting... Well, this was many years ago. Maybe it was catch and kill. Ah.

Who knows? Who knows why they did it? But buying into something and then shutting part of it down immediately, it's not normal. Interesting. Interesting. Well, how long, I mean, would it be difficult for the New York Stock Exchange to go fully digital within their own blockchain solution? No, I think it'd be... I think, yes, they'd prefer probably to use their own solution. They wouldn't use a third party, not a company that big or an exchange that big, but would it be a chore? I mean, it'd be an absolute chore for sure, but I think that it's much more likely you're going to see a very large exchange start to do it.

Like NASDAQ, maybe you'll find the OTC does it first and then you'll find a lower exchange in NASDAQ doing it and it sort of like filters up towards then you get to the larger market cap ones after it's been tried and tested with the smaller market cap ones. So I think that you'll see this sort of like move from the lower market cap stocks and exchanges up to the higher ones over time. This isn't something that's going to happen overnight. I think that what you do find right now is interesting crypto. At first crypto was traded just by people that understood what a wallet was and the UI at UX was terrible.

And then it moved where you could buy Bitcoin by buying GBTC and lots of people did that in their retirement accounts, they did it in their brokerage accounts. And then Ibit came along and people started trading the ETF again in their E-Trade account. Easy, easy, easy to do. You didn't have to worry about a wallet. So a lot of success that's happening in the blockchain business type thing is happening because investors in traditional asset distribution channels are able to now reach it and they're able to reach it in the way that they're used to. Now that's not going to change overnight.

We're hearing talk from Morgan Stanley's E-Trade that they're going to allow trading of crypto on their platform. Again, that opens it up to the community. If I can buy crypto in my E-Trade account, the odds are I'm more likely to do that than signing up, let's say maybe to a Coinbase. And maybe I'd switch from Coinbase over to E-Trade. Right. So as everyone's scared about AI, it says it's going to take jobs. If the financial markets move towards taking the equities more widely adopted towards a solution like this, what happens to the real people? Does their job title change? Do they become redundant? What's the impact to the humans?

Well, I think that if you're in the back office, it's not good. It doesn't really affect much in the front office. There's still people have to decide what to buy, when to buy. There's people that write research on companies as well. So all of that business is still there. Investment banking is still, there's still companies that need to buy other companies. But back offices all across the world, not just in the finance industry, are going to be replaced by AI in some way or the other, whether it's a call center. Where are the most jobs? Are the most jobs in the back office on Wall Street? No.

The most jobs are probably in call centers and other places, sort of lower paying jobs that will be replaced by AI very, very quickly. What used to take, just like editing, for example, this video, maybe it would have taken a week for someone and now you can do it in 15 minutes using a software program. Things are just becoming simpler, easier, faster to do using AI and of much more professional quality in many ways. So things that essentially have an SOP, a standard operating procedure, I guess they'll be replaced by AI. Things that have an artistic nature to them, probably not and not for some time.

I saw an interview the other day with an actor being interviewed and it's sort of like, "Look, will AI take over the movie industry?" The answer is probably no, because you need that artistic imagination that comes from the individual that doesn't come right now from AI. When do you see strategic mergers and acquisitions happening? Because I was reading just the other day that crypto.com and Robinhood are actually getting into allowing sports betting with crypto and expanding what they're doing on their platforms. At what point does that happen?

It's too early for some of the behemoths to be buying maybe their competitors or is this the perfect time? The question really is about, do you need to buy your competitor to build a tech or could you build a tech yourself if you already have the distribution channel? If you already have 15 million people that have signed up for your channel and you want to bring something on, do you need to buy the competitor for the software or do you need to buy them for the folks that are already using the platform? I think that there really is a question of, can I build it myself versus acquiring?

If you're a startup, you're stuck there because if you build something, you've got to build it quickly and get large investors involved quickly, otherwise they could just build it themselves. Writing code these days is not like it was even five years ago or three years ago. Writing code these days is talking to an AI agent that helps you write the code or just produces it for you. The writing of software is becoming cheaper on a daily basis. I think that the exciting investment these days is going to be in data centers. Data centers and energy. People are searching for energy around the world. The US, Trump's talking about buying Greenland.

Why was it a lot of renewable energy in Greenland and strategic as well? I think that finding renewable ways to create energy and that's something that Bitcoin miners have been expert at is going to be very interesting because it's not just about Bitcoin mining, it's also about data centers for all this AI. It's funny you say that we're actually looking to leverage some of our existing property in Texas for data centers just strategically placed right next to an energy plant, right next to water for good cooling. Our investors are very excited about that, so you're spot on.

On that note, let's talk about one of our new co-hosts that will be coming on. One of your good friends you've known for a very long time, Ali. Can you tell us a little bit about Ali and his background? I'm very excited to have him on, but you know him very intimately, so I'll let you talk a little bit more about what's going on. The old men are about to be joined by another old man, Ali Debudi. Ali and I went to Carnegie Mellon together a long time ago. Since then, he's been an entrepreneur, he's invested in a heck of a lot of startups. I'd say that the job he does mostly on a day-to-day basis is Vice Chairman of Millionaire.

I don't know if you travel on a private plane, but if you do, you've probably stopped off of one of his places, but he's very invested in companies, early stage and later stage, and had a number of exits. I think he's going to add a lot to what we're talking about. He's also a strong Bitcoiner, and he's going to add a lot of, I think, interests and views, and probably bring on some very interesting people with us as well. He's quite a personality as well. He's got quite the personality, yeah. Well, we're very excited to have him on, and I think our viewers and listeners, you're in for a treat.

He is quite entertaining, so we're excited about that. Well, I think that's good for our first episode of season two in 2025. I'm really excited of what's to come, because we're only a couple days, what, 10 or so days away from bringing Trump in officially as the new president, and only time will tell what happens there. I think it's going to be very, very good for Bitcoin podlers, and for digital securities, and really for the innovation that the United States drives. Something else that's exciting is we've been up for six weeks. We put out our first 10 episodes, and in those six weeks, we got 7,500 subscribers.

I think that's more than anyone else that really talks about digital security specifically. That's extremely exciting. We've picked up another 2,000-odds in other social networks, and folks are really just now beginning to see us on Spotify and on iTunes. But we've picked up a heck of a lot of momentum for talking about some stuff that's really boring to a lot of people. And we're on iHeart right? We're on iHeart now, right? We're on iHeart now, yeah. That's right. That's right. To our listeners, thank you. We will continue to pump out content. Please let us know if there's areas that you want to dive deeper into.

We're happy to take your questions and implement them into the show, because that's why we're doing it. We're doing this for you. And as the YouTubers say, click subscribe and share with your friends. Thank you very much. Absolutely. Thanks so much. I'm Phil Larmon. I'm Douglas Borthwick. And this is Old Men, New Money.