Anthony Pompliano: ‘Act Dead With Your Bitcoin’ | Speak Up With Anthony Scaramucci

Anthony Pompliano 0:00
One of the benefits of Bitcoin is that it is decentralized. But one of the downsides to decentralization is there is no board of directors, no CEO, no one to organize those types of events. And in the crypto kind of industry, I think people have tried to bucket as much as possible into these events. It helps because they think it’ll bring more attendees, more speakers, more sponsors, etc. But I felt like Bitcoin now is at a point where it can stand on its own two feet, it doesn’t need all of those other things didn’t event and catering the Bitcoin conversation to Wall Street, or kind of sophisticated institutional investors was something I hadn’t seen done before thought someone should do it

Anthony Scaramucci 0:48
alright, so we’re gonna get started them right away. I mean, the first thing I want to say to Mr. Anthony Pompliano is bye for now. Okay, you and Raoul Paul, you know, knocked it out of the park on speak up. People love you, Anthony, because you had to explain things. And yes, you have this infectious energy. But I actually think there’s something more than that about you. I think you’re a visionary. And I think that you’re willing to talk about things that other people fear, okay. People fear the blockchain, they fear change, they fear Bitcoin. Many people, myself included, have been ridiculed talking about it. But I see you as a fearless frontiers, man. And I applaud you for that. And I want to also say that your event that you held two weeks ago in New York City, was one of the best events that I’ve attended, related to Bitcoin, the blockchain things happening in the internet world of money. And so I want to applaud you, and thank you for that. Where did you get the vision for that? I want to talk about that. First

Anthony Pompliano 1:57
of all, that was only successful because you came. You were like the star?

Anthony Scaramucci 2:03
Yes, I was the star. Right. You had you had you had 10 more stores bigger than me, Mike. Kathy, would, Anthony Pompliano. But I was very proud to be there. By the way, I did a great job, and I enjoyed it a great deal.

Anthony Pompliano 2:18
I think that look, Bitcoin is obviously one of the most important assets in the world, it’s now you know, over trillion dollars in market cap and any asset or, you know, trillion dollar company would have the equivalent of an annual meeting. And one of the benefits of Bitcoin is that it is decentralized. But one of the downsides to decentralization is there is no board of directors, no CEO, no one to organize those types of events. And in the crypto kind of industry, I think people have tried to bucket as much as possible into these events. It helps because they think it’ll bring more attendees, more speakers, more sponsors, etc. But I felt like Bitcoin now is at a point where it can stand on its own two feet, it doesn’t need all of those other things didn’t event and catering the Bitcoin conversation to Wall Street, or kind of sophisticated institutional investors was something I hadn’t seen done before. thought someone should do it. So you know, maybe it was a good idea, or maybe I was just too stupid to know not to try.

Anthony Scaramucci 3:22
So I brought I brought some props that okay, and I know this will make you think of your wife. Okay, let me I’m bringing it up. Hold on. It’s coming into camera here.

Anthony Pompliano 3:29
Yeah, I should have listened to me.

Anthony Scaramucci 3:33
It’s got a little bit of its own heartbeat, right, my wife, this for me. Okay. But there’s a double entendre there because you know, I should listen to her and shut up, right. But people should have listened to you. Okay, you got there early. You have 255,000 subscribers on your newsletter. I am one of your subscribers. I find the stuff you write about to be brilliant and insightful. You’ve always got something that I’m reading that is making me learn. And by the way, I’m a great plagiarist and I steal a lot of your content, Anthony. So I just want you to know that okay, rarely footnote you, but I steal your content. So let’s

Anthony Pompliano 4:10
go to the people can’t tell the difference is just they see Anthony they think it’s the same person.

Anthony Scaramucci 4:14
Exactly. God bless. God bless. And you’ve got and you’ve gotten me by 25 years or so maybe more. And so that’s even better for me. So I want to I want Anthony Pompliano content. I’m going to say the following word. I want you to react to the word Okay, you ready? Okay. Inflation. Horrible. Okay, and but okay, but let’s go. Let’s go here. 20% of the dollar has been destroyed. Okay, in the last four years, so if you’re a laborer, let’s say you’re like my dad may soul rest in peace. You’re working a crane. They pay you $1,000 in January 2020. You have $780 of purchasing power today. Yeah. Yes, horrible, destructive to a society destructive to lower middle income people. What are we going to do POM? And what’s going to happen? Yeah,

Anthony Pompliano 5:10
look, I don’t think that there is anything that the Fed or others can do. Because structurally, they have been put in the back seat. And the way I think about this is, if the central bank alone was making decisions, although they are slow, although they make mistakes, if you kind of have one person in charge, or one group in charge, they can kind of over a long period of time, at least keep the train kind of on the tracks. And so what I mean by that is, they definitely were too slow to increase interest rates in 2021, and 2022. But they eventually did do it. And you know, year over year, inflation started to come down. And part of the problem has been that the politicians, they didn’t get the message, the politicians, they’re still spending like drunken sailors. And so at the same time at the Fed is trying to create tighter financial conditions, drain liquidity from the market, you have politicians in the same country who are doing the opposite. So they’re basically fighting with each other. From a policy standpoint, then when you zoom out from just the United States to the global world, you know, at least the fed the ECB, the BOJ, you know, many of the top central banks, they’ve all been on the same page since 2022, which is let’s drain liquidity, let’s kind of create the tighter financial conditions. China, on the other hand, basically said, you know, we don’t care what you guys are doing our economy, our stock market, we need to be pumping liquidity into the market. And so China has been actually acting against on a global liquidity standpoint, these other major central banks. And so when you look at this, it’s one single central bank actually has been taken out of control position, and kind of put in the back seat. So they still have some impact. But I think that’s a huge problem. The second thing is, there’s a psychological scarring that occurs with consumers that I think is drastically under discussed. And so what I mean by that is, if inflation is high in 2021, into 2022, that doesn’t go away, you’ll just wake up when they go, I don’t worry about inflation anymore. And so a lot of what we’re seeing in society, I call it, you know, we become a society of gamblers, we have sports betting, becoming highly popular, being integrated in all these different areas, the lottery is bigger than it’s ever been before, you see zero day options, being the majority of options traded on Wall Street now, mean coins, and crypto and all these things kind of taking place. And a huge piece of it is psychologically some large portion of the population has just lost hope. How do you get ahead, right? How do you do anything? And so if you look at it from a rational position for buy lottery tickets, 300 million to one odds, if I buy a meme coin, maybe it’s I don’t know, 5050 odds, it goes up, right? Like, you know, it’s, it’s much better sports betting is better than the lottery, etc. And so people are almost like trying to become more sophisticated. By doing the gambling, there’s moving to like things with better odds. But you know, look at the story is all this time, like, I don’t think that you’re gonna be able

Anthony Scaramucci 8:06
to the destruction of the money. Yeah, causing people to take more risks, because they’re trying to catch up with the money destruction, right? Yeah,

Anthony Pompliano 8:13
of course. But But I also think that, you know, because we can identify it’s happening doesn’t mean that it’s, you know, this time is different, and all of a sudden, like, gambling is gonna be some great investment strategy. Like it is still a horrible way to invest capital and try to compound capital over time. But you can understand why people are doing it while not agreeing that that is what they should be doing. Right.

Anthony Scaramucci 8:36
Yeah, no, no, I agree with you. And now I want to put to a little bit of role playing, you know, Mr. Pompliano, you’re the central banking chair. And I am the secretary of the Treasury. Okay, so this is obviously real fantasy, because you’ll likely be the Fed chair, but I’m definitely not going to be the Secretary of the Treasury. But here, here we are a little role playing I come to you and I say, Listen, I can’t get these politicians to stop spending the budget that they’re going to put out right now. It’s going to require me to run a $2 trillion deficit. Mr. Fed chair, we went from George Washington to George W. Bush $7 trillion. Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden. 28 trillion. The CBO, which is a nonpartisan study, is saying in 30 years, we’ll have a $154 trillion deficit, which they’re saying is not sustainable. And what do we do, sir? How do you I mean, you’re the Fed chair. How do we manage this? What do we do? How do we get the politicians to stop this? How do we fix this? We were running a budget surplus in the year 2023. short years ago. Is it fixable sir or do I have to just take the money down to zero Oh, and print the 30 or $150 trillion coin to pay it all off? Yeah,

Anthony Pompliano 10:05
I think you have to go to the root solution. One of Warren Buffett’s best ideas, in my opinion, is if you want to actually change the spending, change the incentives. And so if you were to implement a rule that said, in any given year, if there’s not a balanced budget, then people are basically put on notice, if they have two or three years in a row without a balanced budget, then they are not eligible for reelection. All of a sudden, every politician will make sure we have a balanced budget, right, because they want to continue to get reelected to public office. And so again, that is a drastic measure. That is something that would be incredibly difficult to get approved, you know, all these challenges to it. But if you really could just wave a magic wand and solve it, you got to stop spending more than you make balanced the budget, and then you can address some of these other issues.

Anthony Scaramucci 10:53
Sir, I’m an economist. And I’m worried that if we stop the spending, what’s going to happen to the health care system? What’s going to happen to Social Security? How are all these people that have no savings? Anthony, there’s most Americans, the average American has $400 for a rainy day or potential crisis. And so if we from the government stopped spending, isn’t that going to collapse? The economy, sir? Yeah, well,

Anthony Pompliano 11:20
right now the path that we’re on is they’re not going to stop spending. And instead, what they’re going to do is they’re going to keep jacking up taxes, they’re going to come up with all kinds of creative ways to get more money from an income standpoint, but they’ll never be able to keep up with the spending, the spending is drastically outpacing it, but they’ll try. The other thing, I would say,

Anthony Scaramucci 11:38
exercise with food, and, you know, I mean, I hit my legs can never outrun my fingers. You know, of course, of

Anthony Pompliano 11:43
course. But I mean, it’s like, you know, look, it’s things like, probably the best example I can think of is the congestion tax in New York City. Right. So for those that don’t know, on 16th Street, starting over the summer, if you drive below 60th, street Monday through Friday, during work hours, they’re gonna charge you a $15 tax, and the United States has never had a congestion tax in any city before. It’s happened before in Europe. And they think that they’re gonna raise like, I don’t know, a billion dollars a year or something off this thing. And so, on one hand, you’re like, Okay, that is just a money grab as a way to just drive more revenue and figure out a way to kind of shore up the finances of the city. On the other hand, you know, toll roads have obviously been a thing in America for a long time. And so it’s a very nuanced conversation. But that is just one example of the creativity that they’re going to start to come up with, I don’t think that we will get the draconian things like unrealized gains, right. You know, you could imagine doing unrealized gains on people’s primary residence. If people couldn’t afford it, they couldn’t pay the tax. So, you know, there’s got to be some rationale or some path to seeing people being able to actually follow these rules. And so if you think, okay, let’s just talk about the economics of it, the politicians aren’t gonna stop spending. You have a choice, save, save us now, or save people later. And we will always choose to save us now, instead of saving, you know, later. And so what that means is they’re going to continue on the path that they’re on, they’re going to continue to print money, they’re going to continue to keep interest rates suppressed, lower. But what I think we’re finding out is, the money has been corrupted. And when that money gets corrupted, you really don’t have any options. Right? It’s kind of like saying, Hey, I have a gun shot. Should I put a bandaid on it? Well, no, you got to stop the bleeding. You have to go to the hospital, right? You have to go and have surgery, right? There’s a really severe issue, you have to have a severe response as a solution. But right now, all the things that people are considering are interest rates, five and a half, six or five. It’s all bandaid stuff. And so I just don’t think that there’s really a path to seeing them do anything that will come remotely close to solving the problem.

Anthony Scaramucci 14:03
Okay, so So this begs the question as an investor then how do you protect yourself? Last time you did our show was January 5, I looked back price of Bitcoin was 43,009 99. I was a very happy camper at $44,000 a coin. Today three short months later, Bitcoin is approximately 70,000 pump. Did you expect that did you expect this type of robust demand for the ETF and this type of price activity this quickly? I did

Anthony Pompliano 14:38
not think that we would see this much inflow, I did not think that we would hit a new all time high before the halving. And I also don’t think that I expected how fast we went from low 40s to kind of like, low 60s Right. So it wasn’t just hey, wait the all time high, but it was The velocity of the move, I think was surprising. Now, if you were to go back in January and ask me, what did I expect to occur, I definitely thought we would go much higher over the coming, you know, 24 months. And so it feels like we’ve kind of pulled forward some of that price acceleration into the last couple of months. And so there’s one school of thought that means that we’re going to go higher than we previously would have without the ETFs, you know, during the bull market, another school of thought is now we probably end up with the same kind of, you know, new all time high, when this bull market is over. It’s just that some of those returns have been pulled forward. And so there will be longer periods of kind of sideways, you know, in grinding up rather than these more like parabolic moves. I don’t know if it really matters, it’s kind of just you know, from here, we probably have another 12 to 18 months of price appreciation that that will occur.

Anthony Scaramucci 15:55
You mentioned the having I want to get to the having we have a lot of viewer comments. People write into us, and many people don’t understand the having some people are like, are they going to have my bitcoin in my account? What does it mean for supply? You’re a great explainer of things start from a base layer of zero and tell us what the halving actually means, and tell us what’s going to happen? And when do you think it happens approximately April 18 19th 20th. So

Anthony Pompliano 16:23
yeah, the last time I looked April 20, is when it will occur. You know, obviously, the most entertaining outcome is the most likely so the Bitcoin halving occurring on 420 is like, you know, made for the Internet and memes. When you think of the having, let’s talk about gold, right, gold has dug up out of the ground, kind of one 2% increase in the circulating supply of gold each year, you can imagine if all of a sudden, half of the gold miners shut down, and you now only had 50% of the previous kind of supply coming into the market. If demand stayed the same, then obviously, the price of gold would go up, right? With Bitcoin, that’s basically what’s occurring is right now, there are 900 Bitcoin a day that come into the market that are net new to the circulating supply. After the halving, it will programmatically you know, kind of executed in the software, go to 450. And so if you have demand stay just the same doesn’t have to go up just the same demand. But now you have 50%, less incoming daily supply, the price should readjust higher to kind of accommodate everyone. And so, you know, it’s pretty basic idea, I think what people get tripped up on is, they can imagine if 50% of the gold miners shut down their facilities or stopped, you know, kind of digging gold out of the ground. When you talk about the software, it’s just going to do it. All of a sudden people say, Well, how do I know that? Or, you know, what, why does the code execute that way? How can I confirm it? Beauty of Bitcoin is you can confirm it, but but there are some technical skills or experience that are needed in order to be able to to understand the intricacies. Okay,

Anthony Scaramucci 18:04
so we have 900 coins being produced by the network now. And it’s going to 450 How much demand Do you think we have on a daily basis for Bitcoin?

Anthony Pompliano 18:19
I mean, just the ETFs alone, the inflows at one point were 12x You know, that number. So you can kind of think about in Bitcoin terms, there’s 900 Bitcoin a day that are coming into the market, there was, at one point, you know, 10,000 to 12,000, Bitcoin, that people actually were looking for in the ETFs. Now, some of that has kind of slowed down a little bit. But one of the beauties of the halving is not only the fact that the halving occurs, but everyone starts talking about it. So if you go and you watch, you know, CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox, business, Yahoo, whatever, they’re all talking about it right now. And so the more that people talk about Bitcoin, more people that become interested in it. And so demand likely will go up through the end of the year, it won’t happen rapidly, but it will continue to increase. And so you have this like demand shock, where more people are coming in wanting Bitcoin, at the same time that you have a supply shock, or it’s getting cut in half. And so in the past, you know, these halvings, the last one occurred when Bitcoin was $8,000, Bitcoin went to $69,000. Right? When it occurred in the cycle before that, there’s more than 20x increase in price. And so I don’t think that we will see more than 8x. But I do think that we will see, you know, hundreds kind of low hundreds of price appreciation, which, obviously is good for people who are holding the asset, or we’re

Anthony Scaramucci 19:47
going to open it up to outsiders here in a second, but you have a new company, talk token relations. Tell us what token relations is.

Anthony Pompliano 19:57
Yeah, look, you know, I’m very focused on on how do we create as many companies as we can that kind of solve problems in this sector and others. Token relations is an idea that really came from talking to a bunch of companies, organizations, protocols, foundations, etc, in the industry. And they all kept telling me the same thing, which was we have two ways to communicate today, we have a marketing team that’s focused on going and getting new users kind of all your traditional marketing. And then we have a PR team. And those people go and they talk to reporters and try to get his press coverage. But we don’t have any ability to actually talk to our existing users, stakeholders, et cetera. And so from that standpoint, in the public markets, there are teams that are specifically dedicated to communicating with your developer community, your partners, your shareholders, to kind of the market more broadly, outside of marketing and PR. And so that’s what we’re doing here is we’re basically bringing the exact same type of service to allow these organizations to communicate with UK, their existing users, developers, token holders, etc.

Anthony Scaramucci 21:05
Okay, so how do we learn more information? There’s a website, I can go on to what do I do? Yeah,

Anthony Pompliano 21:10
you can go to token dash relations.com, I believe is the website. And there’s nothing that’s really kind of, quote unquote, consumer facing in the sense of can’t buy anything or anything from that standpoint. But it’s a great place where as we put out communication for these various organizations, you can get that information.

Anthony Scaramucci 21:32
PAF important question, I’m going to be asking this going forward for everybody that comes on, because clients are always asking this viewers or is asking this, excuse me, and we’re here at Wealthion to try to help people make money, make them look smart, make smart decisions to secure the future. If a friend came to you today and said, What should I do in the market this week? Maybe it’s the same thing every week pump? I don’t know. But what should I do in the market this week? What would that be? Yeah,

Anthony Pompliano 22:02
the way I always have thought about this is I’ve an asset allocation kind of framework in my head of percentage wise. And then I just think about I’m saving in that asset allocation percentage. So I’ll make numbers up. But let’s just say that I said, Okay, 25%, public markets, 25% bonds, 25%, kind of Bitcoin and 25% venture capital, then what I would do is, every week, whatever money I was going to have leftover, I would just put in those buckets, and try to automate as much of it as possible. You know, you had a great line at Bitcoin investor day, where you said, the best thing to do with your bitcoin is act dead? Well, I think that if you extend that out, one of the most specific things that you can do when it comes to investing is you can just automate that process so that every single week, you’re not thinking through what’s the best thing you know, I should do this week, it’s just have got a plan, and go focus on making more money so that you can continue to get more money into your kind of investment account.

Anthony Scaramucci 23:03
So so it’s a really good piece of advice. So what are some of the things you’re allocating to that?

Anthony Pompliano 23:10
I am not very exposed to the public markets, I only have really one personal holding in the public markets, which is a company called defi technologies in Canada, I think that they are drastically undervalued. You know, I’m a shareholder, personally, we’ve sold a business to them, very bullish on that business. When it comes to symbol,

Anthony Scaramucci 23:32
it’s publicly traded in Canada, what’s the symbol Canada,

Anthony Pompliano 23:34
I think it’s d f, t f, if I remember correctly, and then an altcoin ETF issuer, the company, most recently, when they did an earnings report was trading at you know, kind of $140 million market cap approximately. And their guidance was that they’re going to do I think, $46 million in revenue in 2024. And so it’s just I think, something that’s mispriced, but we’ll see what happens, maybe I’m wrong. When it comes to everything else, I do a lot of early stage investing. Those are usually early stage technology companies, they’re in the private market, they stay liquid for a very long period of time. They’re very asymmetric. They’re, you know, zeros, or we’re gonna get back hundreds of percent on the upside, but usually takes about 10 years to get those back. And then I continue to allocate to crypto. I have a Bitcoin position. The second biggest position that we have is Solana. And then you know, we’re looking at other things, and we’ll probably come up with other ideas of what we should be doing there. And then probably the biggest investing we do is in the companies like we want to continue to reinvest in our own companies that can help us generate cash flow and enterprise value. And so you know, we have a skill set and experience doing that and that usually drives pretty good return as well.

Anthony Scaramucci 24:51
There’s a book behind you pop. It’s called hidden genius. Tell us about the book.

Anthony Pompliano 24:58
Yeah, I don’t know the author. But my wife wrote the book. Can you bring up the mug again? Yeah, hi. No, I wrote the book she interviewed

Anthony Scaramucci 25:10
Colleen on this show. Okay, good. She

Anthony Pompliano 25:15
She studied a bunch of very well known successful people, interviewed, some of them studied other ones, and basically pulled out a ton of insights and commonalities between them. So a good example is, there are many people who all have an alter ego, when they go into a performance, so Kobe Bryant famously had the Black Mamba, Beyonce has something called Sasha Fierce. And so you can kind of go through these different people and see these commonalities. And some of them you can take and apply to your own life. Others are kind of good to understand. But actually, you may actively say that that doesn’t really fit what I’m trying to accomplish. It’s a very kind of good, easy read. She’s a fantastic writer. And it’s a best selling book, although she gets mad when I tell people that cuz she likes to downplay her success, but

Anthony Scaramucci 26:08
it’s her first book, I’m looking forward to her second book, she was on my podcast open book to discuss the book. And I love the book. And it’s a great book about putting one foot in front of the other to pursue excellence. Mr. Baba, we’re gonna take some questions the outside audience, but for this week, specifically, I’m assuming I’m going to tell people defi technologies, right in Canada, right. Okay, the SEC is likely filing a lawsuit against uniswap. I think we did. Do, we did see that the HELOC is uniswap. And is this another FTX? This is Stephen from Pennsylvania. Yeah,

Anthony Pompliano 26:45
the easiest way to understand uniswap is Coinbase, as an exchange allows buyers and sellers to come on. And they can trade various cryptocurrencies with each other. And you just think there’s bids and asks, right. And Coinbase is a centralized company that allows you to make those trades no different than the stock exchange or any other type of exchange. uniswap is similar in that it is an exchange allows people to buy and sell assets. So it kind of brings those together. But it is different in that it is decentralized. And so, you know, the people who are critics of uniswap would argue, the SEC lawsuit will expose the fact that uniswap is not decentralized. The supporters of uniswap would say no, it is decentralized. And this is not the way that regulators should be treating, you know, an American entrepreneur who’s building something here in America, run innovation, etc. I think that when I saw the news, there have been rumors before. So I don’t know if it was necessarily surprising. But you know, I always remind people that when everyone was asking for regulatory clarity, I would always say, clarity is good. Just remember that if you get the clarity, it may not be the clarity you want. Right. And so same thing here is, well, we’ll see what happens, like the beauty of America is that we have a judicial system that allows people to hire legal experts are going to come in to both gonna lay out their case in front of a judge or jury, and there’ll be a decision made. And most likely, if we get to that point, this will lead to some degree of precedent that is set, and will probably determine the future of these decentralized exchanges and types of applications within kind of the American, you know, regulatory jurisdiction. And so I think that’s why there’s a lot of eyes on it, right? You can imagine the people who don’t like this stuff, they want to see kind of the door slammed on the industry, and, you know, finally prove that everything is a joke. The people who are supporters of it, obviously, with like the opposite. And so, you know, I always kind of take the approach of look, the courts or the courts, and that’s the beauty of America. So let’s see what happens once everyone has their day in court.

Anthony Scaramucci 28:55
Yep. And so just for Stevens benefit, and viewers and listeners, they did receive a WELS notice, and there’s likely going to be a lawsuit and Hayden, Adams, somebody that pomp and I know, who is a champion of decentralization and also made a decision. He’s out on Twitter this morning, saying that he made a decision to stay in the US, even though he knows this is a negative regulatory environment here. He thinks it’s unfair, he’s willing to take this all the way to the Supreme Court. The SEC has been slapped around a little bit by our judges, they’ve lied in court about a lot of these things. And unfortunately, in my opinion, the SEC has become a political organization. They’re more focused on either left leaning regulation or right leaning regulation, or Elizabeth Warren doesn’t like it. So therefore, I don’t like it, as opposed to right or wrong, and it’s something that we have to watch for. And I it’ll be very interesting. I do think this stuff will have an impact on the presidential election coming up as well. Let’s go to the next question. Why has my eath continued to hover around 3500 instead of shooting up like BTC? This is Ames from California? Well,

Anthony Pompliano 30:10
the simple answer is more people want Bitcoin than one eath. Right? Doesn’t mean that Aetherium is good or bad. But obviously prices move because of buyers and sellers. And there’s a lot of people who want Bitcoin right now, one of the things that I believe is hurting Aetherium and you’re not leading to the price increase, is there still some questions around the regulatory treatment of the asset? There’s been rumors that the SEC may actually consider it to be a security and you have some issues there. So that’s one overhang. The second thing is Bitcoin, obviously, with the approval of ETFs tapped into a whole new set of demand that previously couldn’t access the asset. There are a couple of ETF applications that have been put forward for Aetherium. Maybe they get approved, maybe they don’t. But if they do get approved, I think that’ll lead to, you know, more demand. And, you know, I also think that it’s important to call out bitcoin is really attempting to be a monetary asset. And so there usually is some maximalism that occurs around a monetary asset, you get paid in dollars you save in dollars, you’re $1, maximalist, you don’t carry around, you know, Mexican pesos in your pocket. If you live in America, I kind of use one asset. And so Bitcoin seems to be doing that in the digital world. Now, Aetherium is not really a monetary asset. Aetherium is much more trying to be a technology platform. And in the technology sector, there is a lot of competition, there’s constant competition, right, Facebook is everyday fighting off the next great social network. Amazon is fighting off the next great, you know, e commerce platform. And so Aetherium now has quite a bit of competition there, you know, Solana and many others, that have either already come out into the market or will be coming out into the market. And so they constantly have to fight that fight to stay ahead, technology wise, but also, they’ve got to figure out, you know, how do you continue to have some sort of economic value creation, that leads to the token going up in price, if that’s what they’re worried about? Now, part of the issue is, if that’s what they’re worried about their spending time on, that may make the regulator’s argument stronger, right, that always second, maybe this is a security and so there’s kind of this balance, but I tend to think in a bull market and most things go up whether you know that value or not. And so, you know, Aetherium is up, I believe, if if I remember correctly, Aetherium outperformed Bitcoin in the last bull market in dollar terms. And so, you know, it’s it’s not all doom and gloom, but definitely Bitcoin right now more people want Bitcoin than anything else. And I think that’s where you’re seeing Bitcoin outperform?

Anthony Scaramucci 32:44
Okay, thank you. As from California, let’s fire up another question. Isn’t the proliferation of ETFs creating a centralization of the network this essentially comes up a lot, Jen from Queens?

Anthony Pompliano 32:55
Yeah, it’s great question. I think that it is creating centralization in terms of ownership of Bitcoin, you know that a couple of points that are important here is when you buy the ETF you are you don’t own Bitcoin, you basically own like an IOU. You can’t get that Bitcoin out of the fund. So you have price exposure, but you don’t actually have custody of the Bitcoin. And so the centralization is that Blackrock or fidelity or bitwise, whoever actually has the Bitcoin, in terms of, you know, what is the negative side effect or impact? When it comes to centralization of ownership, it’s not really that high. If somebody owned 50% of the Bitcoin, they could have an impact on price, obviously, if they sold it all, or something like that, but they can’t really do anything different on the network. It’s not like all of a sudden, they could, you know, hack the network or change transactions or anything like that. And so Bitcoin structure is pretty interesting in that it has almost like three bodies of Bitcoin think very similar to the US government, we kinda have the three branches of the government. And so those three kind of critical bodies are, there’s miners, they’re software engineers, and then there are node operators and or Bitcoin holders. And so what you need for you know, any sort of significant change in Bitcoin is you need all three of them to sign off on that. And we’ve actually seen in the past where people have put forward proposals, there’s been quite a bit of pushback, even if they’ve had, you know, 5070 80% of hash rate in terms of mining, they haven’t been able to get their proposals pushed through. And so I think that the rigidity of Bitcoin in terms of governance is pretty important through those three bodies. And so centralization of ownership is not a big deal. If somebody was able to get centralization of, you know, two or more of those groups, then I think that would be concerning, but it’s very unlikely today.

Anthony Scaramucci 34:49
All right. It’s great question, though. How can I find an investment advisor that understands crypto? That’s bill from Massachusetts. I mean, I’m hesitating here because I don’t know any.

Anthony Pompliano 35:01
I was gonna say she go talk to Anthony scare Moochie at skybridge.

Anthony Scaramucci 35:06
Um, but I’m an Asset Manager Oh my god. I’m not a I’m not an FA, I think it’s a really good question. I don’t have a good answer for that. What do you say? I

Anthony Pompliano 35:15
do think that there are some, the ones that seem to be kind of most ahead of the curve are individuals who work inside of like a traditional financial adviser business, and they personally are interested in crypto, and therefore that is leading them to want to help their clients. So I do think that it is kind of advisor lead interest. And just like anything, if you’re interested in something, then you’re going to go and you’re going to spend time learning about it. And then if you have knowledge, you want to share it with your clients to help them you know, in kind of their investment journey, so that to me has been the place to find them. It’s just find people maybe on Twitter or elsewhere that you know, are interested in our financial advisor and talk to them.

Anthony Scaramucci 36:04
Okay, well, I mean, you could also go to Wealthion.com, you could fill out the form there. And we’ll do our best to connect you to one of our RAS that is forward thinking of crypto. That’s good.

Anthony Pompliano 36:16
That’s a good idea.

Anthony Scaramucci 36:17
Let’s do that. Right. Next question. Is it better to invest in mining company stocks or just buy? So I’m assuming crypto mining company stocks, or Bitcoin mining company stocks or just buy cryptocurrency outright?

Anthony Pompliano 36:31
Yeah. It’s a great question. It depends on where we are in the cycle and kind of what your goals are. So people who just want pure price outperformance during bull markets in the past, definitely the miners have outperformed for some period of time. But when you look at it over the long run, usually Bitcoin itself has outperformed. And it’s for the same reasons that you would see in the traditional markets, why would somebody would buy a miner with cash flow and the ability to use leverage and all of that, versus maybe buy gold? Now, one thing I will say that I think is pretty interesting is over the last five years, gold has actually outperformed the s&p Barely, but gold is still you know, done very well compared to the s&p. And so when you see things like that occurring, it’s just really hard for companies to outperform some of these assets that are highly valued globally, over the long run. And so, for me, personally, I don’t have any individual exposure to any of the mining companies, not because they’re bad companies or anything like that. Just bitcoin is kind of simpler, right? I can just buy bitcoin hold it, I don’t have to worry about price to earnings and how much debt they’re taking on or the issuing stock and of all these different variables that can help on the upside, but can also hurt on the downside.

Anthony Scaramucci 37:52
All right, terrific. Let’s go to the next one. I run a small business, what are your thoughts on selling equity in the form of tokens? Versus crowdfunding? Your neck of the woods? Aren’t you from North Carolina? Yeah, yeah. This is Georgia in Charleston, South Carolina.

Anthony Pompliano 38:06
You know, South Carolina is a different state. Right?

Anthony Scaramucci 38:09
You know, that I’ve seen you know, that. I know you guys have called for down there. Yeah,

Anthony Pompliano 38:13
well, North Korea is on top. So it’s alright. So when you think about this first thing is just like, do you want to raise money? And I think a lot of business owners, especially small business owners, you know, it sounds great, hey, if I get some more capital, I might be able to grow my business, etc. But did they actually want to deal with investors and external folks and governance, things like that, I think is the first question got to ask yourself. The second is, how much money do you need, right. And the reason why that’s important is, depending on the tool you use to raise capital, the costs are different. So if you’re gonna raise, you know, $100,000, but the legal bill to set up the ability to raise that $100,000 cost $100,000, that didn’t make a lot of sense. And so you’ve got to kind of have the right amount of money you’re gonna raise. And then when it comes to just the different use case of tokens versus crowdfunding, I think that there’s a lot more regulatory clarity when it comes to crowdfunding than there is in terms of tokens. And so right now, what I’m seeing most small business owners do is either the raising from private investors that are in the local area, or customers that come in and you know, use their service or their product, or they’re using some sort of crowdfunding component, which just seems to be simpler, cheaper, and there’s not a lot of issues that they have to worry about on the regulatory front

Anthony Scaramucci 39:35
All right, the pump well said Oh, no, they didn’t dad there. Let’s go to the next one. How many of the books on those shelves have you guys actually read? This is Mike and Dave in the control room see that they’re making fun of our more booths jealousy from Mike and Dave, you know that right? That’s fine. You’re an intellectual I’ve

Anthony Pompliano 39:53
read I’ve read them all. You want to know this book? Where’s Yeah, right here. This book right here the sign It’s illustration, you gotta get that one. It’s like, it’s got every great science breakthrough in pretty much history. And it’s the original drawings and graphics, etc, of all that you kind of, that’s a book that you don’t sit down and read kind of cover to cover. You sit down and you go through the pictures for people with small brains like me, and it’s very entertaining and you learn a little bit so

Anthony Scaramucci 40:25
that’s one of the books that I don’t have in my little mini bookstore here. You see that box behind me pop Zoho books that I’ve read I gotta start giving those away to the library so too bad okay, I I read you don’t and remember what Mark Twain said? If you can’t read or you can read if you don’t read? It’s like you can’t read? And that’s more or less you

Anthony Pompliano 40:47
want to know what one of my favorite one of my favorite books that I’ve ever I’ve ever read?

Anthony Scaramucci 40:53
Tell me can you guess? I don’t know hidden genius by Paulina pomp Leon.

Anthony Pompliano 40:59
Oh, come that is one but but there’s even better ones. Tell me the sweet life with Bitcoin.

Anthony Scaramucci 41:05
Are you like that once? Yeah, there you go. All right. That was an interesting fast read. Yeah. Okay. It also included the white paper which you’ve read many times. Yeah, it was a good eBook out there just to let people know that why we like Bitcoin pop. I was there after you but I took a lot of bows and arrows, man a lot of bows and arrows. That’s okay. Flaming flaming arrows up the ying yang.

Anthony Pompliano 41:29
Let them let them say whatever they want to say. All right,

Anthony Scaramucci 41:33
Amen. All right, well, we’ll pop I mean, once again, show my mug off. Okay, make sure Polina sees this mug, because this is a reminder to Polina Pompliano and Deirdre Scaramucci. Yes, we know we know. Anthony, thank you so much for joining us today. You’re the best.

Anthony Pompliano 41:51
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.