Consensus 2024: All Eyes on Regulation

Bitcoin, you can't, it's not really transactional now because you have to pay taxes on every purchase, right? If they, if you, if you go by, you know, an apple or a lunch, you have to, then you have to pay taxes on that. And that's not a good outcome. We may need to make them transactional. We need to make them transparent. And uh and uh as I said, decentralized, if this is technology that has this general ledger and a source of truth, you, you've solved two big it problems, right? You solved the source of truth and the and then the timing in which that truth is, is updated. And so we looked at it and said, ok, this is gonna drive ultimately atomic settlement and the fact that you can have the money transact at the same time and you can have the trust validating who the two parties are. You're gonna take out a huge number of costs in that. And so, you know, we're, we're in a business where we're constantly being pressured to drive down the cost of the delivery of what we do. Uh I looked at this, we as a firm sort of said this is going to be the future, the future is here. Everyone, the future is here on the set here. Let me help you here. Ok. Got it. Tighten this a little bit. It's a little blurry. Do I have to be able to see? There you go. Yeah, if you remove your hands, I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley have Stockholm Syndrome and think, oh, I love being controlled by Apple and I don't really understand why, but I think there's gonna be, I think we're on the verge of kind of a jailbreak. Like I think it's starting to happen where people are gonna start to taste freedom. Again. The internet was supposed to be owned by the people supposed to be owned by its supposed to be communities of people coming together. It was not supposed to be for companies that control this. This is not a good state of the world. I don't believe it's the steady state of the world. I think that entrepreneurs will fix it. This is just what we do here at consensus. We bring gifts for our cohos. Does it look good? And then we're gonna head in the clouds thing going on here. There's a lot of positives to be, to be remaining anonymous. Um But there's a lot of drawbacks. Obviously, it's, it's gets very hot in here, uh especially in the humidity. It's not really a bear market. This guy is probably from, from last year, Danny's Bulls is winning. Hi, high five. Ok. That, that's enough play time would have stopped Wall Street at large from being a participant in the digital markets is regulatory uncertainty. It's the fear that the fed is gonna call and say no, no, no, you can't do that. Uh, the fear of the SEC is gonna be down their throat. Uh, the feel that they're gonna get a wells notice just like almost all the crypto companies. And so as that goes away, you will see a stampede of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and Citibank Jeffries and everybody else into this space. I'm hoping in some ways, I hope it gets delayed a little bit allows guys like us to build our muscles a little stronger because like that's really when the, the big show happens on who's gonna be the service providers to the universe that comes in. It seems very incongruent to be wrapping vanilla money market funds on the crypto rails while Bitcoin on traditional ETF rails. But actually, it's part of a very long journey. And that journey is to be the bridge between traditional finance where people have trillions and trillions of dollars of traditional assets held away from Bitcoin and other asset classes. And we would, we would like to serve as that institutional quality bridge and what we've been seeing uh from the current SEC administration for the last few years um is deep and broad scrutiny of everything that we're doing and it's not just us, it's virtually every company in our space. It really does kind of make my heart stop a little bit and realize to be in the what, what it must be like to be in the shoes of those people who have this idea, they're just trying to do something that's technically interesting and always in the back of their mind is this question of, is this something that's gonna cross the cross a line at the sec either today or five years from now or 10 years from now. And that kind of uncertainty is really detrimental to innovation. It's shocking to me that the United States the largest economy in the world represents, you know, the bottom death style of regulatory clarity. I think when you get the real unlock of the United States economy and you get the real institutional money flowing in, I think the 10, it's just hard to predict some of the upside opportunity. But the biggest thing I'll highlight and like, where does this go? We have to be about more than speculation, you know, III I get a ton of when I say these things, but I'm gonna say it anyway. I don't think Dogecoin has been a good thing for the industry and I'm not anti Dogecoin. I went, but it's like, I don't know what the use case is. I don't know, like are there projects being built to solve real utility. And I see lots of real utility across lots of different, you know, chains. And I think that is what is critical and what, what's for me, the, the 10 year prediction has to be about, it's not about speculation, it's about solving real problems. Transactional freedom is as important. A freedom of expression. The only path out of all of these, you know, terrible crises we're in including the debt crisis and the, you know, the crisis of, of, of, of the rising totalitarian systems. The only path out, the most obvious path out is uh is Blockchain.