Could Bitcoin Replace Gold? (Uncut) 02-28-2025

Could Bitcoin Replace Gold? with Richard Byworth

Gold is just really a much lower quality version of Bitcoin. And when you look at the attributes of Bitcoin, the scarcity, Bitcoin beats gold. Divisibility, Bitcoin beats gold.

Portability, Bitcoin beats gold. Fungibility, Bitcoin beats gold. I mean, I have a friend that had a Hong Kong stamped, Hong Kong dealer stamped bar of gold that he was trying to sell in Switzerland.

He nearly got reported to FINMA for money laundering. So, you know, gold is not fungible if you’re not within the LBMA market stamping situation. So Bitcoin, you know, is just a superior asset to gold in every aspect.

And if you look at, I don’t know what the gold market cap is today, but maybe 16, 18 trillion. You know, Bitcoin needs to go to seven, eight hundred thousand dollars to match that. But it’s better than gold.

So I think, you know, I think that if you understand gold, if you’re a gold bug, you probably need to make sure that you start switching into Bitcoin or at least have 50-50 Bitcoin exposure. On this episode of the What The Finance podcast, I have the pleasure of working on Richard Byworth. So Richard is a managing partner of Seed Capital with 25 years of investment experience.

So, Richard, thanks so much for coming to the podcast today. Thanks, Anthony. Thanks for inviting me.

No problem. Looking forward to the conversation. You have quite a unique perspective and background.

I’d be really interested in hearing, I guess, your quick review of your career and I guess how you’ve got into where you are today. Sure. Yeah.

I mean, I had a bit of a weird start in that I didn’t have your traditional financial education. I had a French major at university, but I decided halfway through university that I wanted to be a trader. And I remember going to my my French tutor and saying, listen, I want to change.

I want to include economics or finance. And he said, I’m sorry, we just don’t have enough men doing French. So you’re going to have to stay with 100 percent focus on French.

So I did. And then when I got out of university, well, actually, I chose to go to business school as part of my university. Period.

So I went to business school in France. And then when I came out, I applied to every investment bank in London and eventually got a role with Paribas before they were BNP Paribas doing a project job for the derivative traders. And that was my entry in.

And I took advantage of it, became good friends with all the derivative traders, got a job after I finished the project. Pricing derivatives. Then my next job, I moved over to Nomura because Paribas was merging with BNP and Nomura had an interesting setup.

They were very much a proprietary house, meaning that they didn’t really have much client flow other than what they did in Japan. So they were actually a lot of traders at Nomura just trading the bank’s capital in London. And so it was a very interesting place to go with someone wanting to build a career in trading.

So I got given an opportunity on the trading desk pretty quick and ended up trading the convertible bond book within two weeks of joining the trading desk. And that really launched my career. Two years later, I was in Tokyo building out the business for Nomura there.

We were very successful in that. It was a very different approach than ever had been done for Nomura before. And so we were very successful in taking the number one slot from Goldman in just a matter of months.

And then about three years later, Lehman happened. And so then, because we’d been so successful with the convertible bond business, we were one of the few businesses that actually inherited a Lehman team rather than a Lehman team takeover because Nomura acquired Lehman Asia and Lehman Europe. So I ended up inheriting the derivative business, the futures and options business and the Delta One business, as well as the convertible bond business.

And that was fantastic for a decent period of time. Then the zero rate environment started to really impact all of those businesses I just mentioned. So it was very hard to make a spread and continue to grow in volume in the degree that we were doing.

And, you know, as is often the case in these big banks, management would come to me every year and go, OK, you need to make more money, but you need to do it with a smaller team. And in 2014, I got to the point of saying, guys, this is just no longer sustainable. And so in 2017, eventually, I managed to get the exit that I wanted from the bank and I joined a crypto company.

I discovered Bitcoin in early 2017. I was actually due to leave and join a private equity company, but I’d invested in a crypto company and I was quite interested in it. The founder asked me to come and join and lead the business and to build out the financial services side of things.

So I ended up building a fund, a custodian solution, an exchange solution, a trading desk as well. So we really became a sort of all services financial house for crypto. We were really trying to do it in a very white hat and regulated way.

And so it was very hard to compete with the likes of Binance and FTX, who would onboard people in a matter of hours or minutes. And we would take weeks to onboard people because of all the compliance checks. So it just it really was very, very hard.

We listed the company on Nasdaq through a SPAC and that was successful for a period. We hit a 1.8 hundred million market cap and then the company engaged in talks with the chairman engaged in talks to sell the company to Binance. I didn’t want to be a part of that.

So I stepped down and that was the end of 2021. And then when it got announced, so it was three months later that it got announced formally and Mark Seas was one of the first people to call me and say, hey, would you consider coming and looking after the hedge fund business at Seas Capital? I said I’d need two things. One, we’d need to build a fund of crypto hedge funds.

And the second thing, I need a holiday. So I’ll join you at the end of the year. He said fine to both.

And so that’s how I ended up at Seas Capital. We now run, well, we’re about to launch our second fund in the crypto space. So as of Monday next week, we will be running a quarter of a billion dollars in crypto strategies.

Yeah, it’s really interesting sort of your career, your trajectory and how you’ve gotten to today. And I’d be interested to hear, you know, how you got into crypto, because I guess if I think about my audience and, you know, traditional finance people, they’re very sceptical. They maybe think it’s a Ponzi.

So, yeah. So what really attracted you and what was that moment where you’re like, wow, this is actually quite important? Yeah, it took a long time. And actually, I was sat with a 60 plus year old gentleman today for lunch and said, look, this is not something that you will naturally get comfortable quickly.

But he is certainly open to learning. And so that’s the that’s the essential part. It really a lot of people from the older generations feel that, you know, they’re too old to learn about it.

They don’t need to learn about it. They’ll just carry on trading in the stock market and let their kids trade crypto. But I think for me, what happened was I read the book Sapiens at the beginning of 2017.

My kids, you know, had been a big focus of my life for the prior seven years. And I took them on holiday to a Club Med in Japan skiing where you could literally drop your kids off in their pajamas to the ski school. And that would be at 8 a.m. And then they deliver them back to you at 5 p.m. So this was the first time that I managed to read a book in seven years.

And I read the book Sapiens by Yuval Harari. And I was really intrigued by a lot of what he talked about in that book about models for humanity and how things have evolved and obviously money being a big part of that. And he kept talking about Bitcoin, which I’d previously dismissed in 2010, 11 as a scam.

And I didn’t understand why this guy who was talking about a lot of things that I agreed with was talking about Bitcoin. And so I said, I clearly need to do a bit of work here. So I started studying.

I read the white paper in the summer of that year. Didn’t understand a word of it, but kept trying again, reading again and sort of slowly working through things. I got the grad on my desk to buy some Bitcoin and then went away on holiday for the summer.

And when I came back, Bitcoin had done 300 percent. And I said, oh, great, it’s brilliant that you bought us all some Bitcoin. And he said, I thought you were joking.

So he didn’t do that. So I said, OK, if I’m going to learn about this, I’m going to have to do it myself. So I ended up onboarding with one of the exchanges in Europe, Bitstamp.

And it was the one exchange that seemed to have a long history and not been hacked and a good reputation. So I actually didn’t buy Bitcoin straight away. I bought Litecoin.

It then did another 5X, literally within a month. It was the tail end of the bull market in 2017. And so I didn’t actually buy Bitcoin until June of 2018.

That was $9,000 Bitcoin and it was on its way down. And then I still didn’t really understand Bitcoin properly or why Bitcoin was so much better than everything else. And that didn’t really happen for me until the end of that year.

And then I had really a revelation moment after doing a lot of work, as I said, just keep reading as much as I could. There was still not as much available material out there for education in Bitcoin as there is today. So it would be a lot easier to get there quicker today if you are very focused on it.

But back then there wasn’t so much. But I remember it was a Pompliano podcast that I listened to with a guy called Murad. And I remember getting off the end of it and going to bed that night and waking up in the morning saying, I really need to buy a lot of Bitcoin.

I really am very underexposed. That was October 2018. And then I bought a lot of Bitcoin and then it halved again.

And so then I tried to buy a lot more. I really didn’t have much money left at that point. So, yeah, it was that was probably my journey.

So March 2017, February 2017 through to October 2018, it took me to really get to what is this thing and saying, OK, I really understand it. I really want to make sure that I have as much exposure as possible. And so, yeah, it’s not a it’s not a quick process.

It doesn’t happen overnight. And actually, just to maybe tell you one one more story to to help your audience just sort of, you know, view, understand how many people from that older generation approach it. You know, when I first joined Seed’s group, Eric Seed, the founder, very inspirational character, huge personality.

He said to me, Richard, I need you to sit me down and explain to me what is Bitcoin. And, you know, this is a very intelligent individual investor who has been investing for years. And he just kept coming back to me multiple times saying, look, just explain it to me in three sentences, because if you if you can’t explain it to me in three sentences, you don’t understand what it is.

And I think that is actually a really good way of of showing what is so difficult about Bitcoin, because it covers so many different disciplines. You can’t distill it into three sentences like you can with most other things. And that’s why you’ve got to go through these various different layers and understanding economics, finance, hard money, you know, what what an asset is, et cetera, et cetera.

And so all of these different things lead to a broad based understanding, including, you know, even philosophy and game theory and all of these different things, including potentially down the road geopolitics. So, you know, Bitcoin is is a very rich and diverse subject that you can look at from very many different angles. And so trying to just distill it into those three sentences is almost impossible, which is why so many people in finance who are in very senior, very established positions in finance, you know, really don’t get to the point of completely getting it because they’re like, OK, just sounds very ethereal.

It doesn’t, you know, it’s not substantive. It’s not backed by anything. You know, it’s it’s not like gold, which is a nice shiny metal that has utility.

You know, they don’t they don’t go much further than that. And so I think it’s easy to dismiss it. And it does require work.

And, you know, it’s ironic that the consensus mechanism for Bitcoin is proof of work. And that is actually what backs Bitcoin. And you have to do the work to understand it.

And so there’s a there’s a phrase in Bitcoin. Everybody buys Bitcoin at the price they deserve. If you do the work early, you get to go in early.

Yeah, it sounds quite similar to my journey. I sort of was buying at the bottom of at the tail end of that bull market to 20k. I think I bought it at 6k and then a half to the next day is what I remember.

And unfortunately, I sort of I was in it for six months, then sort of went away from it. Obviously, that’s financially affected me. But it is that, as you said, it’s that journey of understanding and learning and being a part of it.

And what was it from that from that interview that really stuck out to you? Because that’s quite a quite a statement saying that, wow, I don’t I don’t know enough. And I think in the past you’ve talked about how can I, you know, that you were actually trying to loan money to buy more Bitcoin. So was there something from that interview that just stood out? I think it was just everything coming together and understanding the true scarcity of Bitcoin.

And, you know, the thing I often when I get asked about Bitcoin, I get asked, well, you know, where’s the price going to go this year? And and, you know, I try not to give too many price predictions because you can get very overexcited about Bitcoin when you understand the true scarcity of its nature. But I think a good way to think about it is four years ago today, 3.5 million Bitcoin was sitting on exchanges. Forward to today, you’ve got 2.3 million Bitcoin on exchanges.

Through that period of time, you’ve also had the network issue about 1.1 million Bitcoin. So you’ve seen liquid supply move into cold storage or less liquid supply to the tune of about 2.3 million Bitcoin over the last four years. So Bitcoin is in four year cycles.

And obviously that’s punctuated with a halving in the supply. So this point post the halving that we had, I think it was April last year, you had 3.5 million Bitcoin on exchanges. We were, you know, peaking bit bull market 69,000 or wherever it was we got to.

And you had a significant amount more Bitcoin. Now you’ve had even more Bitcoin be issued and you’ve got, as I say, that 2.3 million Bitcoin that’s just been taken out of supply. Now, we’ve only got 1.05 million Bitcoin left to be issued to the network over the next 115 years.

115 years is going to take to issue that remaining Bitcoin. So you suddenly realize we’ve had 2.3 million taken out of supply over the last four years. There’s only 2.3 million remaining in liquid supply and there’s 1.05 million ever to be issued again.

So you really can see a huge jump in where the price is going to have to go if the same amount of demand is coming in. I think I saw somewhere that we estimate that six times the supply has been coming into the market post halving. So six times the dollar amount of supply that’s being issued by the Bitcoin network is coming into the market in dollar terms since the halving.

So that essentially means, you know, the price needs to go up about six times from here if you’re going to get an equilibrium of that and you see a price point, sorry, a point in those exchange supplies where they just stop being sold. So you’re going to see a slow drift to six times the price to get an equilibrium. Now, obviously, that will be expedited by a Bitcoin strategic reserve or something like that.

But I think it was that supply dynamic that really got me to the point of saying, OK, I just do not have enough Bitcoin. Everything else that we have in the broad asset space is dilutable, you know, be it real estate, be it equity, be it bonds, even gold. You know, if gold price goes to 20,000, you’re going to see a lot more drilling of or sorry, digging out of coal mines and production of gold.

You’ll see that inflation rate increase. It doesn’t matter what the price does in Bitcoin. You’re not going to see an increase in the inflation rate.

So, yeah, it’s a truly finite asset. And I think when people actually get to the point of understanding that, that’s when the penny drops. That’s when you say, OK, I need to have a significant amount of Bitcoin in my savings.

Yeah, it’s a good point, maybe. And I think a lot of people, when they look at gold, they say, OK, this is like a hedge against bad decision making from a monetary policy perspective, from a government perspective, fiscal policy, all these other metrics. Do you see the same for Bitcoin? And as you said, it’s basically the same, but potentially the same, but with no supply increase.

Yeah, again, we’re discussing this at lunch today. I think gold is just really a much lower quality version of Bitcoin. And when you look at the attributes of Bitcoin, the scarcity, Bitcoin beats gold.

Divisibility, Bitcoin beats gold. Portability, Bitcoin beats gold. Fungibility, Bitcoin beats gold.

I mean, I have a friend that had a Hong Kong stamped, Hong Kong dealer stamped bar of gold that he was trying to sell in Switzerland. He nearly got reported to FINMA for money laundering. So, you know, gold is not fungible if you’re not within the LBMA market stamping situation.

So Bitcoin, you know, is just a superior asset to gold in every aspect. And if you look at, I don’t know what the gold market cap is today, but maybe 16, 18 trillion, you know, Bitcoin needs to go to seven, eight hundred thousand dollars to match that. But it’s better than gold.

So I think, you know, I think that if you understand gold, if you’re a gold bug, you probably need to make sure that you start switching into Bitcoin or at least have 50-50 Bitcoin exposure to gold. I think that that’s just the way the trend is going to go. And if you look at the way that wealth is going to transition in the next 10, 20 years, then you know that the younger generation are going to inherit 10 to 20 percent of the world’s wealth.

And they don’t care about having a shiny rock sitting in their safe. They’re much more comfortable with a digital asset. And the fact that this digital asset is so much more superior to gold.

Yeah, you’d really be very remiss not to have Bitcoin in your portfolio if you hold gold. Yeah. And there’s this good point at the moment with the young people, it’s sort of financial nihilism.

It’s sort of so negative about everything. It’s like, well, I may as well just put it all in this highly speculative asset potentially to actually give myself the potential, you know, to buy a house or for all these other things that I want to do. So that’s a quite an interesting thought as well.

But, you know, we’re talking a week after one of the large or almost a week after one of the largest crypto hacks, probably the largest crypto hacks in history. And it’s been quite an interesting reaction because Bitcoin has hardly moved. So I’d be interested to hear your opinion on that.

And to be honest, it’s held up quite well versus some of the other altcoins have absolutely crashed. Not because of that, but over the past few years. So, yeah.

Do you think it’s just that it’s gotten better? What do you think has caused that? Yeah, I think the Bybit hack obviously is the biggest crypto exchange hack in history. 1.4 billion dollars. They stole in Ethereum or ETH, the asset.

And I think, you know, it’s definitely from my perspective as someone who allocates to crypto hedge funds that use these exchanges. It was a concerning Friday night. We were monitoring all our managers very closely.

But what I would say is the difference between what happened with FTX and what happened with Bybit. Obviously, FTX, you could see there was a problem happening way in advance. The hack happened.

It was immediate. So it was a different situation. With FTX, there was a slow draining of the Bitcoin wallet all the way back since June.

So within what we do on the fund to fund side is when we’re allocating to funds, we work out what we ask them, what exchange platforms they use, and then we monitor those exchange platform wallets to hedge against an FTX type risk again. So it provides us some level of early warning system. So we were warning our managers on Friday night.

There’s a problem with Bybit. And obviously, the hack did get announced very, very quickly. So many of our managers now actually monitor the exchange wallets themselves.

So managers were withdrawing. So we had on Friday night, we had about 10% exposure to Bybit on across the fund with different funds. And within the first hour, that already reduced to 5%.

And then obviously, withdrawals started slowing down. And and so the remaining managers had to pull off and they didn’t get off until early Saturday morning. But what was interesting was that many of the managers now are accessing Bybit.

So I would say that Bybit is actually a very popular exchange. They have very good derivative products in the future space. And so what happened there, what we saw, even because the number was 10%, it was quite low, was because many of the managers use other platforms to get access to them.

So for example, they use Copper Clearloop, where you put assets within that custodian, and then they can reflect onto the exchange, you get a credit line on the exchange based on the assets that you have in this safe custodian. So we actually had three managers that use that who had been using Bybit, but they had zero exposure as a result of that. And so we’re seeing that more and more, these type of solutions being rolled out, and more and more managers are using these types of things.

So there’s Hidden Road that have an insurance product, there’s Copper Clearloop, there’s even Coinbase Prime. I don’t think Coinbase Prime have access to Bybit, but they do have access to about seven different exchanges. So what we’re seeing is really an institutionalization of the space.

So even though that was a big hack on a very important platform, even if it had gone the way of FTX, where they’d shut withdrawals and ended up going into a bankruptcy situation, then the losses would have been significantly minimized compared to an FTX situation. So I would say that it was, while it was obviously concerning when it was happening, I would say that Bybit handled things very, very well. They were super communicative.

Binance and BitGet helped Bybit, so they sent funds to them to help fund their short term requirements to allow for withdrawals in Ethereum. So there was a collaborative approach, there was a very good communication approach. But on top of that, the managers reacted very swiftly.

The minute they saw a problem, they were like, OK, we’re off. And so risk was diminished very, very quickly. So yeah, I was very happy to see that when things started getting concerning, we only had 5% exposure.

And that was one of the platforms that’s used the most by the market. Yeah, so it seems sort of a maturing of the industry, basically, when it can go through something like that. And I think as long as it’s not fraud, because yeah, that was the issue with FTX, it’s basically fraud.

So that’s why it collapsed versus this, which is more, yeah, a North Korean hack. Yeah, absolutely. But I mean, of course, a hack could have been fatal.

So, you know, we were lucky that it was an exchange that is so widely used because they’re so profitable. I think the rumor is that $1.4 billion is their net income annually. So it’s not, you know, they obviously had a decent amount of treasury and so it wasn’t the end of things for them.

So, yeah, they’ll be able to work it out. Yeah, which is important, strong exchanges. But I’d be interested in hearing, so if we go maybe pivot to MicroStrategy, it’s something that you said you sort of worked in convertible bonds, hybrid bonds in your past life.

And that’s something that, you know, probably one of the best examples of using this is MicroStrategy. So yeah, I’d be interested to hear, because I think there’s a lot of misconceptions with their strategy there. So what are they trying to do? Okay, so I think that MicroStrategy is a fantastic example of how Bitcoin is changing capital markets.

And, you know, I always refer to two words, accretive dilution. So when you dilute and then you buy an asset as hard as Bitcoin, you are accretively diluting your shareholders. So I’ll just explain that in a few numbers to make it a little bit more simple.

So if you’ve got $50 of Bitcoin, you’ve got a $100 market cap. These obviously aren’t the numbers, but this is just an example. You’ve got two times the amount of market cap as you do Bitcoin.

So we say that’s a two times multiplier to the NAV. If you go out and you say, okay, I’m going to issue another $100 worth of shares and buy $100 worth of Bitcoin, I’m then going to have $150 worth of Bitcoin and $200 market cap. So you’ve gone from a two times NAV multiple to a 1.3 times NAV multiple.

So you’ve accretively diluted your shareholders. This becomes very, very interesting. So Michael Saylor announced a 40% dilution of his shares.

The share price with Bitcoin down that day actually outperformed Bitcoin. And when you look at that as a traditional finance investor, you say, well, how could that possibly happen with a 40% dilution of his stock? Well, it’s because of those two words, accretive dilution. So essentially what happened was he was massively accreting value to shareholders by announcing that huge dilution, that huge issuance of shares to buy Bitcoin.

Now, if you take that a step further, you say, okay, well, he should just keep doing that, just keep doing that. And so that’s what he’s done. So for the last, I think it’s approaching five months now that he’s announced this 40% dilution, he’s pretty much done the entire sale.

So he’s run out of that ATM. So he’s now moving into convertible bonds. But over the process of that, he’s pulled the MNAV down from sort of three and a half, four to 1.6 times multiple to NAP today.

Now, if you think about this from the perspective of convertible bonds, he could push this all the way to one. It doesn’t really matter because he can continue to accretively dilute shareholders through issuing convertible bonds, because when you issue a convertible bond, you’re issuing at a conversion price higher than the current stock price. So you’re issuing more shares dilutive at a higher price again.

But the nice thing about this is even though he’s issuing billions of dollars of convertible bonds, it’s not really dampening the vol very much because the vol isn’t anything to do with his stock or his business. The vol is related to a $2 trillion asset that is highly volatile. So he’s piggybacking off that volatility to create much better value for his investors because he’s selling volatility, upward volatility into the market based on this multi-trillion dollar asset versus his $100 billion or $80 billion today, I think it is, market cap.

So he’s really playing with a multitude of tools that he has to keep adding value to his shareholders. And I think this is what’s really fascinating about this. And you’re going to see more and more companies look to implement a microstrategy type approach.

There’s one in Japan called MetaPlanet. They were running a $20 million market cap business, a hotel chain. They started buying Bitcoin.

A year later, they’ve taken the market cap of the company to $1.5 billion just through buying Bitcoin through accretive dilutions to their shareholders. So you’re going to see this more and more. More and more companies that have cash flow generative businesses are going to say, OK, I can add significant value to my shareholder base by just adopting Bitcoin as a treasury asset.

And microstrategy has really led the way. So yeah, it’s a very defining time for the capital markets. I think more and more companies are going to do it.

You look at GameStop and they’re rumored to be the next people that might potentially do this. They’ve got $4.5 billion on their balance sheet. Obviously, it’s a bit of a dying business, but they’re in a very strong cash position.

They should probably be looking at buying Bitcoin with that balance sheet and they’re rumored to be doing so. So that could be a very interesting space to watch. And obviously, microstrategy has led the way.

You know, I think so if we look at how they can sell these convertible bonds and a lot of the time, 0% interest for a higher, you know, double their current share price. And the reason they can sell it is because these people are buying volatility. Exactly.

That’s correct. And that’s the amazing thing about it. Normally, if you sell that amount of convertible bonds into the market, you end up dampening your vol because you’ve got people trading gamma either side.

And so it just pulls the vol down lower and lower. The more volatility products that are out there decrease the volatility of the underlying stock. But because the underlying stock is only 80 or 100 billion dollar market cap and the real volatility is being driven by a two trillion dollar asset that is highly volatile, it’s going to be very, very hard, even if he issues his entire market cap in convertible bonds, to dampen that volatility.

Because as I keep saying, that volatility doesn’t come from the company. It comes from Bitcoin. And so this is what is truly fascinating about what’s being played out in my strategy.

It’s the volatility. People get caught up. Oh, he’s buying money at zero coupon.

Yeah, but he’s, he’s selling an option. And, you know, that’s what’s bringing the value of the coupon down. So the implicit credit, I think I looked at the last convert, he looked at the implicit credit is 650 over.

So, you know, if he was doing a straight bond, it’d be close to 10%. In a straight bond situation. That’s his cost of capital.

Yeah, which is pretty amazing. I guess that, as you said, it’s not a lot of the total market cap Bitcoin now, but the more, the more this happens, more companies do it, it’s going to, I guess, increase. And then it’s actually interesting.

It might actually decrease the volatility of this highly speculative asset, which is pretty amazing. Absolutely. Absolutely.

And I think, you know, then, and I think it’s interesting to hear you keep saying highly speculative asset, because I think that’s normally the pushback of traditional finance. You know, it’s highly speculative. There’s no intrinsic value.

But I think when you speak to Bitcoiners and people that have been in Bitcoin for a long time, they’re very, very risk averse. For them, this is, this is sanctuary from the system that is just printing fiat. And, you know, making people think that they’re really savvy investors, because the S&P goes up consistently seven to nine percent a year.

But actually, really, that’s just the rate of debasement that’s being experienced in the underlying currency. So, you know, you can call it speculative, but it is actually the hardest asset that is in existence and as an option for people. So I would, I don’t know, I’m intrigued as to why you call it a highly speculative asset.

Maybe tell me why. Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just, yeah, as you said, it’s the narrative around this asset.

And then I guess, you know, it’s not as much Bitcoin, but when you go into the other cryptocurrencies, then they’re a little bit more volatile. I would say they are extremely speculative assets, and I would say completely different assets to Bitcoin. And I think that’s also part of the journey.

Right. I said when I started off, I started in crypto. I didn’t really understand the difference between crypto and Bitcoin.

And, you know, you learn that lesson the hard way. Quite often, you mentioned that many of the cryptos that you’d been watching had lost way more than Bitcoin in the last few weeks. And I think that that’s the true lesson is, is there’s not a lot of substantive value to most of these crypto projects.

Yeah, great point. So Richard, thanks so much for your time today. We’ve sort of gone all over the place.

But my last question is, what is one message you like people to take away from our conversation? Yeah, I think that’s a that’s a nice question. Nice way to round it out. I’d say, look, you may be you may look at Bitcoin and say that this is a scam or this is, you know, it’s got no intrinsic value.

But this is an asset that has crashed and then recovered over the period of the last 16 years. And, you know, if you’re a savvy investor, you know that, you know, that doesn’t happen when it’s a tulip bulb or or some other scam. And so it’s probably worth just doing that little bit of work and having a look at it, try and get through the white paper or at least try and watch a few podcasts from some of these very great thinkers that are out there.

And Michael Saylor is obviously one and has a number of podcasts that people should watch to really get deep into the details of how this technology and asset works, because I think I think we’re definitely at this inflection point where we’re getting into the early majority now adoption phase. And, you know, nation states are coming next. Corporates are already on the way.

So it will become unreachable at a certain point for your average individual. So it’s better that individual investors do the work early. I’m not saying go and put a whole load of money into it, but at least try and understand what this thing is.

Yeah, great message. So thanks again for your time today, Richard. If anyone wanted to find out more about your work and what you do, where would the best places for that be? I’m on both LinkedIn and Twitter.

My posts fairly actively from both of those areas about my thoughts on the market, on MicroStrategy, MetaPlanet in terms of different strategies that we look at within the hedge fund business in the crypto space as well. So, yeah, those those two venues, Richard Byworth, are very easy to find. Great.

I’ll put in the description below. But thanks again for your time. Thank you, Anthony.

Thanks for having me. Hey, everyone. Thank you for listening.

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It could mean we could continue to grow. If not, thanks for watching and see you on the next show. And you also might like this video right here.

All right. Thanks again.