Meme Mania: Why You Should Pay Attention | 1000x

It's kind of hilarious because I'm looking at the price of Bitcoin right now, and I don't think it has changed much since the last episode, even though it's been 2 weeks and I feel like a lot has happened. We're basically at the same prices as at the end of the last episode. You asked me, “Hey, Jonah, what hits first: $24K or $30K?”

We both said $24K. Did it touch $30K? Almost—it was very close. I think we were saved by about $200. The high was $29,959, so I didn't quite get there. I would still characterize that as being wrong, but technically we're not wrong yet. And we're back at the same prices.

I like that. A lot has changed—a lot has changed. I think one of the more interesting things that happened in the last 2 weeks was the failure of First Republic and the aftershocks of that. We have PacWest and Western Alliance kind of collapsing in on themselves, and I do think Bitcoin definitely got a short-term boost from that.

But I'm getting kind of worried, and I don't know if you're feeling this too. The narrative for the longest time since SVB was that bank failures were good for Bitcoin, but we're kind of seeing that not play out as much anymore. I'm starting to think back to SVB and ask: What was the real driver of Bitcoin price action? What was the most important part?

Instead of reallocation because of bank failures, I'm thinking maybe it was just the stimulus effect of the Fed and the FDIC saying we're basically going to backstop all banks. So now, every further bank failure we get has less of that effect because we already know that it's being priced in, right? If First Republic fails and its deposits are backstopped, that's priced in because nobody was pricing in it going under in the same way.

It's a good point you make, but I'm not sure how much of it is priced in. I'm not sure I agree with you in the entirety of that statement. I'm leaning in the opposite direction from you. I'm starting to get a little bit more confident and feel more bullish, rather than more scared of being bullish.

I think the reason is that, since the start of this bank-bailout situation with the FDIC backstopping the regionals, $300 billion is what that costs. Those are staggering numbers when you compare it to what happened in 2008. They're happy to dispense $300 billion to backstop a couple of banks and their depositors, and that basically unwinds the entire deflationary effect of what was going on prior to that, with the Treasury letting—or, sorry, the Fed letting—some of its holdings roll off. Pretty remarkable.

I think you could say that what's priced in is a few more regional banks failing and maybe another bailout or 2. But if you take the view that this cascade is just going to continue until the entire regional banking system has been subsumed by bulge brackets like JPMorgan and Bank of America, I don't think that amount of bailout has been priced in.

Yeah, I think you're definitely right that, if in the long term a lot of these regional banks—a majority of these regional banks—get subsumed, I don't think that's being priced in. That's correct. But I do think that a few more bank failures are priced in. Every subsequent bank failure is less stimulus, unless it's a ton of bank failures. Obviously, if you get 50 or 60, that's going to be more than just 5 or 6. But what I'm saying is that every subsequent one is just less stimulus in the market. I think it's more priced in.

The core of the question is: Why are people reallocating to Bitcoin? With SVB, what was interesting is that Bitcoin led the S&P, but the S&P rebounded too, which I think is important to remember. Risk markets went up after SVB; Bitcoin just went up first and faster.

I think a lot of it was because it was a weekend, but Bitcoin went up first and faster. It was the fastest horse because people were allocating to it based on, “Okay, this is stimulus and this is some sort of narrative, so we're going to bet on this thing.”

If I were to run a regression on it and said there were 2 variables—stimulus, or equity markets going up, and then narrative—I would bet that it would be 80/20: 80% stimulus and 20% narrative. The reason that's important is that when you get headlines now like First Republic failing, PacWest failing, or Western Alliance failing, and you get a move up from Bitcoin, if you don't see the equity markets doing the same thing, then you might want to fade it.

If PacWest goes down next week and Bitcoin is up 4%, to me that seems like a sale as opposed to a buy because of that dynamic.

I hear you. I mean, I guess maybe one dynamic that boosted us so much in March, when SVB went down, was the fact that Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, held more than $3 billion worth of deposits at Silicon Valley Bank. So if you were holding USDC at that time, there was an actual impetus for you to rotate out of USDC and into ETH on Uniswap or something, or off-chain, because your dollars were theoretically at risk.

Whereas if you're a crypto holder and First Republic Bank goes down, or Zions Bancorp goes down, or any of these other regionals, for the most part, you're either not exposed, you don't know if you're exposed, or you're just straight-up in “who cares?” territory. So maybe there's a little bit less impulse to trade than there was back then. Still, the narrative did cause a pop, and you're absolutely right—it was a fade.

Meanwhile, the biggest bank of them all—the United States Treasury, Uncle Sam—that one is looking a little shaky as well. If we had a technical default, where the United States just doesn't pay back bondholders for a little while, what do you think the price of Bitcoin is in that scenario?

I think that depends heavily on gold. My bet is that headline sends us past $30K, maybe to $35K. I had this tweet saying, “I think we get to $35K if that headline comes out.” People said that I was not sufficiently bullish, so I quote-tweeted it and said, “Okay, fine: all-time highs.”

But I think the reaction to that tweet is telling. That quote tweet was definitely a joke. I think we're probably capping out at $30K to $36K, unless you get that and then a really quick—what I could see really propelling us, if we're hopeful to get to $40K or more, is that the debt-ceiling issue happens, people panic, you get a short-term move down in risk markets, and then it's very quickly resolved and behind us. We come out with a good conclusion, Bitcoin has all this narrative behind it already, and then risk markets start ripping again.

I think that's similar to the SVB situation, where you kind of need that confluence. I think the Qs have to go up, and I think SPY has to go up in order for Bitcoin to get to all-time highs. But if you get that narrative juice and then you get that turnaround, buy as much upside vol as you possibly can and just wait it out.

It's interesting you mention upside vol. It's very rare to talk about a megacap asset that could double in price in the next month or 2, and I'm less sanguine about it. I think we could definitely see all-time highs in short order if the United States were to default, and it's crazy that we even have to talk about this.

If you have a spreadsheet with money in it, wherever you are in the world, you have to rewrite some cells and some formulas if the United States defaults. The risk-free rate is no longer risk-free. The value of investing money—or holding money now versus having money later—changes drastically.

It could possibly be the most seminal event in financial history, and it could occur not because of an inability to pay, but just an unwillingness to pay back debt. There are a few scenarios we can talk through around that, but I think you'd see Bitcoin test $70K or $80K if people need to move money out of fiat and into crypto, much like they moved money out of USDC and into crypto when Silicon Valley Bank was under duress and eventually failed.

I think you'd see people move money out of fiat and into crypto in droves if fiat suddenly became unstable. If you're holding fiat right now, you're holding T-bills and earning yield; you're not holding cash and letting it burn. I think you're insane.

I don't think that's going anywhere on your side. Maybe we should just fight each other on Twitter.

Yeah, fair enough. I mean, I would obviously love that. It would make my summer a lot better; I could definitely do a lot more things. But I don't think it's feasible to get to $70K, mostly because I just don't know where that buying is coming from.

Let's think of the market participants who are actually going to be buying this thing. Retail isn't buying it. They might buy a little bit. I think you need to catalyze it—you'd probably need to get through $35K or $40K to get retail back in. Even then, retail doesn't feel as rich or as bored as it did during COVID, so it's harder to get them in.

You don't think even a few basis points of retail would say, “Hey, I'm just going to go buy a little bit of Bitcoin on my Robinhood account just because”?

You've got to get the high-net-worth guys into a frenzy. I think they do drive it forward, and I think those guys take it to $35K.

Remember, I am bullish, so I do think you get some allocation from high-net-worth individuals. Institutions are going to take too long; no institution is going to say, “I’m buying Bitcoin now because of this.” Even if they’re able to get Bitcoin futures on the CME, I think it would just take them time to make that decision. The slow allocators may or may not change their pace based on it.

I say all this because I think that, in order to get back to $70,000, you need all of those groups firing on all cylinders. If you don’t have all those groups firing on all cylinders, it’s harder—it’s just harder to see. But I do think $35,000–$40,000 is a reasonable target, although I’d reassess there.

One thing that I was thinking about—and I’m taking this in a slightly different way—but I’d love to get your thoughts on this. In 2021, there was such a perfect storm: you’re locked in your house, you have stimulus checks, you can’t do anything, and your entire life has just gone online. That led to crypto going nuts. Do you think we’ll ever get circumstances like that again that will lead to a crazy run like 2021? If so, how do you think we get there?

Oh man, it’s a great question. I don’t think we’ll ever—history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes, as the saying goes—get another lockdown with a bunch of stimulus checks. But I can see a different type of perfect storm. One of the themes that we play on in 1000x is how old I am and how young you are.

I would put the question more on you and on Gen Z people. Whenever I talk to them, it seems like they’re doing less of the sorts of things that I did when I was young and more like chasing apparitions of Pokémon around abandoned lots with their phones, or living on Fortnite watching a Travis Scott concert on the internet. At some point, I think enough of these people are going to grow up and have enough of a percentage of human productive hours spent online that crypto—internet money—is going to become more of a thing than fiat for a lot of people.

The seamlessness of the experience of moving value around and moving digital goods and services around, relative to moving actual goods and services and fiat currency, is such a drastic improvement. As the founder of Fireblocks says, it’s 30x better; it’s not 30% better. Eventually, for certain people, you’ll have that perfect storm of just constant economic activity inside of some game or reality that isn’t necessarily what us olds think of as normal. What do you think?

I think there are 2 things that stand out to me as major tailwinds for crypto. One is the wealth transfer from boomers like you to people like me. As parents get older, I think that reallocation is going to bring a lot of money into digital assets.

I also do think—I tweeted this out—but I was in South America last month, and one thing that struck me was that crypto is a genuine thing there. You can actually go buy things with crypto there; there are people who use crypto there. I talked to random people who would bring it up and had Binance accounts. As you get population growth from those areas and as those areas get wealthier, I think the allocation to crypto grows a little bit more, as the rest of the world gets wealthier relative to places like the U.S. and the U.K., where allocations are a bit lower.

Here’s my little conspiracy theory—or not conspiracy theory, but far-fetched idea. We have inflation right now, right? How do you solve for inflation? One way is to raise rates; another way is to increase productivity. AI is radically increasing productivity in certain niche areas right now.

It’s very possible that, in 1, 2, or 3 years, we’re back into structural deflation because the productivity gains that AI has delivered have just gone through the roof. Then you get a crazy bull market from tech. It’s very possible that, if this thesis is true, the 10-year is just ripping forever. We saw peak rates already. That’s possible.

At some point, a lot of people are going to lose their jobs. I don’t know whether it’s 3, 4, 5, 6, or 8 years from now, but UBI starts to become a very, very real discussion. I think that could create an environment that’s very good for crypto. Jonah Van Bourg

How do you escape if you’re in a UBI world? How do you differentiate yourself from the pack?

You have to invest well, basically. Now, here’s the question: Speaking of old-world things that could potentially transform themselves into explosive digital economies, digital products—way back when I was young, you’d get in your car, drive to the gas station, and buy a lottery ticket. That was your way to potentially get rich without really trying that hard.

One thing that I was thinking about recently, amidst this memecoin frenzy, is: Isn’t this just a digitally native, more exciting, younger version of going and buying a lottery ticket? What would it be like if you took the total global spend on lottery tickets and, over the course of the next—I don’t know how many decades—just turned it into global spend on memecoin lotteries? What would the market capitalization of memecoins be if you brought that spend online?

The U.S. spent $74 billion on lottery tickets last year, according to Google. In 1 year, $74 billion was used to buy lottery tickets.

In 1 year? $74 billion? What percentage of the total crypto market cap is that?

It’s like a solid 5%—5% of total crypto market cap. This is $74 billion of buying of crypto. This stuff is up 2x.

Yeah, $74 billion of buying does not equate to $74 billion worth of market capitalization. Maybe it’s 10x that amount. Basically, what I was thinking was, to your question about what causes that perfect storm, wealth transfer as younger people inherit cash, plus a digitally native version of activity that has taken place for a very long time, but in a more flashy and appealing way for younger generations. That could create all sorts of activity.

Crypto, at the end of the day, is a large portion of the fact that it’s a massive casino. The one thing that changed dramatically from last week was the market cap of Pepe. That’s been a wild ride, but it’s kind of comparable to the price of a square mile of real estate on what is now the Las Vegas Strip. It went from worthless to maybe a few hundred thousand dollars, to worth billions, and maybe back down and then back up again through various recessionary scenarios.

You have to think that some of this value trickles down to the Ethereum network because lottery tickets, casinos, and gambling are just one of the many products and services offered on this L1. I think that’s why gas has been so consistently high for the last few weeks. It’s been a crazy uptake in memecoin activity, and it’s all retail.

As much as you might think that we don’t pay attention to it, we very much do, because it’s a great signal for a lot of things. One thing that was heavily debated in group chats and internally was whether the Pepe blowoff and the crazy amount of capital that flew into Pepe were a sign of the health of the market. I’ll give you the 2 sides as I see them, and I’d love to hear where you fall out on that. You may have a 3rd, 4th, or 5th side.

The first is that memecoins generally mean blowoff: You have nothing better to do with your money, so they suck liquidity out of Bitcoin and Ethereum, which causes Bitcoin and Ethereum to go down. If nobody is allocating to Bitcoin and Ethereum, the memecoin can only go up for so long, and then everything starts crashing because people reallocate out of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoin and Ethereum go down, and the money goes into memecoins. It’s a liquidity-suck thesis.

The other side is that it’s an isolated run. Pepe was the only thing that was running; it was kind of the only memecoin that was in existence. It existed in its own world, and there wasn’t that much liquidity—there was about $50 million of liquidity backing a $1.5 billion shitcoin. At the time, I saw that analysis. Those are the 2 approaches to it, and I don’t know if we’ve gotten an answer yet. I’m curious about your take.

I have kind of a TradFi-informed take on this. I think it’s a new use case emerging, and the reason why is the lottery example that I gave earlier. To me, this is a lottery. So far, the 2 biggest use cases for Ethereum—well, blockchains in general—have been DeFi and NFTs in terms of computing, and obviously the original use case is cryptocurrency.

The Bitcoin L1 supports a currency called Bitcoin that is useful to a lot of people, believe it or not. Stablecoins are another use case. But to me, this lottery—this online lottery accessible to the entire world—is a use case.

Many times, as a commodities trader, I used to trade crude oil. One thing that you learn is that, as entrepreneurs in commodities markets, the biggest entrepreneurs who generate the most wealth do so by taking a waste product and turning it into a useful product.

What I mean by that is that natural gas was literally burned at the wellhead until somebody thought, “Hey, this is a cleaner fuel that we can use to heat our homes.” Vaseline, a lubricant that you may or may not be familiar with, used to be a waste product of the refining process, and then Exxon just started selling it for what it’s currently used for and made a fortune.

If you take a waste product and turn it into a useful product, you make a fortune. Before these conversions occur, commodities markets often dismiss this stuff as crap, a waste of time, a problem, or a waste of resources.

I sit here at an institutional firm servicing institutional counterparties and taking institutional risk, and I hear people dismiss Pepe as some sort of waste of block space. I’m thinking, maybe not. Maybe the creators of these types of ERC-20 tokens, which are consuming so much gas and could theoretically be considered waste products, are actually creating useful products insofar as people demand lottery-style upside for minimal effort. It’s human nature. I don’t know; that would be one crazy take on it.

No, I’m with you. At some point, as institutions, we might have to get comfortable speculating on these things. For now, if we were to put 1% of our fund into Pepe and then lost it, I don’t think it would be particularly hard to justify to our LPs. They look at us and say, “Why did you buy a coin that doesn’t do anything?” We say, “It could have gone up 100x. It didn’t, but it could have.”

I’m wondering if this, plus Doge, is going to get LPs and people more comfortable with the idea that you can have these crazy lottery tickets and that they sometimes make sense in a portfolio context. There were some institutional lottery tickets in the form of call options.

A funny statistic, to your general point that this is a big use case in crypto, is that if you bought every single memecoin that was launched over the last year or so, started with $10,000, you ended up with something like $1 million. A lot of it came from Pepe, but also from other coins over the last year, which has been a pretty dire year.

It’s crazy because you end up getting these things super early. Some of them end up with $5 million or $10 million market caps, and some of them end up going to $1.5 billion, apparently. I’m not advocating for people to put their money into memecoins, but there’s some sort of strategy that could probably be developed around this.

If you were going to launch the Golden Coin memecoin index fund that actually does this, how would that be? Would that be a full-time job for 1 person, or 2 or 3 people, just to accomplish the feat of getting into all of them and tracking everything?

For some enterprising young person out there, it’s probably a good idea to think about how to extract the most value from trading. What should you be spending your time on? Someone with any sort of technical ability and an AI-capable team might actually be able to help with this.

You can start screening contracts for specific red flags. Imagine you scanned Ethereum and looked for new smart contracts that were launched. Every time a new smart contract came out for a simple memecoin, you’d pull in the data and ask ChatGPT—or ask yourself—what the red flags are.

Do they have any functions that restrict you from selling? There are a lot of coins that will say, “You actually can’t sell.” Are they upgradable contracts? The ability to upgrade the contract may or may not be a red flag. Do they have the ability to mint additional tokens? That would be a big red flag.

There are all these sorts of functions that you can look for in smart contracts. You compile a list of things that make you want to buy something and things that make you not want to buy something, and then you start running a screener to figure out the optimal memecoins to buy.

After 1 or 2 months of work, I would assume you probably have a pretty good system for picking up memecoins, and you could actually run that as a strategy. That’s my first instinct: There’s definitely a way to screen these coins in a systematic and programmatic manner, make that bet over and over, and then call it a day. Scale that.

There’s no way I was the first one to think of this. I’m sure there are people out there doing it. Now that I think about it, a lot of the initial volume on these things probably comes from people doing exactly that.

The other way to do it is, if my theory is true and that many people are running these bots, you create a memecoin specifically designed to attract bot liquidity. You try to reverse-engineer the bots and figure out what they look for in memecoins, then make a memecoin with exactly those parameters. You lock it, it gets bought by a bunch of those bots, and then you sell into them. You do that over and over and over. It could be kind of funny.

The smartest bot people are focused on sandwich trading and MEV. Meanwhile, when they zig, you zag.

Well, you know what they say: It’s not about how good you are; it’s about the table that you play at.

That’s a very good point. The table that I play at is increasingly graying and aging, so I guess I use ChatGPT more to remind myself how certain financial math works and less to come up with screener schemes to identify memecoins and potentially profit from them.

This is fascinating stuff. One thing that we’re both realizing, just from digging into a topic that neither of us really took seriously even 2 or 3 weeks ago, echoes the broader theme that maybe these things aren’t going away. Even those 16 gwei neutral gas levels for ETH—we’re consistently averaging 50–150 gwei—are deflationary for ETH.

The fact that there are pearls or kernels of an investment thesis inside of it means that maybe we should just get used to this. Even if it does eventually die down, the ETH that’s being burned as a result of this activity is never coming back. That’s real, and it does need to be taken seriously for what it is.

So, on that note, I have a question for you, Avi. We’re burning a lot of ETH gas, and Ether is deflationary against the backdrop of this high-gas environment, which is occurring because of the memecoin frenzy. Then you have Bitcoin transactions that are through the roof because of Ordinals, which maybe you could explain in a minute.

Should we just get used to this higher-blockchain-activity paradigm? What does it mean for price, and what does it mean for the supply and demand of block space? Is there an investment thesis there?

Those are all very good questions. I’ll start by saying the best thing that Ethereum ever did was EIP-1559. It opened the door for so much institutional capital to come into the space.

I gave a talk last week at a conference filled with pension-fund allocators and other institutional allocators. I was the 2nd session in the morning, and I got an obscene amount of questions on this. One of the things that I brought up was that Ethereum is generating a substantial amount of money a year in quote-unquote revenue through its fee burn.

If you annualize it out to $5 billion a year in burn fees, that’s a pretty substantial buyback, quote-unquote. Ether is deflationary, and this is all happening during a bear market. It’s not even a bull market. Ethereum’s price is up since the start of the year, sure, but we don’t have a frenzy by any means.

That really hit home for a lot of people. What I’m seeing is that, if activity really picks up, a lot of people are going to start buying based on the back of that. There was a note put out by a sell-side desk on ETH being deflationary, and a lot of allocators are looking at that very seriously.

That’s actually quite bearish for things like Solana. My prior bullishness on Solana notwithstanding, I’m still bullish on it short- and mid-term, but maybe less bullish long-term. If these L1s don’t generate fees and burn those fees, generating revenue for their shareholders in the same way that Ethereum does, allocators are much less likely to come in and buy them.

It’s a little bit funny to me. Let’s say you had these 2 platforms—Ethereum and a different version of Ethereum where the fees were 1/100th the size—and they had an equal amount of activity. You might actually end up getting a lot of allocation to the first one instead of the second one because it looks better on a basis, even though, moving forward, you might see all that activity move over because of the fees.

Right now, at least, all eyes are on Ethereum because that’s where the speculative money and the market participants are. They’re able to charge those fees. I do like the New York analogy for Ethereum: Yes, Manhattan is expensive, but it’s expensive for a reason—everybody’s there, and everybody you want to be around is already there.

I do think that this is floating around institutional circles: Crypto is now actually revenue-generating. It’s now real. It’s now a thing. The beauty of proof of stake is that all of the fees that are burned—and all the fees that are generated—are now paid back to the owners of the asset.

In Bitcoin, it’s very different. Despite activity going through the roof, all of those fees are paid not to the holders of Bitcoin, but to an extractive third-party entity: miners. You get a worse dynamic because the more activity that exists on Bitcoin, the more supply of Bitcoin is probably going to hit the market.

It also deteriorates the user experience. Binance just halted withdrawals briefly over the past 48 hours because the Bitcoin network was experiencing so much usage and traffic that even basic wallet-transfer transactions were delayed to a point where Binance was saying, “We need to hit the pause button here.”

It’s crazy to talk about how the stakeholders of ETH are aligned because they’re literally staking it, earning the rewards, and processing and constructing the blocks. The fact that you don’t have that in Bitcoin means that, on the one hand, the security of the Bitcoin network is possibly more robust, but on the other hand, its usability as an L1 has a flaw.

Should we be worried about Bitcoin? Bitcoin has been the trade this year. GBTC has outperformed Bitcoin, but pretty much nothing else in crypto has, with the exception of a few smaller protocols.

We should also consider that miners have done pretty well. This is probably very bullish for miners, and I don’t know if that’s being reflected in the price. I also don’t know if the Street has figured this out yet, so we could actually see some really good—

Okay, I just have an alert here: Bitcoin transaction fees are exceeding the 6.25 BTC block reward for the first time since 2017.

That just got sent out, so whatever has been projected for miner revenues this quarter might actually be blown out of the water. Come earnings time for these guys, you could get a pop if the street hasn't realized it. They'll figure it out.

That's a great point. Marathon's stock is up 173% this year. It's crazy, because I was referring more to tokens and token-looking things, but you have a great point with these miners. I guess the question is: Should we be worried about Bitcoin dominance as a result of the fact that transactions have exploded on Bitcoin, an L1 that isn't necessarily built to work like Ethereum, and is deteriorating its UX?

I would think no. I think eventually these ordinals—or Bitcoin NFTs, in the shortest possible explanation—I think this is going to die down, and I think Bitcoin is going to remain a usable network. But if it doesn't, look out below.

I'm actually the opposite. I think what probably happens, if I were to chart out a path, is that we get a tech solution to this. We don't get a “die-down” solution to this. There's no community of developers that's all in agreement working on Bitcoin the way that there is on Ethereum. There are Bitcoin Core developers, but they're split into factions.

Yeah, but ordinals were developed, and these BRC-20s were developed. I think what's happening right now is that you're seeing the origin sparks of an organic development community for Bitcoin.

I think you're 100% right that it doesn't exist today, but I would bet that in 1 month, 2 months, and 3 months, the number of people trying to figure out how to build on Bitcoin probably 2x's over the next 1 or 2 months, based on this activity. People flock to where you can make money, at the end of the day, and the reality is that you can now make money building on Bitcoin.

It might be very difficult, but I think people are going to try. It might not work, but there's going to be an effort made, because if you figure it out—I'm already seeing right now that when you buy these BRC-20s, it's all sorts of... It's kind of messed up, right?

Just for the listeners, what is a BRC-20, for the uninitiated? I'm going to pretend that I know what I'm talking about and just take notes on what you're saying.

Ordinals are effectively NFTs on Bitcoin. A BRC-20 has nothing to do with an ERC-20 in a technical sense. It's not a token standard for building on Bitcoin in the same way that ERC-20 is a standard token built on Ethereum.

A BRC-20 is effectively still an NFT, but it's just a bunch of the same NFTs that are all fungible, so they're kind of, quote-unquote, tokens. You can go to brc-20.io and see all the top BRC-20s. It's just a play on words, again.

When you actually buy and sell these things, you go to a marketplace—I'm forgetting the exact name of the website; I'll pull it up in a second—and it basically lists them out in lots of 100 or lots of 1,000 at different prices, as you would see on OpenSea. When you go on OpenSea, you see a collection of all these different NFTs.

It's the same thing with these BRC-20s, except that they're all the same. They're just varying amounts of them: 100, 1,000, 10,000, and 1,000,000 of these Pepe BRC-20s. So there's no exchange for them yet; it's more of a listing of these NFTs that represent different amounts of the tokens. But someone right now is working on building an AMM for them.

Hmm. They're pushing commits to GitHub.

That's one thing I don't know—the developers are working on their own thing.

Exactly. If you ask me whether they're going to pull it off, I have no idea. I don't even know if it's technically possible to actually build out on Bitcoin. I don't even know what it would look like if you did. You have a whiteboard behind you, so we know you're halfway technical and serious.

Yes, as an investment professional.

Yeah, whiteboards mean you're very technically proficient. I have an HP LaserJet; that's my claim to fame here.

That's how you guys get legit.

I have a Cisco phone, straight up.

Whoa.

I know, right?

Oh, nice. I like it. I regressed back to when the world was 20 years ago. You pick up this thing—it's actually super useful, by the way. I'm so big on phone calls now.

What, landlines?

No, just phone calls in general. I hate Zoom. I've grown to really hate it.

Well, welcome to my generation. I totally sympathize. If you ever want to have a phone call, I'm right here. I have a telephone waiting for you to dial.

When you're on Zoom, you have to look them in the eye and pay attention, and this is... Anyway, it's a whole thing. Get on the phone, go walk around. I live on the beach; you can go walking up and down the beach and get the same stuff done, but you're moving so much better.

Anyway, I completely lost my train of thought.

That doesn't matter. I think in every episode we have to spend at least 3 minutes talking about something unrelated to crypto and trading. Last time, we talked about going outside and chilling out for a bit.

Now we can just imagine Avi Felman walking on the beach with that giant phone with the giant antenna—the 1980s cell phone from Wall Street. Michael Douglas starred in that movie. I don't know if you know who he is, Avi, but he's an actor.

Yeah, so hop on the phone. Forget about Zoom for a bit.

Maybe that's our piece of Zen for this week.

Maybe we should start ending these podcasts with a piece of advice—completely unsolicited. We'll try our best not to make it terrible.

Piece of advice? We're both wearing black T-shirts today, so it probably shouldn't be fashion-related. We're mourning the loss of the days when no one cared about Ethereum and Bitcoin block space. Now it's a big frenzy in New York.

It would be very fashionable.

But this actually has some stuff on it. We've got a casino symbol—the SIG. It's a SIG shirt. I picked it up at some tournament they held at my college a long time ago, while I was there. They held some sort of tournament for algorithmic trading, with a bunch of firms in Chicago, I think.

I think you clearly didn't win it; otherwise, you'd be working there.

No, no one won it. That's what America is all about: 1 winner. It was also a really silly event, very unrealistic in the way it was put together. Anyway, that's what I'm going to blame for the fact that I didn't win.

If you ever fail, just make sure you blame somebody else for it.

I would rephrase that and spin it back to crypto trading as follows: You're going to fail, but just make sure that when you fail, you don't die. That way, you're still around to catch what hopefully is the next success.

I think crypto involves weathering some pretty difficult periods of time financially, and if you can stay in a trade—that staying power ultimately turns you into the contrarian who ends up reaping the asymmetric rewards after everybody else gets out of the way.

I don't understand why you would do this to me. I was clearly joking with my piece of advice, and you come in there with some real advice to give to people and make me look bad.

Avi, are you kidding? We could go back to the automatically generated transcript here, but I needed to throw something in there. Even though you're doing about 70% of the talking on this one, we'll get you talking on the next one.

I had a lot I wanted to hear you say. You have a lot more crypto experience than most, so it's ultra-valuable for me as well.

Well, then next time we're going to have a very special guest on this podcast, and a very interesting guest—someone that you probably have never heard on a podcast before, because I don't think he's ever done a podcast before. But he's one of the most successful traders in American history, so I'll leave you with that.

Again, none of this is investment advice. Crypto is risky. It's been great having you on, and thank you so much for joining. We know your time is valuable, and we really appreciate it.

Very much so. And I will reiterate: None of this is investment advice.

Thanks, Jonah.

Thanks, Avi. Until next week.