Qiao Wang 做客 Counterparty：比特币、AI、Zcash 与 IPO

What else is green? SK Hynix. Memory has to be super green, right? Yeah, DRAM. High of the day, up 2.5%. SOX was up 5%. Yo, yo, yo. How are you, man?

Yeah. Good to see you.

Yeah, likewise, dude. It’s good to have you here. Look, you’re joining at a crazy time, okay? We just got the Anthropic S-1. We’re in the middle of what feels like some Canada event every day. Brazil’s election just happened. AI hacking. The second-to-last bull standing, Anselm, just came out. He’s like, “I’m bearish. Bitcoin’s going under 80.” Like, “Bitcoin’s going lower.” It feels like everything is in shambles. Everyone everywhere is running around with their head cut off, and I’ve labeled you our fabled face of the bulls. Look, we could definitely do worse. I feel good having you as the face of the bulls.

To start, you’ve been tweeting about it a lot. You’ve had some really good posts, but can you lay out your bullish crypto, bullish Zcash thesis for—

Yeah.

…where we are right now, October 2026?

Yeah. My horizon is much longer than your average CT guy. I understand why they’re bearish, but their time horizon is more like next week or next month, which I have no ability to predict. Over a 3-to-5-year time horizon, the thesis for Bitcoin has not changed, right? Has the government stopped printing money? The answer is no. Is the fixed supply of Bitcoin going away? The answer is no. So the thesis for the last 15 years remains the same.

Of course, there’s the AI and quantum threat in the coming years, but I have no reason to believe that we’re not going to be able to solve this. On the quantum side, we know what the technical solution is. The challenge is going to be the governance of Bitcoin, right? What are we going to do with Satoshi’s coin? That’s where the tension might be. But ultimately, we’re going to figure it out.

I think Larry Fink and Brian Armstrong and these guys are going to get together and figure out what the consensus will be. Ultimately, I think the consensus lies with those guys because they own the liquidity. I think that’s how the quantum stuff will resolve, let’s say 5 to 10 years from now. If you’re really worried about that, then you own some Zcash, right? You don’t want to be overexposed to it, but Zcash is probably the best hedge for Bitcoin, both in terms of privacy and quantum resistance.

Something you’ve been tweeting about a lot is this pair trade: the dumbest person you’ve ever met in your life is long Micron, the smartest person ever is long BTC.

Yeah.

Explain why you think memory or the AI trade might be overextended, but specifically why Bitcoin and crypto would benefit rather than just going down with the rest of the ship here.

I’m very bullish on AI over a 5-to-10-year time horizon, once again. It’s a matter of timeframe that probably differs between me and other people. In the short term, the thing that really makes me worried about the AI trade is the chart. The chart just looks extremely—

The chart looks bad. The chart looks bad.

The chart looks bad. The chart looks horrible for the memory stocks. The positioning is also pretty extreme on the AI side, which is why I mentioned the dumbest people I know. Of course, there are some smart people in the AI trade as well, but the dumbest people are also in the AI trade. Everyone and their mother knows AI is the biggest secular trend over the next 10 years, so it’s really crowded.

On the other hand, crypto is extremely underowned. Quantitatively, you can see that by looking at the chart. Bitcoin and crypto have gone through the worst relative performance to Nasdaq, possibly in history, but certainly in recent times. They’ve also had the worst underperformance, or relative performance, to gold.

Yeah.

Last year, gold and the AI trade really sucked all the liquidity from crypto. If the stock market goes down, Bitcoin and crypto are going to suffer. But the stock market is not going to go down in a straight line. On down days, maybe crypto goes down in a similar way or by a similar magnitude. On the rebounds of the stock market, maybe crypto goes up more, right? Sure, crypto could fall a lot, but relatively speaking, I think it’s a lot more interesting than the AI trade and gold at this moment.

How do you—by the way, I like “It’s more interesting.” I could definitely get behind this. Also, the issuance right now is crazy. Meta, $60 billion. The Anthropic IPO is coming. OpenAI is probably coming after that. When you think about crypto being underowned, how do you figure out whether it’s underowned because smart money thinks it’s just not interesting anymore—philosophically not interesting as an investment and as an asset—versus the AI trade just got so parabolic that money had no choice but to shove into it, and it actually does and would and could and should come back?

I do think the majority of tokens are not interesting, so don’t get me wrong: there’s a lot of garbage. But there’s a handful of things that may not be interesting to us crypto natives but are extremely interesting to institutions. You probably saw the JPMorgan research last week that put Bitcoin as having, or expecting to have, the best performance over the next 5 to 10 years, although also with the highest volatility. That was interesting.

Yeah, that’s interesting.

But they’re bullish. Similarly, I think BlackRock is pot committed to Bitcoin. Bitcoin is their fastest-growing product, right?

Yeah.

So, intellectually, it’s not interesting, but that doesn’t mean it won’t do well. On the other hand, AI is extremely intellectually interesting, but it’s also extremely crowded.

How do you— I’m not used to trading markets with this level of uncertainty at this scale. I guess there’s all this uncertainty in crypto; things can get vamped. But we’re talking about uncertainty at the highest level here, with what’s happening especially on the hacking side. There’s also this dual narrative that crypto and cryptography protect it. It’s sort of uniquely Lindy to be a beneficiary in this era. I’m not really sure if that’s cope or how real it is. I like to believe that it is real, but how do you think about navigating a market like this where there is so much uncertainty, which markets obviously don’t like, and which you can imagine is going to lead to hypervolatility, maybe even more so on the crypto front?

But where—what uncertainty exactly?

Every day, an exploit. PHP is hacked. 70% of websites. Hack here, hack there.

Yeah.

Justin Drake, bunker mode, really on the hacking, exploiting side.

So really on the AI side, right?

On the AI, yeah.

Okay. So first of all, people don’t understand the difference between the AI threat and the quantum threat.

Yeah.

These are 2 different threats.

Yeah, yeah.

Quantum is maybe 5 to 10 years from now.

Mm-hmm.

AI is now. What AI might be doing to cryptography is breaking the algorithms classically.

Yeah.

Not using quantum computers. That’s a different threat. But I have no reason to believe that it will break cryptography. Of course, I’m not a cryptographer myself, but all it takes is 5 minutes of chatting with your favorite AI chatbot to understand what the actual risk is, or the magnitude of the risk. For me, it’s on the order of 1% that AI breaks ECDSA. An efficient algorithm to break the cryptography that underlies Bitcoin and crypto may actually not exist. Just because AI is extremely powerful doesn’t mean such an algorithm necessarily exists.

But to your original question, how do you trade? Well, you don’t trade. You just have a long-term thesis.

Do—

And just hold.

Do you think it’s one of these things where the longer that passes without Bitcoin getting cracked, Satoshi’s keys getting cracked, the longer we go with these things holding up and remaining Lindy, the higher and more aggressive the upside Bitcoin will trade, because people start to realize—

100%. That’s 100% the case on the AI side.

Yeah.

The longer that AI has not cracked Bitcoin, the more Lindy Bitcoin is. On the other hand, quantum is different. There’s a clear path toward quantum potentially breaking Bitcoin, so it doesn’t get more Lindy. Every day that passes without quantum breaking Bitcoin doesn’t make it more Lindy. It’s more a matter of the community getting together and reaching consensus on the technical solution.

1. Bitcoin and Zcash Positions

How is your risk portfolio structured right now? Any AI stocks, or zero at all?

I still hold NVIDIA and TSMC, but much less than I bought three years ago.

Okay.

I think these 2 companies have exceptional management and defensibility. I think they’re gonna do well over a 5- to 10-year time horizon. In the short term, I have no idea.

Yeah.

I also own all the hyperscalers. They’re not expensive. I own Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta. They’re reasonably priced, and even if their AI stuff doesn’t pan out, their other businesses will do pretty well. And then Bitcoin and Zcash, pretty much.

How is your Zcash allocation weighted to Bitcoin, and how has that changed over the last year?

Right now, it’s about 2 to 1, like 2 Bitcoin to 1 Zcash.

What about this time last year?

Originally, it was like 5 to 1, but Zcash went up a lot. Or, yeah, something like that.

2 to 1 is substantial.

It is substantial. I just don’t want to sell and pay taxes, right? I’d rather hold it for a longer period of time.

Can you give us the best-case scenario for Zcash moving forward, and maybe why it’s uniquely positioned in the face of quantum fears and AI cracking fears? I’ll only keep you for a couple more minutes. I told you 15, 20.

Yeah. I’ve actually talked to a lot of people who are sidelined on Zcash, and I’ve tried a bunch of different pitches. I think the one that appeals the most to people is Zcash as a hedge to Bitcoin, rather than Zcash being the privacy store of value.

As a hedge to Bitcoin, I think the story is pretty simple. Over the next 5 to 10 years, we’re gonna get quantum FUD every other week. We’ll read papers, and then people will get scared. People are gonna look at which coin has the best roadmap on the quantum side, and by far it’s Zcash. I think that’s the thesis that appeals the most to people.

At a deeper level, to me, Zcash is basically Bitcoin that adapts, that is agile. Bitcoin doesn’t move, right? It doesn’t change, which is ultimately also the governance issue around quantum. But Zcash has a really good steward of the project, of the open-source project behind it, right? It’s capable of releasing new changes, new upgrades, which they’ve done multiple times over the last 6 months.

Yeah.

Right now the threat is privacy and quantum, but 20 years from now it could be something else, right? The hope is they’re gonna be able to continue to adapt to the latest threat.

I think it’s a pretty good thesis. There are 9 different ways to explain it, and I think that’s a pretty good one. Is there anything else? Chat wants to know: any other coins in crypto that you like? Venice, perps, anything else in crypto that you really like?

I think there are probably 5 coins that I like in crypto, outside Bitcoin and Zcash. But I don’t hold them because I just don’t wanna diversify. I wanna put all my money—

Oh, you really only hold Bitcoin and Zcash?

In crypto, yeah. I wanna put all my money in my best ideas because I also hold some stocks, so I’m reasonably well diversified, right? But in crypto, my 2 best ideas are Bitcoin and Zcash.

If Bitcoin and Zcash didn’t exist, then, yeah, I would look at Venice and the usual suspects, like Hyperliquid and so on.

When you think about these positions, do you have any invalidation? Are you a Zcash seller back at 500, or are you an actual—

I don’t have a price invalidation.

Got it. What is the narrative or thesis invalidation for both?

If the Zcash team somehow all gave up on the project, right?

Yeah.

Or if AI actually cracks cryptography irreversibly.

It’s over then.

Yeah. The probability of that, for me, is less than 1%.

Yeah. 1% or infinitely paid. I could take those odds. Okay, the last thing I wanna know—I don’t think you have a strong opinion, but Anthropic filed its S-1 today. I’m curious what you think is going to happen when we get to the Anthropic IPO, and then maybe the OpenAI IPO. Are you a buyer of this? Are you ignoring it? Do you think it accelerates the trade to the downside or restarts it to the upside? What do you think happens when we get to these IPOs?

Yeah. I’m not a buyer of IPOs ever. IPOs are basically a scam. It’s not a scam in the sense that they’re criminals. It’s a scam in the sense that IPOs are the type of trade where the seller sets the price and the time, and you, the buyer, are subject to an insane amount of adverse selection.

Sure.

If you look at the history of IPOs, especially the mega IPOs, on average, it’s a losing trade over the 6 to 12 months following the IPO. Especially in the case of Anthropic and OpenAI. I didn’t even buy SpaceX, even though I’m a huge fan of what they do. I don’t think the price is right, so I’m just gonna stay sidelined.

I will buy at some point when the price drops a lot or they become actually profitable and the moat becomes—

Exactly.

Right now, they’re not profitable. None of the 3 companies are profitable, or barely, so I’m not buying these IPOs. Especially in the case of Anthropic, I just don’t like the company. I don’t like the leadership. For me, buying a stock is being friends with the founders. If I don’t like the founders, I’m not gonna own it.

Fair. It’s not a bad take, being friends with the founders. Fair take, by the way, not to be the biggest fan of Anthropic’s ownership.

Okay, a way to bring it full circle: you made this tweet a couple of days ago. You said, “Multiple friends went to Silicon Valley recently, came back, 2 to 3X their portfolio, basically. One of them is a crypto person and said it reminds him of December 2021.” What do you think the parallels are to December? That’s a little bit of a jarring statement. What do you think?

People are euphoric. When you talk to people there, you get a vibe of irrational exuberance. I didn’t make the trip myself, but what I heard is that when you talk to people there, you get that vibe.

December 2021—I still have PTSD from that era. People were throwing parties and stuff like that, crazy parties. But that’s only one of the many data points. You shouldn’t make a trade based only on this observation of irrational exuberance, or the vibes. It’s one of the many data points you need to look at.

After December 2021 and going through the crypto unraveling—markets unraveling, I guess, but I think about it as it relates to crypto—taking it back to AI and where it currently is, how do you know when it’s time to buy off the bottom?

I guess it depends on the specific companies. I’ve never bought an index of semiconductors. There’s too much shit in it, and I don’t understand—

There’s a lot of shit in it.

—and I don’t understand 90% of them.

There’s a lot of stuff in it, yeah.

I’ll probably only buy more NVIDIA, TSMC, and maybe ASML. These are the 3 companies I think I understand. If they fall like 50% from here, I think it might be a good buy, assuming the fundamentals don’t change.

Fair. I think it’s a good take.

Qiao, dude, you’re a Chad. I’ve crowned you the face of the bulls for right now, really. You’re the most optimistic person as it relates to crypto and my favorite bag, Zcash. We need you out there fighting the good fight. Is there anything you wanna shout out or shill at the end here?

Yeah. Alliance is doing great. Shilling my own—

2. Alliance Backs Founders

Oh, let me ask about Alliance. What is the weighting right now of crypto-native companies versus AI and other things?

To answer your question directly, it’s about 50 crypto and 50 everything else. We don’t even do AI on the pure software side of things. I think that stuff is over. The non-crypto stuff is more hardware, physical AI stuff.

Nice.

But to be clear, we don’t pick companies based on what they do. We pick companies based on the founders.

Okay.

One thing I’ve learned over the last 5 to 10 years of doing this is that we’re not good at predicting the future.

Yeah.

We’re very good at selecting the best founders.

I like that take. Dude, congratulations. You guys are crushing it. Keep fighting the good fight, man. We need you out there on the front lines.

Thank you.

All right, brother.

Thank you.

Thanks for joining. Have a good one. Peace.

Bye.

Well, that, my friends, is Face of the Bulls. No one has a short-term take. That’s where we’re at. I don’t think anyone has an optimistic short-term take. He rocks. Super, super sharp guy. He runs Alliance now with Imran, who I’m a huge fan of. I guess short term, nobody’s bullish, dude. Oh my God. I am live every day at 8:30 a.m. EST. We are gonna do midterms, and we're gonna do a midterm segment. I don't know fucking jack shit about midterms, so I'm gonna lock in before that. Hang in there, my friends. It’s going to be okay. I promise. We have been through worse. We're going to be fine, and we are going to be just all right. I love you. I appreciate you. I will see you tomorrow, and hopefully before long, we'll be hearing from a new press secretary, Nicki Minaj. I love you. Peace.