#218 Chris Burniske & Jack Tatar: Cryptoassets - The Rise of a New Asset Class

Transcript

[Music] hello and welcome to episode of the show which talks about the technologies projects in startups driving centralization and the global washing revolution my name is Brian Harman crane and I'm a hair Roy today we are entering Jack data and CRISPR whisky were the authors of crypto assets the innovative investors guide to Bitcoin and beyond we'll walk through the universe of crypto assets classify them talk about how to value them and how they should be part of any smart investors portfolio

Jack and Chris welcome to the show thank you thanks for having us you guys cool so let's let's begin it yourself Jack you've had a sort of a long professional career in the investment management field tell us your story about how you got involved in the blockchain space yes appreciate it so I've spent nearly three decades in financial services from being a financial adviser sitting with clients and taking a look at investment portfolios and I guess back in 2013 after writing about retirement I discovered the thing called Bitcoin and we took a look at it I've run a research

firm we took a look at from the research perspective and at the time we produced the research report that soon turned into a small book called what's the deal with Bitcoin but then I started to take a look at it as an investment vehicle writing on retirement my view was well can Bitcoin be considered an asset and an investment so that led to a series of articles on MarketWatch about investing in Bitcoin for retirement following the ups and downs of that investment and ultimately it doing pretty well for me as an investment that led me down the rabbit hole of Bitcoin and crypto assets and soon led me to fortunately connect with Chris Byrne iski and that led to

the book so and since that time I've been involved and some startups I've been an angel investor to a number of startups I've also been an advisor to a number of startups in the crypto space so um I'm down the rabbit hole right now and like I said I've had a long experience and I think I can bring some of the financial analysis side of it into this as well so this is Jack I met I mean retirement portfolios retirement planning sounds like a very kind of old-fashioned thing imagine leather couch in classic scotch that kind of thing so how is that perceived he must have been like among the first people in that area to think about a write about Bitcoin what did you

call he say well it did take a lot of scotch to obviously you know convince these colleagues that I was going down the right the right path there but you know if soon you young guys will have to deal with retirement as well but I think what what was interesting is when I did write the articles and I wrote them on market watch which really was a financial investment platform and you know you're talking back in 2014-2015 and I remember specifically one article and I invested my own money into this and I did it in such a manner I'm sure we'll be discussing the financial planning aspects of it but I remember writing one article where I essentially lost half of my investment and at the time I couldn't get out of it and a

traditional investor might get out if they've lost 50% I couldn't get out of it because of the structure of the investment and I remember writing the article and I think it was one of the most commented articles in MarketWatch and and I contend that no one has been called an idiot or a more than I have been in this one article and so it was great and I now I wear it as a badge of honor because about six months later I wrote an article about how it was the best investment in my retirement account but I think at the time people and this is back in 2014 where you know this was well before even Jamie Dimon was stepping up and calling it a fraud and then realizing oh yeah I made a mistake so so yeah there was a lot of criticism around it but once again I did it in the

concept of not taking a moonshot but putting in as a what I felt was a suitable investment and crafting it into my asset allocation models but it believe me there was a lot of justice when when I did write some follow-up articles where I had made a lot of money and secured my retirement and all those other people who now call me a I don't know where they are but it's very easy to do that from the internet but but I do have to get to leather couch I like that idea I'll go with the leather couch the scotch and everything else we you know that's good as well so I do I do want to to Jack's horn for a second because that book what's the deal with bitcoins he put out May 2013

so that was before you know the late 2013 run the first time they claimed crossed $1,000 the you know far before it had really crossed mainstream consciousness I think we had an early run early on in 2013 right we went from something like $3 to 30 or was it 30 to 300 but we had that run in spring of 2013 but it was really November of 2013 that put Bitcoin on the mainstream radar for the first time and Jack was in there before that and he was in there when we were all calling it bitcoins and so when I did my due diligence on Jack he definitely earned a lot of street cred for me when I saw he he had published in

May 2013 an actual book I think the and I appreciate that Chris thanks what's interesting as many people say to me well I guess you were buying Bitcoin back in 2013 and sad to say I wish I had but at the time the only place that you could really buy it was with Mount GOx so I could have potentially bought it and who knows where it would have would have ended up maybe with Karp Ellis and his cats or whatever whatever ended up with with with the funds there but it's been interesting to follow since that time so yeah I've been involved I've seen a lot of seen a lot of things I know where the bodies are buried so thank you Chris I appreciate that yeah and of course Chris actually I remember

you sent because because you had this company Ark investments and I remember that you you guys wrote a paper there bitcoin being this new asset class and and and you sent it to us because you were podcast listen this is like a long time ago now remember seeing it was like all this what could make an interesting episode and like it was always sort of in the back of my mind so it's been a long time that I've kind of wanted to have you on and and talk with you so I'm glad it finally happens well thank you so what was arc in vestment and how was that through that job that you first became interested in Bitcoin or how did that happen well personally I had a friend dragged me down the Bitcoin

rabbit hole in my last year of college so early in 2012 I think it was dragged me down and was you know really excited about a number of concepts but at the time the main application that Bitcoin supported was the Silk Road I don't even think coinbase was around at that point it was very limited in terms of what you could do in the ecosystem if you weren't a developer and so while it was an interesting thought experiment for me and I've gone back and I've looked I have like a Facebook post on the company page that I was working on I liked about

Bitcoin and I've had friends come back to me with conversations that to be honest I don't remember about Bitcoin in that period there was then about a two-year gap where I remained tangentially interested but again didn't think of Bitcoin as an employment opportunity until I joined this firm arc investment management in the summer of 2014 arc was a start-up at the time didn't have any funds so was just getting off the ground just crafting its portfolios and as a thematic technology investor I was put on the next generation internet theme and that involved putting in the

elements to that theme which included things like cloud computing Internet of Things machine learning social media and we ended up putting cryptocurrency in there as an and our director of research was was a big proponent of Bitcoin as was Cathy would our CEO CIO and so everyone was on board but this was I mean the the ETF that I worked for originally a rkw when we launched that in October of 2014 there was pretty much no way to get Bitcoin exposure into an ETF and so we held like token plays not in the 2017 sense of the term but more these small cute plays like Nvidia right for the

GPUs or Taiwan Semiconductor who has the fabrication plants that produce the Asics that go into a lot of Bitcoin rigs but nothing substantial and we were actually approached by greyscale who had the Bitcoin investment trust that would be coming online exiting from the private placement into gbtc so they approached us in late 2014 because they said hey here's this public fund manager that has ETF's that has cryptocurrency on their website and so that kicked off a about three-quarters of a year to a year of due diligence on Bitcoin the paper like I published a couple of papers summer of 2015 I had to look

deeply into the long-term security of bitcoins Network so the long-term incentive model and trying to figure out what an equilibrium transaction fee would need to be to sufficiently secure the network from a 51% attack all kind of sort of nerdy stuff that I would have had to do if I were due diligence saying you know an equity like Red Hat or face book different but different things I had to investigate but same amount of rigor and then Ark became the first public fund manager to invest in Bitcoin in September of 2015 with the first purchases of gbtc happening in the mid-20 range when Bitcoin was in the mid to hundreds and I think gbtc got all the

way to three thousand dollars at its peak and so it's been a phenomenal investment and that gave me leverage to just increasingly focus on crypto really lost all interest in in equities by late 2015 early 2016 and so I ran with ARC script of effort for about two years and then very amicably have transitioned on I remain involved with arc and as a board on the board of arc but then now I'm running my own firm called placeholder which is a venture capital firm that invests in decentralized information networks incentivized by token and I'm doing that with Joel man degra fantastic well so

let's get into the first thing that seems to be something dear to your hearts which is this question of how do we call these things cryptocurrency of course is the term that's most often used but doesn't necessarily make so much sense for for many of these things why do you guys think this is so important what we call them and what are you have proposals in that regard well we named the book crypto assets to be very clear that we think this asset class goes beyond currencies a new reference Brian a little bit ago the new asset class white paper I put out with coinbase that we sent to you in 2016 and

it really draws from the seeds of what we we let we we lay down in that paper in that this asset class as a whole I think of more as an asset class native to information networks and the novel ways in which it organizes and incentivizes human activity I find to be an innovation much more akin to when the the joint stock companies in the early 1600s were created to fund merchant ventures write long term capital projects for return on that capital and so really pulling this asset class and this movement out of the currency

conversation because that gets us into all kinds of dead-end arguments and conversations around you can't have so many currencies in there too volatile and yadda yadda yadda and more pulling back and saying okay this asset class as a whole we call crypto asset within that asset class there are verticals just as within the equity asset class there are verticals by sector or market cap or growth or value or whatever it may be and so with encrypted assets we think of right now three verticals there will likely be more in the future we might actually have a fourth but cryptocurrencies crypto commodities crypto tokens and the fourth that you can maybe add with crypto kitties as crypto collectibles

but if we just start with crypto currencies you know per economics the definition of a currency is something that serves as a means of exchange store value and unit of account so means of exchange is exchanging this unit for goods and services store value is self-explanatory and unit of account is really the measuring stick of value and those are things like Bitcoin litecoin Z cash Manero ripple those guys target being a currency in a more Universal sense but most of the assets out there I would argue right now are crypto commodities which aetherium kicked off and so just as in the physical world we have physical commodities like oil wheat natural gas bananas copper gold so on

and so forth and those commodities lay the the foundation to building finished goods and services I would say in the crypto space we are seeing the birth of digital of markets to price digital commodities so why can't I trade you know on CM e cloud storage futures or bandwidth futures or GPU flop futures or all kinds of derivatives off of those digital commodities and I think that what the crypto markets are creating are these global 24/7 markets to price these digital commodities and provision these digital commodities which is extremely important when we think about this transition from physical to digital that pretty much our entire society is going through the last one and I'll keep a

brief of crypto tokens is really when we just think of again using the physical analogues of currencies and commodities come together form an economy to produce finished goods and services I think of cryptocurrencies and crypto commodities late at as laying these foundational layers blockchain layer and application service layers so that finished digital goods and services can be provisioned to consumers and a lot of those finished digital goods and services will have their own token so this is things like you know auger or steam or air GaN I may even put in there and so that is that that is the stack that I that I think of that we think of for this space right now this is this

whole point about crypto assets I think is very important because I've grown very frustrated with seeing the press and seeing the media constantly refer this whole space as crypto currencies and they equate everything back to Bitcoin and and we really need to recognize that there are these differences that Chris is laid out within the whole category of what we're discussing here ether cannot be compared to Bitcoin and we keep hearing the press say oh well you know which cryptocurrency is gonna survive ether at Bitcoin they are different and it's very very important and it's a major part of what we wanted to accomplish in the book

was to divide this space up as Chris is mentioned additionally it's also important when you start to take a look at investments and evaluating these businesses and these coins because they do have different uses and that potentially at some point in the future you're going to see this classification come into play when we have investment vehicles like Chris is saying cloud futures and things along those lines that are going to provide diversification within this space for investors so it's very very important that people don't put everything under the concept of crypto currencies and and I honestly believe 2018 will be the year that will pull the curtain aside and

show people that there is more to the space than just Bitcoin and part of that is to get away from solely looking at Bitcoin and solely referring to the space as crypto currencies and recognizing that their crypto assets and accordingly as an asset they're invested vehicles so let's explore the boundary between some of these categories so you can start with the category crypto currency and crypto commodity so Bitcoin according to you is a crypto currency ether is a crypto commodity what defines the boundary for some asset to be a crypto currency and a crypto commodity the

boundary is is inherently fuzzy and in all asset class definitions and differentiations are fuzzy is what a fun is I've I've dove into the academic literature of the over the years the distinction that I make between say Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency and etherium as a crypto commodity is bitcoins Bitcoin was brought into the world to serve on a global basis these three use cases right means of exchange store value unit of account whereas etherium was really brought into the world to provide this decentralized world computer which I would think of as a digital commodity and with units of

ether converting into gas to pay for access to that that decentralized world computer or that digital commodity and so for that reason I think it it and and early on you know when vitalik talked about ether I believe he said you know this isn't meant to be an investment where this isn't meant to be speculated on I forget the exact quote and certainly it has ether has become an investment over time and something that people speculate on but really it's the the genesis i think that differentiates i do want to add one wrinkle here which frustrates some people but while i agree and i and i do believe in this classification and and hope that we can

refine the classification and there's lots of people with good ideas you know around app coins and utility tokens and different ways of slicing this pie and i think it's all healthy and it's all additive one other way to think of these assets if you think of each crypto network as a economy that provisions a single good or service or couple goods or services then each native unit within that crypto network does technically serve as a currency and so within that network it should be sorts serving means of exchange store value and unit of account use cases intra network now what I would argue differentiates between something that is serving as a currency intra network

versus a crypto currency more broadly is how many networks is it used within right and so Bitcoin is this interchange this this mother change or mother chain that is used to swap in out and out of all these other assets of all these other crypto networks and in so doing it's serving more as a universal currency which is why I would call it a crypto currency as opposed to a lot of other assets with which primarily just operate within their own network their own crypto network ether you know is is is bending these lines because it has gotten so big and used as a means of payment but those are just some nuances yeah sure I wanted to kind of weigh in

on that because I think ether is an interesting example here on the one hand of course you right but he was it was really like marketed in the beginning in the white papers as the case is like gas pay for computation on this world computer but I think if you look at the valuation is in my eyes or let's put like this if it was actually just used with that I think the valuation should be like much much lower and and you have two problem there to that if the price goes up the cost of computation goes up makes network less attractive so people would want to move elsewhere and run the computation elsewhere because you know to a large extent I think like running computation on these like blocks and networks it's going to be you know somewhat somewhat of a commodity right

you'll be able to run it on like one network or the other network is you know as long as they have like somewhat similar security characteristics dropping if you look at either actually the only way you can justify this valuation is if you assume that it will have this kind of currency function for smart contracts and maybe be used as like collateral or if you had like really good stable coins that could move across chains that could be a huge threat for ye sir what are you thoughts on that well first of all I just I just want to say the fact that we're doing this classification is discussing this classification is a

major point about valuing these these assets and as Chris mentioned before this is probably going to evolve but putting the stake in the ground with this taxonomy allows us to better value and evaluate each of these coins in each of these assets and I think this is gonna be very important because they're gonna be they're gonna be people out there were smarter than me who are gonna analyze the space and bring up a lot of these points and evaluate them within the context of of the of where they stand in terms of this taxonomy and also like you say going across the board I think it is a very interesting thing Chris mentioned before that maybe

there's a fourth crypto collectibles right which which is which is interesting but I also think in looking back at the book this hold the whole rise of Ripple that has that has occurred has also forced me to look back on and Chris mentioned it before that that we viewed it as a crypto currency and and you almost wonder if some of these some of these assets can potentially change I'm not sure that we can view Ripple as a cryptocurrency anymore perhaps it's more of a crypto commodity but what's important is that we set the basis for how to evaluate these coins and and how to view them

because what you're going to find in the next year is you're going to find that there will be analysts and there will be tools and resources available to us to now evaluate these assets we're gonna have data we're gonna have smart people looking at this and what we've tried to do here and I think what we're gonna see more people doing is laying that foundation for how to evaluate these assets so when we put together the taxonomy in the division there it wasn't to be the be all end all a lot of it was to say here's a foundation here's there's room for growth and to evaluate it and and all of these points that you're bringing up I think will play well for people to understand how to evaluate these as

assets how to evaluate their network value and ultimately can they can they exist and should they be investable in their in their current state and and specifically I would say you brought up ripple Jack and Brian you were you were mentioning aetherium I think this is where we go back to while there is this taxonomy of cryptocurrencies cryptic my descriptive tokens and we'll add crypto collectables within each asset each crypto asset within its crypto network acts as the native currency within that crypto network or perhaps a private currency and so within that network one

of the three use cases is store value and I think over time we will see battles for different crypto assets to capture more mindshare more store value my chair currently Bitcoin has the most store value might share but aetherium certainly a lot of ether holders are using it as a store value or you know investors that are hoping the future utility value is such that it will lift the price of the asset but no matter what the asset is and this is particularly the case for ripple there needs to be a contingent I think of hot alerts if there's not a contingent of ha dollars then you could have if you have

all the entire float of the asset base that is circulating as a means of exchange you will likely have pretty high velocities you know bitcoins means of exchange velocity is tomato around 15 most other things are going to be north of that given the confirmation times and you could actually have pretty low network values to sustain large large large economies or large transaction volumes within these crypto networks so the store value aspect is key and we have seen the financialization of so many asset classes like if you go back to the early 1970s when we went off the gold standard that's really when oil and copper and a bunch of physical commodities started more becoming financial or there was a whole

financialization component added to their utility to the world and so this is just a continuation of that and I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing it's just there needs to be a balance right between store value and and and the actual utility or means of exchange of a crypto asset yeah I think that's a very good point yeah I guess so my impression of the markets today is that almost everything gets treated as if it was kind of the store value thing and valued on that basis and and I remember back in 2013 and maybe 14 when people were talking about Bitcoin being used

for remittances and I was interesting too because they're not you know I did like some kind of math and you look at okay diem remittance market right let's say now on the one side I like sell euros for Bitcoin and it gets sent over and converted and for a local Nigerian ID remember what the currency is called there but for yeah so and if you did the math and if you have to look at the size of the Romans market and you assume that you know one of these transactions maybe they would only hold a Bitcoin for a day and or it could be less and then the effect on the price was actually almost negligent it could it could actually be used to to manage a huge amount of the remittance market proportion without

really driving up the price I guess that's kind of your point this falls into the valuation framework and we could we could jump to valuation but this idea that the equation of exchange could become and I would argue will become the bedrock to crypto asset valuation so the equation of exchange being n V equals P Q so M is the monetary base size of the monetary base V is the velocity which you were just kind of implying there Brian and then P is the price of the good being offered within that economy sold and Q is the quantity and so within that framework

and if we just stick with Bitcoin right if if we think of P Q for the remittance economy as the amount of money transferred using Bitcoin to facilitate the remittance economy then we take something like okay there's 500 billion dollar remittance economy let's say Bitcoin takes 10 percent of that that means each year bitcoin has to move 50 billion dollars in order to facilitate that use case and then you know let's let's assume a velocity of 10 just to make it easier we can get into how we've quantified velocity later but a velocity of 10 so I have that that 50 billion PQ say and I'm dividing it by a velocity of

V of 10 which gets me a necessary monetary base M of five billion which is really not that much in order what that would claim is Bitcoin would need to store five billion in value to facilitate 10% of the remittances market at this velocity right so there's lots of assumptions baked in there but then you can start to stack these right and the one that everyone use right right now is digital gold right you have a 2.5 trillion global financial gold market and I use the global financial gulp gold market not total above-ground stock so 10 percent of that is 250 billion and so that currently justifies bitcoins Network value and with something like

holding store holding it as gold or store value that actually has a velocity of zero so you pull it out of the float I've written about this on a lot more detail on medium opposed called crypto asset valuations with the whole framework and and an open-source model on it but I think there are truly ways we can value these things but you're absolutely right that right now the prices of most of these assets are based on expectations of future utility and not current utility value I would just I would just like to draw attention to Chris's post on on medium around this and it's it's required reading for anyone who really

wants to get a basis for valuation one of the other posts I like which which simplifies things for for me which is helpful for me was this post about the the J curve and this was something I saw during the the dot-com era as well and the crypto J curve that Chris talks about is the fact that assets are made up of utility value and speculative value and when something comes out like we sorta calm there was a high speculative value and at some point in time there's a need to come down there and speculate a speculative value because because of just what it is speculation but ultimately there needs to be value seen in the utility aspect

of this and then we have that J curve and when there's a realization in the utility of that of that asset it goes up now we were seeing that with Bitcoin and we've saw that with Bitcoin there was a lot of speculation and then we had a burst in the bubble but then all of a sudden we started to see the utility of Bitcoin a lot of these things as Chris is mentioning store value remittances so all of a sudden there is now the value in the utility of the token that sends it up accordingly the J curve and I think this is an important and a simple way of looking at these assets for some of these assets like a ripple and and some of these other cryptos where there's that speculative value but really does the token does the

coin have any utility and if it doesn't have any utility we're probably gonna see that go down substantially but once the utility is realized and with a lot of these assets the utilities will be realized they will shoot up and and I've done some we're taking a look at some of the dot-coms where and we write about this in the book where we've seen during the.com the speculative value was such that all of these stocks went up well accordingly when we realized that there was nobody behind the curtain they went down to zero pets.com all of these they went down to zero but accordingly you even if you look at Amazon's chart Amazon had that speculative value and then it came down because people were concerned and and

all of a sudden we realized that there's a major utility in that asset and we had the J curve so those two pieces of it Chris's work on the valuation and his in this formulas there and the crypto J curve I think it required reading for anyone who really wants to get a basis for the valuation of assets that are out there right now in the book we talk about potentially valuing some icos which i think is is another thing to look at as well but RIT that's really required reading for anyone looking at the valuation of these assets going forward so yeah I mean like the I think the Christmas Post really walks through like the history of Bitcoin and how there was this like speculative value that was accrued in

2013 and then it went out of the market and the utility came up and so the like sort of the ratio of the speculative value and the utility value is what is change in a cycle which I feel is what Chris is trying to say is is like a J curve my question here is when we look at like all of these different assets all of them give different kinds of utility it's a Bitcoin utility supposed to be store of value is helium the utility is supposed to be accessing transactions in this world computer presumably same from other smart contract art forms money dough the utility might be transacting

on the dark the dark net so and some and some of these utility values are entirely subjective right like I might place a very high utility on store of value somebody else might very very little value to having a store of value so if the meaning of utility for all of these different assets is it does not translate from one network to the other and from one person to the other how can a valuation model be based on this idea of utility so it's great question and the the idea of utility for any individual crypto network shows up

in the PQ side of the equation of exchange where we have to think about the digital good or service being provisioned and what is the price per unit of that digital service and then once I have had that assumption I can also apply costs decline curves right so just to use a very simple example file coin or we could use something like orchid right decentralized VPN or a mesh network or whatever it may be the crypto commodities are easier to do this for so I'll just run with file coin for now there is a dollar per gigabyte that we know based on current cloud vendors that people are willing to pay to store their

that that their files and there is a pretty well known cost decline curve for storage going into the future and so I can project you know what is going to be the dollar per gigabyte stored on the file coin network in 2018 2019 2020 going out you know to 2030 so that's the price I can also make a projection on the quantity of gigabytes being stored and I can do that by looking at the total addressable market of cloud storage and gigabytes and creating an S curve I use an S curve that actually I used a lot at arc under the guidance of Brett Winton the director of research there where you put in things like okay when is when does the network launch

when does you know when is there the inflection point at ten percent how long does the sweet spot of this curve last but anyway an S curve to show the adoption cycle within the total addressable market will give me the gigabytes stored by file coin in any given year when I multiply together the price per gigabyte which is P by the number of bytes which is Q I get a dollar amount of value that is transacted in the file coin network on any given year in exchange for the good being provided which is which is cloud storage once I have that and I can have that for every single year I then have an assumption around velocity for any given year and I

can divide that PQ by the velocity to get the monetary base necessary to support that economy and then the last step is and this is in each subsequent year right I have then and the monetary base or what we would call the network value well network network value that gets a little trickier I can circle back to that but monetary base in the float to support that economy and then I divide that by the number of tokens that are in the float to get a utility value price per token every single year and then let's say I projected that out to 2025 I can take that utility value in 2025 and discount it back to the present to

actually get a rational market price for this asset today based on future utility value some percentage of that rational market price will be supported by current utility value and the Delta is the speculative value and so that's the basic framework the only wrinkle in there that I didn't really mention is taking out from the float right at the very beginning the percentage of the asset being held by ha blurs and stagers if there's you know some bonding that mechanism necessary for the node supporting the network because really the only assets available in any given year within that economy are the ones that are freely fro floating and therefore can be exchanged for that good

or service you know Brian you mentioned before about the guys with the leather couches and the Scotch you should have them they should be watching this type of thinking that's going on because this to me is evidence of what we're looking at here you can't call this a fraud you can't call this something that that is a fad because when you're able to take what Chris is talking about and a lot of the things that we've looked at when you're to take a lot of these these resources and these these tools to evaluate these assets it further proves that we are really looking at assets that need to be

considered for investments and for companies going forward so you know I I would invite all those people as they're sitting around their leather couches and drinking their scotch to pay attention to this to show them and like I said before almost pull the curtain aside that there is a big world out here because what you're going to see I do believe is the type of thinking that Chris is mentioning is going to be what we're gonna see from analysts over the next few years from the investment firms and beyond and we don't have to we don't have to rely on investment firms Chris's work is all open source you go to Twitter you get such amazing analysis that's out there this clearly shows that we're not in an

a a situation that is going to go away this is very solid this is very there's a foundation here for these assets and the fact that you can evaluate them in the manner in a Christmas speaking about I think is something that's very important for people to take take a look at and and to understand and recognize that I guess like when the joint stock companies came about for the first time the fundamental ways of valuing these assets as the net present value of the discounted cash flow probably to a century or two in order to be developed maybe even more right and exactly what what's what you seem to be suggesting is okay

that there is going to be like rational ways of valuing these crypto assets and perhaps one of the your proposal is that MV equals PQ that equation of monetary velocity is going to be a is going to be the one that that does it so maybe I can take a text an example in Illustrator like test my thinking of it so maybe we could like value ripple using MV equals PQ like the XR P so for our listeners that that may not be aware the essential role of the xrb is to self paid transaction fees every time a transaction occurs on the ripple network

and the ripple network ideally is going after the market of the cross-border currency transfers so the P here is the price per for the service so let's say parties are willing to spend 20 cents in order to transfer money cross-border on average so that becomes P and then there's a Q which is the demand for the transfer of cross-border money flows in the world so it'll be a huge number right so it will be earlier there might be I don't know trillions of dollars of demand to transfer money like that so that P the price the transaction cost people are willing to pay from transfer

money cross-border multiplied by the amount of money people are willing to cross borders in a whole year that is P cross Q and that's one side of the equation the other side of the equation is M into V where V is the velocity which is how many times of people willing to circulate the example here in the given unit yeah in a given year so that depends on sort of the behavior of the holders of ripple how they are acting in some way yes and if you take this PQ and divided by V that should be sort of the market cap of the monetary

base yeah and so there are tricky things specifically with the crypto currencies so sometimes I'll consolidate PQ just into annual transaction volume because that's you know just the turnover of the of that crypto currency I think the way you approached it is another interesting option if you said okay what is the average dollar per transaction and what are the number of transactions specifically if X R P is only being used to pay fees and not actually the medium that is transacting all of that value if it's only the fee I don't know how everything going to work out for ripple because you don't have to use xrp necessarily within

inter ledger or the ripple Network I would say the thing that people should most keep in mind around ripple is it has been emphasized as a a fast settlement time cryptocurrency which implies a high velocity and the higher the velocity if you think about velocity in the denominator then the the higher the velocity goes actually the lower m needs to be to support whatever size economy PQ and so that's just you know something that people need to wrap their minds around and to go back to the last point of the example I used before we perform these calculations we should take out the percentage of the float

that is being held by hablas or bonders and so then that only leaves the the assets that are in the float to facilitate this economy which then allows you to get a monetary base that you divide by only the tokens or assets that are in the float to get you a dollar value per token the trick here is to truly get the net work value you then have to take that dollar value per token and multiply it by all the assets that have ever been issued because not necessarily all of those assets are on the float and so that's where network value can expand beyond the the monetary based soley necessary to support that PQ cool well I want to move to kind of did

the other part that perhaps a lot of people are not as familiar if they're listening to this podcast and you guys spend a lot of time on that in the book which is looking at Bitcoin looking at crypto assets more in the larger framework of you know portfolio a diversified balanced portfolio so Jack you you are and have done a lot of work around portfolio construction retirement planning can you give it I mean very just sort of brief overview of like what are some of the kind of frameworks using and how does cryptocurrency encrypt your assets fit into that this is a very

important discussion because we're seeing more and more people come into this space and investing money into the space and and they're coming in basically throwing money at it and thinking that they're they're going to make a lot of money and and in essence they have but when I started to look at this space back in 2013-2014 as an investment I looked at it from the perspective of financial planning asset allocation and and in the book you know cuz Chris spent a lot of time with art Laffer who's an economist we dependent on the work of Sharpe and Harry Markowitz who was kind to discuss modern portfolio theory so it's very important

to evaluate investing in anything from the perspective of your overall portfolio now everyone's gonna have a different risk profile everyone's gonna have different financial goals or whatnot but to put all your assets into all your money into one asset you may look back and may say well I made a lot of money on Bitcoin thank God I didn't put in anything else but you've always got to protect yourself against the risk so when I looked at this I looked at this from the portfolio allocation and asset allocation models that are out there which typically you'll see are equities and bonds back in 2008 after the financial crisis a lot of the financial firms realized that you didn't get that diversification by being in stocks and

bonds when the markets crashed they both went down so there was this view that you needed to have assets that were non correlated and this asset class known as or asset classification known as alternative assets became something that the financial firms started to say you need to have a portion of non-correlated assets in your portfolio to protect yourself against downturns in the market so we started to see allocations come along that said maybe fifty percent in equities thirty percent in bonds and twenty percent in these alternative assets as a way to protect your portfolio and a lot of this depends upon the work that like I said Harry Markowitz did an on portfolio theory so when you take a

look at alternative assets what you find is they typically are made up of things like gold or real estate or hedge funds and things of that nature that are non correlated to the rest of the market so my view was well it seems to me that something like Bitcoin fits that model of an alternative asset and when we started to take a look at the non correlation of the asset and and recognizing that it's actually there's actually a high level of non correlation between Bitcoin and the overall markets equities and bonds then even gold it's it provides even a better level of non correlation than these other assets and we've done some other work around volatility and things of that nature

ultimately the feeling was Bitcoin can fit into your portfolio or prudently allocated portfolio as an alternative asset and in this way financial professionals investment professionals can potentially look at this asset for their clients and provide diversification provide portfolio protection by investing into Bitcoin and crypto assets as this alternative asset sleeve and that was what I made my investment in Bitcoin on back in 2013 2014 and it's a big part of what we tell people now in the book is how they should be looking at their overall portfolio and investing accordingly into

these assets now of course everyone's situation is different someone like Chris who's a lot younger than me he may be willing to take a little bit more allocation into crypto assets then potentially I am who who is closer to distribution of of assets than accumulation of assets so everyone is different but to be able to view your portfolio in a more holistic manner and say where do crypto assets fit in you know we feel that there is principles and there are resources and tools to do that and so that's that's really where I feel that if you view these crypto assets and as an alternative investment and fit them in accordingly to your portfolio then you can find that then

you can fit them in in a prudent manner now as that happens let's say you invest 10% into crypto assets and you had done that for the last year you might realize that that 10% is now 30% of your portfolio because of how it's grown so then you have to take a look at rebalancing that portfolio and bringing it back to your asset allocation now that's that becomes something that's of interest to people because they're saying wait a minute I've got this winner here why don't I just ride that horse and keep going so you've got to take a look at your own situation and say do I need to do some rebalancing to come back to my original portfolio allocation and someone like Harry Markowitz and modern portfolio

theory would say rebalancing is important does that mean that you sell all your winners and and because maybe you have nothing but winners in your portfolio well then it becomes something to to consider and I know Brian you and I have talked a little bit about I think it was when says who who wrote this article about not selling Bitcoin or keeping a portion of your Bitcoin because it's potentially could go up I think it's an interesting perspective but I also think you have to have rules in place when you invest and those rules can be around asset allocation and portfolio allocation and things along those lines additionally there may be some rules within the crypto assets base I have kind of learned myself that as much as I

would love to rebalance and sell things and come back to a prudent asset allocation model I may find that maybe from my perspective I don't want to sell all of it so I've found myself selling potentially 70% and keeping 30% for the long run so this is in essence actually pushing some of the rules that are out there around asset allocation but I think it's very important for people when they start to invest in this and now the key thing is invest in this and put this into their portfolio they have to do with the rules and that's why it's very important like I said we spend a lot of time in the book around how this fits is an alternative investment within prudent asset allocation and and I do

want to add one thing I think everything Jack just said is is great and on point and prudent when when getting off the ground in this space right like first rule always of Krypton investing has never invest more money than you're willing to lose just time and time and time again that said depending on who you are and depending how early you got into the crypto space you may be at a point now where you have set aside a nest egg in in in hopefully an asset outside of the crypto space that's totally uncorrelated to crypto and maybe you have a diversified portfolio thereof

equities bonds real estate precious metals it all depends on how much you've made in the crypto space but from there if you have that then you know this idea of hollowing and compounding capital starts to get extremely important because if you just bought and held Bitcoin or ether or whatever it is and you let that compound compound compound let's say you've taken out your cost so at that point it's just monopoly money for you that is when the returns can be truly astounding and so I mean it's the idea that that that you need money to make money and so it really it's a nuanced subject because it really

depends on what your risk profile and your asset base is as an investor the other thing I would add and at Chris I think you're it's a very exciting time for people who have invested in the space and are investing in space the thing I will also throw in there as well is don't lose sight of the fact that at least here in the United States the taxman is watching and we're starting to see even with the new tax law that there are going to be some more stringent taxing regulations that are going to come into play here so just recognize this recognize you've got to do your record-keeping and recognize that there may be some reasons for tax selling and things along those lines but I think the

beauty of this whole discussion is we we've moved from just Bitcoin the technology the societal impact that it has to now evaluating it and the crypto assets in the investment space and putting all of these all of these concepts of financial planning asset allocation that Brian's buddies with the scotch and the leather couches spend a lot of time doing and now we've gone there and we've been integrated that into the discussion it's a very exciting time and it's and hopefully like like you know I've well I've often said it's Bitcoin is almost a gateway drug for Millennials to invest and for people to get involved in

investing so I think it's a good thing and and I'm glad it's legal well let's speak a little bit about where we are right now so right you guys wrote this book I mean it came out pretty recently I came out a few months ago but of course publishing being slow you had to finish it earlier and I think you had some kind of date maybe it was January I think of last year exactly a year ago end of March start of April is when we submitted the full rough draft of the manuscript I'm right but but yeah I think you had the cutoff date where you use basically when you when you talked about the values and returns right I think that was in January so we did a few things it depends on the chapter

you're you're absolutely right that for some of the Bitcoin specific chapters we just said okay Jan 1 2017 so that we wouldn't cherry-pick we wouldn't be accused of cherry-picking but then for many for some of the other assets depending on what we were exploring and the point we were trying to emphasize we just included as much data as we could say for like volatility analysis or developer contributions and so some of those data points took us up to the start of April 2017 but you know when we started writing the book ether was at $7 Bitcoin was at 700 and it was like writing while running up a mountain or running up an avalanche and you know

what's interesting another point about it is that we had the cut off in in March and I remember Chris and I we were we had written obviously about the ETF's and there was a whole Winklevoss etf and if you remember the decision was coming down about the Winklevoss ETFs in March 10th watch attempt and so we were we were very nervous because manukan say about the numbers we made the content around theory to make it as evergreen as possible so that the numbers don't detract from the message but here we were with the Winklevoss situation which could be out of date two weeks after we it went to the publisher

so so we had to hold off on end I think that was the last thing that we ended up fixing was finally when the decision came down around the Winklevoss etf's fitting that into the book and and that was that was a bit nerve-racking for us so I do wanna kind of come back to this though right because I agree I mean I think if you look at the content like valuation methods analysis to portfolio things like all of those they I think they're still valid right they still kind of make sense however did the figure of the kind of aggregate crypto currency crypto acid market cap at that time was on 24 billion I think when you wrote it

today we're at over 700 so we have an increase of about 30 X now obviously people bought back then you know they would followed your advice although I guess it was hard to do since book was not yet they were drawn phenomenally well but what about today I mean do you guys feel the same way I mean because also if he if he if he look at living today for a few days ago I looked at this drawn drawn 15 billion so it was like what is drawn to read the white paper and it's like some in quick I mean I don't know maybe there was something there but like it's just it seems very incoherent poorly written thing that unclear if it's anything at all and then you have things like Kodak and now

announcing Kodak coin we obviously seem to be in some kind of crazy bubble so how do you think about it today here's an interesting so I'm definitely gonna answer that but I just blew my mind for a second so I'll share it with you guys the official release date of the book was October 19 2017 without anyone looking what was the aggregate network value of all crypto sets October 19 2017 no looking I want to hear everyone guess 150 oh very close Brian 170 billion so it has gone up 4x since the book was published I'm not taking credit credit for that

full run by any means maybe maybe mr. Taylor had had a little bit to do with it but you know all all jesting aside the markets are white hot right now there's there's no doubt about that it is not a situation where I would recommend someone dumping in you know all of their life savings I don't think I would ever recommend that but even you know sort of this prudent model that that Jack and I talked about of one to five percent depending on your your risk profile etc even with that money I would I would recommend averaging in and realizing more than anything this is a multi decadal gain and if we approach

what's going on with crypto assets from Carlotta Perez's framework of technological revolutions in financial capital then this is we are less than 10 years into a 50 year techno economic paradigm shift and it fits all of the patterns in terms of the web is consolidating around Google Google Apple Facebook Amazon they are data aggregators that are crushing the competition meanwhile you have an open data layer system called block chains which are percolating up growing fast and inevitably with these highly disruptive innovations and these techno economic paradigm shifts you're going to have all kinds of volatility right

speculation lays the foundation for innovation and we are really entering what Carlo Carlota would call the frenzy stage so we've been in the eruption stage we are now entering the frenzy stage where increasingly financial capital will divorce itself from from the actual reality from what's being built and we're gonna see some cycles over this of this over the next few years I would argue and then the question becomes okay when does the music stop and when do we have the big crash because lots of people have been talking about oh this is a bubble and we're gonna have a crash and blah blah blah and I agree with all of that but I think in 2017 we had three if not four Corrections of 30 or 40 percent right in

the traditional capital markets that's a crash in crypto I classify a crash more as 80% plus when we look at late 2013 to January 2015 Vic only lost 85 percent of its value and so when I think about that big crash we may have one of those say in 2018 I don't know I don't have a crystal ball but when I think of the big crash in the longitudinal perspective I'm looking at the peak of the tech and telecom boom 2000 Bloomberg Tech index was when you adjust it for inflation about 4 trillion so we right now are about 20% of the way there and the telecom boom that shed we shed a couple trillion in value and so I

think that the big crash will come when we are you know well into the trillions I think we will lose we will shed trillions of dollars in a network value but until then I'm not you know I'm not obsessing over trying to call this crash I think Peter Lynch is famous for saying far more money has been lost preparing for Corrections than in Corrections this is if you think about the tailwind of what's going on here and you are approaching it from a 50-year technical economic paradigm perspective and you are just adding adding incrementally responsibly adding adding adding over time you will be fine in 2015 sorry in

2015 25 0 you will get hurt if you're buying a ton now freaking out in six months because half of your net worth is gone and so on and so forth so it's really important and I'll end my tirade now to just responsibly easing the things there's no rush we're gonna go through booms and busts the big one is probably a few years out when we're well into the trillions or five years out of ten but it's just important to remain cool-headed about what's going on here I want to make one comment I totally agree with Chris you mentioned before about Tron and tronics and I I want to draw it I want to draw something to the

book that I think you know Chris and I spent a lot of time on this recognizing that things were gonna things could potentially blow up as they have but we also put things in the book on how to value assets then I think stand the test of time and can be evaluated and people need to look at you mention tronics okay and we all know we've seen that rise up you mentioned about the white paper in the book we lay down a framework for how to evaluate assets and specifically these are things that can be used for the icos out there white paper developers community all those types of things and the reason we did that was so that people would view assets that they were gonna put their money into like a

Tron and put it through this evaluation method that we put out there you mentioned about the white paper Tron and was now seeing articles about Tron and what was wrong with it if you had gone and taking a look at our framework for evaluating these things and evaluating I SEOs that we talked about in the book you might have recognized these types of things in fact we even talked about Ponzi schemes the history of Ponzi schemes and what Ponzi schemes mean for two fold first to kind of shape talk about how Bitcoin wasn't a Ponzi scheme but additionally to also say how you could potentially see crypto assets that are Ponzi schemes so we we laid out a lot of these these theories and a lot of this framework out there not only that

that doesn't really have any there's not set in time but can be used to evaluate the crypto assets out there when we talk about this time is different thinking I mean this is the type of thinking that people have around crypto assets they need to understand the historical basis of this as well and and that's why you'll see chapters in there that talk about a lot of these things and the reason is is not so much not so much to get hung up on on the numbers that are in the book but the theory and the foundation for studying this space that we tried to lay out in the book that we feel can transcend any time in any market movements great you know I actually I totally agree that the book does deliver on that and it does provide some very

good frameworks and methods for forgetting about this now this one more thing I'd love to get kind of your assessment on so we do the podcast with Ari Paul that I'm sure you guys know I think it was maybe around five six months ago I think I was I'm not sure if he had started that if they had started they found that they were just about to start and you know as curious as you pointed out the market cap even then was much lower and he at that point said that the kid he knew of about or he estimate that there was about a hundred billion of kind of you know institutional you know kind of traditional investment money waiting to be invested into the space and I mean that is the one thing that I feel like

even though these valuations seem outlandish in many cases that there's just this avalanche of people basically following exactly your advice jack and saying okay I should have some exposure to this thing it is a good asset class to have in the portfolio it has a big future you know I must get into this and not so much it's back exactly looking at the project right so how do you guys look at this situation right now you also see this huge avalanche of just money coming in and and maybe one what one want to add to me it seems that has a kind of inevitability to it as well right because if you know others are gonna do it when others are gonna say I want 3% of my portfolio in crypto you

know that has refractor prices up so you also want to do it right and you want to do it before the others do you guys think this is a big driver and will continue to be a victor ever so something that I'm always looking at there's kind of two parts to your question there's I would say the institutional capital and then the retail capital and what's coming in and what's coming in when I think we're still at the tip of the iceberg with institutional's I mean you've got some some clearly you've you had the hedge fund lift and Cray's of 2017 the crypto hedge fund but in terms of sort of established financial incumbents a lot of them they they do have their toes in the water you

know a lot of like the authorised participants or trading shops or people are working on this traditional hedge funds they are working on this so they're there but they're not deploying capital at scale yet because weirdly enough especially for some of the big quant hedge fund shops the markets are still too small still too small in terms of liquidity and and and the volume that they would like to move through with their algos so I don't think the institutional side is there in the way that it's sometimes portrayed and a great example of that would be what happened to Kodak stock yesterday right Kodak announces kodak coin which is

really issuance of a new asset that there's no indication of how that asset is going to drive cash flows to increase the value of kodak stock which is how kodak stock is valued and nonetheless the stock I think popped 130% one hundred fifty million dollars in value was created and I would argue that is more because in the traditional capital markets where more institutional investors are there is still a thirst for products that they can trust that they can hold to gain some kind of exposure to crypto without holding crypto directly and so that was an example to me of the unmet demand and thirst on the institutional side still

for crypto exposure and it's just gonna require more securitized instruments instruments that fit the puzzle pieces of ETFs or mutual funds or other institutional money managers constraints right they they can't buy a Bitcoin directly it's not necessarily that they don't want to then on the retail side I'm always trying to figure out what amount of this appreciation is due to new fiat currency coming into the markets versus sort of this speculation multiple where people bid the price of assets back up and up back and forth so I bit up ripple and then I can bit up ether and then I can at Bitcoin and we see this cycle right

where Bitcoin pumps and then some air comes out of it the halt or all the other crypto assets pump now aetherium is starting to develop its own thing but there's this rotation cycle with encrypted assets and so I estimate roughly 15 billion a month comes into the crypto markets of new Fiat and I can run through that calculation it's basically just you know assumptions around the number of new users per day the average buy-in per new user and 30 days in a month and so I mean that's a very back-of-the-envelope estimate but that's how I approach the retail inflow and interest as well let me just let me just respond to Chris's Chris's point which i think is is very very valid

point about Kodak is that it does show the appetite for the retail investor to want to get involved in this space and I mentioned before the Winklevoss ETF and how that was dismissed and how we still don't have one I think you're gonna see that change over the next year or so I think you're going to start to see Bitcoin based ETFs come along and and may potentially other kinds of Kryptos that the key thing here is that the user experience for the retail side has to be improved I mean you can talk to people who say you know I want to get involved I open up an account at coinbase everybody gets pointed to coinbase and and they grow frustrated and then they want to buy this asset and they have to go to another exchange it is not an easy thing to do it is a hard job honestly to

invest in crypto assets the user experience has to be improved and there have to be instruments that I think will make it easy for people to invest we're getting there I think it's an opportunity and I think you're going to see it additionally I think you're going to see diversification in the space I think you're potentially will see investments that allow you to invest in different segments and have diversification theorem perhaps Manero perhaps ripple in a portfolio I think you're going to see these types of things one point on the institutional point that Chris made I thought it was very interesting this year with I SEOs beginning of the year I SEOs anybody could get into I cos it was a very democratic way for the average

person to really make some money I remember the old days of IPOs you couldn't get an IPO unless you went and played golf and let your broker win at golf that was the only way you could get an IPO stock okay now all of a sudden we have the ICO market and anyone can get in and and six months ago you could have threw a dart in any of these icy o's and you could have made money what we've seen now is obviously we've seen a lot of lousy icos come along but we've also seen institutional shops start to jump in and say wait a minute we want that ICO so you've seen some of the Democrats - the Democratic nature and the individuals benefiting from icos

kind of falling by the wayside with a number of these ICO switch has shown the institutional money coming in and I mean how many times you looked at the ICO market since there's a pre pre pre pre sale and millions of being thrown in by by institutional shops and institutional money so I think that's been an interesting aspect as well but clearly it shows institutional money is coming in I think to Chris's point very valid the markets may not be big enough for that but on the retail side there's a huge opportunity for people to come along with with investment vehicles that are user-friendly and allow people to easily and seamlessly get involved in this space and not have to wait for a company to change their name to

incorporate blockchain or to come up with coins or whatever it's but to be able to play in this market and do it easily and then I think once that happens the exciting thing for me is then people can rely upon advisors and investment professionals to provide advice to them around the space because right now they're running blind and we need to see some more advice and professional help around this space to help out the average investor make sense so we're coming to the end of this show so I think the final thing we'd like to cover is your experience of writing the book and and and like so your book is one of these fellows that really tries

to go into this theory of like classify crypto assets value crypto as and towards the whole universe as opposed to being a book just about Bitcoin after he published the book the markets have changed a lot is there anything in particular that you wish you had done differently well to give a little bit of background and then circle back to what do we wish we had done differently you know the book was born by Jack sitting down next to me at consensus 2016 I think it was and Jack was the one who pitched me on the idea of the book Jack's really the one Jack was the genesis of the idea of the book and he was like you know I'll get us I know an

editor I'll get us an agent will submit a book proposal and I was kind of in disbelief and we we went and we did it and lo and behold we got a deal from mcgraw-hill I think in November of 2016 started writing December of 2016 so it all came together rather quickly but when we were putting together the book proposal what we what we realize is there truly was a market opportunity because while the crypto asset markets weren't you know the craze that they are today I think when we started writing the book actually they were at 10 billion in network ID for the actual start in November December of 2016 but what we realize is there had there had been two previous eras of books about

this space there had been the Bitcoin books right like Jack's early book but then the Bitcoin Big Bang the age of cryptocurrencies and I would say digital gold by Nathaniel popper really sort of was the marquee book of the Bitcoin era of books the second era really followed sort of the progression of the space they were the blockchain books right or the blockchain borderline not Bitcoin ebooks you know that sort of Bitcoin winter we went through of 2014 2015 2016 as people were you know saying Oh clearly bitcoins and I can work it's dying but it's this blockchain thing this DLT thing that's really cool and so we had

those books and and and you know the authors of those books they are fans of crypto so so I should give them credit for that but the emphasis is on blockchain technology and with the blockchain revolution really encapsulating that era this third era that we felt coming but we we we saw a window for and an opportunity to write a book for is really the crypto asset era it's going beyond Bitcoin it's going beyond blockchain technology it's saying this is an asset class as a whole this is the whole variety of what's going on here this is what it means as an innovation for the world but really focusing on the permission list public blockchains

because you never ever bet against open in the history of information technology and so that's why we wrote this book and we thought we we feel very fortunate with our timing and we do think that there will be a proliferation and we're already seeing it on Amazon with self-published books of these more broader crypto focused books sort of this third era of books on this space in terms of things that we wish we had done differently I mean Jack and I joke about this often and we we we have been getting enquiries about you know will we update the book or will we write a sequel or what do we want to do I have to focus on placeholder I'm exhausted I

don't think I can write another book for a while but it is true I'll just leave it to blogging on medium for now but it is true that there is so much I think Jack and I have learned over the last year that we could write a second book no problem and not not to say it would be better than the first book it would just go into more detail on more topics that we know people are craving and so I'm happy with how we did the book I think we could write another amazing book if we put our minds to it or each individually do that and I guess where I where where I finally land on the book is it fits a market need and provides the foundation that a lot of people are

craving in this space right now from a perspective that they can relate to I will just share I will just share with you a little bit of a secret here is that originally we wanted to call the book or the book was gonna be called something different and it was interesting because we spent a lot of time discussing this but originally the book was going to be called blockchain assets and we spent a lot of time evaluating that and and a lot of that discussion would have been a nightmare right right and a lot of that and even crypto assets people are like well what the heck I you know they're expecting a horror story but but a lot of our discussions around that crystallised a

lot of our thinking around the taxonomy and led us to the spaces that we we brought the book so we grew a lot writing the book and our and it really crystallized and synergize our thinking around this III do want to share one last thing about it which i think is is a good example of this whole space we published the book and we have a very good publisher and the book came out and the book met some immediate success that success was really a surprise to the publisher to the point that if we have listeners out there who were who went onto Amazon and found themselves being

unable to buy the book because it was out of stock it wasn't our fault I think that people were surprised by the interest and the support in this book and in this title and I think it surprised even the publisher which I think says a lot about this whole space is that there's still this this disbelief or this dismissal of this space as being as big and as of interest as it is and and I think that was kind of an example of this and you know where we go with this going forward we don't know we were trying to you know crit like Chris says trying to keep our social media and medium and and even the website that we have about the book up to up to speed

but it was an interesting take I'm glad I was able to do with Chris and and I do believe that the book has found a good time in in in being published where it was but I do think there's a lot of value that if you go into the book can transcend this current time frame and even things into the future we tried to put a lot of theory in there which I think still still pays dividends to this day fantastic well thanks so much guys for coming on it was a real pleasure we were running quite late but it was so enjoyable I can you know and that's how it goes so yeah thanks so much for writing a spoken coming on it was really interesting to talk with you guys I'm sure there will be a lot of kind of follow ons and updates and

changes in the valuation frameworks the markets and hopefully we can do a repeat of this at some point of course we will link to the book some of Chris's medium post and evaluation framework Jack's articles about how loss he lost his retirement money in Bitcoin and they gained it again and yeah so I hope we just can check this out and yeah thanks so much for tuning in once again we are gonna be back next week and if you want to support show you can leave us and I just for you actually Chris you did that once I saw it so thanks for that I did I did I'm still waiting for my tea yeah yeah we're gonna get a new teachers mate and you're gonna get the first one wait

what do I have to do what do I have to do for a shirt come on I'm one of those guys that loves free stuff well you can leave us matches for you or you can send a really nice note and probably either one will work well thanks to you guys thanks for having us thanks really appreciate thanks [Music] [Music]