Blockstream Talk #4 — Jesse Knutson: Financial Products on Bitcoin & The Future of Institutional Demand

Link to the podcast video: https://youtu.be/EXvNvePLFzc

hi i’m Samson Mow, chief strategy officer here at blockstream. and this week i will be hosting blockstream talk. so my guest is none other than your usual host Jesse knutson, our vp of financial products. in this episode we’re going to dive into Jesse’s background as he comes from the banking industry. and we talk about his early days as a Bitcoiner in a bank. we also talk a lot about the blockstream mining note which Jesse is the primary driver for here at blockstream. so he deals with STOCKR, our partner in luxembourg, to do all the tranches. he handles the investor relations, and also is very active in the community talking about the BMN. we also talk about his newsletter, which he’s been writing for a very long time, which gives a lot of insights into the Bitcoin markets. and we wrap things up discussing his vision of building financial products on top of the liquid network. i hope you enjoyed this episode as much as i enjoyed recording it.

Samson Mow: hello and welcome to a new episode of blockstream talk. this episode, i will be your host. so the interviewee has now become the interviewer. how do you like that Jesse?

Jesse Knutson: the tables have turned. i don’t know — we’ll see. so far so good.

Samson Mow: so why don’t we start by giving your introduction: who you are, what you’ve been doing, your background, and your role at blockstream?

Jesse Knutson: sure. my name is Jesse Knutson, i’m vp of financial products here at blockstream. and i’m working on building out a portfolio of financial-type products — the big one at the moment is the blockstream mining note. previous to working on Blockstream, my experience was mostly in investment banks. first as a sales trader, and then later in equity capital markets. and i’ve also worked really closely with the mining team here at blockstream to help leverage some of those relationships from my previous career, and introduced them into our mining business. and i mostly host a podcast. sometimes i’m a guest.

Samson Mow: right. so you are a banker by trade. how did you get into Bitcoin? what was your journey like? and were there things that you had to unlearn to become a Bitcoiner from banker?

Jesse Knutson: yeah i think for my generation of people in banking, the global financial crisis — the gfc of 2008 — was a really really big moment. and i think that probably was a big moment for satoshi as well, right? i mean if you look at the text and the genesis block and “chancellor on the brink of bailouts for the banks,” i think it’s probably fair to say that that was a big motivator for satoshi. and i think Bitcoin itself was probably in some ways a response to the gfc. so post-gfc i was sitting on a trading desk at barclays in taiwan with my colleagues, and we were just constantly looking at the trajectory of markets, our careers, the industry, and everything that the world was on, and just thinking, How does this not absolutely end in tears? and around that time i stumbled upon an interview with Raoul Pal and Grant Williams talking about Bitcoin. and i’d heard about Bitcoin previously through talks from andreas antonopoulos and it sounded interesting, but Raoul framed it in a way that i think, given my background, made a lot of sense. and he also had a one million dollar target price on it so that was really interesting, like, I better take a look at this and figure this out. it seems like there’s a lot of people talking about this — i should probably try and understand it. and that’s what i did. and i mean Raoul had the one million dollar target price but he later sold at $2,000 so that that was kind of funny. but i think for guys like myself that realize that there was a problem in markets and in the world in general, and i think especially for more macro-first focused investors and even a lot of gold bugs that acknowledge that there’s this problem that needs to be fixed, it wasn’t much of a jump to go to Bitcoin. there wasn’t anything to unlearn because you already thought that there was a problem. and when you dig into Bitcoin it just seems like, Hey this could be a plausible solution to this problem.

Samson Mow: well hopefully you’ve stopped following Raoul Pal’s advice, right?

Jesse Knutson: yeah he’s gone out into the weeds a little bit. i’m still a subscriber to Real Vision and i do like listening to his commentary on some stuff but yeah he’s definitely gone out into the weeds a little bit.

Samson Mow: yeah so you mentioned some years ago you tried to get your colleagues, your fellow bankers, into Bitcoin and they didn’t react that well. so how did things change. are they coming to you now and saying, We should have listened to you, Jesse, you were right all along? or what is the dynamic like and what are those conversations like?

Jesse Knutson: i don’t think that ever happens. people never come back and say, I should have listened to you. but i loved working at Macquarie, and one of the cool things about being at Macquarie is they’ve got a stretch of quarterly profitability that goes back something like 40 or 50 years. so they’re very entrepreneurial and they very much encourage you if you have a good idea to shoot it upstairs and try and advocate for that idea, and to try and push it. so in 2016 i started to think that Bitcoin was probably my good idea, and i started to push it internally. i think people look back at Bitcoin’s history and i think we think about the last four or five weeks in 2017 as really crazy when price went parabolic. but people forget that 2016 was a pretty crazy year too. i mean that was just a constant every day we were up 80 bips. it was just we were going up almost every day and then periodically we’d have like a 30% or 40% drop. but it was up almost every day. so that was 2016 i think was a really interesting year. so my first idea that i pushed internally was, Hey we should do a Bitcoin fund. i was looking at the gbtc and i thought, Well this isn’t a very effective tracker fund — this could be improved upon, so why don’t we try and take our resources as a bank and repackage this and do something similar but make it a better tracker fund? and the feedback i got on that wasn’t very positive, so there was a lot of pushback. like Bitcoin was seen as very speculative, very risky, and not really great for the bank from a reputational perspective, but as it continued to go higher i mean i was lucky to have a very supportive boss and who was helpful at connecting me into people, and we ended up forming a digital asset working group with people in different geographies in Macquarie — in australia, in the US— and i was a key part of that. so we got to do a lot of interesting things that eventually culminated in us putting five million dollars into bitfury. and that happened in 2018. so i think that didn’t really get a lot of press, but i think for the time was very very forward-looking for a bank to do. i also got to do a lot of investor relations events and just basically got put on the road to talk to all our hedge fund clients, engage their level of understanding in Bitcoin, and what their interest was. like would they actually be interested if we could do a product? and that was a really interesting time because it was mid-2017 and Bitcoin was gaining steam but hadn’t had to blow off top yet and i was getting meetings — like normally i would get a meeting with two or three people at a fund, but i was getting meetings where 19 people would turn out and it would be the whole investment team. it would be traders and it would be portfolio managers and senior cios, so that was really interesting. that’s when i started to realize, Okay, there is a massive amount of institutional interest in this thing. and we also got to do a lot of really good investor relations events — i’m based in taiwan — so we had a dinner in taiwan for some senior management clients and then we had charlie lee and bobby lee and vitalik all at the same table and that was an interesting time too because that was like july of ‘17 when ICOs were just starting to get going, and i had just learned about ICOs like that week. and so we got to ask vitalik about it. i was like, Wait this is people are giving people money to do what? and it was just a really interesting and exciting time in the space. and then later that year we also had a really big institutional conference at the same time that people like JP Morgan were doing these blockchain events. we wanted to do one that was very much a Bitcoin event. and that’s when i met you Samson, as i dm’d you on twitter and said, Hey i work at this bank and we want to do a Bitcoin event. would you come and talk to our clients? and you said, Hey i can’t make it but we got this guy Adam Back. i said, Okay yeah, Dr. Back — we’d be interested in hosting him. so Adam came and then we had J.L., the ceo of tether and Bitfinex, and we had senior guys from bitfury. so looking back it was a really unique opportunity for those investors, and we had 80 or 90 institutional investors at our offices in hong kong, and they got to interact with some of these people who were really heavy-hitters in the industry and asked them questions. and i think that was that was a really exciting time.

Samson Mow: yeah definitely. i think some people forget, but back then Bitcoin was a dirty word. and that’s why i think a lot of the narrative was circled around a blockchain. you talk about the blockchain, you don’t talk about the Bitcoin because that’s sensitive, you don’t want to get into that topic, right? but that was an interesting era. it was like a formative era of Bitcoin where you had to like sneakily talk about Bitcoin without talking about Bitcoin.

Jesse Knutson: yeah i had people tell me that they would not put their names next to a Bitcoin project. there was just too much reputational risk personally, and then for the bank as well. and so i think we’ve really turned the corner on that with all the institutional investment we’ve seen over the last 12 or 15 months. i think that’s basically in the past now, and there is no reputational risk now for banks to participate in Bitcoin. and that’s a big change.

Samson Mow: yeah, we’ve come a long way. the other thing is you’re outlining a missed opportunity for Macquarie. Macquarie could have been like a gbtc, right? they could have done that years ago.

Jesse Knutson: realistically, like you can only do what you can do, and they probably couldn’t have got away with that. and in hindsight it was probably a bit naive of me as the loudest internal Bitcoin nut to propose that as the first project. but it did eventually go in a good direction, and some of the people from our digital asset working group also went off to work in the space. so two of the key constituents were the guys that went up and set up iris energy which is a miner — i think they’ve already IPO’d on the Nasdaq. so i think the banks probably have lost a lot of brain power too to Bitcoin industry because it just pulled people out.

Samson Mow: i guess that’s a good segue to get into mining because you helped get Macquarie actually into mining now. so let’s talk a bit about mining at Blockstream and the BMN. so it’s been great to see an accelerated interest in the BMN. maybe you can give us an introduction of what the BMN is? how it works? what are tranches? and why does Adam Back need to market buy Bitcoin every time we do a tranche?

Jesse Knutson: yeah. so Blockstream obviously has a fairly large mining business and the BMN is basically our effort to tokenize that business — which has been predominantly institutional-focused — and to offer our mining business, that product, to a broader range of investors, whether they’re family offices or individuals. at the moment the BMN is only open to non-US qualified investors, but we’re working on broadening that to US investors as well. it’s not as easy as it sounds and i understand there’s a lot of demand in the US, but it’s a work in progress so i appreciate the patience of the people that are waiting on that. each note is backed by 2,000 terahash, plus or minus, and what investors get is the Bitcoin that that underlying hashrate produces over the course of of 36 months. and what you’re referring to with Adam having to buy Bitcoin in the market is: that’s to maintain fungibility. so if you think about it, we’re issuing these tranches over multiple time periods, so the first one was done in april, and those investors have mined almost two Bitcoin in the 120-plus days since then. so if we do a tranche next week we have to make sure — for fungibility — to make sure that the tranche coming up has the same amount of Bitcoin. so you have to go into the market, buy 1.9 Bitcoin, and tie that to the new BMNs that are being issued. and so that’s important for fungibility and to make sure that it’s all apples to apples. and then when we get this thing trading on exchanges, that there’ll be better liquidity, rather than having BMN series 1 tranche A, B, C — all the way through.

Samson Mow: right. so you’re saying that the BMN is backed by terahash. how does that differ from cloud mining or just leasing machinery from someone else?

Jesse Knutson: yeah so that’s part of the reason why we have to do it in tranches. our target is obviously 100 million euro — we go back and forth between euro and us dollars because it’s issued by a luxembourg securitization fund, so most investors are probably more familiar with usd but we do go flip back and forth between euro and usd, which is slightly annoying. but that’s why we have to do multiple tranches is because we have a pipeline of equipment coming in. i think everybody’s very aware of the global semiconductor crunch and how it’s very difficult to get hardware. so we can’t just issue 100 million BMN and then hope the equipment comes in. i think that’s how a lot of cloud miners blew themselves up, and i think they probably — not all of them, necessarily — had nefarious intentions when they started, they just got caught up in being unable to meet obligations that they were already committed to. so to prevent that kind of situation, we’re only issuing BMN when we actually received hardware, have it installed, and are beginning to mine. so i think that’s a very big difference to cloud mining. and then the duration too. i mean, 36 months — you can buy hashrate contracts in the market — but there’s nothing even close to that duration, 36 months. i think the longest hashrate contracts that i’ve seen are six months. so it’s really a very different beast in terms of products that are currently on the market. and then i guess also that it’s an STO issued by a luxembourg securitization fund. it’s a lot more transparent, there’s offering documents, we’re applying for an ISIN — it’s just a different level of transparency and of obligations on our end that i think should give investors a bit more of a peace of mind.

Samson Mow: and there’s liquidity, right? you can trade it right away OTC, and it’s coming out on Bitfinex securities.

Jesse Knutson: yeah, that’s amazing. i’m actually quite amazed to see how we’ve had a organic peer-to-peer market develop in the Telegram chat. i mean to traditional investors the idea that this thing is trading in a Telegram chat probably sounds a little bit insane, but it’s a really cool community and i would definitely recommend taking a look at that Telegram chat, reaching out to us and getting the link, because people are doing a lot of modeling in there on Bitcoin mining that i think is pretty top-notch. and it’s a pretty good source i think for information in general. and then people are trading the BMN back and forth with each other — of course between whitelisted individuals — it is a security token so you have to have a whitelist. and yeah the goal ultimately is to have it trading on a lot more exchanges. and Bitfinex securities will be the first step on that, but we hope to have more in the future.

Samson Mow: yeah. link to the Telegram group is right here: t.me/blockstream_finance. so tranche 6 was the largest BMN tranche to date at 13.9 million euros or 16.1 million dollars. and there’s a lot of institutional investors coming in. what’s your take on the future of the BMN and where it’s going?

Jesse Knutson: yeah so i think the participant mix, the investor mix, is changing a lot. so the first few tranches were heavily skewed towards high net worth Bitcoin-type investors, but i think now we’re having a lot more conversations with more traditional investors. so i think that’s one direction it’s going. i think especially as it gets bigger, we’ll see a lot more interest and participation from more traditional investors. it’s really an interesting product. i think the STO industry is an industry that’s been waiting for a product to push it forward and i think the BMN might be it, because it’s a natively-Bitcoin product and i think it’s one that traditional investors are very interested in. like clearly mining has a lot of investment interest at the moment — even at the premium the miners are trading at. we’re also working with custodial partners to help custody both the BMN and the Bitcoin that’s produced by the BMN. i think that’ll be a big step to being able to integrate and interact with some of these bigger professional investors. and i think we’ll see more support from trading venues as we go forward. so there’s really no reason why the BMN can’t trade on a national exchange, like a proper traditional markets exchange in some place like Europe or Asia. i think that definitely could happen.

Samson Mow: or maybe seashells [Seychelles? 17:19]

Jesse Knutson: exactly right. yeah. i mean i’m in Taiwan right so i have had conversations with people here about having it listed in taiwan. and it would be a big jump for them — the regulators here are very conservative, but i don’t think it’s impossible.

Samson Mow: you write the Blockstream markets weekly newsletter, which is great. and i want to continue on that line of thought about institutional investors. but in your newsletter, you said that paul tudor jones kicked off the institutional phase of Bitcoin adoption. and i wanted you to expand a bit on that and what it means, and also i believe he said something about self-custody, and that is the best way to hedge against inflation. so maybe give us some of your thoughts on these.

Jesse Knutson: yeah i think when he had that investor letter that came out i guess it was fourth quarter or third quarter of last year — institutional investors are not that dissimilar from retail investors, really. i mean they’re very herdish and they look to see what their peers are doing. and a name like tudor when paul tudor jones wrote that in the investor letter that he thought Bitcoin was the probably the inflation hedge, i think that caught a lot of people’s attention, so that helped really kick off the streak of institutional investment that we’ve seen over the last 12 or 16 months, and i think there’s something there — like the traditional investors are definitely investing on basically a pure inflation thesis, and that’s something that i brought up a couple of times on other podcasts that we’ve done. what are they missing, right? so paul tudor jones, they’re looking at Bitcoin as a pure inflation hedge with a high beta kicker — that’s how i describe it — because he calls it the fastest horse, but he says it’s got the characteristics of gold but it’s much smaller like we discussed yesterday, there’s an ocean of institutional money that’s trying to fit in a very small container and that will just drive price higher, so i think that’s what he means by that. but i think he’s right, like Bitcoin is definitely the inflation asset, and a lot of that is like there’s tinder that has built up over generations, and COVID was this spark that got a fire going that accelerated all of these trends that are really massively beneficial to Bitcoin — and would have played out anyway — but covid and government response to covid and all the money printing and like authoritarian responses have really accelerated these trends in Bitcoin’s favor. and i think the lightning network is probably something that these investors haven’t quite factored into their models yet. so if you think back in 2016–2017, the narrative for Bitcoin went from peer-to-peer electronic cash to store of value and to enter digital gold, and i think what’s going on in el salvador is shifting the focus back to electronic cash. so i think that application is not at all on the institutional radar, and i think that that could be massively disruptive and also big for Bitcoin in terms of network effects as well, and can push prices beyond what they’re probably anticipating. and then i think also improved confidentiality and the ability to move value out of jurisdictions that impose ideas like unrealized capital gains — i think that will become increasingly valuable in the future, and i don’t think investors have necessarily factored that into their thinking at all.

Samson Mow: yeah i think the the electronic cash narrative or aspect of Bitcoin is really about the bearer aspect of it, right? and i think that’s why ptj is saying you need to hold your own keys, it needs to be in your own custody. but you can’t have eCash without value, right? it can be a medium of exchange, but unless it has value, it’s not going to be a good medium exchange.

Jesse Knutson: yeah i think his point was — he was being asked about, What do you think about this futures-backed etf? and obviously it’s not an ideal instrument, right? it doesn’t track that great, it’s not like a spot etf. there’s a lot of additional costs on it and it’s just easier, if you can, just to buy Bitcoin. why not buy the real thing and then have all the benefits, like you mentioned, of a bearer asset? the problem is that for a lot of institutional investors in the u.s in particular is that there’s regulatory and mandate restrictions and they they just can’t get access to it. if you’re a fund you can’t necessarily buy Bitcoin and self-custody it. but that this is one of the interesting things about Bitcoin, is that we as retail investors, as individuals, have that freedom, and we have a we have a big leg up on the institutional guys — who will eventually go that way — it’s just going to take them years.

Samson Mow: all right let’s shift gears a bit and talk a bit about Blockstream’s acquisition of Adamant capital. so what was the goal to acquire that hedge fund? and what kind of products are we trying to build on Bitcoin and on Liquid?

Jesse Knutson: yeah i i think the the Blockstream mining note — i look at it as like a massive icebreaker, right? that’s just plowing the way for a lot of other things to come. it’s a very unique product, as i mentioned, it’s natively Bitcoin and i think it really bridges the gap between the old world and the new world, and i think it’s something that traditional investors really want to invest in as well. i think the BMN will be a big part of driving broader liquid adoption and a slew of new assets and products that will be issued on on liquid. so in the Bitcoin space there’s some really interesting yield-generation opportunities and some traditional arbitrage strategies that work really really well in this space. so i think what we’re trying to do with the fund is to build on the momentum of the BMN and the broader Liquid adoption that we’re seeing, and package up some of those strategies and offer them to investors in a pretty convenient way. so i think the most exciting version of the the strategies that we’re looking to put into the fund are: if you can do it on liquid, if you can marry it to a token, if you can self-custody it, and if you could trade it either p2p or on something like Bitfinex securities. and i think that becomes really exciting. that’s probably the best version i think of what we’re doing and probably the end-goal for what we’re trying to get to.

Samson Mow: gotcha. so you were one of the early Bitcoin adopters at Macquarie. maybe you can talk a bit about how we established a relationship with Macquarie at blockstream to do mining. why did they decide to work with Blockstream? and where we’re going in that direction?

Jesse Knutson: yeah. i think a firm like Macquarie, they obviously do a lot of due diligence on anyone they’re going to work with, especially if it’s in the public eye. and they’re maybe for US listeners, they might not realize the scope of Macquarie, because they’re not a big retail bank, but they are literally — in the infrastructure space — they are the whale of whales. they have the world’s largest infrastructure fund. and so they have a lot of partners globally that they can select from. so there was quite a rigorous selection process that we had to go through, and i think it’s a big credit both to the mining team and to Blockstream in general that Macquarie chose us to work with. so i think we should be extremely proud of that. and Macquarie is nimble. i think they’re the tip of the spear probably relative to their counterparts in the US. so i think there’s going to be a lot more very well capitalized players entering the mining space in the coming years, including sovereign states. so i know that we’ve talked about this before, but there’s a lot of noise coming out of central and south america. there’s sovereign states that are investing in mining there. last week there was news that laos in Asia expected to make 200 million dollars next year from Bitcoin mining, so the space is changing very very quickly and i think while it’s great to be chosen by people like Macquarie, that we also need to be very front-foot, and we need to be moving forward and chasing down opportunities to make sure that we don’t get passed by some of these guys who are going to be very very well capitalized and pushing very aggressively to extend in the space. so that’s a challenge for us.

Samson Mow: yeah it’s funny how you mentioned like some people in the US are not that familiar with Macquarie. when that announcement first came out, i didn’t hear that much from my friends on on this side of the world, but all the friends i have in Asia and australia, they pinged me right away and they said, That’s huge! that’s massive! i can’t believe you got Macquarie! it’s just there’s a bit of an information divide here, but if you have a good grasp of everything around the world, who are the big players, then you see that this is where it’s going. everything is going towards Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining and financial services built on top of Bitcoin.

Jesse Knutson: yeah, and Bitcoin mining is a great one for those kinds of investors because it doesn’t have all the issues of trading and messing around with fiat and all of those regulatory hassles that come with that. mining is — it’s an infrastructure, it’s a yield business, right? it’s something that they’re very familiar with. it’s like running a waste treatment plant or something like that, where you do a big infrastructure build and then you earn back money over time. so that’s something that those kind of players are very familiar with, and it’s not that big of a leap for them.

Samson Mow: i think we’re also very lucky at blockstream to have you because you were the key man on that deal bringing it in and getting it put together.

Jesse Knutson: well, that’s why i get paid the big bucks, right?

Samson Mow: that’s right, that’s why you get paid the big sats.

Jesse Knutson: that’s right. just, yeah — trying to do my part.

Samson Mow: so you’ve been writing this Blockstream markets weekly newsletter since you started. let’s talk about that for a bit. what is the the goal behind it? and is it a lot of work to do? and does it consume a lot of time? and do you get any good feedback from people saying, That’s a great newsletter?

Jesse Knutson: no, not really. so i was a sales trader for years, and that’s a big part of the job is every day you write market wraps. and i’m in the habit of doing that and i think i would do it even if i didn’t send it out, just because it helps me organize my thoughts and keep on top of what’s going on. and that way when i’m having a call with someone about the BMN or about Bitcoin or the market in general, that i have thoughts that are up to date and i have a view on the market and hopefully can add value in some way. but yeah the newsletter is something — it might be one of the longest running newsletters that nobody has ever heard about. so i started writing it at Macquarie because it was just decided internally that we needed to have something like that, like we needed to be up to date on the news and the price and stuff like that if we were going to try and push Bitcoin internally to senior management. so that’s when i started working on it. so it’s probably been going for geez four or five years running. and yeah it’s just an effort to organize trading news and market trends, and occasionally take a stab at where i think prices is going. it is a ton of effort to write that, but i think it’s useful and it helps me and hopefully it helps people looking at the Bitcoin space as well. definitely sign up.

Samson Mow: yeah definitely. and i think we can put a link. if we can’t then cut this part out: medium.com/blockstream-markets-weekly. yeah i remember when you first started writing the markets weekly and i think you had a little piece of technical analysis there, like a flag analysis, and Adam commented and said, You shouldn’t include TA in this thing. but it was just a funny argument that i witnessed.

Jesse Knutson: yeah no i’m a pattern guy, i like a lot of those basic patterns and i think that they work very well in Bitcoin, so i think things like the pennants, the flags — i think Bitcoin is actually a very technical asset, and i think having worked in taiwan so long where taiwan markets are massively retail-dominated — like 70% of the trading volume here is retail — and because Bitcoin historically has been retail-dominated, i think there’s a lot of spill over there. and the things that work in markets like taiwan and korea where there’s so much retail participation, tend to work in Bitcoin as well. so that’s something that i’ve noticed. and people have different perspective on how they read the tea leaves, which essentially is what it is. so i do like the pattern stuff — i’ve toned that down a little bit, i know Adam doesn’t like it — so i’ve toned that down a little bit. but i do like the statistical stuff too, is a lot of fun, and do reference a lot of the on-chain stuff, though i do have some question marks there on how accurate that stuff is at times.

Samson Mow: i don’t know, for me none of that really matters. it’s just gonna keep going up at varying rates.

Jesse Knutson: yeah i mean i typically have an optimistic bullish bias, and people make fun of me for that in the note. but i’ve been right — we’re still going up. but you do have to have that in the back of your mind in Bitcoin that this is an asset that is still small, that has a lot of upside, the macro trends are all in its favor, there’s very little institutional investment — that has to grow, you have the demographic things in its favor. i think everything points to it going bigger, so i think you have to have that in mind when you’re looking at your timing. i think it makes sense just from a trading perspective to have your long-term HODL position and then have a discretionary trading position where you flip in and out. and yeah i think tactically like on the pullbacks, buying the dip — it works out — it makes sense.

Samson Mow: definitely. so looking forward, what are you most excited about in the world of Bitcoin?

Jesse Knutson: yeah i mean i think the world has changed a lot in the last two or three years. generally i think the overall trajectory is not great, but that’s what got me into Bitcoin, and i think that broad-based acceptance of hard, censorship-resistant money can go a long way to fixing the world’s problems. so that what motivates me to be in the industry, and that’s what i look forward to seeing Bitcoin’s contribution to the world in general. so i think it’s that, and then a hundred-thousand price print by christmas would be nice as well.

Samson Mow: so basically your outlook is, Bitcoin fixes this?

Jesse Knutson: yeah, pretty much. i think for a lot of things. yeah i mean, inflation is a massive problem and it has been for a long time, and that’s one of those things where i feel like i’ve been talking to people about that to investors for a long time and they’ve largely dismissed it, right? so i can remember a conversation with an analyst in 2018 where i was talking about inflation and how it’s a big problem for people on the street and i don’t care what the fed says — it’s a problem. and he says, Well cpi is low. and i said, Well my kids’ tuition goes up every year. houses are only going in one direction. like, there is clearly inflation. and he said, Well i don’t know what to say — cpi is just low. so inflation is a big problem and i think Bitcoin goes a long way to fixing that, for sure.

Samson Mow: definitely. well it’s been a great chat, Jesse. and i’ll give the show back to you next week.

Jesse Knutson: okay, thanks. i thought i was gonna have to look for another job there.

Samson Mow: all right, thanks, and talk next time.

Jesse Knutson: thanks a lot, Samson.