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00:00You guys don't worry about any of this stuff right. Like there's no word. No. No one in Bitcoin has to worry about Treasury Fed cooperation to keep keep the issuance going. I think we worry about it to a certain extent. Joe I think everybody is focused on what inflation is going to do in the next decade or so here including the big winners in the crypto folks. Is it really interesting. Well how does inflation sort of or inflation trend sort of impact the way you look at crypto. Well a lot of investors in crypto see Bitcoin rightly or wrongly as an inflation hedge. And that's certainly something that a lot of investors and allocators seem to be concerned about these days remains to be seen whether or not we will actually get inflation. So far you know the prospects for inflation seem fairly dim but that's definitely part of the appeal for a fixed supply asset where there is no monetary discretion whatsoever. And you know the issue in schedule is totally predefined. I mean it's been noticed that the likes of Squire for example of some of these publicly traded companies have been starting to look at crypto bitcoin as instead of treasuries in some way and using it as an alternative asset because perhaps they are looking to diversify away from the US dollar. So suddenly it speaks to what the Federal Reserve is really doing right now. But crypto has been on attack for many a reason large part because finally institution investors do seem to be getting in putting a small amount of their money to work. But it's a big seismic effect on the overall bitcoin market. What are you seeing at play that is driving us up past 18000. Well there's endogenous and there's exogenous factors so the exhaustion as factors are the macro factors that we're talking about here. The fact that we're in this largely unprecedented monetary environment which is causing people to veer deeply negative interest rates or fear of the potential for inflation. But the endogenous factors are very interesting and somewhat underappreciated perhaps. You talk about institutional investors getting exposure to Bitcoin. The last time we had a bull rally bull run like this in 2017 it was very difficult practically for those large institutional allocators to functionally get access to the asset the tools and the plumbing. A lot of this didn't exist back then. There were very few or none. There were no qualified custodians that could help you take get exposure to the spot asset. There was very little in the way of prime brokerage. There wasn't really a robust lending market. The CMC futures product only launched at the tail end of that bull rally and it's very liquid today. So the endogenous factor is something that's being overlooked in my opinion a little bit. The fact that the plumbing for the industry can accommodate more capital. Of course you do need at the same time there to be a good reason to allocate to the asset and the you know that's where the macro element comes in. But what we've been doing and what the entrepreneur as we back have been doing over the last three years or so is actually building that financial infrastructure which can accommodate capital and can make these large investors comfortable with access to the asset class. Nick I am curious. I mean go back a little bit to that that run up that we saw in 2017. And just I mean we've talked a lot back then about all the ISE CEOs and the way that Bitcoin was sort of used as a funnel for those. That doesn't appear to be the same case now this time around 20 20. Absolutely. And the way we saw Bitcoin trading was as a pass through asset. It was a vehicle to get exposure to these really exciting ISE CEOs that a lot of retail investors were piling into and exposure to alternative crypto currencies that were even more volatile than Bitcoin. And that's very much not the case today. The S.E.C. made their opinions extremely clear on ISE CEOs. For the most part they consider them to be investment contracts and they've been cracking down very hard on some of these unregistered securities offerings of the last three years. So there really isn't the presence of this of these alternative coins that are being newly launched. That's just not a feature of the market today. It really looks like it's more a function of allocators. Taking a second look at Bitcoin saying maybe there is something interesting here. Maybe this is a slowly monetizing alternative monetary commodity. You know maybe I should take a look at it. Nick six months ago we saw the bitcoin having where the rate of issuance newly decreased. Six months after that suddenly the price takes off. Pretty clear. Totally separate things. Can we officially say on air here that the having was already priced in and has no bearing on the price. So you know this lot of bitcoin is going to be very upset with me for saying this. But yes I don't know that the have had a meaningful effect on the price of Bitcoin. It was something eminently for possible from day zero. We knew what the supply schedule of bitcoin was going to be. So no I don't believe that an incredibly foreseeable change was a driving catalyst here. I think the catalysts are outside of the market or related to infrastructure.

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I Don't Think the Halving Had a Meaningful Effect on Bitcoin: Nic Carter

Bitcoin is seizing the spotlight from gold as a hedge against risks such as further dollar weakness or a pick-up in inflation. The cryptocurrency’s approximately 150% jump in 2020 puts the digital coin’s price relative to gold at the highest in almost three years. Nic Carter, founding partner at Castle Island Ventures, speaks with Bloomberg's Caroline Hyde, Romaine Bostick and Joe Weisenthal on "What'd You Miss?". (Source: Bloomberg)

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