00:12:21 · Anthony Pompliano
[00:12:21] S2: Today's episode is brought to you by Abra. Bitcoin holders know the long game, but sometimes you want liquidity today or a way to pursue more Bitcoin over time. That's why Abra caught my attention. It offers two different ways to make your Bitcoin holdings work harder depending on what your goals are. If you need dollars without selling your Bitcoin, then you can explore Bitcoin backed loans with US dollars or USDC borrowing options. You can review the terms and compare rates at abra.com/pomp. Thinking longer term? Explore Abra's Bitcoin yield strategy, managed by SEC registered investment advisor, Abra Capital Management. It aims to generate yield denominated in Bitcoin, which can have a strong compounding effect over time. I recently spoke with Abra CEO Bill Barhydt on the show for a much deeper exploration on Abra, tokenization, and more. Go and check it out, and if either approach interests you, visit abra.com/pomp to learn more. Abra is a paid sponsor. This is not investment advice. Loans and yield strategies carry risks, including liquidation and loss of principal. Returns aren't guaranteed. Go check them out at abro.com/pump. Every person listening to this show, you probably own Bitcoin and you got it the same way. You paid full price on an exchange. But there's a smaller group of business owners, family offices, and investors with sharp CPAs, and they're quietly getting theirs a very different way. They own the machines that make it. Mining. Here's how it works. You buy the miners, and Simple Mining hosts and runs them at their facilities in Iowa on industrial power rates that you could never get on your own. The Bitcoin they mine goes straight from your machine to your wallet. There's two reasons I find this interesting right now. One, the economics. Cheap power lets you convert electricity into Bitcoin at a discount to spot. You're acquiring the asset below the sticker price that everyone else pays. But second, and listen closely, you've got a big income here. Miners are classified as computer equipment. Equipment means depreciation. Qualifying buyers can write off the entire purchase in year one. It's the same playbook real estate investors have run for decades, pointed at Bitcoin.
00:14:16 · Anthony Pompliano
Your CPA will want to see this before the end of the year, and so with attractive financing available, you can deploy these assets without selling any of your assets to do it. This is not some garage operation. Simple Mining runs over 40,000 machines and was just ranked the fastest growing company in Iowa on the Inc. 5,000. They They put together a valuable resource called the $20.26 Bitcoin Mining Blueprint. It covers the five mistakes investors make when allocating to mining and how to avoid them before deploying capital. You can access it for free at simplemining.iopomp. That's simplemining.io/pump. Go check it out today. What are you guys doing to help investors insulate themselves from this?
00:14:53 · Jan Van Eck, Anthony Pompliano
[00:14:53] S1: From the from the government spending? I mean, every time I have an opportunity, I'm like, you have to have real assets, gold and Bitcoin in your portfolio. You don't know if it'll pay off, but those times... You know, my dad started VanEck and he started the first gold fund in The United States in 1968. So I... He was a gold bug. I'm not a gold bug. You know, most of my career, gold's been going down. You know, it bottomed at $250 an ounce, which is when the Central Bank of England sold it, by the way. Good good good timing. So I am not a gold bug. It's hard to believe, but I do think this is just a structural risk. And the way I put it is, for the entirety of US history, there's been financial crises that have come from the banking system or other industries, like agriculture and then rolled up through the banking system. This is gonna be started in DC and it's... There's no... No one can bail us out. And I think the rest of the world sees this. China's holding of treasuries is down by half from its peak and they are buying almost half of all gold production this year. The private market, you hear about central banks ad nauseam. This is private Chinese investors. So the world kinda sees that we're doing this and they're like backing off. [00:16:12] S2: And when you're thinking about this in terms of gold or Bitcoin's price, you said maybe it will pay off. Do you have a probability that you would assign to either one of those?
00:16:12 · Anthony Pompliano, Jan Van Eck
[00:16:12] S2: And when you're thinking about this in terms of gold or Bitcoin's price, you said maybe it will pay off. Do you have a probability that you would assign to either one of those? [00:16:22] S1: Listen, I'm a long term bull, so I definitely think it'll be higher in ten years, significantly higher. I just I just don't know. I just can't imagine. You know, I ask people, Anthony, when is The United States not gonna honor its obligations? Some people call that a default. And then I say, it's going happen in the next ten years and literally 99% of the people say no. Then I say, what about Social Security? What's going to happen? 2032, six years from now, they're gonna cut payments to Social Security. You know, people would be very, very unhappy. And then people say, well, they'll make up the money from somewhere. I'm like, really? Are they gonna do that without causing massive inflation or or other kinds of risks? And you see how people have punishing politicians for inflation. Right? I think that's partially got Trump elected, think, the midterms. So what? We're gonna massive... We're gonna inflate our way out of our debt? It's it's there's no easy answer and it's not gonna be pretty. [00:17:20] S2: How does AI and maybe the deflationary, you know, of AI affect the government spending? Is there a world where they can keep spending but AI bails them out?
00:17:20 · Anthony Pompliano, Jan Van Eck
[00:17:20] S2: How does AI and maybe the deflationary, you know, of AI affect the government spending? Is there a world where they can keep spending but AI bails them out? [00:17:30] S1: No. I mean, they're writing checks to people, right, for health care or other... I mean, unless health care... Well, retirement, by definition, can't. And then health care, I I can't see health care costs coming down so much because there will be new technologies like GLP ones that people wanna spend money on. So... No. I mean... And people say, oh, AI is a new kind of technology. It'll... It's deflationary. I'm like, what do you think that PC was? What do you think the Internet was? Right? Amazon has cut the cost of getting goods to your home. So all technology is deflationary. There were... There was great technology in the seventies, but we had runaway inflation. So I think they're not not the same. [00:18:10] S2: Let's talk about the crypto ETFs. You guys have the Bitcoin ETF, but you also have really pushed to kind of pioneer a number of the other Altcoin ETFs. [00:18:19] S1: Yeah. [00:18:19] S2: What's kind of your analysis of that right now?
00:18:19 · Anthony Pompliano, Jan Van Eck
[00:18:19] S2: What's kind of your analysis of that right now? [00:18:24] S1: It's... We have... And we have 13 crypto ETFs in Europe. So before the US government allowed it, we got pretty aggressive. I I think the days of sort of more crypto ETFs are basically over. What we what we are pushing is active management. We have an actively managed... I know you interviewed Matt Siegel. Most advisers can't pick Avalanche versus Ethereum, or or these kinds of things. So we did some layer one blockchains, right, the foundational ones will survive, I think. And then the exchanges, I think, will survive. Now, I don't know if Hyperliquid survives or, you know, I I know the BNB token isn't a direct play, or a play on on Binance, but, the Binance ecosystem maybe. But those are the two categories, Anthony, that stick in my mind. Otherwise, go with an index or go with an actively managed fund. [00:19:18] S2: Now a lot of the promise of crypto is they're coming for you. You know, they're coming for Wall Street. They're gonna tokenize things. Hyperliquid is gonna use perps. There's all these kinda new variations. Do you see this stuff as a headwind for the ETF industry, or do you actually think the ETF industry can just embrace the new technology and figure out how to how to kind of stand on its shoulders?