Digital Asset News Sunday livestream on midterm election market cycles and crypto outlook
Rob and Jerry Hall discuss historical market patterns around US midterm elections and their implications for crypto.
Summary
Rob and Jerry Hall of Digital Asset News host their Sunday livestream, examining historical S&P 500 and crypto performance following US midterm elections, with data going back to 1942. Rob presents data showing that six months after every midterm election, the S&P 500 has been positive, with returns varying depending on whether the incumbent party retains or loses Congress. The pair discuss the implications of rising bond yields on corporate debt refinancing, the growing tokenization of real-world assets, and why BlackRock's Larry Fink has compared tokenization's current stage to the internet in 1996. Jerry offers a counterpoint on altcoin speculation, arguing that for most investors on a limited budget, Bitcoin remains the clearest choice, while also sharing an update on his Compute Portal project — an agentic control plane for AI compute provisioning.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Welcome and Introduction
Rob: All right, Jerry, we are live. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Sunday livestream. We're joined as ever by Jerry Hall from Costa Rica. Jerry, how you doing?
Jerry Hall: I'm doing well. I hope everybody's enjoying their Sunday. We got a great show lined up for you.
Rob: It's always a great show. And what makes the show even greater is Jerry's very stylish blue Colombia shirt, which is breathable. Jerry, that's a nice shirt. Congratulations. Looks like you're taking some profits and using them for good deeds.
Jerry: Thank you, sir. I will take every compliment.
Rob: Exactly. There'll be lots today. Now, I don't know if those compliments are going to come in the comments section as we get into the Q&A, which you guys can ask Jerry any question you want to. But today we're taking a look at some upcoming things that are happening — specifically the midterm elections, which I believe is on November 3rd. This is in between the presidential elections here in the United States, if you're not from America. During that time, we are going to vote in or out different parts of Congress — senators and house representatives. The big question is: what happens during this time? What happens afterwards? And also, what happens if the incumbent presidential party, which is Republican, loses — if Democrats flip the House and Senate — and how that affects the markets?
I'll be honest with you, all politicians are liars, and you know that they're lying when their mouth is moving. So if we can understand that, we can understand what's happening here with the markets.
Midterm Election Market Cycles
Rob: We always talk about this — how midterm election years coincidentally always fall on the Bitcoin and crypto market down years, after we've had a huge bull run. The last bull run, I would debate, wasn't that huge, but we did hit an all-time high in Q4, a year after the Bitcoin halving. That happened in 2025, it happened in 2021, it happened in 2017, and so on and so forth. We'll see if it continues. I still believe in four-year cycles.
But the big thing is, people say, "There's just so much going on and I feel like things are never going to turn around." Au contraire. Because I can tell you that since 1942, buying just the regular S&P 500 on midterm election day generated a return of 15.2% over seven months forward. I had to take a look at that and say, well, how does that look at just six months? Because that seven-month figure kind of skewed the results — there was one year when it was negative. Six months after every single midterm, going from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Truman, JFK, Lyndon B. Johnson, Nixon, Ford, all the way to Biden — six months after every midterm is a positive time frame.
So what usually happens? The S&P 500 goes up, and then usually we have a pretty nice increase in our markets as well. But then the question you have to ask is: what about what happens if the incumbent party — the Republicans — start to lose seats? Because that's chaos. How does that affect the markets?
We know it's all positive, but how much positive versus just keeping everything? I'm going to answer that question right now. Midterms — doesn't matter who wins — S&P 500, six months after election day. If the president's party, whether Republican or Democrat, lost the House, you were only up 9.5%. That's a relatively modest return. If they lost the Senate only, they're still up, but by 11%. And if they retain the House and the Senate, you're looking at a whopping 16.7%. This is going back all the way to 1945.
Even if — and I think Republicans are going to lose the House; that's what it looks like, even on Kalshi and Polymarket it's like 80% plus — even if they lose the Senate, you're only down two points from the retain scenario. And that's just for the traditional markets.
What about crypto? Funny thing — after the US midterm elections, looking at six months after, in 2014 and 2018, you were actually down. So just because the traditional market goes up doesn't mean our market is going to turn around. That's just how things are. I hate to tell you, but that's just it. You could be down. 2014 was early days, 2018 was getting a little better, but 2022 we had a plus 49% — probably because we started to print so much money.
But what about one year? One year after election day. Back in the early days of crypto and Bitcoin, 2014, you were up 25%. This is the crazy part — Jerry, do you remember hearing about Bitcoin back in the day when it was in the hundreds of dollars?
Jerry: Yes.
Rob: I do too. And man, I wish I would have bought a lot back then, but of course, hindsight is 20/20. But 2014, if you just waited a year, you're up 25%. If you would have bought on midterm election day 2018, you'd be up 45%. And check this out — in 2022, if you would have bought Bitcoin on midterm election day, you'd have already doubled in one year just by buying and holding.
But what about altcoins? Six months — not too bad. But then if you take a look at one year later, 93%. Looking at 2023, one year later after the drop down: Bitcoin again 93%, Solana 79%, Tron 67%, Ethereum 42%, and BNB is down. So the question you have to ask yourself is: are altcoins worth it? Jerry, what are your thoughts on all this?
Jerry's Take on Altcoins and the AI Capital Concentration
Jerry: I have an overarching thought, and it's probably pretty contrarian. For most of recorded history, midterms and political cycles affected capital markets because of the implication that one party or the other would control spending.
One of the elements that we're seeing here is that AI and the compute trade isn't really tied to any political party's spending behavior or spending bias. Republican and Democrat alike are all outside of the AI compute trade, which is the largest capital concentration the world has ever seen.
So although I do believe that a lot of the market will still be based in traditional patterns, I think we're going to start to see a divergence from that, because the largest capital concentration is outside of that influence — until the government gets to the place where parties and committees decide spending on AI infrastructure. And I think we're a cycle or two away from that.
As far as the information you just put out, I'm really compelled to put some money in my IRA and make a few trades based off of that secular pattern. Do I deploy the rest of my capital for the 2026 year into Bitcoin, take a profit within my IRA so that I can acquire more Tesla? Because that's actually my end goal — more Bitcoin, more Tesla, more SpaceX. And I think that might be a way to do that.
Rob: Yeah, it sounds like some pretty good winners. But you know, like what you were talking about as far as government spending — Republicans will say, "We're very fiscally responsible," and Democrats say, "We're here for the betterment of the people and we have to spend more." I'm going to show you guys a video going back to the Clinton era of just how much we continued to spend.
The History of Government Spending Promises
Rob: Let me play this. Let me know if there's any echo, because yesterday we played a video and there was a massive amount of echo. This one shouldn't have that issue.
The video clip plays a montage of presidential statements on spending and stimulus, from Clinton through Biden:
Bill Clinton: "I call on Congress to enact an immediate package of jobs investments of over $30 billion to put people to work now, to create a half a million jobs."
George W. Bush: "Today I am sending to Congress my plan to provide relief to all income taxpayers. We must give overcharged taxpayers some of their own money back."
George W. Bush: "One of the most decisive actions the government can take is to give people their money back so they can spend it. And that's exactly what we've done. In the second week of May, a lot of folks are going to be getting a sizable check."
Barack Obama: "The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that I will sign today is the most sweeping economic recovery package in our history."
Donald Trump: "I am asking Congress to amend this bill and increase the ridiculously low $600 to $2,000, or $4,000 for a couple. This plan will get checks out the door starting this month to the American people who so desperately need the help."
Joe Biden: "Over 85% of American households will get direct payments of $1,400 per person."
Kamala Harris: "I'm going to give all adult citizens in the United States of America $5,000. If the Republicans win, you will each have $5,000 in your pocket."
Rob: Jerry, what are your thoughts about that? Especially as we take a look at the M2 money supply gaining precipitously as the talking went on.
Jerry: It never ceases to amaze me the way in which the carrot gets dangled. The $5,000 — even $10,000 a citizen — would be pennies compared to the spending. The real issue isn't that Americans need the government to give them money. The real issue is Americans need their government to be more fiscally responsible.
Rob: Looking for pipe dreams, Jerry. Very nice. And I don't think it matters whether you're Republican or Democrat — irregardless of party, the spending is just absolutely insane, which makes the bull case for Bitcoin, but it's the bear case for everything else.
Jerry: The cost of living is just accelerating. And unfortunately, wages don't keep in lockstep with that. Therefore, a majority of the population is getting poorer month over month, year over year. And until they address that, we have to keep ringing the bell, folks. Take that currency and acquire scarce, valuable assets.
Rob: That's just that simple. And that's a good point. I think everybody in the comment section can agree with that. People are getting poorer. Goods and services are increasing in price. And why is that? Well, we just took a look at it over the last two decades. There's a reason why. And you can just see right here the M2 money supply — what that means.
Altcoin Performance from the 2022 Midterm Low
Rob: So the question is, what kind of assets are we talking about? I like real estate, I like gold, and I like Bitcoin. But also — I know this is not popular — altcoins can do pretty well.
Going back to what we just talked about: if you bought on the midterm day, these five altcoins — and Bitcoin, which I have labeled as the best — Binance, Ethereum, Solana, Tron. Solana, you're up 1,113% from 2022 to January 19th, 2025. That was the all-time high. Now, are you selling at the all-time high? Probably not. Nobody really does that. But those are the gains that you can expect to see. Maybe you hit 800%. Tron 630%. Bitcoin 580%. BNB and Ethereum kind of laggards — 317% and 271%.
And then also, as a reminder, I know people say this bull market is brutal — this bear market, excuse me — it is not brutal compared to the last four years. At this point in 2022, we were down 71% and we were still going to go down another six percent around November, usually around the FTX collapse. But right now, we're only 35% down from the all-time high.
Now, if things stay true and accurate — which they won't — but if we stayed accurate all the way through until the next big runup in four years, that's the price of Bitcoin at $226,368. And as a reminder, how accurate are price predictions? They are not accurate and every single person is wrong. I'm just showing you the availability of where it's at. But this is why we Bitcoin. This is why we buy into alts and things like that.
Jerry, before we go on to the recession indicators — any last words before we move on?
Jerry: What's interesting is when you showed that graph about the extremely attractive gains in projects like Solana, BNB, etc. — the very first thought that came to my mind, because it was my actual experience, is: for every one bet that I placed in Solana, I had ten other bets. Cosmos, Juno, blah blah blah — all garbage.
So although it is true there will be some altcoins that have larger returns than Bitcoin, how do you know which ones they will be? You don't. And so I've done a little bit of soul-searching. I had this great conversation with my son about this exact topic and we came to the conclusion that, on a limited investment budget, the best investment is Bitcoin. Just put your money in Bitcoin and be okay with that.
Now, once you start having the ability to diverge and diversify your portfolio, adding a small bucket of layer ones, and then your next level of expansion could be an even larger bucket of edge layer ones, etc. It's hard to know. It really is. It's hard to know because we're still so much in the speculation phase. Projects like Solana and Near are gaining adoption in real-world use cases. Obviously Tron, Solana, and Ethereum are locking down the stablecoin market. We're starting to see some formation of utility, but we're still very heavy in the speculative area as it pertains to this space. I just wanted to put that counterpoint out there.
Rob: Yeah, absolutely. That was a good one, because it's a great reminder that not everything's going to go up and to the right. I mean, everybody thought back in the day — remember Luna? The future of finance?
Jerry: Oh yeah.
Recession Watch Indicators and Bond Yields
Rob: Anyhow, moving forward — I showed this on NFA Live this Thursday. It's the recession watch indicators. We take a look at the six National Bureau of Economic Research big indicators: non-farm payrolls, real income, real consumer spending — and that would be what Jerry was talking about — real income excluding transfers is going down, real income does not keep up with inflation, industrial production, unemployment, real manufacturing. If you want to find this, I had it as an artifact on Claude and I moved it over to my website. If you go to Dan Teaches Crypto, click on Tools, they're all right there. They're free, 100% free, and they'll always be free. Early warning signals.
We took a look at these and it's looking not too great recession-wise. Then stocks and bonds — bonds themselves. I want to get Jerry's take on this because we talked about this before. Treasury yields — I know people are like, "Ah, so boring." But it is something to be aware of. Treasury yields for the 10, 20, and 30 just kept going up after 2020. And during that time, I want you to notice this thing called the equity risk premium, which shows you whether bonds are paying more or stocks are paying more. If bonds are paying more, why would you get into stocks? A lot of big companies, institutions, and conglomerates pile into treasuries and bonds as yields start to go up. And what does that mean for stocks?
Well, bonds pay more — why isn't the stock market going down? Jerry?
Jerry: The stock market stock price is directly correlated to the US dollar. It's a unit of measure. And as that market expands, it's expanding with M2 money supply. So there's a real correlation there.
I think the real question to ask is: why are bond yields so important as a piece of information as it pertains to stocks, real estate, gold, silver, Bitcoin, digital assets?
From a business perspective — as it pertains to General Electric, Ford, 493 of the companies in the S&P 500 — bond yields determine refinancing rates. The cost to refinance debt is directly correlated to bond yields. So if it is more expensive to have your company's mandatory financing rollover cost more, that will affect that company's operations — whether it's applying money to R&D, new hires, laying off workforce, reducing its dividend, if it even offers one. Higher bond yields mean higher refinancing costs.
And trust me when I tell you, the playbook over the last 55 years in business is: borrow money to expand your business. So every business on the planet is predicated on a debt rollover cycle. Trillions of dollars of corporate debt need to be rolled over in the next 12 months. Bond yields being this high — after being as low as they were through the COVID era and even before the COVID era going back to the 2008 crash — refinancing your existing debt is getting more expensive, which means it will have an impact on your business once you refinance. And that ramification will not be positive. It'll be negative — whether it's hiring, firing, services that you offer, R&D to improve or iterate. All of those things are downstream to that ability to refinance. That is why it's important to understand the mechanism. You don't need to be a bond expert. You don't need to be a credit market expert. You don't need to be a risk mitigation expert to understand: if the cost to borrow money is more expensive today than it was yesterday, anybody having to roll over debt will be impacted negatively.
Rob: And I think that's going to happen. You said 12 months?
Jerry: Trillions of dollars in the next 18 months, trillions upon trillions in the next 24. Most debt cycles are around five years.
Rob: When did we have zero rates?
Jerry: 2020, 2021. 2021 was the golden age. 2022 even had really good rates. It wasn't until the end of 2022 where we were starting to get some hawkishness. There were some little blips, but look at what's happened over the last 12 months. The inflation as a result of those low rates — that affected every purchaser — created decision-making processes that are now coming to affect debt rollover entities.
Rob: So these big huge conglomerates have to refinance a massive amount of debt. It would probably behoove them to look for ways to cut costs, to save money, to find a new angle, to find a new business to bring in more capital. Because if they have to redo all these different refinances like you talked about, this would lead to the next piece — which is tokenization.
Tokenization, Real-World Assets, and the 1996 Internet Analogy
Rob: I think the next market will be predicated on three different things: payments, as it always is; tokenization of real-world assets — which could be equities, commodities, or treasuries; and payments for AI agents. Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, and Morgan Stanley are all talking about tokenization during their earnings calls.
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon talked about tokenization, DeFi, and prediction markets potentially expanding trading revenue — looking at where they can bring in more funds, more products, more activity, new clients, broader distribution. They're looking at wider use of DTCC tokenization services. And as a reminder, we talked about that yesterday with their four-quadrillion-dollar payments and money market movements going all the way through the globe.
Wells Fargo CFO Michael Santomassimo said cross-border transfers are settling in two minutes or less — making things more efficient, cutting costs. Morgan Stanley's CFO says faster, easier asset movement from tokenization could actually increase demand for advice and wealth management services.
And that comes down to the last point, which is what this title came from. Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock — I think they've got around 15 trillion in assets under management — stated this a couple of months ago: "If history is any guide, tokenization today is roughly where the internet was in 1996, when Amazon had sold just $16 million worth of books and three of the rest of today's Magnificent Seven hadn't even been founded yet. Tokenization could advance at the pace of the internet that most experts expect, with enormous growth over the coming decades."
And talking about that leads me to this: Solana is seeing massive growth, closing the gap for real-world assets. Solana's real-world asset footprint climbed from roughly 4.5% of Ethereum's real-world asset valuation a year ago to roughly 26% in just 12 months or less. So as we move into it, it's important to take a look at where the hockey puck is going, not where the hockey puck is.
Jerry, final thoughts before I get into the Q&A?
Jerry: It's easy for me to get optimistic because some of these technologies do promise extremely productive growth. And I would, from an ethics standpoint and a capital standpoint, really like to expand my wealth through constructive productivity — not through the failure of others.
So for me it's kind of a feel-good story, and it gives me hope that should the productivity translate to the reduction of debt, there is hope for deflation and prosperity. That would be fantastic. I don't know if it will, though, because people are people. The same humanistic characteristics and mannerisms and behaviors got us to this place of $40 trillion — soon to be $42, $45, $60, $70 trillion — in debt. All those same behaviors will most likely still be present when the productivity spigot is turned up, unless discipline and responsibility can be implemented. And maybe AI can help influence that.
Rob: Discipline and responsibility. Well, if it's programmed into an agent that makes the decision, then it will materialize.
Jerry: Yeah. Skynet.
Q&A: Ondo, Real-World Assets, and Market Volatility
Rob: All right, let's get into the best part of the show — the Q&A, where you bombard Jerry with non-stop questions. Me's got a good one: "Hey, what happened to Ondo and real-world assets?" Talking more about real-world assets tokenization. Jerry, do you know anything?
Jerry: It came after my heavy deployment into a whole bunch of altcoins. Ondo came after that, so I missed the boat.
Rob: I have some Ondo. I bought it on Kraken and hopefully it does pretty well. I know it's — and I use that term loosely — I think people would say it's not "backed" per se, but either Goldman Sachs or BlackRock invested into it. Correct me in the comments section. That's one of the big things, but there's a lot of different ones. Canton is partnering with or using the DTCC. And I also didn't know this, but you can gain yield on real-world assets — specifically the equities portion — on Solana and some other chains. But it is dependent on loans and borrowing through DeFi. So I'm like, that just sounds a lot like 2021 again and I don't want to deal with it.
Darth Mike says, "Stock market is going to be fun on Monday after what's happening with the coast in Korea." I have no idea what's going on there. Let's take a look. The domestic index is falling sharply. The investment industry is taking notice. Over five days it's down 13%... 19% over six months. That's going through Monday. We'll see how much it translates. I don't know what else.
Palanteer — Skynet. Speaking of which, that's not doing so good. Jerry, you got any stock in Palantir?
Jerry: No.
Rob: I've got a little bit. It's not looking so good for me — 7% down, 11% down, up 4%. But again, on Friday everybody was still freaking out over the Thursday hot inflation print. Nobody seems to like that. Then all of a sudden we had a bunch of longs getting liquidated. So you add those two things together, and then there was also an issue with CoreWeave — which we didn't cover — but this was about their debt and their bonds raising exponentially. So it looks like there's an issue with AI bonding, but of course there's going to be a lot of volatility. The question I have is: is there still demand for AI?
Jerry: Unsatiable amount of demand. Now, here's the reality of it. A tremendous amount — we'll call it exuberant capital deployment — in the AI industry, much of which will never get returned to the investors. So there'll be some huge losses, no differently than the millions and up to almost billions that were deployed on tech companies in the internet boom that never returned anything — like all the people that lost money on pet.com. However, that doesn't mean the internet lost value. It gained value — multiples and multiples of value. Just like AI.
But I don't think it'll be the companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. that are the big winners. The winners will be the ones that actually have the electricity running through the chip and the ones that are able to maximize every token spend — how much high-bandwidth memory gets compressed out to long-term SSD, which is a lot cheaper to make. It'll be a refinement, iteration over iteration over iteration. So companies that are basically software companies will get obliterated by AI, and companies that actually produce the inference or produce the token that a model will use and a requester will deploy — those will be the ones that I believe will win. X, X AI.
Tesla, SpaceX, and a Potential Merger
Rob: Mike Ron asks — and this will merge into the SpaceX and X topic we just touched on — "There's been rumblings about Tesla merging with SpaceX. Do you think this is a possibility or does it just not make any sense?"
Jerry: I think it's 100% a certainty. One of the tangible building blocks beyond speculation that I can point to is the Terrafab development. The Terrafab — being the world's largest chip GPU/CPU manufacturing facility known to human beings — is a Tesla–SpaceX joint venture.
So I think it's a foregone conclusion that they'll become one entity. And I believe the mechanism that will be used is the SpaceX stock that Elon controls — not in the hands of board members or other stockholders or banks — that will be used to acquire all of the necessary public shares and preferred shares for SpaceX to acquire Tesla, and for them to become one.
Rob: It's going to be massive. Hey, did you see that Tesla demo for the new road?
Jerry: Oh my goodness. Is that the coolest thing in the world? And all of that was made possible by battery and compressed air — no actual petroleum fuel.
Rob: It is amazing. I saw it and I thought it was AI at first. I'm like, "Well, that's dumb." Then I'm like, "Wow, it's on the official Tesla homepage." Oh, I guess it was all right.
Hey, Robert Downey says, "I don't know anyone who would invest in Palantir. It's a mass surveillance company." Not wrong, but as a reminder, I'm in it for the tech.
MicroStrategy, MSCI Removal, and Bitcoin Credit Products
Rob: This one's for Jerry. "Thoughts on MicroStrategy being removed from the MSCI. Is this going to be the catalyst that brings things down, or is it like, ah, whatever?"
Jerry: I think Strategy has worked out their ability to balance their credit products with the acquisition and the selling of the underlying asset of Bitcoin. Therefore, MSCI — I don't think any of those things matter. I think they're stable in their ability to offer their credit products, pay their dividends, and over time increase, because the appetite for credit is just expanding.
So if your yields are better than the market, and you're in a market that's expanding — in other words, your offering in that market is better than all the competition — you're going to garner more of the market. And their entire mechanism requires more of the underlying asset as it grows. I think it's a net-net positive for Bitcoin. As their credit products grow, they have to acquire more Bitcoin, which is great for Bitcoin holders. And it's great for all those people because the yield that the credit is offering is better than, for instance, the treasury bond market or the corporate bond market.
Rob: Makes sense. Jerry is so smart.
Muhammad says, "Wait until Bitcoin goes to 59K before you start DCA." That could happen. But I still think we're going to have a pullback in Q4 — I just don't know what the catalyst is. If there is one, so much the better. Anything below the 200-day moving average, I always said, is a pretty good time. I think at one point we got to 57 or 58K. But yeah, to deploy. This is why I dynamically DCA — as the price goes lower and the risk levels go down, I start to increase every Monday on the Cash App. Jerry, what do you use to buy your crypto these days?
Jerry: I just have my Schwab account linked to Coinbase and Kraken. Those are my two Bitcoin acquisition vendors.
Sweatcoin, Hypercycle, and Compute Portal
Rob: Mary says, "Good morning." Sergey says, "Jerry, what happened with Hypercycle?" Before Jerry answers the Hypercycle question — what happened with Sweatcoin? I just got an email a couple of days ago. They're shutting down the whole operation.
Jerry: Oh.
Rob: Yeah. I know. Time to delete my app off my phone. Well, I mean, the app was pretty cool because it would say you walked this many steps, which is good for health.
Jerry: I used it as a step counter. And I thought it was cool because they were going to give away the tokens. I invested a little bit into it. All that investment is gone. That sucks.
Okay, Hypercycle. I think Hypercycle had hoped that its basic underlying technology would get adopted by other developers who would build products and services on top of it. And that just didn't happen. You can point to several things — this is just my personal opinion — but I think Hypercycle, instead of deploying an SDK and creating environments in developer communities to build on top of the underlying technology, decided to go other routes. And those other routes didn't pay off. Happens all the time.
Rob: Yeah. And that'll lead us to other things — Compute Portal and the lesson you learned along the way.
Jerry: Compute Portal, my baby. We are about 85% of the way there from having a fully agentic interaction platform — in other words, a control plane for agents to source, provision, pay for, and deploy their compute needs. So it might be a training agent that needs to train on medical data concerning BI or vitamin C research. Or it could be your Grok bot setting up your home AI system for you — one that manages your Ring doorbell and your internet-enabled refrigerator. Agents are going to be doing tasks with more and more things, and some of those things will be the actual facilitation and payment of a service. Compute is a basic fuel. It's the commodity that underlies all of compute — electricity running through a chip. You have to have it. It's not negotiable. It's mandatory.
So the Compute Portal marketplace that we built for humans — we are redesigning an entire control plane for the agentic world. And I sent you a neat little deck on it, Rob, just moments ago because I finished it last night.
Rob: You know, maybe you should come on this other channel I've got called Dan Teaches Crypto. We can talk about it.
Jerry: I'd love to, but I can't seem to get an invite. Do you know somebody who's pulling the levers over there?
Rob: I know a guy who knows a guy. But the big thing was — and this is what we did in one of our other videos — someone was talking about privacy and they said, "I'm sick of using Claude because I'm afraid they're going to take my information." Now, there are terms of service and those change all the time. Right now it looks like there isn't really much going through, but I actually talked about Compute Portal on the video I did about GoDaddy. And they said, "Yeah, but it'd be great if it was private." And that's one of the things you guys offer, I believe.
Jerry: Right. We offer a private cloud and we also offer architecture for you to have your own device running your own model, with your own harness over the model — which is your app, the way you would interface with your model — all within your home. And it can be firewalled so that only select things interact with the internet, and other things are guarded and shielded. We offer a wide range of compute options.
Rob: This is good for people who don't want to have their IP taken. This is also good for people and businesses that can't afford to have it in the public. Legal matters is one. Healthcare is another, because of the HIPAA requirements — the portability act. You can't give out patients' information. Nobody wants to know that, oh, poor Rob, he's only got one kidney left because he sold one. I don't want to have that information out there. So I need something like Compute Portal for something like that. It makes a lot of sense. Everybody can check it out at computeportal.io.
Gifting Bitcoin as a Wedding Present
Rob: Here's a good one. "Off topic — I want to gift Bitcoin as a wedding present, but they're new to it. With that comes my responsibility." Because if you just give it to somebody, they're like, "All right, bad news — someone just called me from XYZ exchange and I sent them all the Bitcoin. Is that what I'm supposed to do with it?" What's the way you'd gift it, Jerry?
Jerry: I did this a while back — years ago. I made up these little business cards with a paper wallet for XRP. And there was a period in my life where I was using those to tip at restaurants instead of giving a cash tip. I gave them a business card that had a paper wallet with some XRP in it.
Rob: That's a pretty good idea.
Jerry: You can do the same thing with Bitcoin. The beautiful thing about it is that they can take the card and they may wait 15 or 20 years to initiate and spin up the card, but when they do, the Bitcoin will be there.
Rob: Yeah, and in that situation, that's cool. You're like, "Hey, I gave you 0.1 Bitcoin," whatever it is. But then what happens in like 10 years when they're like, "Hey, I found this card — what the hell is 0.001 Bitcoin? That's like a trillion dollars." So that'd be something. But how did you do it with the XRP and tipping people when you went out?
Jerry: I made a business card — a physical piece of paper — that had the wallet code on it.
Rob: Got it. Unfortunately guys, I've got an issue with my battery right now.
Jerry: Is it time to go already?
Rob: It's time. We're almost 50 minutes. Jerry's got to get into his football.
Jerry: Today's football day, folks. Don't forget.