Crypto investor Rob revisits the case for digital assets during a bear market, addressing common criticisms
A solo presentation by Rob of Digital Asset News examining the recurring arguments against crypto and making the case for Bitcoin and select altcoins.
Summary
Bear markets test conviction, and this solo presentation opens with a reflection on why investors get into crypto and why bear markets — particularly flat, low-volatility periods — test conviction. He revisits a wave of negative media coverage from 2022 (from outlets including the European Central Bank, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Goldman Sachs) and draws parallels to the current environment in 2026. The core of the video is a structured rebuttal of four criticisms raised by actor and crypto critic Ben McKenzie in a new documentary: that crypto has no economic value, that decentralization is a myth, that crypto primarily enables illicit activity, and that it is driven by the greater fool theory. Rob concedes some points — particularly around the centralization of Binance, Tron, layer-2 solutions, and stablecoins — while arguing that Bitcoin and major altcoins still demonstrate real utility, inflation-hedging properties, and legitimate payment volume. The session closes with a live Q&A covering topics including Fed rate cuts, AI and inflation, privacy coins, Chainlink's tokenization partnerships, and meme coins.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Why We're Here: Reflecting on the Bear Market
Host (Rob): Hello everybody. Why are we actually here? Sometimes I do these videos just to reflect on what's happening — not just in the crypto sphere, but in the broader sense. We have to think about why we got into this space, whether we need to re-evaluate where we're at, and whether we should just be quitting.
Before we get into all that, just want to give a shout-out to Jerry. Jerry is not going to be able to make it today. He's on an excursion over in Costa Rica having a great time. And this is possible because he did a pretty good thing — he invested into crypto and digital assets and took profits along the way. Now he's living the life he wants over there in Costa Rica. Shout out to Jerry. We'll see you next week.
So today, what we're talking about is just a little recap about why we're here. I always think about this as I'm coming into the bear market. Right now, we are in the throes of the bear market, and it's not the worst part of going down from our all-time highs. What is a real crusher in the crypto space is flat. When there's not much price action going up or down, it just becomes boring. And we're not here to be bored. We're here because there's an interest in digital assets, obviously, but we like the volatility. When things are kind of just even keel, we're like, "What the heck is going on?"
This always reminds me of going back every four years — like 2022, when we were at this exact same point around April 2022. It just seemed like we were repeating, and we just repeat these types of cycles. But even back then, there was a lot of FUD going around about how much we'd fallen, how awful crypto assets are, how it's dumb, and how you are stupid for being into it. I remember this as clear as day.
The 2022 FUD Headlines — and What Happened Next
Here are some of the titles that I read back then. This one's from the European Central Bank: "This is Bitcoin's last stand — we don't expect this to actually survive because it's trash and it's tulip mania, 2022." Well, that didn't work out. Wall Street Journal: "Crypto party is over," June 16th. Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, from Jamie Dimon — though I don't think he's actually changed his tune on Bitcoin, but on blockchain he sure has, as they're moving forward with decentralized applications and different crypto assets as they move into the payment industry. "The case against crypto," The Atlantic. "Crypto is a house of cards." One of my favorites — New York Times, November 2022, which was at its all-time low, so that was actually pretty good timing: "Why Bitcoin is the greatest scam in history." The Guardian, July 2022. "Bitcoin is not a hedge against inflation," April 2022. From Bloomberg: "Tesla sells 75% of Bitcoin." Of course, that was actually true — Elon Musk, they got rid of their Bitcoin, not all of it, but they offloaded some. They still have some on their balance sheet. "The death of the crypto dreamer." And one of my favorites — Goldman Sachs: "Bitcoin is not an investable asset class," either May or June 2022. Goldman Sachs, one of the big leaders in institutions and investments. I find that quite hilarious now, because just a couple of weeks ago they filed with the SEC for a Goldman Sachs ETF trust for Bitcoin.
So these are the things we go through. And now, of course, we have other parts of this FUD. Ben McKenzie. We actually talked about this in the FUD video — we took a look at John Stewart, Ben McKenzie, Coffeezilla, and Professor Jen. I know he's not a professor, but that's what everybody calls him online. We dissected everything going through that. And actually, Ben was right on some of these things.
Ben McKenzie — OC star and also Gotham actor. Doesn't matter where you come from. He's a reasonably smart guy. He actually put some things out. And because of this new documentary, which has got a lot of different accolades and awards from different screening partners — the London Screen Festival official selection, and so on — he's been everywhere. He's been on The Daily Show, The Daily Show with John Stewart, and a couple of other different ones coming out. They've really latched on to this.
The Four Criticisms of Crypto — Ben McKenzie's Framework
So what I wanted to do was come through this and take a look at the big four criticisms of crypto right now that Ben has pointed out. This is the same thing we talked about in 2022, the same thing we're talking about now in 2026, and probably the same thing we'll talk about in another four-year cycle.
Criticism One: The Economic Nothing
The first criticism is the "economic nothing." Bitcoin was supposed to be for payments. It's not really going that route. I know people say, "Well, Lightning, bro — Lightning Network, Lightning Payments." How many of you have used Bitcoin for payments in the last 12 months? Raise your hand. Exactly. I'm not talking about ever — just the last 12 months. Okay then.
So I see it more as a hedge against inflation, a store of value, and what some call digital gold. Now, we're talking about hyperinflation. This is actually pretty relevant, because this is the same reason why I buy Bitcoin every Monday — there'll be a purchase firing off on the Cash App tomorrow for me — because I believe that the US government and all governments around the world will continue to print their money to oblivion. Some do okay, like America, the EU, Australia, China. But some places really screw up — like Yugoslavia in '92–'94, Zimbabwe in 2009, Venezuela and Argentina — they went through hyperinflation, essentially making the value of their fiat worthless. This is what Bitcoin actually helps with. Again, hedge against inflation.
Here is the M2 money supply for the United States. What do you notice? Everything's going up and to the right. And the overlay right there is the S&P 500. When you take a look at this, you wonder: did stocks do well, or was it because we just kept printing money? I think it's because we kept printing money. It's not just us — it's the US, China, the EU, Germany. They're all printing and they won't stop. That's pretty much how it goes.
So that's the whole thing with dilution — not delusional, dilution — of the supply. And this is why Bitcoin wins. It's only 21 million. 21 million Bitcoin, or 2.1 quadrillion Satoshis. One Bitcoin is 100 million Satoshis. You can't print more than 21 million. We're not printing — we're mining. Right now, we've already mined 20 million. There's only 1 million left, and everybody's buying it up.
I'm not going to go deep into supply shock here, but I will say this: if you look at it just time-wise, seven or eight years ago in 2017, the average house in America was $337,000, and you could use 24 Bitcoin to buy that. Congratulations, you're a new homeowner. In 2021, just four years later, it took nine Bitcoin — and the house was more expensive. Why? Inflation. We keep printing money. And in 2025, the same trend continues.
Don't believe me — there's a link in the description for this entire presentation. Go to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the BLS, and type in whatever dollar amount you want and pick the year. I picked $1,000 in 2000. That's the same buying power as roughly $2,000 in March of 2026. So you had twice the purchasing power 26 years ago, and you didn't do anything. If you left your money in a savings account, congratulations — you have half the purchasing power you had before.
The dollar is backed by the 100% faith and goodwill of the US government — that's absolutely true. But they're also debasing you. And that's why cash is trash until there's a crash. Remember that. It's kind of important.
Altcoins and Stablecoin Payment Volume
Okay, so we have all that, and that's if we're talking about Bitcoin. There's other stuff — these things called altcoins. I know everybody's given up on them except me, but there's a reason, because they actually do things. 99.9% of altcoins are worthless. However, for payments, these are the rails that are built on Binance, Ethereum, Solana, Tron — and it could also be Polygon or Base. These are the top four.
And it's not just me. As we talked about, this is Visa on analytics. They're tracking these. The big ones, of course, are Tether — a stablecoin — and USDC — also a stablecoin — both backed one-to-one by the dollar, either cash or US Treasuries.
The volume over the last 12 months: $3.4 trillion for Tron, which is the altcoin that Tether mostly runs on. $3.4 trillion for USDC or Circle on Ethereum. $1.8 trillion for Solana. $1.7 trillion for Ethereum. And then it goes down from there.
And if you think, "What's the viability of this product?" — well, just on March 31st, roughly a month ago, stablecoin volume passed ACH for the first time ever. This information is from Artemis. We can see that ACH in May of 2024 was $7.2 trillion. Now, moving into the current period, stablecoins are at $8.1 trillion versus ACH at $7.3 trillion. So stablecoins, which are on these altcoin rails, are now doing more volume than bank-to-bank ACH payments. That's what's happening.
Gold vs. Bitcoin as an Inflation Hedge
So we have stablecoins, altcoins, and Bitcoin — which I think is a store of value, a medium of exchange potentially, and digital gold. But what about actual gold? Because as we talk about this, I own gold. It's great. I wasn't a big fan of it, but after getting it beaten into my head for so long, I'm like, I should probably have some of this. It's a good hedge against inflation as well.
Right now, gold is roughly $4,724 per troy ounce, as of April 26, 2026. One troy ounce is 0.06 pounds — roughly 15 troy ounces to a pound. Very small. Almost $5,000. Pretty amazing.
If you take a look at it as a hedge against inflation going back to 2001: if you put $1,000 into gold when it was $258, you got roughly four troy ounces. Today, at roughly $5,000 per ounce, those four ounces are worth about $20,000. Not too bad. You put $1,000 in and got $20,000 out.
Now take Bitcoin. I can't go back to 2001 because it didn't exist, but I can go to January 1st, 2020. If you put $1,000 into Bitcoin just seven years ago, you'd be at a 10x — $10,863 — as of the price today, not the all-time high. So if we're talking about a hedge against inflation, gold's not too bad. Bitcoin's really good too. And if we overlay that against the M2 money supply, you see gold going up and to the right, and Bitcoin going up and to the right even more steeply.
As a reminder for all the gold bugs who might be watching — and I'll be honest, that's probably pretty rare for this channel — let's be clear about what we're investing in with gold. It's not because it's a medium of exchange. Nobody's going to the pawn shop throwing a troy ounce coin down and saying, "Give me that bike." That doesn't happen. Here's what gold is actually used for: investment is 40 to 45%, central banks is 15 to 20% — that's roughly 65% of demand just from people going, "I think it has value." Jewelry fabrication is another chunk. Okay, you got me on that one. I don't own one piece of gold jewelry. Apparently people say it's the greatest thing to have a gold watch. I don't even have a watch. I have a cheap Walmart rubber ring that cost me about eight bucks.
Now, gold bug people will say, "No, no — it's all for the tech industry, for mainframes, motherboards, chips." No, it's not. It's six to 7%. So just stop it. Yes, there are some gold traces on chips, but a greater conductor of electricity would probably be copper. And that's why copper is so important for compute, AI, and data centers. We're not basing everything on gold.
Gold was at some point used as a medium of exchange, and it still could be. There's this thing called Tether Gold — you can tokenize gold, hold it in a depository backed one-to-one, put it on your Tangem wallet or Ledger, and spend it anywhere it's accepted. It is tokenized, and it runs on what? Tether. And what does Tether run on mostly? Binance, Ethereum, Solana, Tron.
So if we're taking a look at the economic viability of crypto — what Ben McKenzie was talking about — I can still make the case that even gold can be made more useful through these rails. Economic nothing? I think it does have value. People believe in it, people can actually use it, and it is a good hedge against inflation and a store of value.
Criticism Two: The Decentralization Myth
Now the next one — the decentralization myth. Ben actually has a pretty solid point here. So first of all, what are we talking about? Bitcoin or altcoins? It's a difference.
As far as decentralization, Bitcoin is the king. You can look at Bitnodes — there are 23,885 nodes in the world. Take a look at the Bitcoin mining map: thousands of miners all over the world as well. Links are in the description so you can check this out.
What about Ethereum? Is that centralized? Not really. Ethereum mainnet statistics: United States has 1,926 nodes, China has 927, Germany 821, United Kingdom 312, and so on. What about Solana? Same thing — they've got a bunch of nodes. They weren't as decentralized as they used to be, but they're doing pretty good. Good job to Solana for making things up and improving total nodes and global distribution. You can see that on Solana Compass — links in the description.
Now, for Binance and Tron — you got me on that one. I'm not even going to try to say it's super decentralized. I envision it the same way as Base. That's CZ and Justin Sun. I think they just have one node under their bed. I'm not sure, but Ben McKenzie got you on that one. It's not that decentralized.
And also layer-2 solutions — if you think they're decentralized, well, they just froze roughly $334 million because of a hack. That is a layer-2 solution on Ethereum, as of April 20th.
And if you're talking about decentralization for stablecoins, there is a plethora of data from Circle where they have frozen hundreds of millions of dollars. March 2026: 16 wallets worth hundreds of millions of dollars. July 2023: following a $126 million security breach, the government said "shut it down" and they said "sure." August 2022: US Treasury Department OFAC sanctions — "shut it down, Circle, blacklist these wallet addresses" — freezing over 75,000 addresses. And there's more. May 2025: Libra memecoin scandal, $57 million — "shut it down." Absolutely, boss. Done.
And Tether's the same way. January 11, 2026: $182 million frozen. June 2025, and so on and so forth. You get the point. There's a lot of freezing going on with Tether and USDC. And we have Scott Bessent just recently saying, "Oh yeah, we just froze $340 million against Iran because we can do it." And that's what they did. So Tron was the blockchain, Tether was the currency — and it can be shut down. It is not fully decentralized.
Criticism Three: Illicit Activity as the Primary Use
However, that does go against the third criticism — that illicit activity is the primary use for crypto.
Do you know how much illicit financial flow is being conducted in US dollars? There's a lot of it sloshing around. $4.4 trillion of activity, and roughly 2 to 5% of global GDP is being used for drug trafficking, human trafficking, corruption, and bribery — and that's the US dollar. So what, we should get rid of the US dollar? Good luck. It's everywhere.
But what about crypto? Crypto is actually $158 billion in illicit activity, but it has a smaller market cap. However, it's less than 1.2% of all on-chain volume. Yes, there is some sanctions evasion — but if you're doing that with Tether, good luck, Iran, because that's not going to happen. Maybe they should have just accepted Bitcoin. Interesting.
The scale of activity: 3.4% of the total — almost 97% of that $4.4 trillion we talked about — is the US dollar. And also, if Ben McKenzie still wants to talk about this, he can, but he knows better. This is the former deputy director of the CIA. He says Bitcoin is a boom for surveillance — "we can use everything, we can see every type of transaction on chain." He states Bitcoin tech is "a powerful but unrealized forensic tool." And if somebody like ZachXBT can do this — tracking wallets even though each wallet isn't labeled with a person's name — all you have to do is track them and you can find out who it is and shut them down. That's what Tether and USDC did. And if you don't know how to do that and you're a government or a state or a county, just hire Chainalysis. They'd love to do it for you.
So criticisms one, two, and three are addressed.
Criticism Four: The Greater Fool Theory
Lastly, the greater fool theory. Here's the thing — McKenzie's right. A lot of these altcoins really were worthless. They didn't do much. They were just a big rug pull, a big cash grab. Over 13.4 million different cryptos have died since 2021. I don't have anything up to date for 2026, but that's pretty much where we're at.
So the question is, is there a greater fool theory? I'll just say it like this: if you believe it has value — and as we've just shown, there is some value there — then all the things we just talked about apply. And I'll just tell you this: if Bitcoin or these altcoins aren't valuable to you, then give them all to me and we'll see how much value they've got.
Live Q&A
Rob: What is everybody's questions today? It's everybody just saying hi to each other, which is pretty nice. You've got to love the community. Hello from Chicago. Rusty Bot is here. Cardano drama on X — what? It must be the weekend. Everyone tracking the drama. I'm going to guess that Charles Hoskinson may be at the center of it. Just going to guess.
Greetings from Belgium. Muhammad's here. Yeah, if you bought before 2020 — look, let me take a look here.
Liberty says, "If you bought, you can 2x if you bought before 2020." This is a historical snapshot from CoinMarketCap for the prices of Bitcoin and altcoins on April 24th, 2022. Let's just go four years back. Look at these prices. And yes, it doesn't escape me that we are talking about the number-go-up theory, which is of course what people love.
Bitcoin on April 24th, 2022 was $39,000. And as a reminder, this is why I still think we have some ways to go down, which would be kind of exciting — let's be honest. It went from $39,000 down to $17,000 in November. This is just April of 2022. Now we're in April of 2026. Ethereum was $2,900. Tether's a dollar. BNB was $400 — what is it today? $635. It can go down lower. What else? Solana was $100 — what is it today? $86. That's sad.
Oh my god. Everybody's least favorite coin of all time — Terra Luna. This is what Ben McKenzie was right about, these rug pulls and different things. Although there is one thing to think about with Terra Luna, because people will say, "Well, that was just a scam all the way through, just like Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX." Have you been following along with how Sam Bankman-Fried invested everybody's money? If they would have kept all of his investments — he did stuff like Anthropic, a lot of different AI plays, he invested into some really smart businesses — it'd be worth like 10 times today what it was back then. All they had to do was not liquidate him. Unfortunately, he was using funds that people deposited in FTX, but over time, he was actually one of the better investors you could have gotten into — a heck of a lot better than the crappy hedge funds people deal with. And then Luna — it goes to show you that maybe if Luna could have been given more time, things could have worked out. Maybe an algorithmic stablecoin would have actually worked. But we'll never know because it was liquidated and stopped. Bummer.
Avalanche was $71 back then. I know it's not even close to that now. It's worth half of what it was, and that was back during some pretty bad times. So yeah, some of these are just dogs. That's why I'm only investing into Bitcoin, Binance, Ethereum, Solana, Tron — and actually I'm getting away from Binance.
I need trade education — you're not going to get it here. There are a lot of other channels out there for that.
Yes, exactly, Mary. China crypto is done. Heard the same thing in 2022 and 2018. We'll see. Maybe you're right.
Cool H says, "People will stick with Monero for their illicit activities." No, I think people will stick with cash. Cash is my favorite. It's great. And you know who really likes cash? All the different vendors out there, all the restaurants, all the mom-and-pop places — they love cash. You know why? Because they don't have to pay the fee to Visa and Mastercard and Stripe. That's why I like to use cash. Essentially, I'm giving them a 3% haircut every time I whip out my debit card.
Wanker Brothers Twins say, "Privacy coins in the future?" No. My question is, is Gemini the future? I think they're having problems — rumor is. Zcash isn't that decentralized either. End the show with a meme — very nice.
But it makes you think, right? If you're telling me it's so non-valuable, then just give me one.
Liberty, we covered this yesterday. What's your take on the new Fed chair WSH coming in next month? They'll probably cut rates and do what Trump says. One of these will be bullish or bearish.
The video we talked about yesterday was about the new Fed chair WSH talking about how AI is essentially reducing the price of everything and will continue to keep reducing the prices of goods and services. He says if that's the case, then we can't keep rates high. So I was thinking to myself — is this because that's what Trump wants, or is this because it's really actually happening? My question is, does anybody see lower prices because of AI right now? I don't know. I don't see it. Maybe not now. Maybe it's going to happen soon, but we'll see.
I don't think he's going to cut rates anytime soon. I don't think anything's warranted. I think we've seen a little uptick of inflation. And that's the whole point — if you start cutting rates with inflation, inflation goes up even higher. You're there to jockey the move and either raise rates if inflation is too high or cut rates as it goes down. You want it around 2% inflation rate year-over-year, as Jerome Powell has talked about. We'll see. Good luck.
Litecoin did a block freeze fork to stop a pool software glitch. Maybe it was like the Arbitrum story we talked about. People were telling me, "But Rob, it is decentralized because it is a group of 12 individuals who make the decision for the foundation." And I'm like — you're telling me that 12 people makes it decentralized? I guess it's better than a bank, but still, that's a pretty poor argument.
C says, "Meme coins are the best because they don't promise anything. It's pump and dump. If you catch them early, you can make money." Yeah, it's the same thing with like Polymarket and Kalshi, but that's more of an insiders game. Wait a second — that does sound like meme coins. Just ask Trumpcoin and Melaniacoin.
Chainlink and Real-World Tokenization
Bodan says, "Rob, have you heard about the Amazon Chainlink club?" I was going to talk about this today because I cannot wrap my head around why Chainlink's price does not go up. Look at this — Chainlink tokenization bridge layer. Chainlink is now the backbone of an $11 billion Arizona mine tokenization. Where did I put this? Right here. $11 billion-plus in securities from copper and gold assets. By integrating Chainlink, assets tokenized on the Bridge Tower tokenization platform — including DOMX — now have access to the complete set of data, interoperability, and orchestration solutions required to manage the full tokenization lifecycle. This includes Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol.
So again, you have real-world utility. Things are really doing well with Chainlink. You never hear anything negative about Chainlink, yet Zcash goes up 66% in a month, Chainlink 11%, Monero 23%, Hyperliquid 9.5%. What the hell? Tron goes up 5% even though it froze everything. Ethereum 20%, Bitcoin 19.1%. It's a strange world we live in. I'll tell you that. I think it goes to show you that it really just is a bunch of speculation.
Anyone think Pepe or Bonk has a future? Maybe Pepe. I have some in my retirement account — I kid you not.
And yeah, Filecoin is collaborating with Cardano as well. Great. Maybe both of them can actually pick up each other's chain and make it great, because it seems like everything's going pretty much sideways. But we'll see.