Rebuilding the $12T Repo Market on Bitcoin | Bitcoin Dave

**David Hoffman** (0:03)
Bankless Nation, I'm here with David Seroy, otherwise known as Bitcoin Dave. Bitcoin Dave, welcome back on to the podcast. It's been a while. How are you doing?

**David Seroy** (0:10)
Yeah, thanks. You actually originally coined that name Bitcoin Dave. And I still think I'm Bitcoin Dave, but you're no longer Ethereum Dave.

**David Hoffman** (0:18)
I'm no longer Ethereum Dave. Yeah, I'm just Bankless David.
Okay, Bitcoin Dave. Bitcoin has this manifest destiny to hyper Bitcoinize the world. I don't know if you believe that, but that's one of the original views of the path of Bitcoin as a monetary asset, to just blanket the world, denominate everything in BTC. Are we still on that path?

**David Seroy** (0:43)
I think so. Yeah. I mean, I think the thesis of Bitcoin is pretty well established. It's one of the few things in our entire industry that almost everyone agrees has legitimacy. You know, Bitcoin as non-sovereign sound money, what is still up for debate is kind of like what's next and beyond after that. For me personally, I do think that Bitcoin needs programmability, maybe not on the layer one, but in these more expressive layer twos. And so I do think that there is huge unlocks that are enabled for Bitcoin as money, if you can add more trustless computation to Bitcoin.
So that's kind of how I think about the future.

**David Hoffman** (1:21)
When I say the words Manifest Destiny of Bitcoin, that comes from this idea of just like Bitcoiners have just memed Bitcoin to where it is today. And it's just been accepted. The world has just absorbed Bitcoin into its vernacular, into its portfolios. And the brand of Bitcoin has just done phenomenally well. I think like much to the frustration of the Ethereum crowd, where the Ethereum crowd was like, we really need to build Ethereum. And it's going to be hard. And there are challenges to overcome. And I think when Ethereum people look over the fence at the Bitcoin world and be like, man, they just had it so easy. All they had to do was meme Bitcoin into hyper Bitcoinization.
Do you agree with that kind of like lens?

**David Seroy** (2:05)
No, no. Like people have always said like money is a meme. And like, I get that, that there is like a somewhat social consensus around what is money. But there also are like actual properties that make money good money. And Bitcoin does embody those properties. And you cannot just meme them into existence.
You know, like a lot of the properties of Bitcoin are actually what allowed the memes to take off. And if those properties did not exist, then the memes would not. So while I am somewhat sympathetic to the idea that like things need to be built, there needs to be this kind of programmable ecosystem in some of the Ethereum arguments. At the end of the day, it's like, it's not just a meme. Bitcoin has the best properties of money.

**David Hoffman** (2:43)
So do you think that Bitcoin is still on this like long arc of hyper Bitcoinization? Or I don't know what the word is. Hyper Bitcoinization, I feel like I'm dating myself because that's like a pre-2020 word. But like, I don't know what word you guys use these days.

**David Seroy** (2:58)
I think at the very least, some form of Bitcoin is inevitable. Like I very much, I think the sovereign debt crisis is a major issue. I do think that eventually we will hit a kind of strong phase of monetary debasement. I'm not sure that AI is going to entirely bail us out of that crisis. And I do think Bitcoin is in prime position and arguably sole position to capitalize on that. Now, to what extent it capitalize, it could potentially be capped somewhat by Bitcoin's limitations. Like if we just keep things as the status quo, it's like great.
It's a non-sovereign store of value. That is probably good enough to be a world changing asset. But can you do better than that? And I think that's kind of really what we're pushing at the frontier of Bitcoin, is kind of exploring, is there more? Is there more to be desired here?

**David Hoffman** (3:45)
Yeah, that's something I want to talk about today. I still want to kind of like hash out this idea. And the reason why I ask with this framing is that every single cycle of sorts, cycle, the 2017 cycle to the 2021 cycle to the 2024-5 cycle, I guess, is marked by Bitcoin growing in some sort of step function way in adoption and legitimacy and price. And when Bitcoin peaked in 2017, 2018, it was still a bunch of retail, but you got your first idea of institutions and people building very large businesses around this. This is like when Mike Novogratz went from just a speculator to he started to build Galaxy in 2017, 2018 And then in 2020 to 2021, you had Michael Saylor first start to do the whole Bitcoin treasury thing. And then now moving from now, here we are. And Saylor is once again trying to elevate Bitcoin from digital gold to digital capital.