Iran Settles Hormuz Tolls in Bitcoin - SpaceX HODLs 18,712 BTC - Bitcoin Pizza Day

Indiziert: 2026-05-22

[00:00:34]This is very nice.

[00:01:03]Hey everyone, welcome back to Get Real.

[00:01:05]This is episode three. I'm standing in for Emily Dempsey today here with Corey Clifton. What's going on, Corey?

[00:01:15]>> Brady, it's good to see you. It's been a while since I did your show, Swan Signal Live. And if we have to uh make you a subhost, then uh so be it. We get to hang out. Yeah, you guys can see me tomorrow with John.

[00:01:28]>> That's right.

[00:01:28]>> Right here on the same channel, Swan Signal. Every Friday, uh, get reals every Thursday at noon ET. And, uh, we do the afterparty after about 25 30 minutes here, uh, going through the news and through our, uh, sections of the show, The Looking Glass, um, where we talk about kind of the bigger biggest story of the week. Then we're going to pour the tea with some shorter, uh, stories, some quick hits.

[00:01:53]Uh then we will go down the rabbit hole.

[00:01:56]This will be uh kind of a look at Bitcoin vocab and uh this week in Bitcoin history. So uh yeah, let's just get started on the top here. Corey, uh with uh what what do you what have you been doing in your evening the last couple of weeks?

[00:02:13]>> Well, first off, I have to just note that uh I was using my AirPods for the uh speaker, which is why there was no audio in the spaces. So hopefully people have figured that out and we'll see people filing in. I was like, why do people keep on coming into the spaces and leaving, but um yeah, I didn't quite make it to the studio this morning. I'm at a at a cafe not too far from the kids school and uh just thought I'd try it here. But uh got to get better with the setup. Um boy, what has been going on in general?

[00:02:44]Um did you ask me what I've been doing with my evenings? I've been working.

[00:02:48]>> It was a leading question into NBA basketball, but that's okay. Uh, fair enough. Uh, yeah, it's it's funny. I I mean, I don't have the time, unfortunately, right now to watch entire games, but I'm getting very good at finding out whether a game is worth watching. And, uh, you know, when it gets close again, you start watching again, and then somebody pulls away. And then you kind of fast forward to see if it gets close again.

[00:03:09]>> And you can get through a game in about 45 minutes, maybe 30 minutes.

[00:03:12]>> There you go. Way to do it. Watch the fourth.

[00:03:16]>> But yeah, it's it's a it's an amazing it's amazing time. I realized this is always when I play the most basketball and kind of sherk my workout duties and I like to hoist up some 28footers instead. That's my workout these days.

[00:03:29]>> Yeah, >> it's NBA playoff season.

[00:03:32]>> The Wimby shot, the pull up from 28. Uh yeah, well that's been fun. There's there's really great playoffs so far and it's been a fun little distraction. Uh not distraction but uh a break from the Bitcoin fire hose.

[00:03:48]>> Yeah. Well, it there has been a lot of news. I know you have some items to dive into.

[00:03:54]>> Uh, but it it has just been insane on the timeline lately. Uh, and I can't wait to chop it up.

[00:04:00]>> All right, so let's get into the looking glass portion of the show. This is the biggest story of the week and we've got around Hormuz safe as the the top story this week. Um, this is kind of a story about the the petro dollar kind of flipping in real time uh with a sovereign use case. And a few weeks ago, uh, we did hear from Iran that they would settle tolls in Bitcoin or yuan.

[00:04:26]Uh, and this is a little bit different.

[00:04:28]This is a story about uh, insurance being sold by uh, Iran through called Hormuz Safe. uh they launched a website and announced it uh this week. Uh here's a look at the the website itself. Secure digital insurance for maritime cargo.

[00:04:47]Hermuse safe provides Iranian shipping companies and cargo owners with fast verifiable digital insurance paid via Bitcoin and settled at the speed of the blockchain. This is kind of wild, Cory, just to see um a major player in the international oil scene uh adopting Bitcoin as a way to sort of route around the petro dollar.

[00:05:10]>> It is crazy. It is really proof that Bitcoin is for enemies. Bitcoin is for everyone. It's an open protocol and anybody can use it whether you like it or not. Um, and I think it's particularly instructive that they are not using stable coins obviously because stable coins are basically CBDC's and censorable and reversible and are already completely under the thumb of five eyes and the state department etc. So, you know, they're kind of a a honeypot to catch criminals and and stop them and, you know, basically just obviously the the fuzzy edge of what is called a criminal or a terrorist could actually just be an adversary and, you know, somebody that you have sanctions on because of political reasons as we see time and time again. So, you know, it is um it is kind of showing that if you are out of favor for whatever reason with whoever controls the common methods of payment, Bitcoin is is there for you.

[00:06:10]And that doesn't make you in just just noting that doesn't make you necessarily like an IRGC booster. It's just being aware that that things have changed and that there is a way to transfer value that uh nobody can stop.

[00:06:27]So the cover the insurance coverage includes inspections, detentions, confiscation risk, uh war damage is excluded here. Iran expects to generate $10 billion in revenue from lowrisk coverage of vessel inspections, the detention, the confiscation. So this is uh this is not an insignificant amount of Bitcoin that might flow through this insurance product and about 20% of global oil moves through Hormuz as we've kind of been painfully aware during the Iran war.

[00:07:04]>> Yeah, it'll be uh it'll be interesting to watch uh if people start to sleuth the wallets and see if they actually hold it.

[00:07:11]>> Yeah.

[00:07:11]>> As it comes in versus true >> I don't know what they would trade it into. I guess they could trade it on their there's a pretty large Iranian exchange that they could trade it into something and then maybe trade it for gold or something. Um but yeah, it'll be interesting to see if if they end up being hodlers of some kind. Uh the logic is just increasingly clear. I was trying to place this into historical context and you know it was before your and my time in Bitcoin but I have seen a number of people liken this to the Cypress crisis in 2013 and just that was something that was on the international stage. They did a bailin and basically confiscated something like 90% of deposits. Cypress at the time was mostly used for >> you know essentially storing storing wealth outside of Russia was kind of the main the main use case. And so a lot of people kind of got screwed and and it got a lot of people looking at Bitcoin and was part of the narrative in the big bull run that took Bitcoin from uh really that that bull run was from two bucks to,00 >> at the peak in in December of 2013. Uh, now I'm not forecasting a 550x here, but uh, it does seem like the kind of thing um, you know, maybe harder harder because it's Iran and you know, we're at war with Iran right now to have that conversation around a dinner table or with somebody that's not into Bitcoin, but I can imagine a lot of other places around the world where the nations are not combatants and they kind of just see this as, you know, essentially politics by other means. This actually is a great way to have the conversation about Bitcoin. And if you're in South America or you're in Europe or you're in Africa, you're in Asia and you're just kind of observing Israel in the US versus Iran, you know, it's um it is something that you can explain Bitcoin through very clearly.

[00:08:58]>> Correct. Yeah. This is wild. Back then in 2013, 2014 times, even when we were getting into Bitcoin in 2017, it would have been absolute mayhem for weeks on this news. And today it's sort of expected. I think that sense of inevitability that we all had when we really understood the fundamentals of Bitcoin is starting to spread to sort of casual observers of Bitcoin through the ETFs and the talk, you know, talk in the federal government here, both, you know, executive and legislative, even in some judicial judicial action at times. And then you know a nation state like this really uh endorsing I guess uh you know kind of indirectly I guess uh the use of Bitcoin on this international stage and this this level of news now just seems to be uh kind of expected at this point.

[00:09:59]>> Yeah, there's there's something else.

[00:10:01]You're right. It's just more of the same. I think we all understand that Bitcoin is, you know, has won the battle versus all the altcoins and cryptos and that's been over for two and a half years now and, you know, we're basically entering this, you know, Bitcoin versus Swift, Bitcoin versus the dollar stage.

[00:10:21]And you know, if you thought the six-year slog of trying to get people to understand Bitcoin versus Shitcoin with a hundred billion dollars of VC money, lying about Bitcoin, if you thought that was hard, uh, expect something like six decades for the next battle. Like, I don't think we'll be I don't think I'll be around advocating for Bitcoin when Bitcoin really surpasses the dollar's network effect. The dollar network effect is insanely strong and has the full might of the west and not just the not just the US but like all western aligned nations. It's basically the global economic system, you know, runs on dollars and it's just way easier to make money in the dollar system than it is in the Bitcoin system. Nobody wants to spend bitcoin still.

[00:11:08]>> Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's going to come from nations like Iran and BRICS. Um, where like that's where the adoption is going to happen on nation state levels first. Although we I I've been hearing rumors that there may be a big announcement on the Bitcoin strategic reserve front this summer. Uh, and who knows? I'm not going to pursue that anymore. I was too bullish about it last year. So, we'll leave that aside. Could be could be interesting news, though.

[00:11:33]Uh, let's pour the tea, Corey. We got three stories here. The first one is SpaceX is uh they filed their S1 which we which flipped public yesterday which included uh disclosure that they're holding $18,712 bitcoin. Uh this is a fair value of$ 1.29 billion uh on 331 which is what they reported in the S1. That's about 1.45 billion today uh at a cost basis of about 660 million.

[00:12:03]So they're up uh significantly on their position there. Uh it's been unchanged since the end of 2024 and uh the IPO is going to happen in a couple of weeks. Uh we have uh looks like IPO is targeting about $1.75 to$2 trillion valuation. So this is a you know obviously a massive company. Uh Starlink is a big part of it and uh we have perhaps you know if Tesla does end up merging with SpaceX at some point could be perhaps the large the biggest company in the world they'd rival the big tech companies the hyperscalers Nvidia um and they're holding a significant amount amount of Bitcoin on the balance sheet.

[00:12:44]I'd say this is just another signal similar to the level of uh the story we just talked about uh that you know the the mo the richest man in the world, one of the most exciting companies in the world is holding so much Bitcoin on their balance sheet. Uh what do you make of this one? What's the significance?

[00:13:02]>> Well, you know, I'm I'm I'm glad that even though Elon doesn't tend to talk openly about Bitcoin much anymore, it's been a while since he wrote Bitcoin is my safe word. feels like five years ago.

[00:13:15]Probably was five years ago.

[00:13:16]>> Uh, and then, you know, if you kind of read all of his pumping of Dogecoin back in the day as sort of like the proxy for him talking about Bitcoin, which kind of makes rational sense, I get it. That said, we've also heard him really not understand Bitcoin live on spaces before to the degree that he ought to. Uh, hopefully that's changed over the last three or four years since uh he kind of embarrassed himself uh on live audio.

[00:13:42]But um you know it's it's clear that uh I think it's the the number two owner of SpaceX stock is rumored to be the guy that uh is really into Bitcoin and has driven these purchases through. Um, and he stands to, you know, I I I was unclear as to whether he'll own 7% of the stock post IPO or he'll basically get diluted and be, you know, I think I think maybe it was just the he has 7% of the common, but the preferred is already about 50%. Something like that. So anyway, even if the guy is at 3.4%, uh, I believe his net worth should be 72 billion. So that may be can you is it Vargas? What's his last name? You've seen this on the timeline.

[00:14:32]>> Anyway, >> anyway, the top exec that's not Elon is evidently a big Bitcoin believer and uh should be about the wealthiest person that's really into Bitcoin on the planet uh in a few weeks at least on paper with the with the SpaceX stock. Um I am I I I have to mention because you know me I like to mix.

[00:14:59]It is interesting that there was a TAM slide and uh they said their TAM is like 28 trillion which is the size of the US economy. So that was that was pretty interesting.

[00:15:11]>> Uh but yeah, I think they they are certainly planning to uh you know the story that they're selling is that we're going to need data centers in space.

[00:15:20]Yep.

[00:15:21]>> And that SpaceX is going to be a way to get that done. And you know, maybe not wrong. I don't know. Uh we'll see how it plays out. But uh you know, this this is certainly the richest valuation ever seen in an IPO. Um it is a company that loses a lot of money today. So there is no PE multiple. Uh you know, so it could be the best company of all time and could be world beating. But uh on today's metrics and anything that you can look at for forward revenue over the next couple of years, you know, it I just have to warn you guys, it certainly looks rich and I'm not buying any. Um and it's it's always a weird sign when you see like massive retail distribution. I mean, they've somehow figured out to to be able to offer it to everybody at Fidelity and everybody at Schwab, you know, on day one in the IPO.

[00:16:15]And that's usually the kind of thing you do when you're maybe don't have as much smart money piling in as you would hope.

[00:16:23]>> Fascinating. That's not the take I would have made or my sort of uneducated take about it. uh my assumption would have been that it's uh fair a fair value and with the prospects of you know the businesses that could be launched by through space exploration mining uh new settlements uh all kinds of material to anyway uh it could be there but I really I do appreciate your take because uh it often as over the years you've often sort of checked my optimism in in in good ways. I remain wildly optimistic about Elon and the things that he's been able to do and the fact that SpaceX is, you know, forcing NASA to try to leaprog them. And I don't know if you saw NASA announced yesterday that they're planning a moon base to have astronauts be able to actually, you know, stay for weeks at a time, maybe months at a time on the surface of the moon. Like this is this is all just Elon being crazy and intelligent and uh so I appreciate that a ton.

[00:17:23]>> Yeah. But I'm not buying SpaceX at two trillion.

[00:17:26]>> Yeah, maybe wait for it to go down.

[00:17:29]Understood. Uh, all right. Uh, next, uh, and for the tea is, uh, Ken Griffin. Uh, he's an American hedge fund manager. Uh, he's the founder and CEO of Citadel. Uh, he has been on record uh, being rather skeptical about AI's effect on society and our economy and the job market, etc. Uh but he changed his tune in a speech at the Stamford Leadership Forum this week. Uh we'll watch this quick one and a half minute clip uh and then riff on it.

[00:18:07]>> Let me just you know share a few thoughts with you on this. Number one is in the last few months there has been a step change function in the productivity of the AI toolkit. It is it is profoundly more powerful than it was just nine months ago. And for us at Citadel, that has that has allowed us to unleash a much broader array of use cases for AI. And it has been really interesting to watch, to be blunt, work that we would usually do with people with masters and PhDs in finance over the course of weeks or months being done by AI agents over the course of hours or days.

[00:18:55]So these are not these are not mid-tier white collar jobs. These are like extraordinarily high-skilled jobs being I'm I'm going to pick a word being automated by a I got to tell you I went home one Friday actually fairly depressed by this because you could just see how this was going to have such a dramatic impact on society like and and when you witness it in your own four walls when you see work that used to be man years of work being done in days or weeks.

[00:19:34]It's like wow like that's the first time I've seen real impact.

[00:19:40]>> Yeah, I got to agree with him and I think that's been our experience at Swan 2 is there was really a step change earlier this year started with Opus 4.6 six and the capabilities both on the coding side, every every aspect really felt like you were interacting with a peer uh who knew far more than you did and could think far faster than you did.

[00:20:04]Uh and we've really ramped up uh in our company uh using AI because it's become so much more usable and effective at the work that we do. Uh so I've definitely felt this. I've been thinking about the AI effect on society for uh you know a lot over the past few months trying to figure out how to position my family, how to you know to position our company and uh it it certainly is as of a few months ago clear that that AI is at the point where it will start having a much more significant effect on our economy and our society.

[00:20:39]>> No, absolutely. And the thing is, I think the knee-jerk reaction when you first see it happening is that uh being frightened and being scared, but it's already not supported in the data. So there was there was a a trough and you saw engineering job posts go down for you know about six months straight and that lasted through about February >> and there were even uh non-technical optimists like myself that were thinking in December when I started cla coding and then you know you saw openclaw and you were thinking all these things that could be done with it and then you rolled into February and I was thinking well maybe business people can kind of catch up to the engineers and you know we can do a lot of these things that they knew and in February the uh the engineers ran away from us completely and we maybe became you know 1x engineers in our spare time and they became like 100x engineers because they can harness you know hundreds of agents in in full companies and I mean it is it is just um it has made engineers wildly productive uh the so that let's put that here another thing that we need to realize is that software can solve solve so many more problems in the near and far future for us than it does today.

[00:21:58]And it wasn't economical to build that software previously because there it was too expensive to do. And now it's not expensive to do. And so you're going to see more software than ever before. I would I would expect that we will have a hundred times more software in 10 years than we do today. And it's because we can build it economically now. And so you're only going to see an explosion in engineering jobs, builder jobs, designer jobs, leveraging these tools, making more software. Software continues to eat the world. This is not some This is not some magical change that came out of nowhere. We used to call this big data, then we called it machine learning, then we called it AI. I advised and was like the first external person at an AI startup in like 2015. That's one of the biggest uh customer service AI startups.

[00:22:45]does does all the airlines and half the banks at this point. I mean, this is this is not new. It's just a great progression. What I would say is that I think you're right. I think we were kind of on the flat part of the S-curve and in December with, you know, basically Cloud Code took over the timeline and then OpenClaw took over the timeline in January and then uh Opus 4.6 and Codeex 5.3 from OpenAI came out the same day. I think it was Fab 5 and that just it's just exploded. And so now I do think for useful AI for all companies and people basically has started to charge up the uh the vertical part of the S-curve uh as of this year and this will always be known as like the year that we started up the vertical part of the S-curve and we'll reach full saturation and then get back to a normal uh adoption rate at some point in a few years. Um, but there's uh there's something called Jieven's paradox that a lot of people in in the space and in tech certainly know and most Bitcoiners have seen it on the timeline, but it's basically that every new technology actually creates more work >> and that you you know even though the cost of doing the thing that you did before drops so much, there's so much more you can do because it exists that uh the fear of uh losing employment is just not there. And so you have basically two ways that people are marketing AI. And we'll use Daario from uh from Anthropic for one. and and his his goal basically is to uh tell all companies and investors that uh everybody's completely and he's going to take all of the market share and Anthropic and you know is going to do everything and Claude is going to do everything and so you should basically support their massive valuation because they're going to eat everything. Um, so he tries to scare everybody. And then you have Elon who talks about uh universal high income instead of universal basic income and saying that nobody's going to have to do anything and everybody's going to be rich. Just follow me. And he sells like the optimist view. They're both There's going to be plenty of work for everybody. It is going to be massively disruptive. I do think this is going to be a a tough, you know, 5 to 10 years as we transition to having this new tool.

[00:24:58]But you know the internet was very disruptive. AI is very disruptive. You know railroads were disruptive. Like it it is not something that we've never dealt with before. And it is it is basically self-interest of bankers, media and the AI frontier model companies themselves that are promoting these super scary uh scenarios or these super optimistic scenarios to try to juice their valuations which makes sense because they're trying to raise tons of capital. was really capital intensive.

[00:25:29]Um, so I get it. But, uh, you know, I guess one last thing I'll mention is, uh, you know, I I did have, uh, lunch with a banker yesterday who's monitoring all this stuff very closely. And, and he pointed out that one of the reasons they uh, rushed the SpaceX IPO out is that Elon and all the people around him expect uh, the OpenAI IPO to basically suck. And for OpenAI has like not not a certainty but like a decent chance of their valuation collapsing at some point because their users are you know have plateaued or come down and Anthropic stole so much share etc. People don't like Alman Sam Alman whatever. Um and so they were trying to get SpaceX out uh before uh OpenAI muddies the waters. That's just something interesting. Um we should mention that we're going to hop over to spaces here in a minute. So we're about to wrap up. I know we didn't get through the whole agenda, but we can cover some of these topics live on spaces. Brady, uh, why don't you just join with the swan handle, or if you can put it in there as well on the spaces, that'd be great. Was there anything else you want to cover on the YouTube before we shut it down and hop over?

[00:26:38]>> Uh, we could do quickly the vocab word of the day. We can save pizza day for spaces. And we were going to talk about ETF outflows, but we can save that for spaces or >> No, no. you you are the longtime uh head of education, a title you swapped back and forth with Stefan Laa a few times, but uh why don't you give us the uh terminology? Let's do that.

[00:27:00]>> Okay. It's censorship resistance and uh you know, our goal here is to provide some kind of Bitcoin 101 education for those who might be new to Bitcoin. Um and so censorship resistance is one of the most important properties of Bitcoin and it has uh profound impacts on on society. Um so basically it means that there's no no prop Bitcoin is prop property and that no actor like a government or corporation or some coalition can prevent a valid transaction from being included in the in the ledger um and sees coins without I guess their cooperation. This is of course providing that you are holding the coins in self- custody. If the coins are in custody on an exchange, uh, for instance, then they are much more easily confiscated, um, which is why at Swan, we do try to, you know, kind of guide our clients through kind of the custody, uh, spectrum, um, and eventually get them to, uh, self- custody uh, with Swan Vault, which is a collaborative custody product, which makes custody really sort of much easier uh, for people who aren't comfortable with doing it themselves. So, uh that we do very much try to encourage people as much as we can to move to self-custody through swan vault and that's why um so this happens through proof of work. Uh Adam back invented proof of work.

[00:28:33]Satoshi adapted it and adopted it and it basically creates this asymmetric um situation where it's would be extremely expensive, right, to go back into the blockchain and to uh alter transactions or to uh censor them going into the blockchain. And because of this, it has uh lots of benefits. And I think one of the most that I've been drawn to, especially before Bitcoin, I was really sort of down about the idea of privacy, this is post Snowden, and that we're kind of living in this this society where we can just be spied on uh at any time. And Bitcoin showed me that there's a way to kind of correct for that, at least with money, and maybe that cryptography could be applied in other ways uh to help improve privacy for all of us. So, that's a big one. Um, and yeah, this is that that censorship resistant uh property of of Bitcoin.

[00:29:35]>> All right, I missed it. And Jeremy's going to kick my butt, our chief business officer, who's in charge of Vigil Protocol, but uh I was supposed to uh draft a reader ad and actually promote Vigil on this. So, the best I can do right now is check out vigil protocol.ai.

[00:29:52]Uh this is Swan's new product for 45 million affluent and high net worth households. So think if you have like uh a complicated financial picture somewhere between like one and 30 million of assets. The whole point here is to have your affairs in order to have this one place where you've pulled in all of your documents from your lawyer, your accountant, your financial adviser, your real estate, your insurance. It's mapped, it's audited, it's monitored, and you can know for sure that you and your family uh are going to be okay and that everything goes to the right places. So, it's not about growing your portfolio. It's about protecting what you have and making sure that your family is going to be fantastic. So, all right there, Jeremy, that's the that's the script off the top of the head. And uh I'm going to check that box, but I'll do a better job next week. Anyway, let's uh let's shut this one down and head over to the spaces and let some friends up on stage. And uh Brady, thank you for uh abley filling in for Emily. Uh and we look forward to uh getting my co-host Emily Dempsey back uh next week, Thursday 9:00 a.m. Pacific and uh noon Eastern. Set your reminder. Please subscribe to the Swan channel and uh thank you for joining.

[00:31:01]>> Thanks everybody. We'll see you over in the space.

[00:31:15]All right, I'm going to jump in on my phone and then I'm going to get Swan in there on the laptop.