From American Hashrate to Wall Street: How Bitcoin Benefits The U.S. | Bitcoin 2026

All right, this is going to be very informative for all of you. This is, look, I've looked at the panel discussions all day. There's a lot of very technical uh integrated people in Bitcoin. You know your world better than anybody. What we're going to tell you about is the bridge to the Tradfi world and all the boomer. And we're at a real crossroads here. Bitcoin is spreading to the masses. We have two great panelists here to talk about that. And so, let me just dive into the first question. ETFs have taken in about $60 billion dollars of cash in about 2.5 years. That is I'm an ETF analyst. That's is breaks every record imaginable. They were a huge hit. Morgan Stanley just came in. First bank ever. Obviously, these things are going mainstream. Boomers love ETFs and the assets are growing. We're from where both of you sit. What does that demand tell you about where we are in Bitcoin's integration into the American financial system and how big of a pool of capital is in play? Let's start with you, John. >> Thank you, Eric. I appreciate it. Now, you said 60 billion with the uh ETFs in in Bitcoin. We are very very very much at the beginning innings. I would say the first inning in the growth of Bitcoin. That number although it may sound large is minuscule to the pool that's out there. If you look at just the advised money as of of advisors the Morgan Stanley's the Maril Lynches um that are out there that's $146 trillion. And you know what? They're not advising yet to put your money in Bitcoin because of the volatility. Only 0.008 of them can advise because they got compliance issues of Bitcoin having 80% draw downs. Once that becomes more mainstream, think about the amount of money there. Another thing that is really really important that people don't understand is how much money is going to be transferred generational from the baby boomers to the Gen X to the Gen X and the millenniums. All right, that's another 124 trillion. Baby boomers hold less than 5% and that's older people like myself. All right, Gen X's hold 20 to 25%. All right. Millennials hold 25 to 35% in Bitcoin. The younger people understand it, know it, love it. What happens in the next 20 years when the transfer of wealth goes 124 trillion down to, you know, those people that already have adapted it. It's going to blow your mind away. So when you're saying 60 billion, it's nothing. >> Well, let me hop in here, guys. You know, the compression of Bitcoin is unbelievable. You know, I I think I was the first guy on a on a stage like this wearing a suit maybe in this industry, and that was about, you know, 3 years ago advocating for this industry. And now every single day, you see what they're doing. You see what Charles Schwab is doing. You see what JP Morgan is doing. I mean, you know, you literally had Jamie Diamond two years ago that was laughing at Bitcoin, not not, you know, believing in the asset. And now all of a sudden using JP Morgan Chase Haste, you can go out and you can, you know, borrow against your Bitcoin holdings to get home mortgages. You have Charles Schwab that's about to, you've seen all the announcement that they've made, but they're about to custody Bitcoin for the first time. This is the lowcost provider, you know, of all wealth management in the country with 30 million bank accounts, and they're going all in. You see what they've done at at BlackRock. You see what they're doing with all the ETFs that you just mentioned, the most successful ETFs in history in history. Every single one of them that launches has become an incredible success. Now all of a sudden they're adding on top of that. They're adding yield strategies on top of that. Then you look at what Michael Sailor's doing and he's doing. He's a dear friend and doing a phenomenal job. You look at what Simon and Metaplanet's doing, doing a phenomenal job. You look at what 21 Capital is doing. Guys, they are buying and they are not selling. You look at what I'm doing in American Bitcoin mining. We are we are mining and we are not selling. We believe in the asset. You look at all the companies how they're growing their Bitcoin treasuries. You look at private companies like the Trump Organization, how we're treasuring Bitcoin because we believe in it as an asset class. We are compressing Bitcoin. There is a limited supply and that limited supply, as much as we like to throw around 21 million, it's not 21 million. People have lost it. But beyond that, people are not selling it. People are holding it. Bitcoin is becoming sticky and it's no longer, you know, the DeFi crowd who are incredible, the young kids who really believed in digital assets and were buying Bitcoin when it was $10 and $50 and $100. Now you have the biggest institutional accounts. You have governments. You have the United States government that holds 300,000 Bitcoin and will not sell it. You you have the Middle East that is using energy from cities that they don't need to cool in the middle of winter, but they do obviously have to cool in the middle of summer because it's hot as hell. Guess what? They're using all that extra capacity for to mine Bitcoin. Guys, it is compressing and it is compressing hard. And honestly, I I was saying this backstage. We were talking a little I'm more confident in Bitcoin today at the number that it's at today than I was in Bitcoin when it was 125,000. Because honestly, what Bitcoin's done in the last 6 months relative to what Bitcoin's done in the the previous 3 years is transformational. I mean, this this rush is only getting going and we are we are in the greatest period I think in the history of crypto and and just hold on guys, hold on. It it's coming. Okay, >> if I could just add to that, first of all, you got to love Eric's passion. It's awesome. You know, we talked a little bit about I talked about the retail space, but the institutional space that's going to get adopted. You know, people like Larry Frink when we're talking to the conversations I have with the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world. It's not are you buying Bitcoin, it's what percent of your portfolio are you allocating to Bitcoin. It's a big difference. It's happened just in the last year. And it and so there's so much and once the institutions really really get involved it's game over. >> Yeah. No doubt the institutional adop it's in this is an interesting asset. Most assets in the history of America start institutional and then the banks and asset managers democratize them to the retail investors. This one kind of went the opposite direction. It's very interesting to watch and watching all of these sort of suits and older people kind of understand it. And this brings me to another question which is you know I operate in a in a big company and I also have relatives and family and when I got into the Bitcoin ETF coverage I remember my mom was like it sounds like funny money in space that was her reaction to Bitcoin. Some other friends were like isn't that just gambling? These are regular people who have good amount of money and you know her her reaction the people who went into the ETFs I think were kind of ready. They were like early adopters, but there are a lot of people like my mom out there. And I want to ask both of you, how do you sell her on this asset, you know, maybe elevator pitch style. Start with you, Eric. So, one of my closest friends in the world works for one of the biggest banks in the country. He runs Private Wealth Management in Greenwich, Connecticut. And about two years ago, he comes up to me. He goes, "Eric, I can't believe you like this Bitcoin crap." You know, like I view it as funny money. And I started laughing at him. And I go, "What would you invest in?" and I won't give his name away because he'll probably be fired tomorrow. But I go, "What would you invest in?" He goes, "You know, I really believe in fixed income." And I go, I I literally started laughing, you know, sure enough, Bitcoin's going up and up and up and up, you know, and I asked him one day, I go, "Hey, how's that uh how's your fixed income account doing? You know, how how's your portfolio looking right now?" About 6 months later, he comes to me, he goes, "Eric, how do I buy Bitcoin? What what do I do? Where do I buy it? I I have to start." You took somebody who literally just didn't believe in the product, and you instantly converted him. But what's really amazing about America, we've got the best economy by far in the world. We've got the best system of government by far in the world. We're actually the probably the country that needs Bitcoin the least and we need it here. You look at every other market. Name a currency, guys, that you would want to own anywhere around the world because there's not a single one that I would want to own personally outside the United States dollar, right? Right? And you can make a lot of arguments even about the US debt and a lot of other things, but name another currency you would want to own. If you lived in Iran right now, would you want their currency? Of course you wouldn't. Guess what you want? You would want Bitcoin. You'd want something that, you know, has massive volumes going through it that could be traded 24 hours a day, 7 days a week that you could put on a, you know, either on DeFi or you could put on a Ubi key or whatever you use. You could transfer anywhere around the world 24/7 and it doesn't go to hell. It doesn't go to hell because of wars. It doesn't go to hell because of bad governments. It doesn't go to hell because of of of corruption or fraud or bad currencies or illquidity in a currency. Right? It it's an asset that you can move anywhere on Earth 24 hours a day that you can transact hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars with virtually no fees that you can transfer to any wallet around the world any time. If you lived in Iran, isn't that what you wanted? If you lived in Europe, literally an unbelievably developed part of the world that's growing at half of the GDP growth over the last 15 years of the United States of America, would you rather have the euro or would you rather have Bitcoin, an asset that's grown at, you know, 70% a year on average year-over-year for the last decade? You know, the it's not even close. And then all the time I get to hear from these people, well, you know, Bitcoin has high volatility. It's okay, fine. then do yourself a favor. Go invest in fixed income at 4%. You know, I'll invest in in Bitcoin. I'll ride out the volatility and we'll see who wins that equation in a 10-year period of time. And so, that's I think what I would I would tell your mother, right? I mean, it's a better gold. It's a better gold. It's a gold that has an ecosystem on it that's actually fungeible that you can actually carry, that you can actually transport, that's been an unbelievable store of value worldwide. and and every country in this world needs it needs it substantially more than all of us Americans need it. And I still think for an American is one of the greatest asset classes you could possibly have. >> Okay, let me let's let's say All right, applause. Yeah, this is a the home the home crowd here. Let's say she sold on this. She's like, "Okay, now she probably would buy the ETF because it's so easy." You know, ETFs are McDonald's easy. You know, I use fantasy football, Dunkin Donuts app, and Amazon like most people. And as somebody who just went through a large research project for this book, I said, "Okay, let me get my own Bitcoin onchain and do it the regular way because some of the OGs worry that the ETFs are keeping people from actually using Bitcoin." And I want to talk about the user interface. So, it was clunky. It took me a couple hours to get from my bank into the Bitcoin, then the wallet. It cost me 1.4% to transfer the money. And coming from the ETF world, that's like highway robbery for me. I mean, I'm used to one basis point, right? So, how do you get the user interface to be much more like Dunkin Donuts or fantasy football so that my mom's not like completely like, "Oh, the hell with this." >> John, maybe because I come out of the the hospitality background. Maybe I yell at the crypto community all the time and I'm I'm the biggest part of the crypto community. I I truly love everybody in this room. I I love all of you. There's there's no one that's been a bigger champion for this industry than me. But I come out of hospitality. I built the building that's about 1,000 yards behind us. Trump, I built most of our hotels. You walk into one of our hotels, you'll never touch a bag. You'll never touch an elevator button. You'll, you know, be brought up to your room. You do everything humanly possible to make somebody's experience nice. Then you look at crypto, especially going back a couple years. Look at DeFi, right? Where you're trying to go into a or you're trying to go into MetaMask and you're trying to put, you know, you know, US dollars. You're trying to put some token Ethereum in there as gas fees and all this crap and you have some pop-up extension on your browser and that's blocking your ability to it was an absolute disaster. An absolute disaster. You had to graduate from MIT with a computer science degree in order to make it usable. And that technology when it's not usable, when it's not userfriendly, will never work. And honestly, I I think crypto is starting to understand that. And I think they've done everything humanly possible to simplify technology to make it userfriendly. But when you talk about the interface between kind of tradi and defi and even cfi, this is where the big banks are going to come in and they're going to do a great job. Charles Schwab has spent 30 years working on, you know, stock trades. You know, so have all the other banks. They know how to make it easy. If they didn't make it easy, they were going to lose customers. You have to make this this industry approachable. You have to do it for your mom. You have to do it for the general consumer. And the faster this industry can get our acts together in terms of user experience, the faster we're going to grow. And so for all the companies out there, for all the people who are heavily invested, focus on user experience. Focus on making it simple and easy and not torturous. And that's going to accelerate our growth in in magnitudes that that you can't even possibly believe. >> And all right, John, let's talk about this. So my mom again is a boomer. We have a phrase on the team, boomer candy. There's a certain kind of ETF that is specifically aimed at older investors. They have a ton of money but not a lot of time and so they're a little more riskaverse. So there's these ETFs that like you use call options to give up some upside to protect your downside. John, you have some called buffer ETFs. There's also equity premium income which are similar but like less buffery. And collectively in the equity space, they have about 200 billion. Now in the Bitcoin space they have about 1 billion. So there's a lot of growth potential here. Nate Tracy called it Bitcoin with training wheels. Talk about this as a front door potentially for the very nervous boomer. >> Thanks Eric. So we started looking into Bitcoin and we're a traditional asset manager 50-year-old company and you know everybody I was a former CEO of one of the largest banks in the world. So people could say you're a suit and I purposely wore a tie today to display that. Um yeah, that was my background. But I also really bought into Bitcoin early and we could talk about that later. But we also wanted to use what we were really great at and we're phenomenal risk managers. Um Calamos is the largest buyer of convertible bonds in the country. We know how to manage risk. We know how to manage your downside. And we thought that Bitcoin, even though it was the best performing asset in the last 12 years, to get more people involved, that couldn't take the volatility. Maybe, you know, grandma or mom doesn't want the potential of a 80% drop that we we could we we launched a year ago the first 100% protected uh Bitcoin ETF. And then we launched 90% and 80%. And we didn't just pick those numbers because it it sounded good. We picked them in the mind that in a traditional portfolio whether the oldfashioned 6040% the way our product works if you get the 100% protected it's approximately like a money market or used treasury or cash. You get the 90% it's like gold commodity. The volatilities are similar. If you get to 80% it's very similar to equity. And so what does that mean? Well, you have the volatility stream that's very similar in those three classes in a traditional portfolio, but the upside in each and every one of those is so much higher than the traditional product. What has equities returned in the last 30 years? S&P what just under 10%. What's Bitcoin done now? you're buffered at the top, but even at the buffer area, the cap rate, it's much larger. You know, if you buy 80 80% protected stuff right now, you get to take keep anywhere between 35 to 45% of the upside depending on where options are trading during that day. That's a lot more than equities. So, in mind, you can now in your portfolio get Bitcoin exposure. And we're not talking 1 or 2%. We're advocating for 10 to 15% in your portfolio with our products because the act exactly or very similar to what I just mentioned but you have the upside of Bitcoin and that will cause massive adoption in America and we feel that's training wheels till Bitcoin gets to the point where it is a million dollars of coin where the volatility has shrunk and then that will all convert to just straight Bitcoin. Okay, let go ahead. Give it up. These are I mean these are very ETFs are the Silicon Valley of the investing world. So you're you're hearing about the latest gadgets that they're making. That is very important stuff here. So um that is what's called buffer ETFs. Just FYI. Okay. You mentioned suits. We're all kind of in suits. I get called a suit all the time on Twitter or X. I get called a boomer too even though I'm Gen X. You get the idea. Now, there's this term called sou coiners, and they're coming in very quickly. I find it interesting about both of you that when you look at Bitcoin, it's it's got debasement hedge properties like gold, but it's also got censorship resistance. It it's truly decentralized. It's really interesting currency that way. And most most of the people in emerging markets can really identify with needing censorship resistant currency, right? But both of you actually have acute experiences despite, you know, how much money you have and how much suits you own with needing a censorship resistant asset, which I find kind of fascinating, ironic. And Eric, let's start with you just so we can get a little bit into like why you're involved. >> Well, listen, if you would have gone back five, six years and and told me that, you know, I would have been part of one of the fastest growing Bitcoin companies anywhere in the world, American Bitcoin, what we've built is is unbelievable, guys. We're mining Bitcoin here in the United States. Uh we're doing it better than anybody. We're doing it cheaper than just about anybody. Uh we're effectively mining at about 50%, you know, discount to spot price. We're doing it in West Texas using some of the best American energy and we're really leading the way. We're we're we're doing amazing. And you know, you you probably seen what we've done in terms of, you know, building our treasury. It's it's been just an amazing amazing project. But if you would have told me five six years ago that I was going to go from building buildings like the one behind me, you know, to to having this kind of passion for digital assets, I would have laughed at you. and a little thing called politics came into the equation and you know some of you have probably heard the story most of you have probably heard the story but we became the most canceled people arguably in in in the history of the world they came after us like we were dogs I remember getting the calls from Jamie and and uh you know the big banks uh Capital 1 and and JP Morgan Chase you know congratulations Eric all of your bank accounts are shut down you know and in terms of JP Morgan it was you know about 55 bank accounts in terms of Capital 1 it was over 300 bank accounts these are for you know golf courses These are for residential buildings, commercial buildings, homeowners associations, the biggest hotels in the country and around the world, restaurants, um, you know, office tenants. I I can't tell you how many accounts we had. And they were turned off in the middle of the night for doing not a damn thing wrong simply because they didn't like the fact that, you know, there was a person in my family who wore a red hat that said, "Make America great again." And then they were hellbent to do anything they could to take us out, you know, politically, financially to to come after the company that I love and that I've built and that I run every single day. And you know what's funny? Those same people were going after so many people in this room. You know, raise your hands if you were debbanked. Raise your hands if they went after you. They went after you guys. They went after me. And honestly, it created a love fest between, you know, the people in this industry and and and between my family, which frankly would have never gotten into digital assets had we not lived that experience. And I met some of the smartest people I've ever met in my entire life. and and people who wanted to change the system. People who thought the Swift system was an absolute joke, which it is, where, you know, if you don't get your wire transfer in by 5:00 on a Friday afternoon, the biggest banks in the world get to keep your money and effectively earn interest on your money for a, you know, 72-hour period of time until, you know, midday on the following Monday. You had a financial system that was fundamentally broken. And it drove us crazy. And and it was all because of politics. Had this not happened to us politically, had they not tried to shut off one of the, you know, biggest real estate companies in the country, one of, you know, the the largest brands around the world, some could say one of the most powerful brands and and families around the world. They did this to us. You know what they can do to the everyday person? They don't stand a chance. And by the way, this is the United States of America, let alone what they do to people, you know, around the world in second and third world countries. They don't stand a chance. And that's what made me a believer in digital assets. And that's what got me to to to find, you know, and you know, American Bitcoin, which is company. And that's why I come to every single one of these these seminars. That's why I advocate like hell for an industry that I believe in because guess what? No one will ever cancel us again. We won't allow them to ever cancel us again. And if those big banks who have prayed on so many people and destroyed so much financial freedom, not just here in America, but around the world, you know, as they're giving out, as they're paying out 10 basis points on money market accounts to grandma, you know, while they're borrowing at 4 1.5%. Give me a break. Is that real finance? Is that a first world market? To me, it's not. You know, you give one of the big banks your money, you give them 100,000 bucks. You know how much they have to legally keep in the bank? 10%. Which would you rather have? You know, and you and by the way, you go to that bank and you ask them to withdraw $10,000. You know what they do? They turn you over to the IRS and they tell you to come back in 3 weeks to get your money because they don't have enough at the bank. This isn't real finance. You know, you're a person that is an 800 FICO score and you want to go get a mortgage. You know, you and your wife or you and your husband want to go get a mortgage. It takes you 120 days to go through a process with a bank that you've banked at for the last 20 years, having never missed a payment, ever done anything wrong. Is that proper finance? It's not. And so, I became hellbent on fixing the system. I became hellbent on on taking on these banks and fixing the system because it's the only way you can put them back in their place. And so, you know, that's my story. I never thought in the wildest world that we would have been cancelled as a family and that we would have been thrown away like dogs. And honestly, in retrospect, the world works on kind of, you know, inverse consequences. It's the greatest thing in retrospect looking back that's ever happened because it truly opened my eyes to a whole new horizon and and caused me to meet some of the greatest people that you'll ever know. And many of them are in this room right now. One thing that I have to say is you don't have to be the Trumps. And you know um unfortunately it was very political. Unfortunately it's one of the most powerful families in the world and you know they were targeted but it could happen to everybody. And uh if you don't think it can you're wrong and I don't have to sell to this crowd because I understand you get that but I I'll just tell a quick two second story. I was in Greece with my family in late June of 2015 and the economy was not great. If you remember, they were calling the pigs back then. And capital controls came in. What does that mean? That meant that I don't care if you had millions of euros in the bank, you could only take 60 million 60 euro a day out of your bank account. The cash machines weren't giving money out. If you were in Cypress, they were even taking your money. It's like, is this is this capitalism? It's it's unbelievable. And I I could not and and and and these capital controls were for the entire country. Not singled out to the most powerful family. It was for everybody. It could happen to you. It could happen to me. It could happen to all of us. So that's what I said, wa and not and also knowing that it didn't it wasn't just a day or a week. It lasted for close to five years now. They let up a little bit by a little bit, but it was it was terrible. And so, you know, having run a major bank, the antiquated systems that most the entire banking system has, as Eric mentioned, Swift, this and that, people have actually all the banks were silent. And a year ago, they were all talking bad about Bitcoin. But we know they got the clue. They're not stupid. They had to say that because they were behind the eight-ball. And what what did they do behind the scenes? They were working 24/7 to catch up and to come along. And guess what? What did Morgan Stanley do last week? You know, what's JP Morgan doing? What's everybody that said they would never touch it? It was for criminals. Whatever. They're all in it. And so kudos to this crowd for being the believers. You guys won. Um, fantastic. All right, we're going to do somewhat lightning round here, but I really want to get to the train. Uh Lynn Alden, who wrote a great book called Broken Money, has a phrase, nothing stops this train. And it's a it's like a political comment, but it's totally apolitical because no matter who's in office, the the debt goes up. It's they they both agree on that, I guess. And the money supply, as you both you all know, went from like 11 trillion to 22 trillion. This is a silent tax. It's inflation. We you guys all understand this. I want to ask you though, will what happens? Like first of all, could the train stop or could it slow down? Are we just headed for like debt city? Will the strategic reserve actually help hedge that or could somebody actually balance the budget one of these decades? Eric, >> how much time do you have? This train's not slowing down. In fact, this train's only getting faster and faster and faster. A couple things. First of all, great legislation has been put in that's been incredibly pro- crypto. Second of all, you have an entire, you know, government in this country that's behind cryptocurrency. Third of all, you have every country around the world watching the United States of America and watching exactly what they're doing and frankly copying the legislation that's happening over here. And fourth of all, guys, we become too big and we become too powerful and we become too vocal. They are not stopping us. They are not putting this cat back in the bag. It's not happening. It will never happen. I don't care who you put in there. They will not put this cat back in the bag. We've won this. We have won this. And we are only accelerating this this great race. And you better believe it is dangerous. You better believe government spending is dangerous. Look at what I I don't want this to be political. I I want to try and stay as far away from this as humanly possible, but you know, just go up to Minnesota, you know, look at look at the fraud that they were able to find up there. And yet they try and eliminate $18 billion worth of fraud and and guess what happens? They put up every obstacle to not eliminate fraud in the country. And this is the United States of America. We have the best system by far in the world. Hands down is not even close. You know, if it's hard for us to do, if it's a strain for us to do in a government that wants to get rid of fraud, in a government that invented Doge, in an envir, you know, in a in a government that wants to cut the hell out of the budget and be as efficient as humanly possible, no other country around the world stands a chance. And I think that is your case and point for Bitcoin and for digital assets. >> All right. Yeah. I mean that's obviously a crucial selling point for being a depmentment hedge and uh it's fascinating and you know the strategic reserve obviously John you know is that something that actually ironically could be used by governments to hedge their own out of control spending >> look if you look traditionally what are in the strategic reserves I'll I'll talk about the United States treasuries mortgages great safe products right liquid mortgages but what are the returns If you start putting Bitcoin in there and we ride this from 80,000 to a million plus, don't you think that's going to help put a dent in the in in the in the deficit? It definitely will. Stable coins, another phenomenal thing. All bet by treasuries and dollars as some people may not want to buy uh treasuries as much as they used to. Well, guess what? We got stable coin companies that are the six largest buyers of US treasuries in the world right now. So these companies are eliminating former countries that were supporting you know the treasuries. So this ecosystem of Bitcoin and crypto is definitely helping the United States and the whole world. >> All right, last question really single word answer. Okay, people like price targets. I'm not I'm not allowed to give them, but I like what other people do. The year is 2030. Right now, the price is 76,000 77,000, something like that. What is the price of Bitcoin in 2030? Best guess, Eric, then John. >> So, a long time ago, I said that Bitcoin was going to hit a million dollars. And I I have absolute conviction in my mind that Bitcoin is going to hit a million dollars. I don't know if it's 2030. I don't know if it's 2031, but I absolutely believe it gets there. I I believe we are in the infancy. I think our best days are ahead of us, guys. The compression is happening is happening right now in ways that so many people can't even comprehend. And I've never been more bullish on this asset class in my life. >> All right, John, can you give me a number? Are you going to go with a million, too? >> Listen, uh, I was asked the same question in Abu Dhabi at this conference um, a few months ago, and my answer was a million dollars. It has not changed. If anything, I think it's at least that. >> All right. bullish up here. I want to give a nice round of applause for our two great panelists. Thank you very much, guys. >> Thanks, Eric. >> Every year, this community comes together to celebrate, to debate, to build what comes next. And every year, the stage gets bigger. Sound money center stage. So where do you go to celebrate the next chapter in Bitcoin history? You come home. Nashville, July 2027.