Mark Moss: Building a Personal Treasury with a Perpetual Bitcoin Machine | Bitcoin 2026

All right, welcome. Thanks for welcoming me here in Bitcoin Vegas 2026. I think this is now the seventh or eighth Bitcoin conference I've been at. And I love being here with all the Bitcoiners cuz you guys are the smart ones. You believe in Bitcoin, the most pristine asset collateral we've ever seen. And you made the right move. You bought it. You own it. That's the good part. The bad news is almost everybody in this room is still going to lose the game. Not because you didn't buy the right asset, but because you're using that asset in the old fiat system and you're playing by an old set of rules that no longer work. Now, the personal treasury, where's my the personal treasury is the answer to this. It's a way that we can take Bitcoin and build it into a system that can build wealth for the rest of our lives and for future generations. It's so that we can pass down not just an asset, but a system. Today, I'm going to break that down for you. Now, this is a question that I get asked almost all the time. Probably every day, I get this coming across social media. How much Bitcoin do I need to retire? I believe there was a panel here on stage yesterday and that was the entire topic of that conversation. How much Bitcoin do I need? Do I need 10 Bitcoin? Will one Bitcoin be enough? 6.15 Bitcoin? What is the amount of Bitcoin I need? But the problem with that question is it assumes that you're going to have to sell your Bitcoin in order to live. So, what will the valuation of that Bitcoin be by the time I'm ready to retire? And will it be enough to fund my lifestyle? and I cross my fingers and I hope that I die before I run out of money. The problem is that what you did is you just swapped the asset instead of the mutual fund. You got Bitcoin, but you kept the same broken strategy. And so what that is is a fiat mindset dressed in Bitcoin orange. You got the right asset, but it's the wrong system. Now, the reason why this has become the default plan is because of this chart right here. What we can see is since 1971, you guys all know about 1971. We'll talk about that more in a second, but since 1971, workers have gotten extremely more productive. Every single year, more and more productive just like they are right now with AI. But the problem is as the value was creating going up, wages flatlined. And while a lot of people look at that and think that it's hard to get ahead of because of that, it's just a mechanism. But it's deliberately engineered mechanism and it's been designed it's been designed to run that way for over 50 years. And so I want to talk about the paradox here and oh shoot I have less time than I thought I did. So I got to talk even faster. Uh the paradox is that today in today's world with fiat debasement it's never been harder to achieve the American dream. It's never been harder to live. It's never been harder to buy the home and have the wife stay at home and live on one income. You earn income. you pay a huge amount of taxes. You have to live on whatever is left and then hopefully you're stacking sats. You're staying humble. You're stacking sats 5% 10% a year. But on the other side, if we understand how to use the mechanism, it's never been easier to build wealth. Both are true at the same time. I'm going to show that to you in this talk. Okay, let's go through this real quick. The system is not broken. Yeah, fix the money, fix the world. We're here to fix the world. But right now, we have a system and it's not broken. It's actually working exactly as it's designed. It's just not working in your best interest. It's not an accident. It wasn't incompetence. It was engineered. We can go back to pre-913, pre- Federal Reserve, we were on a gold-based equitybased system. Equitybased system. Fast forward creation of the Federal Reserve, 1944, Brettton Woods agreement. 1971, after the whole world was put onto the US dollar gold standard, the whole world is rugpulled. Nixon rugpulled the world, took us off the gold standard, and since 1971, we've been on a fiat-based, a debt-based monetary system. The problem is that most people are still playing the game for the old system, not realizing we're in a new one. Now, this is something that you see and hear all the time. There's panels up here talking about the Cantalon effect. If you've read any of these books, the Bitcoin Standard, Broken Money, Natalie Bernell's book, you've heard about this Cantalon effect. And it explains that whoever's closest to the money supply gets the benefit. And we're all we're all a victim to this. And if we can just get onto a Bitcoin standard, we can fix this. How it works is level one, whoever's closest to the money, the commercial banks, create money through lending. Level two, closest to the money supply, those with collateral, they borrow first. They take that new money and they start buying assets. Level three, the asset prices start going up. As credit expands, real estate goes up, stocks goes up, of course, Bitcoin is more volatile, it goes up even more. Level four, after that happens, then consumer prices start going up. Level five, where most of us are at the bottom, our wages go up last. Our wages go up last after everything's already more expensive. Prices are more expensive, asset prices are more expensive. That's the Cantalon effect. five different levels, but almost everyone lives on the bottom rung. Not because they have to, because nobody showed them the ladder. We're going to fix this. We're going to build a system for this today. Now, we have to understand at the top, the banks create the money. The commercial banks create the money and then people close to the money supply use that money to buy assets. But you see, almost everyone here has a bank account at the same banks. And almost everyone has access to lending and credit the same way. It's what you use it for. The same bank, the same credit, the same access, but different outcomes. And the variable is it what you use the credit for. And here is just the chart that kind of nails this point right here. The system is not broken. This is not a failure. What you can see right here is the system is working exactly as designed. Again, 1971 where the arrow is, you can see the line going down there. And you can see since 1971, the top 1% of earners have seen their wealth go up and up and up at a parabolic rate. While everybody else, the bottom 90% have seen their wages stay flat. They're not smarter than you. They're not luckier than you. They just understand how to play the game differently. So let's take the Cantalon effect and let's flip that upside down and let's lay out the Cantalon playbook. So the Cantalon playbook is using two things. the cantalon effect which I've already explained new credit creation and money creates buys assets push those assets higher but that sits inside of this macro loop now you've heard Lyn Alden says that nothing stops this train which means the governments can't stop won't stop they have to continue printing more money to continue expand and so as the deficits continue to get bigger and bigger as they have more and more debt they have to push the cost of that debt lower and lower so then rates go down they need the debt to be cheap it's one of the reasons why the Trump administration ation is so bent on getting rates down. Not to save the economy, to make it cheaper for the government to manage the debt. Now, when they when they borrow more money and push the rates down, then inflation goes up, but it does two things. Number one, it destroys the real value of the existing debt. So all the people that took the debt, it all gets destroyed through inflation. And at the same time, it pushes asset prices higher. So in this macro loop, the government can borrow more. They can run bigger deficits. They need cheaper debt. They push more inflation. Asset prices go higher. Debts get destroyed and just repeat over and over. And that's a cycle that just never ends. This isn't political. Every single president, both parties, the debt continues to expand. And so for us, we just need to decide which side of this loop do we want to be on. We want to be on the left side where we're just working for wages and we're paying our taxes and we're saving our five or 10% stacking sachs. Or do we want to be an owner? Do we want to own assets? Do we want to own pristine collateral? Again, Bitcoiners already made the right call. You already bought the right asset. You're ahead of 99% of the world. But if you're on the wrong side of the system, it's still going to break down in a fiat liquidation plan. So, what we want to use, we're going to build this system. We're going to use both the canal on effect close to the money supply using cheap credit to buy assets. And then we use the macro loop where those two things combine. Assets inflated by the canthalon effect, debt destroyed by the macro loop. You don't do anything. We use the loop's energy to build your own personal treasury. It's what I call the judo move. Now, real quick, let's go shout out to Naval for this quote here. But before I break out this playbook, I got to go real quick here. I got to say something. And I say this as a Bitcoiner. I say this as somebody who's been making Bitcoin content trying to orange pill people for over a decade. I say this as somebody who read Ron Paul's book in the Fed and I'm all here to end the Fed, right? We're here to end the Fed. We want to get rid of this fiat monetary system. We want to go to a sound money system. We believe that can fix the world and it can change the world. I'm here for it. I'm trying to bring it in as fast as I can. I'm a partner at the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund. We're literally deploying money into companies trying to build the world that we want. So while I'm working as fast and hard as I can to build that world, we also have to realize that we live in the current world that we're in. And the quote by Nal says that the only real sign of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life. So certainly we want to build this and I want to build that world for my kids and my grandkids and your kids and grandkids. But I also have to live in this world as it is. So you and I, we know the money system is broken. We know the Fed is the problem. We understand the Cantalon effect. But then we go home and we stack our stats 5% a year because we don't want to give the system any energy, right? But you can believe the system is wrong and use the tools while it still exists at the same time. All right? And I call this the judo move. So instead of pulling out of the system and abstaining, we want to take the energy from the system and use it against itself. Some people call it a speculative attack. I got to speed up through this. Now, this strategy has been used to build wealth for millennia. The problem is it's only been available to the billionaires because they only had enough money and assets to make it work. But Bitcoin is the cheat code. Bitcoin sitting inside of this system allows all of us to now have the same playbook, the hardest asset in human history. And the Canalon effect now flows new money into assets first. And of course, Bitcoin is the hardest asset. The macro loop pushes permanent inflation. And Bitcoin is the the perfect inflation hedge. The tax code rewards long-term holders, owners, and of course, Bitcoin rewards patience. So, Bitcoin isn't fighting the system. Bitcoin is fitted perfectly inside the system for us. All right. So, let's think about this. To build our own personal treasury, think about a central bank. A central bank acquires hard assets, issues credit against the reserves, never liquidates or sells the reserves. Sovereign wealth funds the same thing. And so we want to think about that. How do we buy Bitcoin, the best asset in history and issue credit against our reserves and never liquidate that? Now, my grandfather understood this, and I'm sure you guys have family members that did as well. My grandfather understood that he was supposed to buy as many assets as he could. So, he bought land and he bought houses and he bought um office buildings, but then when he died, my father and my aunts and uncles sold it all. They didn't understand the system. They did what the fiat word told them to do. Sell the assets, get the money, spend the money. And that's the fire. That's the fiat virus. Stack Bitcoin for 40 years, retire, start selling my Bitcoin. Hope I don't run out. Die with zero. All right. So, we want to change this. Um, see, how fast can I go here? Uh, so the old old track is earn the government takes 20, 30, 40%. Live on what's left. Stack five or 10% in stack uh in stats if you're lucky. If you skip your morning coffee every day, retire, start selling. But what we want to do is run the cantillian playbook. So we want to earn money. I'm going to show you how to do this on the next slide. Earn money. We want to reclaim some of the money that we would send to taxes and invest that by acquiring more assets. We want to use those assets collateral to issue credit like a central bank. And then that funds our lifestyle and liquidity to again buy more assets. Let's take a look at this. So the perpetual Bitcoin machine has a name, has a mechanism, five steps. Number one, just like a bank, just like the Cantalon effect, whoever's closest to the money supply, you have an account at the bank and you have access to credit and we can use credit to acquire tax depreciation assets using the tax code using the system's own tool. So we can buy real estate, we can buy all types of equipment, but we can buy Bitcoin mining equipment. And if I buy Bitcoin mining equipment, then the IRS allows me to use that depreciation to write off my taxes. So now, without having to make any more money, instead of giving a huge chunk of money to the IRS, I get to keep that money and I get to buy more Bitcoin with that money. That's step number two, reclaim. Reclaim by investing into assets that generate depreciation deductions. The government is literally paying me to buy Bitcoin mining equipment. Then I use that money I've saved to acquire more capital. New money flows into Bitcoin every single year. Plus, my Bitcoin miners are producing more Bitcoin every year. My asset base, my collateral base is growing. And it's a loop. So now I have all this new Bitcoin that I could issue credit against to buy more Bitcoin miners to reclaim my tax money that would have gone to the government to buy more Bitcoin. And every year the new Bitcoin mined and produced gives me ability to create more credit to write off more taxes to buy more Bitcoin. And it compounds and it compounds and we can pass this system forward. It's a self- sustaining system. The credit funds the assets. The assets generate reclaim taxes. The reclaimed taxes buy more Bitcoin. This is the system that we can pass down. Now, I do want to say something really quickly, especially to my hardcore Bitcoin fans. They think that in this new world on a Bitcoin standard, credit goes away. I don't necessarily agree with that, but I do agree that credit is very dangerous. It's like fire. So, I'm not standing here telling you to go issue a bunch of credit recklessly and buy Bitcoin. It's not what I'm here to talk about. What I'm talking about is to engineer a system. Engineering system requires discipline. But the people running the perpetual Bitcoin machine, they don't like they don't yolo into it. They study the system and they build the machine. Now, I want to say real quick, but just imagine. Imagine owning a system where your Bitcoin reserve grows faster and faster and faster without working harder because the machine you build is compounding. The Cantalon effect close into your assets. The macro loop destroys the debt and inflates your reserves. And the tax code allows you to build this Bitcoin machine, reclaiming that money and putting it back into more Bitcoin. That's what sovereignty looks like. Now you know why it's never been harder if I play by the old rules to build wealth. But if I use the system as it's designed today, not the one that we hope comes eventually, but the one we have today, it's never been easier to make money. And I'm going to close with this because you know in the white paper we talked about the time chain. Life is a time chain. We are Bitcoiners. We are here. We believe in proof of work. And my life should represent the proof that I was here and the work that I put in. I'm not going to die with zero. I'm not going to leave the world off worse than I found it. My life will be represented by the block that I have. And the next generation will add on the next block. They're not going to start from zero. They're going to start from a higher place. And every single generation in my bloodline will start from a higher level. That's what Bitcoiners do. We think long term. Don't save for your future just to sell it and have your kids start with zero. Build the machine. Run the playbook. Fund your future. Be the central bank for your family. And yes, leave them Bitcoin. But even more importantly, leave them the system. All right. Thanks so much. 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.