🔓 More headroom

Time changes all things but the past.

In other words, the past is immutable. And while bitcoin transactions certainly share that property, Bitcoin discourse has evolved considerably over the past 17 years.

Few know that better than today’s Supply Shock guest, Patrick Murck.

Murck is an American technology lawyer and entrepreneur who played a key role in legitimizing Bitcoin in its early years.

He co-founded the Bitcoin Foundation and served as its general counsel between 2012 and 2014, and then as its executive director until 2015. 

More recently, Murck in 2023 founded and became CEO of Surus, an institutional-grade asset management platform that sits between traditional finance and the digital asset space.

Rizzo asked Murck about how it must feel to see the price of bitcoin beyond six figures, considering he was building in the Bitcoin space when it was worth only a few bucks.

“ Yeah. I mean it's interesting, right? I was never a huge price guy and I'm still not really a huge price guy,” Murck said. “It's cool and it's a great validation signal and it kind of creates bandwidth to do things now that you couldn't do when the market cap was smaller.”

“But when I think back, at least for me, the narrative that really stuck with me and why I spent all my time on it and why it became my life…it wasn't to hit $114,000 a bitcoin. And it wasn't to have Wall Street diving into it. It was for people to have more autonomy and freedom in their financial lives.”

Murck went on to say that Bitcoin has indeed achieved some of that, and that the conversation around money and finance is very different than it was in 2008, 2009 and certainly in 2012 and 2013 — “serious wins that we can put in the bank.”

But when it comes to the BTC treasury companies and Wall Street games, he doesn’t really care about those aspects of modern-day Bitcoin at all.

“When you get to these larger [bitcoin] valuations, you just create more headroom for economic activity. That's really important when you think of market cap and price, like I get that.”

“At the same time, if all the bitcoin just gets locked up in publicly traded companies, then I don't know what we've really accomplished, right? If it just becomes a store of value that is basically held by a few publicly traded companies and a couple of whales, then I don't think we've really succeeded, at least in Bitcoin-specific terms, even if we changed the conversation and things like that.”

“And that would kind of be a bummer.”

Catch the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and X.

— David

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• BTC/USD has retreated by around 5% from yesterday’s all-time high. Price as of 10:10 am ET: $118,240.

• Standard Chartered has launched spot trading for bitcoin and ether via its UK branch for institutional clients, per Reuters.

• Local media reports that Kazakhstan is considering adding bitcoin to its national reserves.