BTC221: Bitcoin Self-Repaying Mortgage Products w/ CJ Konstantinos (Bitcoin Podcast)
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Hey everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals Podcast. Boy, do I have a banger of a discussion this week with CJ Constantinos. CJ is the founder of the company People's Reserve, where he's getting ready to launch a loan product for people interested in buying a home, posting some of their Bitcoin as collateral, in addition to the collateral that the home already provides.

But by doing this, you're able to significantly lower the interest rate on the loan because you pose less risk to the lending provider. This is a fascinating topic and no one does a better job of explaining the mechanics behind it all than CJ. So without further delay, here's my chat with the thoughtful CJ Konstantinos.

Celebrating 10 years, you are listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pysh.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the show. I'm here with CJ, and I'm pretty excited about this conversation because you're doing some pretty neat things, sir. So welcome to the show. CJ LeBron: Well, thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here. I've been a longtime fan of your work and I've learned a lot, so it's kind of surreal for me to be on the other side of the screen here. Preston Pysh : Oh my goodness. Thank you for that. CJ, I want to start off where we always start off these conversations. Tell us your Bitcoin story, because before we get into these incredible things that you're working on and building,

Sometimes it's helpful for people just to kind of hear your story. How did you find it? As a side note, I literally had a conversation with a gentleman today that, this is just so funny, I have to share this story. He was telling me that back when Bitcoin was in the pennies, he looked like a DEA agent and nobody would sell him marijuana.

So he went out and bought a couple hundred Bitcoin to go buy marijuana on the dark web. And that's how he became Orange Pill. So everybody's got their crazy Bitcoin Orange Pill story. Let's hear yours. Hopefully, I don't know. Let's hear what your story is. Yeah. Well, mine wasn't that lucky, but man, what a crazy story that is.

Found out about Bitcoin in 2013. And I learned from Jeff Berwick, calls himself the dollar vigilante. So I subscribed to his content and listened to all of his things, learned from him. And it was really interesting because around that time in school, I had done accounting and moved on to finance. So I was learning things that I'd pay to learn. And it was cash.

capturing my attention. It was very intriguing. But of course, just like most people who start in Bitcoin, I thought, you know, this volatility is going to be amazing because I can buy and sell and I just click the buttons and I'm going to be rich. I mean, I'm going to be the best trader in the world. And of course, you know, I get absolutely demolished and smashed. I watch Bitcoin go from a hundred bucks up to a thousand bucks and then all the way back down.

And I'm like, okay, I have no idea what this is. I have no idea why these things are happening. I better find out what's going on here. So I started to take a deeper dive and that's where the fun really began for me because it became more of a passion. I got into mining. So I started building my own rigs and I'd never built a computer before. I actually built like wooden frames, like how silly and stupid of me to do that. But I was just so eager to like get hands on and kind of learn how it worked. And I started plugging machines in the wall and they started making money and

And I was like, well, time to scale this puppy up. That time I lived in a townhouse with my girlfriend and I broke our air conditioner from all the heat. She's like, that's it. You're done. Get out of here. So it was like one of those learning experiences. But I think the real value I got from that, though, to this day, I still recommend people pick up hobby mining, not to make money, but

but to learn how the network works, to learn how price discovery works with a proof of work consensus protocol, with the cost of production of Bitcoin being the starting point for price discovery in the marketplace, that has just delivered an immense amount of knowledge and understanding to me, which I was able to transform into the Bitcoin fair value algorithm, which miners use to properly manage their treasury through this commodity cycle. So that was like my first real big orange pill. And then

I want to go back to that, but keep going. No, you were going to say something else. Finish up that thought and then we'll go back to that. So the harshness about getting into the industry was that I had no idea what the difficulty adjustment was. I had no idea what the having was.

And, you know, I'm sitting there doing calculations on my computer, like, oh, if I get this many machines, I'm going to make this much. And if I order these new machines that I'm really going to be cranking, but you don't account for difficulty with everybody else getting those machines delivered, hash rate increasing, block times going less than 10 minutes, difficulty going up every 2016 blocks. And then you get hit with the halving where your profitability gets cut in half in one day with no mercy. So that was like,

Wow. That was my next big orange pill that really made me fall in love with the protocol and understand that it was an engineered money. It was strategically designed to leverage these natural laws of economics and commodity cycles and price discovery to empower its holders. And I've been hooked ever since.

Yeah, I think people that are new often misunderstand the halving, what it does by cutting everybody's profits in half, like the snap of a finger. I personally try to explain it using like a gold, like if I was going to mine gold and you just take any gold miner in the world and the halving happens, you snap your fingers and now all of that equipment that used to find 100 ounces a day now is finding 50 ounces a day and there's nothing you can do about it. Do you have, you know,

You said that that was kind of a pivotal moment for yourself to really kind of deeply understand how this all works. I'm curious if there's other things about Bitcoin that were these kind of like aha moments or that really solidified your belief in it.

If they are, tell us what that is. And then if you have any examples to help people really kind of synthesize it or visualize it so that it makes more sense. Because here we are talking about the having, but without a real world example for people to kind of visualize it and see it, sometimes it's difficult.

Yeah, I love that gold example because that's how I linked it in my brain as well. And I always tell people, actually, one of my best Twitter posts and my highlights is about what they call the all-in sustaining cost in the gold marketplace. And this is the cost that it takes a miner to rip the gold from the ground

and sell it into the marketplace. And we know the natural laws of economics and price discovery work with that free market price signal, where profit is the invisible hand that drives the market. So the cost of production is really the beginning of the margin, because if the price goes below the cost, there's no profit to be made. So there's no incentive to expand supply. And that dynamic then allows you to start to understand, okay, hey, when I go into the grocery store, I'm not making a bid on what I want to pay for the item. The

The producer is responsible for setting the price point. And when he's looking at his balance sheet, he needs to understand that all in sustaining cost so that he can ask for a price above the cost because that's why he's in business to make a profit. And what's amazing is if you become too greedy, then the competition within the rest of the marketplace is going to undercut your price. So it's like a natural mechanism to balance the marketplace. And Bitcoin takes that mechanism and leverages it

to drive value into the network itself. So I always say, you know, gold has an all in sustaining cost. And as they devalue the dollars, the cost of production is going to continue to the rise because the labor, the land, the materials are going to rise.

as the dollars are diluted, which means that cost needs to be passed on to the consumer. So if you want to access the value proposition of gold, you have to pay a price above the cost. Well, it's the same thing for Bitcoin. If you want to access the value proposition of Bitcoin, which in today's world of lies, a truth ledger happens to be probably one of the best value propositions that exists, then you're going to need to pay a price above the cost. The magic happens that Bitcoin is the only commodity in the world because of its strategic engineering that

that it can actually raise its own cost of production. Imagine if gold, I mean, we talked about how the halving could double the price of your equipment. Imagine if gold just decided, eh, you know what? I'm going to make myself harder to find today. It's alive, it's breathing, and it's a mechanism built into the money itself, which is why I like to refer to Bitcoin as engineered money. And perhaps, in my opinion, probably the first form of true money because of absolute digital scarcity. Preston Pyshenko I want to pull on that thread where you said that

It makes itself more difficult to find. Because that's another interesting analogy for people that don't understand what the difficulty adjustment is. So I'm going to put my own spin, then I'm curious to hear your admonishment to this. But the way I would describe it to people in the gold space, it'd be like collectibles.

collectively, globally, and it's important that you look at it globally. If everybody would hire twice as many people and have twice as much CapEx to mine more gold tomorrow, the gold in the ground would sense this and make itself twice as hard to be found if you did it. And there's no way to physically represent this other than digitally, and that's what Bitcoin has done.

And for people that have never studied it or never really dug into how the protocol works, I think this point is lost on them as to how the scarcity of it keeps ratcheting up every four years. And this is a key component, this difficulty adjustment, which is different than the halving, is a core component that enables the speed at which the Bitcoin are coming onto the market. I'm curious to hear your take on this and whether you see it as the

the having and the difficulty adjustment kind of working hand in hand? Do you see them as separate things or just your general thoughts on it? I think you said that beautifully. And I would like to add that it's not that complex of a process. So for people who don't understand the difficulty adjustment, every 2016 blocks, which is roughly every two weeks, the protocol will look at block times. And if the average block time is less than 10 minutes, then the difficulty will increase. And that increases the cost of production. Now,

Now, what's amazing is, and this is, it reminds me of the Fed. It reminds me of the central bank. Is the difficulty adjustment the central bank of Bitcoin? I love that question because when the economy gets too hot, you raise those interest rates, try to slow it down. Economy gets cool, you lower the interest rates, try to heat it up. Well, we have this mechanism in Bitcoin too. When the hash rate gets too hot, you raise that difficulty and that decreases profitability and some machines will be forced to turn off because they won't be profitable anymore, vice versa.

If the hash rate is slowing down, blocks take longer than 10 minutes, difficulty can decrease, increasing profitability and then re-incentivizing growth of the network. It's absolutely amazing. It is literally alive and breathing and there's no other asset in the world that we've ever seen like it ever before. Preston Pysh : I love this point. I've never heard that before, that it's basically acting like the intention of a central bank. The intention of the central bank is to make those adjustments.

and never put more units, the intent is to never put more units into the system, but is absorbing the blow basically. The difference here that you're talking about is the frequency at which that absorption and release is happening is every 10 minutes, which is way different than what a central bank does. I would argue they're doing it every five years or whatever a standard credit cycle is. Some people would probably argue eight years, somewhere in that ballpark. But this is happening every 10 minutes.

It's happening programmatically where it doesn't matter what your opinion is, whether it should be looser or tighter. It's just math. And there's no one person making that decision, right? Absolutely. I mean, you're spot on. Look, let's remove the human element. Let's remove politics and emotion. You want to talk about data dependent? Bitcoin is the ultimate form of data dependency because it's simple mathematics. So it's not that complex of a

a process to understand. And then when you, and I do consider it separate from the having, because the having immediately reduces that block reward by 50%. There is no mercy on that. There's no metric to gauge. It's just every time we get to that point, we hit a having block reward down by 50%. But the difficulty adjustment has a little bit more of a breath of life in it and to where it can adjust up, it can adjust down and it does it over that two week period. It's basically the optimization of

of a mechanism to help regulate and control growth of a network. It's a beautiful mechanism. Preston Pysh : I love that example. That's so good. Okay. So you became Orange Pill, you deeply understand this. And so you're like, "Hey, I want to build in the space." You start People's Reserve. Talk to us about what was the motivation behind this. Tell us everything you've got. Let's hear it. Robert Leonard : Yeah. So unfortunately, I paid a lot of the research and development costs that went into this through my really bad

decisions of letting go of Bitcoin. So People's Reserve is a company that is designed to empower we the people, to empower us holders who have been responsibly saving in Bitcoin. I think the biggest problem us Bitcoiners have right now is we have a lot of wealth trapped in what I like to call the internet economy. And the internet economy is this amazing domain. No one country can control it and no one country can out-compete it. And we actually have a free market yield curve in

in the internet economy on its reserve asset, Bitcoin. So it's the only economy in the world that is number one, debt-free, and number two, offers a free market interest rate on its reserve asset. So as a Bitcoiner, my first question was, okay, well, I have a lot of this wealth tied in the internet economy. How do I access it? How can I unlock this wealth? It's trapped equity. And one of the first solutions is that you can borrow against it. Unfortunately, with the mechanisms that are set up right now,

absurd interest rates are required in order for you to tap into that equity. So it kind of mitigates any reason to actually take out the loan, unless you're going to have investments in something that are going to produce at a really high CAGR that you're extremely confident in. It's a bad carry trade, if you will. The other thing is we have Bitcoin and we want to figure out how do we create cashflow? That old fiat mind disease I like to call cashflow. 60% CAGR somehow isn't good enough, right? We need cashflow. But for me personally, I...

bought my first house, and right now the damages are up to 9 million. So if I had just kept that Bitcoin, I'd be $9 million richer. And it's going to get worse as time goes on, especially as we're viewing the monetization of Bitcoin right now with our own eyes. But being forced to sell the Bitcoin to buy the house, which was a decision that me and my wife made, we were having a kid, people need a home. It's part of the hierarchy of needs. And

And you want a nice home to be able to raise your family and make memories. I mean, it's way worth it. But I say, I'm alive on the outside, but I'm dead on the inside because I know this house, I have no chance of getting anywhere near the amount of Bitcoin that I paid for it. Real estate is absolutely crashing against Bitcoin. So that was a big motivation for our Bitcoin powered mortgage product, which we call self-repaying mortgage. And then on the flip side of that, our Bitcoin bond product is about the cashflow. You

at some point in time, you want to escape the rat race. You want to not have to go work for the man and clock hours, and you want your equity to be able to produce that cashflow for you. And I think that's why real estate became so popular because it is that source of cashflow. And what do we want to do? I don't want to sell my Bitcoin. I don't want to sell my, there's nothing that can convince me to sell my Bitcoin. I think if you sell your Bitcoin, you're a fool and you need to study it a little bit more. And trust me, I was a fool. So I had to study it a little bit more.

I'm saying that because I made those mistakes and I want to help you not make those mistakes. And the Bitcoin bond allows you to get the cash flows that you would get from a treasury product, but also at the same time, it maintains exposure to Bitcoin's upside. So you see some of these products are starting to come out now, but the Bitcoin bond offers 100% downside risk with infinite upside potential. The upside potential is not capped.

It's actually the price performance of Bitcoin that produces the yield on the Bitcoin bond. So these are the products that we've developed at People's Reserve. And we have a plethora of them where we've taken Bitcoin and we fuse them into credit and debt products. But these two products are held close to my heart because, like I said, I had to pay for the R&D that went into these. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.

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All right, back to the show. Preston Pysh : I mean, it's so hard. I was having another conversation with a person today and people just don't know back 10 years ago when you were in this space, we had no scaling solution, right? Lightning was talked about. It wasn't a thing and nobody had a clue whether that would scale or anybody would start running a node and opening channels or any of these things.

It's been so de-risked that when people come to it today and they're talking about some of these risks, it's very smirk-worthy for people that have seen where this was a long time ago, where there really was deep technical risk in whether it was going to actually become something. And so the reason I say all that is the decisions that you're talking about, you definitely need to be cut some slack because I think most people would have bought the house too, and you just never know.

what it's going to turn into. So I love this. So just to recap, three things, a Bitcoin-backed loan, self-paying mortgages, and Bitcoin bond. The one I want to talk about in more detail is self-paying mortgages. Explain this as if I have a house that I want to buy in one year from now. This is theoretical or anything. And I would love to utilize a product like this. So walk me through it from the user's perspective, from the person who's wanting to buy that house.

Walk me through what this would look like, what this would feel like after I would initiate the product. What would the month-to-month feel like and look like? Just go through some of that with us with a lot of detail. Yeah, sure. Absolutely. Happy to. So the first thing is there's a couple of issues. And before I dive into the product, I want to make this issue clear because we talked about earlier how price can go up and it creates profit and that incentivizes supply. Well, what's really interesting is when we have the proper barcode,

borrowing tools and products and services like we see coming from People's Reserve, there is no price the marketplace can offer to incentivize selling. So typically, the market would incentivize you to sell by raising the value of your Bitcoin. But look no further than Michael Saylor to understand when you're borrowing money and the value of Bitcoin goes up, you don't sell your Bitcoin, you borrow more money and buy more Bitcoin. So the

There's a really interesting dynamic here where we're getting into a time where I think it's going to become clear. And I think this is the marketplace's next big orange pill, really, that there is no economic way to incentivize selling of Bitcoin. The raising of the price to the person who has access to the proper products and services to borrow against their Bitcoin. There is no price that can incentivize selling. That introduces a new risk. It's called the liquidation risk.

And I think we're going to see the banks with the repeal of SAP 121 and that amazing article that you wrote with rehypothecation, the banks are going to play these games and liquidation is how they're going to get your Bitcoin. You have to be really careful on who you choose as your counterparty and why you're choosing them as your counterparty. Because it's not just about non-fractional reserve banking practices with no rehypothecation. It's also about liquidation risk because Bitcoin is volatile. We know that. It's a positive characteristic of the asset class.

Well, at People's Reserve, our mission is to remove that liquidation risk for you. So this product is, you're not directly borrowing against your Bitcoin. That needs to be well understood. Every other product in this industry, you are borrowing directly against your Bitcoin. And if the price of the Bitcoin goes down, you can get liquidated. I think that's the biggest risk for losing your Bitcoin in the near future. So how do we avoid the liquidation risk? We create contracts that don't require the Bitcoin to serve

as the main form of collateral on which upon margin has to be called. So when you sign up for a Bitcoin self-repaying mortgage, it's really like a traditional mortgage and that there's a lien against the home and that we are very biased lenders and we want to lend to qualified borrowers. However, you can post your Bitcoin as an extra component to the contract. And what we do is we take the value of your Bitcoin and we take it relative to the value of the debt and we form your LTV.

So the LTV is always going to be based on the Bitcoin value relative to the value of the debt. But that's not the only thing securing the loan. It's also the lien on the property. So what happens is we can say to you, you will not lose your Bitcoin if the price goes down. And that's a really important concept because I don't want people to lose their Bitcoin for any reason, including volatility. So what do we do is as the price goes down, what happens is the risk for the lender goes up. So

So we have to adjust your interest rate up to compensate for the additional risk. And if the price of Bitcoin goes up, vice versa, our risk goes down. We can lower that interest rate for you. And then there's a few other options that go in there as well. Like maybe you don't want to sell all of your Bitcoin. So you can sell a portion between zero and 100% of your monthly payment. And since you asked for a specific example, let's just say that our interest rate would start at like prime plus one. But the

But the more and more Bitcoin that you post as collateral, the lower and lower your interest rate can go. So I'm not going to share the exact details. We don't want to lose our first market mover advantage. But there are specific thresholds that when you move to the next threshold, your interest rate will adjust upwards or downwards. You could actually secure an interest rate with people's reserve that is prime up towards of minus of 50%. So if prime is at six, you can get three. If prime is at three, you can get one and a half.

And we're able to do this because of different mechanisms within our system. But the other important aspect to this is BTC collateral is held in multisig and there's no rehypothecation. And if there is rehypothecation, we would be in breach of contract. We're Bitcoin maxis building for Bitcoin maxis. So we want to make sure that we hit all of these important points in this product to make sure that Bitcoiners understand, wow,

People's Reserve knows that Bitcoin is the most pristine form of collateral in the world. People's Reserve knows that the Bitcoin that I've been responsible to save up plays an important role for the plans of my family and the future generations. And we want to build tools and services that empower you as responsible savers of Bitcoin, where you can sleep easy at night, not have to worry about the volatility of Bitcoin ending up leading to a margin call on the

on your home or your property or your rental property or whatever it may be. So that's the idea. That's the focus behind our products to make sure that we can empower Bitcoiners with products that remove liquidation risk, which is going to be the largest risk in the near future. All I can say is wow.

This is super exciting. What you just described is super, super exciting. And it was very crystal clear. I don't even really have any follow-on questions for you because you made it super clear. I think people often forget how important collateralization is.

when you're buying a house, let's say you only put 20% down. From the bank's perspective, they're looking at the value of the home. And as long as you have an insurance policy for a low amount of down payment that you put on it, that pretty much covers a majority of their risk. And so if you're adding a kicker of this pristine collateral that keeps going up in value against the house, it should get cheaper and cheaper from an interest rate standpoint. Just think

thinking through it because the bank doesn't have that risk anymore, especially if you post a lot of collateral in Bitcoin to basically offset the cost of the entire house. It's completely de-risked at that point. Very, very exciting. I'm curious with respect to getting some type of fixed rate based on a certain threshold of Bitcoin collateral that might be posted. Let's say I post

60% or 70% of the home's value in Bitcoin, can I get some type of fixed rate terms? Or does it seem like it's always going to be some type of arm component that's below prime based on how much is being posted? Yeah. Unfortunately, the trade-off is the adjustable rate, which allows for the liquidation risk to be removed. So if we go back to fixed rate, now you have to reintroduce the margin call and liquidation risk. To balance out that factor, you have to

adjust the rate because that's how you compensate for risk. What's so amazing about this marketplace and the internet economy is that interest rates are not just going to be based on the supply of money and the demand for loans, but the perception of counterparty risk. So it's not going to be a price control stated rate based on anchor rates like we see today. And even now, the Fed is lowering the front end of the curve by stating the federal funds rate lower, but the 10-year, which is an anchor rate for mortgages, is not listening.

is doing its own thing. So whenever you try to mess with a yield curve, you can get in trouble. And a fixed rate is actually a price control. I think that's something that's actually come to fruition because of fractional reserve banking, because of the ability to create circulating credit that's not backed by reserves, whereas Bitcoin credit is a commodity credit that's fully backed by reserves. So it's a different set of rules and laws based on free market mechanisms versus this fake world that they've kind of created and titled finance. Robert Leonard :

God, I agree with you. That statement was so profound. The foot stomp for me, folks, I just want to say this again, because I think you are so right. I think this fixed rate mortgage situation that everybody's experienced for the last four decades being commonplace is a function of the manipulated fiat fractional reserve, unpegged currency

debacle that has played out over that period of time. And I think that you're exactly right that I think moving into the coming two decades, three decades, this is going to change drastically. And I think this product that you just explained in great detail to everybody is going to be one of the main reasons why. And I think fixed rate products, although that's what I personally want to lock in, of course, and

One of the main reasons why I haven't moved out of my house is because I locked in at an incredible rate, practically nothing down on my house, kept my Bitcoin and didn't use that at that time. Preston Pysh :

Of course, I never want to give up this thing. And of course, I want to get another. But I think we're moving away from this world. I don't think that this is going to be the norm for all the reasons that you just described. I think this was a temporary kind of weird dynamic. Do you think that? Sorry to go on. It's such a profound. It's OK. Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead. No, no. I want to hear what you. I was going to say, I was going to say, because there's so many things popping in my head.

You said it perfectly. You look at your debt as an asset. Yes. But if you talk to most people, they look at it as a liability. They want you to pay off your debt or you're in bad shape. Not today. Not when the rate that you're borrowing at is lower than the rate and the increases in prices. You're actually getting paid in terms of purchasing power to borrow. And that creates the problem because you want to keep your low rate debt and God forbid, but maybe 15, 20 years, if you have a $2,000 mortgage payment, you might be able to pick those $2,000 up off the ground.

and then walk into the bank and make that payment. That is an asset to the borrower and a liability to the lender. And that's why the banks don't even hold these loans on their books. People's Reserve is going to be happy to hold a self-repay mortgage loan on our book because we've eliminated risk and we're getting a good yield on secure cashflow backed by a fully reserved asset and a real world asset.

The banks, they take their fees and then package all these mortgages together in a mortgage-backed security and then sell it off as a cashflow product because it's too risky. It's not an asset. It's too risky to keep on their book. It's actually, in real terms, it's a liability. Sorry to cut you off, but that's what triggered my mind. Preston Pysh : No, God, you're exactly right. And it's only becoming more risky with the way that inflation has been playing out since COVID. And I think that some of that is only going to persist and maybe even get stronger.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts on, so we've had President Trump made a statement just, I think, last week as he became president, and he was talking about how interest rates need to come down. So it almost seems like he's trying to reinvigorate this idea that if we can drop the interest rate on property, property values will pop. But again, we're doing this manipulated, false

of capital for home purchases. Do you think that they're going to be able to do that moving forward? And if they do, the impacts, I'm kind of curious what you think the impacts of something like that would be. I have an opinion, but I'm curious what your opinion is. Yeah.

Yeah. And that's a great question because I think that is the number one and most important thing going on right now, besides the monetization of BTC. So when you look at the yield curve right now, they're trying to do that right now, they are lowering the federal funds rate and the free market, the bond vigilantes are saying, no, I don't really care what headline CPI says because prior to 2020, I believed you. But since 2020, I don't believe you because I'm looking at the cost of my business going up. My

My long-term plans are being absolutely decimated. I should have been able to build three more factories. And now I have to finance just one factory because my savings in that treasury note isn't paying the yield that it needs to pay to keep up with those prices. And that's why we're getting that sell-off pressure where yields are getting pushed up on the long end of the curve because...

lenders are not being compensated and real rates of return. In other words, when you take the APY that you're getting on your debt note and you subtract the price increases, real rates of return are negative. We're going right back to free market incentives. When real rates of return are positive, that makes sense that you would not spend or invest and that you would save your money and lend it to the government because at the maturation of that note, you're going to be able to buy more goods and services.

But when real rates are negative, it does not make sense to save your money and lend it. It makes sense to spend it and invest it immediately because you're going to get more for it that day. Even if you get the yield at the maturation, prices have increased beyond the yield and you're getting less goods and services.

And this is the problem that the Federal Reserve faces right now and the United States Treasury and Donald Trump. So you can lower the front end of the yield curve all you want. You're not going to be able to convince businesses and other entities that are using treasuries or trying to use treasuries as a store of value to lend you money with a more negative real rate of return, because that's what you're asking them to do. You're asking them to swallow and accept a greater loss of purchasing power over that duration.

It's getting to the point now where they're saying, no, we refuse to do that. And then on the flip side of it, yeah, we don't, we simply don't believe you. And you know, on the flip side of it, if that rate gets too high, then we see what we see. The U S treasury is stuck. It's,

issuing on the front end of the curve, because if they issue on the long end of the curve, the interest expense is going to go up. And the higher the interest expense goes, the greater the deficit. Well, the greater the deficit, the worst inflation is going to get. So I think right now we're kind of in that sweet spot where it's like not too negative and just enough of the long term people to say, well,

If I'm losing a couple of percentage points, then so be it. At least I know I'm going to get paid my money. But if they lower interest rates and all of that money on the sidelines goes rushing back in, like they lower the Fed funds rate down and they forced all that money back into the marketplace, you're going to get the price increases anyway, which is going to create the deeper negative real rate of return. So we're stuck between a rock and a hard place. And at People's Reserve, we believe that

that the future of finance is going to be built around Bitcoin equity. We're going to see a rumbling, a shaking in money markets and in the foundations of finance. And if you want sustainably lower interest rates, well, maybe it's not based on supply and demand and price controls. Maybe we go to that variable that is risk and you can incorporate Bitcoin into that product, into that debt issuance to mitigate risk, allowing for sustainably lower interest rates. And that's the magic of the People's Reserve Bitcoin bond.

Love this. Okay. Let's talk about, so you have a Bitcoin-backed loan product. SAB 121 was just rescinded by the SEC. There's a little bit more work to happen with some of the other agencies before I think the banks are going to be able to start custodying Bitcoin and treating it as this pristine collateral that you're talking about. I'm curious your take on over-collateralization for loan products with Bitcoin being the core of the collateral, whether

whether you agree that it should only be over collateralized for borrowing and lending. And then I'm curious to hear just your thoughts on how some of this is going to unfold with the SAB 121 being changed. Robert Leonard : Yeah. So this is a huge thing for Bitcoin. I don't think people really understand it and they don't want you to understand it because it goes to the balance sheet. It goes to what's actually happening at the banks. So when you make a deposit at the bank,

They're not putting your money in a vault and putting armed guards next to it. Technically, you're lending them your money, which is why they pay you interest. Well, when you lend them your money, that deposit to you is your asset, but to the bank, it's their liability. Now, we have different reserve requirements and ratios. The Federal Reserve says zero,

reserve requirement, but you also have basal banking. And then you have banks who make up their own protocols and policies to stay within that gray area. And with every liability, there needs to be a corresponding asset. Well, in fractional reserve banking, that corresponding asset can represent multiple liabilities. And the problem is when Bitcoin is that circulating liability, you can't print more of it. So if you're going to fractionally reserve it at

At some point in time in that credit cycle where there's a destructive part of that credit cycle, which is a natural and healthy part of the credit cycle, which we don't get right now, by the way, it's too big to fail. So just print over it. And that's the source of the problem. If we were allowed to have some creative destruction, if we were allowed to have the mismanaged and the over leveraged destroyed, like we saw with FTX and other lenders who chose to use rehypothecation schemes, well, then they get destroyed and you build from a stronger base.

And the economy right now, we're so far beyond zombie companies. We're literally in a zombie economy. That's how far we've come. So we need to get back to the natural credit cycle and accept that creative destruction is a good thing to have. And if we integrate Bitcoin, we can see that happen. I agree with you in that fantastic article you wrote that there's an extreme amount of risk behind

re-hypothecating and using fractional reserve banking practices when Bitcoin is the customer liability. And what's going to happen is people are going to get hurt because they're going to settle with you on the US dollar value of Bitcoin at the time of the crisis. So much like the people in FTX had Bitcoin at $16,000, and then they went through this whole big process. A

A lot of people are like, this is great. If I can just get my Bitcoin back, I'm sitting pretty here. But then they found out, well, you're going to get the US dollar denominated value of Bitcoin at the time of the crisis. So I see that transitioning perfectly into the eventual fractional reserve rehypothecation scheme crash that comes from banks having to learn the hard way. Because we all have to learn the hard way. And unfortunately, I don't think they're going to listen to people like you and I. And they're going to take that calculated risk

in order to increase their profitability. And that risk, unfortunately, just like mortgage-backed securities, gets passed on to the marketplace. And the marketplace will have to print and make up for it. So that's why I said earlier, you just want to make sure you're choosing your counterparty correctly. And something that's really interesting here, and we have some legal interests here in the state of Florida about this with some parties that we're working with, there's a thing called healthcare sharing ministries. And if you're a healthcare sharing ministry, you

You are actually a nonprofit ministry that separates yourself and then is no longer under the Affordable Care Act because you're signing a statement of faith that you want to segregate your medical costs from the other people who are not of your faith and do certain things with that medical money that you don't believe in and that you wouldn't do with your money. So there's a special designation for health share that separates them and regulates them in a different way than a typical health insurance company.

Well, at People's Reserve, we believe there's a future where there should be some type of financial share or what we call FinShare. And people sign a statement of faith where we do not believe in fractional reserve banking. We do not believe in rehypothecation. We do not believe in usury. And because of that, we want to deposit our monies at an institution where my deposit liability is going to be backed one-to-one. So forget about FDIC insurance. You don't need it because you're one-to-one back. And

You're not going to have to worry about rehypothecation, meaning you're the only person who's going to have the claim on your asset.

That asset remains your asset. It can't be pledged to another party on your behalf. And then finally, you're going to be able to get into a situation where you say, look, I don't believe in lending people money on a credit card at 30%. I don't believe in that. We can come up with different types of programs to help people who need access to credit, who are low income with low credit score. We can do things in a voluntary way, and we can come up with programs that support those voluntary movements to help lift people up and get them a headstart.

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All right, back to the show. Preston Pysh : I think that the point you made earlier in the show, which is the way that large players are going to get Bitcoin in the future is really through this liquidation risk and the everyday retail person not understanding what their counterparties are actually doing with their Bitcoin. And so my concern on the article that I wrote for the Saab 121 suggesting that under collateralization should be illegal, unfortunately, I don't think it is going to play out that way.

And the reason why I don't think it's going to play out that way is because the apex predators in finance and Wall Street deeply understand this. And they know that if they can play this game and they can create situations where under collateralized borrower lenders are swimming naked, they can basically take those coins and then

They're just going to have to shove dollars down the throat of the people that lost their Bitcoin through choosing a poor custodian. That's my concern. And I think that anybody, I don't know, I'll leave it at that, but hopefully I'm wrong. I would love to see this be a fair set of rules. I think there's also going to be countries that get this very right that will set up laws like that.

And then their citizens are going to be in a much better stable environment than the ones that are playing these games for the apex predator financiers that are trying to create situations that basically take advantage of the people that truly don't have time or know these complex financial games that are played. But yeah, sorry to keep you on. I mean, I think, no, no, no, you're spot on. And World War III is being fought in the field of finance. We've

We see Donald Trump coming out and talking about tariffs, getting rid of the income tax. These are all really exciting ideas, but it's the income tax that actually secures the bonds, our United States treasuries. So if we were going to take that production off of our own selves and then put it into the spending of what we do into other countries, it's kind of like doubling down on the existing problem, right? Because we print all these dollars and we send these worthless paper dollars to these people and they send us real stuff.

And okay, well, what's the promise that I'm going to get these dollars plus interest back? We enjoy that stuff because we're very productive on the financial side of things. We're the most financialized economy in the world. We have a lot of value driven to us through the stock market, and we're able to collect those taxes to secure the cashflow required to finance a portion of the bonds. But if we could do it fully, then the Fed wouldn't hold $7 trillion worth of treasuries. Even with the current setup, we can't do that. I think it's an interesting concept.

And I think it's really exciting because if Trump is willing to talk about these things and make moves this big, there's no doubt in my mind, the money markets are going to be rewired and we are going to see a complete rocking and shifting in the foundations of finance. And I think the solution to this is our Bitcoin bond. It's so simple that when you hear it, you're like, this is crazy. Why haven't they already done this? Because the problem is the US treasury market has a lack of demand.

I was at the Bitcoin Energy Summit last year. I got a chance to talk with Byron Donalds, who's actually my local representative. He sits on the Financial Services Committee. He told me, he said, "CJ, you're not going to believe this." I said, "What's going on?" He goes, "When I was on the Financial Services Committee, we were talking about stablecoins and how they can create demand on treasuries." And I said, "Well, Byron, that's cool, but what concerns me a little bit more is that the Financial Services Committee is talking about demand on treasuries."

So tell me more about this demand on treasuries conversation versus the stablecoin thing. I get the stablecoin thing, but how much lack of demand is there? How much of a concern is the liquidity in the US treasury marketplace? Because if there's little red flags and they're looking for solutions, that tells you that we have a really big problem in the United States treasury market. And it's a lack of demand and it's a lack of liquidity. So how can you generate demand? Easy. You combine Bitcoin, you fuse Bitcoin into the treasury product itself. And at People's Reserve, our Bitcoin bond product

Typically, it's like an 80-20 split. So let's say you raise like $100 million, 80 million would go into a five-year US treasury note around four and a half percentage points. And then 20 million would go directly into spot Bitcoin. And it's a principal protected note structured with that ratio. What happens is over the course of five years, the 80 million at four and a half percent matures at a value of 100 million. So the principal you invested into the product, even if Bitcoin goes to zero, which it's not,

But even if it went to zero, the principal invested into the product is protected by the full faith and credit of the United States government and the power of their printer. They're going to print that money and they're going to give it to you. The problem is what the hell are you going to be able to buy? Well, every other debt product says you're going to be able to buy less goods and services because the real rate of return is negative. Bitcoin bonds create a positive rate of return by turning the best performing asset in the world, Bitcoin, into the source of yield on the debt note. So if Bitcoin just stays at the price it is when you issue

issue the note, you get 4% APY. If Bitcoin price goes down 50%, you get 2% APY. But the five-year is already paying four and a half percentage points. So for 50 basis points, you are basically getting infinite upside because

Because if Bitcoin does what people like you and I think it's going to do because of the monetization of the asset class and because of its evolution from digital gold to pristine collateral, it's going to blow the socks off of everybody. And if you get like a 30% CAGR, you're talking about a 5X, which would produce a 20% APY. Yeah.

And if you get a 10X and you maintain 60% CAGR, you get 40% APY. So a Bitcoin bond can produce between 20 and 40% APY when the 1982 non-substitution based CPI is around 10%. So you're talking about positive real rates of 10 and 20%. So if you want to create demand on your treasuries, you have to create a positive real rate of return.

There's no better way to do that than to fuse Bitcoin directly into the product. Preston Pyshenko You know, at the Nashville conference this past summer, you had RFK and Donald Trump that went on stage and announced that they had an interest in creating a strategic reserve. They both had very different numbers that they were talking about. But RFK also talked about the need and the desire to take about 2% of

of Bitcoin in each one of the treasury's issuance and make it a part of the bond. This was really glossed over. A lot of people didn't talk about this coming out in his speech. And I think it was just as important, maybe more important than the strategic reserve is this idea of taking some Bitcoin and tying it with US treasury issuance, because you're right. Look at what

Janet Yellen, this past six months to the past year, everything that's been issued has been short duration paper. It's been like three month paper that has basically funded everything. If she tried to issue a 30-year bond, I think it would be totally disastrous.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

natural market demand for it. Robert Leonard

they would push the rates up tremendously and the unmarked to market losses on banks and insurance companies would go through the roof. I mean, they're already through the roof, but it could create potentially an economic emergency, which of course would get the printers running again, which would then spark up inflation. But another thing that's happening, I think we got a little bit of an inside track here at People's Reserve is a lot of the focus is on the federal government strategic Bitcoin reserve. But there's over 15 states that have already introduced

strategic Bitcoin reserve for the state level. Now, going beyond that, what's really interesting is that the city's balance sheet is not the state's balance sheet and the municipality's balance sheet is not the city's balance sheet. So it's not just going to be the federal government that has a strategic Bitcoin reserve. It's going to be the state government and it's going to be the city government and it's going to be the municipal governments. So I think we start from the bottom up and we'll see municipal Bitcoin bond issuances first. And these politicians that are more local and can move faster will be

will be able to attract demand and liquidity that they've never been able to attract before so that they can reinvest in infrastructure and benefit their constituents. You want to talk about build back the United States and make America great again? Well, Bitcoin bonds on a municipal and city level is how you attract massive amounts of investment to build out infrastructure so we can stop looking like a third world and start looking like the first world countries. Preston Pysh : Guys, is he just shooting arrows straight into the heart of the target or what? Good Lord. I totally agree.

Totally agree. And like everything we've seen in Bitcoin, it's grassroots first and then percolates up instead of it being at the top and being pushed down like all the policy and regulatory

approach has been for decades and decades. It seems so organic and so in harmony with how nature functions that when I see things and I hear points that you just made, it's really hard for me not to be super bullish on Bitcoin and what it's doing because you're exactly right. This is going to happen at a city level or a municipality level first. You're going to see them test it out. It's going to work spectacularly and it's just going to percolate from there.

It's going to kick off a flywheel. I can make you a little bit more bullish if you can handle it.

It starts a flywheel that we've never seen before, which is when the US Treasury wants to increase demand on their debt notes, they'll raise interest rates because higher yields equals more demand. Well, when the Bitcoin bond produces a high yield, it's going to create more demand. Well, when you have more demand, you need to have more issuances. When you create more issuances, you're going to get the allocation that goes directly into Bitcoin. And with absolute digital scarcity, the laws of economics tell us the price is going to be forced up, which then actually create

creates a higher yield on the note. So you get a positive feedback loop that feeds itself, that drives immense value into this product. Preston Pyshenko To your point, this is MicroStrategy's convertible debt issuance through and through, like best performing fixed income instrument on the planet. And of course, the market wants to buy more, right? So what's he doing? He's creating more. And now you have him doing it in the preferred space. So I think

I think it's really an example of what you're talking about, of what can happen in municipalities that want to do similar things. Preston Pysh : Michael Steyer has led the way and the financial engineering that he's done will go down in history as one of the smartest moves that's ever been made. I think what's interesting about these municipal Bitcoin bonds and even

sovereign and corporate Bitcoin bonds is that they settle in USD. So you get Michael can borrow at zero, but with a Bitcoin bond, you're actually getting four and a half percent cashflow. Michael settles in equity. These settle in dollars.

So you remove a little bit of potential liquidity issues if somebody wants to liquidate into dollars rather than equity. So I think there's room for both, right? I mean, look at how many banks there are in the world. There's not one banks to serve them all. In a true free market, there are many different problems that need to be solved. And each product solves that problem in a different way. And that's why Michael continues to expand his offering and find new products and services to offer to the marketplace because there's nuance within each one of these problems

And these products are going to solve those problems on a global scale, and no one company can handle it. So once people swallow the pill that Michael's cooked up for us, this is going to accelerate. Preston Pyshenko You know, if you're a comptroller in one of these cities, municipalities, or whatever, there's tons and tons of financial benefits

mandates that various entities have to own munis, municipal bonds and fixed income. If you're listening to this and you're not thinking about somehow doing something like this to just drive massive... Could you imagine the demand for a muni that incorporates this, the first one to do it? I think it'd be through the freaking roof. They'd actually have a higher credit rating than the federal government.

You're going to get triple A pluses in Florida, the beautiful city of Naples. Naples has a very wealthy constituency. There's a lot of tourism here. There's a lot of stuff that goes on down here where the city is in a very healthy position. You're talking about a triple A credit rating paired with Bitcoin. So you're backed by the government. And this muni bond, this municipal Bitcoin bond is going to attract billions of dollars of demand,

not only from other sovereigns and corporations, but also from the small and medium-sized businesses who have been looking and trying to figure out, how do I get Bitcoin on my balance sheet? You cannot have a small and medium-sized business that needs to reinvest its revenues to expand its business, lock equity in Bitcoin, and then have to deal with the volatility. Imagine if your business is up and

and you're expanding your services, but your balance sheet is down because of the volatility of Bitcoin. That is a big blocker. Not only that, but locking up that equity and not having it to deploy and expand. Those are big blockers to small and medium sized businesses adopting Bitcoin treasuries.

Well, the Bitcoin bond removes downside volatility. You can have exposure to Bitcoin with cash flow on your balance sheet. And when you bring a people's reserve Bitcoin bond to people's reserve, we treat it as pristine collateral. You can borrow against that and access the equity on your balance sheet to expand your business without giving up the equity value. The applications of these tools are just like Bitcoin. They're so expansive that I think even myself, I haven't been able to comprehend it all yet.

We got to shut this thing down. I'm just, I'm raging over here with bullish sentiment. Yeah.

Good Lord, CJ. We need to have you back on the show. That's for sure. If people want to learn more about you, tell them where they can go. Well, hey, thank you so much for having me. Like I said, I'm a longtime fan. Sitting on the other side of the screen, I too, my heart is beating. It's been a great conversation. And you guys can follow me on X at CJ Constantinos and at People's Reserve. All right. We'll have links to that in the show notes. CJ, wow. You're a wealth of knowledge and...

Man, you paint a very bullish and exciting future. So thank you for making time and coming on the show, sir. Thank you so much. See you next time.

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