Now you only get a handful of basis points, maybe 9 basis points for a loan. But you can see if you got 9 basis points every 10 minutes, how many 10-minute intervals are there in a day, you can see how lucrative that is. And what that means is that the market rate of bitcoin in the flash loan market is likely to be much greater in the market rate of fiat that’s set by a central bank and then things really get interesting. And that explains why so many people want to make crypto ETF to collect crypto, to be able to lend it out in the flash loan market. That’s really the name of the game. It’s not to raise $10 billion and get 21 basis points. So we’re living in aberrational times. And you might regard crypto as an aberration, but that’s not the aberration.
What happened over 40 years, that’s the aberration. Crypto is to return to normalcy. From a bulk of history, there wasn’t a central bank that told people what rate to lend money at. We really think it’s normalcy because within our own lifetime, that’s the way the world worked. For thousands of years recorded history in most cultures all around the world, people figure out what the value of money was, they didn’t need the central bank to tell them. So what’s really happening is we’re going back to normalcy. In a world of normalcy, hard assets, not financial assets. true measure of wealth. We’re going back to that. So I hope that’s enough of a lecture. I don’t want to go – I can go on a lot longer, but it just gave you a mini lecture on the subject.
I guess, we’ll call it comments on aberration.
Therese Byars: Okay. What is management – this is a question about succession what is management doing to make themselves more dispensable to the company in as minimal value disturbing way possible with the death of the great Charlie Munger, the Horizon Kinetics reverse merger and the recent court decision on TPL, I think many FRMO shareholders are looking to the future and wondering how management’s excellent leadership and direction will persist in some form beyond the lives of current management and even the lives of existing shareholders who may plan to pass on their FRMO shares to their children in a similar way that Mr. Stahl has mentioned, as being his own intent in the past.
Murray Stahl: Well, I guess, we’re in the process of doing is we’re looking at people who are obviously younger than ourselves, who might take over the reins when unfortunately, we’re either not around or we are around or not able to exercise our functions. That’s what we’re doing. We don’t have anything to announce to you right now, but when we do, we’ll certainly let you know and I get nobody is forever. To a degree, if it makes you feel better, I feel great. I don’t have anything wrong with me, at least not that I know of, and I’m not going anywhere, but you’re right, we’re going to have to plan for succession. We’re in the process of doing that, and we have something tangible announce, we will certainly announce it. And where you have public trade securities, you can attract – it’s easier to attract some people than it is to attracting people to a private company. So that’s what we’re thinking about doing.
Therese Byars: Around 80% of the U.S. national debt is owned by the U.S. public. Is it conceivable that the Fed could raise interest rates to nearly broker-like levels if they wanted to and effectively nullify or greatly reduce the payments, we would have to make for the U.S. public portion of its debt by simply raising taxes on U.S. companies and individuals to compensate for their own interest payments to a large degree.
Murray Stahl: Okay. I don’t believe it’s conceivable. I think that the interest rate problem is considerable. And I think it’s coming to a head. The demand – the interest expense in 36 months or probably less. It’s going to be the biggest debt item. A lot of the bonds are owned by tax institutions, that doesn’t help. If you want to tax people more, they always have the option of voting with their feet and not owning the bonds. So I don’t think that’s going to get you anywhere. I think the interest problem is one of the great problems that is faced by nations periodically when they borrow too much money. Usually, the solution is inflation, is not a very good solution, but usually, that’s where the direction it goes in. I think it’s going to go that way as well.
But today, we have the complexification of cryptocurrency. So I personally think cryptocurrency is going to be a tremendous asset class and people to wouldn’t dream of owning cryptocurrency, they are very safe and secure and the treasury security in the not-too-distant future when they see the interest they can earn on crypto. They’re going to be investing in crypto. My personal belief, we’ll see if I’m right or wrong.
Therese Byars: Is there any effort being made to grow Winland’s electronics and monitoring business, Growth in that segment appears largely unchanged since 2013 and limits the ability of Winland to accumulate bitcoin and mining assets. I recall that Winland was initially bought by FRMO for its excess cash flow and high return on equity. Since the financials do not break out the electronics business assets from the mining assets, for the purposes of funding Winland’s continued bitcoin accumulation. I wonder how the return on assets on the electronics segment compares to say a high-yield savings account that could similarly fund the bitcoin operations by liquidating the electronics business at this point, given the segment’s static growth over all these years, is this not dissimilar from how Consensus Mining and senior edge corporations are currently operates.
