Digital Social Hour
Michael Terpin: What Billionaires Aren’t Telling You About Bitcoin’s Next Cycle | DSH #1622
16 Nov 2025
Chapter 1: What was the early vision behind Bitcoin that many forget?
There was just Satoshi saying, this is going to change the world. And if you believe it, I mean, he has a famous saying where he's trying to explain. So he said, if you don't believe it or don't get it, I'm sorry, I don't have enough time to explain it to you. There's another saying that was not by him, which is that people get Bitcoin at the price that they deserve.
So the people who learned about it really early and got it and kept it, they're billionaires now. You have 10,000 Bitcoin, do the math. And again, buy at the bottom, sell at the top. And people forget that. As Warren Buffett once said, you can only tell when the water's gone out who's been swimming naked.
Okay, guys, we got Michael Turpin. Look at the outfit he's brought today. Let's go. Represent.
Yeah, I'm happy to be here. So the story behind this outfit is I have a tailor in Shenzhen who's awesome. And he does a lot of the stuff that I used to get from the tailors in Hong Kong, but about like a quarter of the price. And it's in this place called Luhao City that's got, you know, a hundred tailors and then like a half, an acre, no more, acres and acres of fabric.
And so his wife and my girlfriend went looking around for something that would have tigers on it because, you know, when I'm in Vegas, I do live in Tiger Mansion, as we call it, which is the former Mike Tyson home where he kept his tigers. And I bought that a number of years ago and we use it as a great event space.
Yeah, your team has phenomenal events there. I've been to some of them, and it's so cool seeing the tiger pits. I mean, we saw those in movies growing up. And, yeah, that must have been a bucket list item for you, huh, to own that house?
Yeah, you know, I mean, I never, you know, sort of dreamed of, like, you know, sort of having iconic celebrity mansions. But when it came up, you know, it seemed like the thing to do. It took some renovation, but I feel like I'm a historical kind of – custodian of it. I try to keep it, you know, very close to what, you know, Mike Tyson's original vision was.
And so we really have kind of not really changed anything, just sort of, you know, updated it and not updated, just sort of like restored it.
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Chapter 2: What ideological battle is emerging in the Bitcoin community?
Yeah. You still have all the old photos on the wall, right? Yep. The ancient paintings are pretty old.
Yeah, and also, you know, the giant life-size lions that he had commissioned, I believe it was from Versace, on the top floor, and the big mural that has all the paintings of all these boxers that's an entire story tall. And, yeah, it's just in the lion fountain when you first walk in. And, yeah, so he bought it.
You know, in the mid 90s, it was actually originally owned by the Damani family that built the Tropicana. And he just sort of like did his own Mike Tyson touches to it and turned it into something far more iconic.
I love it. And with your events, what's sort of the mission with having those? Because there's some high quality people that attend those.
Yeah. You know, I mean, it's everything from I mean, it's two acres. It's got an 80,000 gallon swimming pool in it. It's tigermansionlv.com, so you can see some of the things. And, you know, we've done everything from 500-person events that are just like wild, crazy indoor-outdoor parties with, you know, music and, you know, fire dancers and things like that.
I mean, obviously we have security keep it like, you know, tame within the neighborhood boundaries, just like the Michael Jackson thing. Manchin does in the historic district of town. I think that's sort of our other kind of like, you know, sort of quote unquote competition for like, you know, iconic events.
And, you know, it's I think Vegas just, you know, needs to have more of these, you know, kind of
homes off of the strip that could be used for, uh, for events, mainly corporate events, uh, you know, movie shoots, um, uh, influencer, uh, you know, activations and everything down to like just private dinner parties, you know, I mean, we've got a group in this week that's just, you know, coming in and doing something for about like 40, 50 people.
So otherwise, so anything from like, you know, dinner and the iconic sort of a dining room with all the chandeliers to, uh, um, to, you know, more of a, uh,
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Chapter 3: How did stablecoins like Tether change the crypto landscape?
I bought it from the person who bought out of bankruptcy 20 years earlier. Got it. But, you know, I've met him a couple of times. I've not talked to him since this happened, but I've let people who he works with know about it. And so I'm presuming at some point he might want to see what we've done to restore it.
Did you tell him about Bitcoin to buy some?
Well, you know, he has actually been involved in Bitcoin in the past. He had a Mike Tyson Bitcoin ATM a number of years ago. And so he certainly and he, of course, had his he sold millions of dollars of NFTs. So he is not he's no stranger to the crypto world. Good segue, by the way.
Yeah, smooth, right? You're still all in on Bitcoin. You're still pretty optimistic about it.
Absolutely. So I'm not a Bitcoin maxi. I call myself a Bitcoin preferentialist. So I realized, so Bitcoin maxis, and I know a lot of them because I've been in Bitcoin for over 12 years. are the ones who basically are Bitcoin is like, you know, the Holy Trinity. It's the be all end all.
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Chapter 4: What is the story behind Mike Tyson's Tiger Mansion and its crypto connection?
As Michael Saylor says, there is no second best. And some get to the point where they're like, you should arrest Vitalik. Everybody who does anything other than Bitcoin is a criminal. You should throw them in jail. I basically believe that Bitcoin is the original blockchain. It's the original digital asset. It's the one that everything else is built upon or at least influenced by.
But I don't think since, you know, Ethereum never had the flippening back in the ICO era, I don't think that anything will ever pass Bitcoin. in terms of overall market cap. I think it's store of value. If you look at gold, gold is bigger than pretty much anything out there in the stock market and it's continuing to grow. Assets, asset classes are different than sort of companies.
And Bitcoin is an asset class. And it is growing faster than gold. So at some point it will overtake gold. I mean, gold right now is about, I think, almost $20 trillion as an asset class. Bitcoin, if it gets to a million dollars, would be that size. Of course, gold by then will probably be higher. So maybe it's got to get to a million five, two million.
But that's all I think an if and not a when. It's proven itself. Now, the other, you know, tens of thousands of digital assets, you know, are kind of a different couple of categories. They're called altcoins. And, you know, I believe that they certainly have a place in terms of, you know, Ethereum, for example, which I was involved in the launch of.
You know, it is something that Vitalik was a, you know, Bitcoin, you know, early Bitcoiner, actually one of the founders when he was 16 years old of Bitcoin magazine.
Wow.
Yeah. And, you know, he wanted to build things on Bitcoin but found it frustrating because, you know, I mean, it is intentionally sort of calcified in its code so that, you know, it's hard to be changing all the time and still be a store of value. And so he wanted to go and build, his vision was to have a world computer where you could actually program on a blockchain.
And that's what Ethereum's vision was. And that's really what they've done. And, you know, they've been remarkably successful in building, you know, several hundred billion dollar market cap around that. You know, DeFi was not built on Bitcoin. NFTs were not built on Bitcoin, although you have ordinals now.
You know, many of the most iconic things that have been built in the Web3 world have not been built on Bitcoin. They've been built on Ethereum. And now there's, you know, contenders to the Ethereum throne in terms of Solana and some other ones. And so I think it's healthy to have the marketplace of ideas.
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Chapter 5: Why do some investors succeed with Bitcoin while others miss out?
And they're like, hey, everything will eventually be on Bitcoin. DeFi will be on Bitcoin, et cetera. That's their vision. It may take a long time. It may be not as fast. But, you know, if you're able to go and settle on Bitcoin, certainly you don't have to worry about the underlying platform going away.
I saw on another interview someone asked you, do you think Bitcoin will hit a million dollars a coin? And I think you said yes. Absolutely. It's pretty high.
Yeah, well, you know, I remember when Bitcoin first came out and it first had $1,000 and some Wall Street analysts started to cover it. And Gil Luria, I believe his name was, who was with Wedbush Morgan at the time, he wrote a report saying that Bitcoin will either go to zero or to a million dollars. And he put the chance of it getting to a million dollars to be one half of 1%.
People thought that was outrageous. Wow. If you took that bet, you made a pretty good bet. Of course, the bet you would have made would have been to buy Bitcoin at $1,000. You're up 100x right now. And that was actually even a high for that cycle. I mean, it had started the year when it hit $1,000. It started the year at $11. It went all the way up to $1,200.
And then a year later, it crashed down to $171. And then the next cycle, it ended up going to $20,000. And that's really what the four-year cycle is all about. And I've tried to explain that to investors. You know, very smart people who are investors successfully in real estate, in commodities, in tech startups, and they never quite got there.
what I was talking about, maybe because they didn't understand the white paper. I have the white paper in my book and I annotate it because sometimes people will get thrown off by the equations in the middle of it. That was just showing off to other cryptographers. I mean, the juicy stuff is in the first and the last pages.
And if you just read that and understand what he says, you can see that he really created something novel that, you know, is changing the world.
Yeah. I mean, these days you could buy a lot of things with crypto.
And it's not so much about what you can buy. So Satoshi's original vision, peer-to-peer cash, failed. But it enabled what has become peer-to-peer cash, stable coins. If there was no Bitcoin, there would be no Tether. And I helped with the launch of Tether, too. Wow.
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Chapter 6: What factors could lead Bitcoin to reach $1 million?
And, you know, and the people who launched it originally in the United States, you know, in Santa Monica, California, Brock Pierce and Reeve Collins and Craig, the CTO, Craig Sellers, you know, they ended up selling it because they're afraid of regulation. So they sold it to Bitfinex, which then spun it off to it's now out of El Salvador. Right.
And the people who ended up buying it and now running it are now multibillionaires. Crazy. And, you know, I mean, the idea that Brock had originally was just, you know, hey, you know, have a coin that can be used to have a U.S.
dollar equivalent because in the early days of trading, you know, you had to go and if you wanted to go buy Bitcoin and trade it for Ethereum or trade it for Litecoin or whatever, you know, you had to go and it would take sometimes two or three days to go and settle through a bank account if you wanted to arbitrage between
you know, the premium that you were paying for periods of times in, say, Korea, they call it the kimchi premium. You know, there was a time where you could buy in Canada and sell in Korea or in China and make like a 20% spread.
I remember that, yeah.
Right? And so, but the only people who were able to take advantage of it were ones who were dual citizens of, say, Canada and China. Right. Because they would have both bank accounts. Tether took away that arbitrage and it basically made it to you just simply, you know, exchange it on any exchange for a U.S. dollar denominated coin, not have to deal with the banking system.
That was one of the whole purposes of Bitcoin was to not have to deal with the banking system. The white paper was written, you know, right at the height of the financial crash in, you know, October of 2008.
You mentioned people were scared of regulation back then. Is that still the case with crypto and the Trump administration?
You know, the early people in any technology want something different than the mainstream. If you ask the, you know, the degens that came in, the crypto anarchists, et cetera, they're like, no, this is to bring down the system. This is to like get away from banks. This is to collapse the governments. This is to, you know, this is following the ethos of the cypherpunks.
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Chapter 7: How does Michael Terpin view the future of Bitcoin cycles?
How much do we cash out and put into a home? And she'd be like, all of it. And I'd be like... No, no more than half, you know, that type of thing. And so, you know, Michael Saylor was like one of the first people to say diversification is not a good thing. If you have the best asset, why do you want to sell it for a second best or third best or fourth best asset?
And, you know, had I had that philosophy, I would have thousands of more Bitcoin right now. But I'm still doing OK and I've got some great homes.
Yeah. Can't complain. And you were early on Ethereum, you said, and Tether, which is even crazier. Yeah.
Yeah, Tether, obviously, you know, you couldn't buy Tether and like have it go 100x because it was a stable coin, right? Yeah. And I wasn't an equity owner of Tether. I just helped with their marketing. Got it, got it. I launched them and I launched Ethereum. So, again, my way of getting into Bitcoin and that led me into crypto was in, you know, I started hearing about it in 2012.
But I didn't really go all in until early 2013 when I got invited to the first Bitcoin Foundation conference by Brock Pierce. And, you know, I then all of a sudden saw the light. I sort of, you know, because about a year earlier, I was invited to go to a conference. you know, sort of a future of money conference in San Francisco.
And they had somebody from one of the earliest Bitcoin exchanges that got shut down because of regulation in 2012 called Trade Hill. And I had a conflict. So I sent the head of my San Francisco office of my PR firm. And I said, I'm interested in this Bitcoin. What do you think? And she's like, oh, it'll never work. They are so smoking crack.
Now, had I gone, I would have probably had the same reaction I did a year later, which is like, oh, my God, this is going to change the world. And as one of the co-founders is a friend of mine now, Ryan Singer of Trade Hill said, yeah, not only would you have had the same reaction, but you would have started buying Bitcoin at $4 instead of $120. Jeez.
And of course, people got in a year earlier than that were buying it a dollar. That was like, for example, Roger Ver. You know, Roger Ver, you know, he famously, you know, learned about Bitcoin. He was living in Japan. He read the white paper. He is like, this can't be true. If this is true, it's going to change the world. He literally spent several days.
I've heard him tell the story and I talk about my book. He spent several days trying to disprove it. He literally stayed up night after night to the point that he got hospitalized for exhaustion. And this is a young guy in his early 30s who was a martial arts fighter, and he got exhausted to the point that he had to be hospitalized.
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Chapter 8: What is the significance of the Bitcoin super cycle concept?
Right. And this has been a secret of short sellers for generations. Yeah.
Yeah, they use the media to induce fear and then they buy at lows and then put positive media behind it and repeat.
And I think you can see now that all of a sudden the price is in, you know, 100,000 plus. All the institutions are just like, you know, jumping in. And of course, they'll be the first ones to say it's going to go down when they want to buy more.
But, you know, the biggest thing that happens, though, and so the first reason I wrote the book was to, it's not Bitcoin for dummies, it's Bitcoin for investors that haven't done enough research. Right. Or the right research. And so that's who it's for. And that's sort of the message is that Bitcoin, it's not accidental that it's the best asset class of all time.
I mean, literally, there's no other asset class that went from a tenth of a penny in 2010 to over $100,000. Yeah.
What is that, a $10,000 X?
Way more. It was a million X when it went to $1,000. So it's a hundred million X. Holy crap. A hundred million X. There was only one sale at the 10th of a penny. That was Marty Malky, who is Satoshi's intern, I call him. He was a college student in Finland, 19 years old, that read the white paper. The white paper was there for anybody to see who subscribed to these obscure cartography groups.
And Satoshi had his email on there. Satoshi at gmx.net or whatever. And he said, hey, I really like what you're saying. And I know how to build websites. Can I help you build a website? Because Satoshi went and took out bitcoin.org. And he's like, yeah, I can use some help. I'll pay you in Bitcoin.
But what I could really use help is I'd like somebody else to be mining all the time so that I know there's at least two people mining all the time. And, you know, Hal Finney also, you know, started mining a few days later. But if you look at the number of wallets, I mean, a year into Bitcoin, there was less than 100 people mining. Wow, that's it? That's it.
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