🚨Bailouts replaced accountability.🚨
"Bitcoin is the most resilient beast I've ever seen in financial markets."
Pius Sprenger sat on the Deutsche Bank desk dramatized in The Big Short — Greg Lippmann's desk, the one Ryan Gosling plays. He co-built the ABX index and shorted subprime for three years while every PhD in the room called him wrong. He was right.
Now he warns Wall Street is running the same playbook on Bitcoin — while the power law projects $1M a coin.
#273 — FULL EP with
@PiusSprenger
Timestamps:
0:00 — The PhD who shorted subprime from inside Deutsche Bank
5:00 — Joining Deutsche Bank's derivatives desk in 2004
12:00 — Meeting Greg Lippmann — the desk Ryan Gosling runs in The Big Short
17:00 — Co-building the ABX index with Goldman and Bear Stearns
22:00 — The Austrian lesson that rewired him: price is the only information
30:00 — Three years short subprime while every PhD in the room called him wrong
40:00 — Easter 2008 at Bear Stearns — the weekend it all flipped
47:00 — The $3 billion counterparty standoff
53:00 — How the 2008 bailout killed accountability in banking
1:04:00 — KYC and AML as compliance theater
1:10:00 — Lutnick, Dimon, and using size as a weapon
1:17:00 — From 25 years on Wall Street to Bitcoin
1:21:40 — "The most resilient beast I've ever seen in financial markets"
1:24:00 — The Power Law explained — network effects meet adoption
1:31:53 — The math: $1M per Bitcoin in 8–9 years, $7–8M in 17
1:35:00 — Why the power law is falsifiable science, not a price prediction
1:36:00 — Wall Street is repeating subprime with Bitcoin
1:40:00 — Strategy, STRC, and what negative convexity really means
1:48:00 — Short-sellers, the market's "nasty creatures"
1:55:00 — One week in 1985 East Germany — what he recognizes today
2:03:00 — Every crisis since 1987, and why the next is 1,000x bigger
2:09:44 — "Bitcoin is the best contrarian bet"
2:13:10 — The Bavarian farmer father who refused every government subsidy
2:16:40 — The scientific approach to Bitcoin