PODCAST: Ikigai's Travis Kling on Why Bitcoin Is a 'Baby X-Man'

"Bitcoin is unequivocally a macro asset," said Travis Kling, the former hedge funder and now founder and CIO of Ikigai Asset Management.

Kling spoke with CoinDesk for one of the inaugural episodes of Bitcoin Macro, a pop-up podcast featuring the speakers and themes of CoinDesk's upcoming Invest: NYC conference on Tuesday, Nov. 12.

Travis Kling has exploded onto the bitcoin scene over the past year.

Nolan Bauerle: Welcome to Bitcoin Macro, a popup podcast produced as part of the CoinDesk Invest New York Conference in November.

Both the podcast and the event explore the intersection of bitcoin and the global macro economy with perspectives from some of the leading thinkers in finance, crypto, and beyond.

Do you see bitcoin so you've got sort of the main stage of macro assets within that, is bitcoin in the wings waiting to come on stage? Is it actually on stage and maybe in the background? Where is it in that scene? Is it right in the main stage already and no one knows, or is it in the wings, is it a background singer? Where is it?

Like we talked about a minute ago, bitcoin's gone through a bunch of phases in its life, and I think that sometimes people get confused about literally what is bitcoin.

Bitcoin's a very volatile asset, but the realized volatility of bitcoin is decreasing at a logarithmic rate.

You know, a gentle reminder that there's like two and a half million bitcoin that have never moved before, right? And so, all bitcoin in existence is like 18 million, but like two and a half million of those are probably lost or they're Satoshi's, and I don't think he's moving them any time soon.

There's lots of derivations of work that we do around HODL Waves, and we also talk about days destroyed, bitcoin days destroyed, which is the sort of opposite side of HODL Waves, which is, if I buy one bitcoin, hold it in my wallet for a year, and then I send it to an exchange.