Ten31 Timestamp: The Empire Strikes Back
TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast
Marty Bent
4.8 • 804 Ratings
🗓️ 20 April 2026
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Term 2.0 is trending imperial as the US flexes financial and military muscle across the globe, from the Strait of Hormuz to the Panama Canal. While ceasefire headlines whipsaw market sentiment, Bitcoin is quietly decoupling from tech stocks and showing resilience against a backdrop of great power competition with China.
In this episode:
- Empire vs Republic: Are we entering the decline of the republic or the rise of the empire?
- Middle East ceasefire chaos and why oil prices aren't reflecting the full strategic picture
- US-China leverage game: Who blinks first on gas prices and supply chain disruption
- Rare earth industrial policy: The Sierra Verde acquisition and Indonesia partnership
- Bitcoin diverging from software stocks after months of tight correlation
- Strategy's STRK preferred stock and the risks building in DeFi derivatives
- Institutional pressure for quantum resistance by 2029 echoing the 2016 block size wars
TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 - Empire Strikes Back: Term 2.0 going imperial
00:01:06 - Oil prices and ceasefire volatility
00:02:11 - Bitcoin decoupling from software stocks
00:04:18 - Market positioning and the taco trade
00:07:26 - US vs China leverage thresholds
00:11:06 - Mark Carney and Canada relations
00:12:57 - Rare earths and Sierra Verde deal
00:13:58 - De-dollarization narrative reality check
00:17:13 - Indonesia and Brazil geopolitical moves
00:19:31 - Panama Canal strategic importance
00:20:47 - Strategy STRK preferred stock mechanics
00:22:17 - DeFi hacks and derivative risks
00:25:15 - Quantum computing institutional panel
00:27:20 - NIST criticism and 2016 parallels
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, no, no, no. |
| 0:09.0 | All right, the Empire Strikes Back. |
| 0:10.4 | That's what you titled this week's time step. |
| 0:13.6 | I was, I was waiting for you to do the whole thing. |
| 0:15.4 | I was just going to sit here and enjoy it. |
| 0:17.6 | Or rendition. |
| 0:20.9 | Yeah, Empire Strikes Back. |
| 0:23.0 | You know, I think this week, this month, this year, this Trump 2.0 has just been trending |
| 0:28.9 | firmly in one direction. |
| 0:31.1 | And we've called it out more and more over the last, you know, handful of months doing |
| 0:35.5 | the show. |
| 0:36.1 | You've called it out on TFTC. |
| 0:38.1 | We've talked about it in the timestamp. But, you know, Imperial is like the word that kind of comes to mind increasingly |
| 0:42.4 | with what we're seeing. And they're not to apply any value judgments one way or the other to that. |
| 0:49.5 | I think we can agree that that is not our ideal direction of travel for this country, but as objective |
| 0:55.5 | analysts of what's going on, increasingly it looks more and more that way. I think there's a question |
| 0:59.9 | of, you know, a lot of us have, if you're interested in Bitcoin, for interest in financial markets, |
| 1:04.6 | generally, world history, you look at the U.S. and you say, you know, over the last 20, 30 years, |
| 1:09.9 | we've displayed a lot of trademarks |
| 1:12.0 | of a declining great power. And certainly, I think our commander-in-chief has given us |
| 1:18.2 | many of those of his own over the last year or so, especially with his tweets. But, you know, |
| 1:23.7 | I think it's worth asking, you know, if we map ourselves to roam, as many people often do, |
... |
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