Cathie Wood and Anthony Scaramucci discussed institutional investment in digital assets, brushed off bitcoin’s ESG woes, and warned investors about excessive leverage in a recent interview. Here are the 10 best quotes.

• Bitcoin bulls Cathie Wood and Anthony Scaramucci sat down for an interview with Bitcoin Magazine last week.
• The pair praised bitcoin as a crypto "reserve currency," but warned investors of the risk of leverage.
• Scaramucci said he sees bitcoin hitting $100,000 by the end of 2021. Here are the 10 best quotes.
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Crypto bulls Cathie Wood of Ark Invest and Anthony Scaramucci of Skybridge Capital sat down for an interview last week with Bitcoin Magazine.

The pair praised digital assets, brushed off recent environmental concerns, and talked about their start in the crypto space during the conversation.

They also warned cryptocurrency investors to be careful with excessive leverage, with Scaramucci calling the practice a "knife in the steering wheel of your sports car."

Here are the 10 best quotes from the interview, lightly edited and condensed for clarity:

Cathie Wood

1. "Our conviction in bitcoin has only increased over the years. And I think the big exclamation point for me, in the early days, was my mentor Art Laffer…we were collaborating on a white paper and I said 'Art, how big could this be.' And he said, 'well, how big is the US monetary base,' at that time, it was $4.5 trillion today, it's closer to $7.5 trillion, and so we ran with it and haven't regretted it for one minute since."
2. "Bitcoin is the reserve currency of the crypto-asset ecosystem. It is the flight to safety currency. And I do believe that's still the case."
3. "Beware, from a leverage point of view, you can lose everything out there in crypto if you're a leveraged player. So buyer beware, be careful, but hang on for a beautiful ride."
4. "Putting bitcoin mining into a solar powerwall merchant power ecosystem so that it could absorb all the extra energy coming from the sun after the powerpack is filled up. That would add a new dimension of economics to this ecosystem and would encourage homeowners and utilities to add more solar than otherwise would be the case. So it's actually going to accelerate the movement into renewables. I think that's what's going to bring institutions back."
5. "I think we used a million Monte Carlo simulations to figure out if institutions start going in, where will they go? Well, they'll tiptoe in….according to those simulations, in order to maximize the Sharpe ratio, an institution might move towards 6% of a portfolio in bitcoin. In order to minimize volatility and enjoy the increased return associated with crypto, that percentage might be more like 2.5%."

Anthony Scaramucci

1. "When I came out of the White House and got blown into Pennsylvania avenue, the first thing I did was buy the URL skyrbridgebitcoin.com. Why? It became very clear to me in my short stay in Washington that we would eventually be digitizing US currency…but I have to confess I was still very cautious. So I had a checklist, and there were three things on the list. Number one: were there at least a hundred million users…number two: what was the US regulatory landscape…was it going to be accepted clearly here…third thing was the storage…can I store it safely…where there are layers of insurance."

2. "We're embracing the volatility. Remember, volatility may not be a measurement of risk if you understand fundamentally what you own. You can use the volatility and the manic depression of the market to take advantage of the markets."

3. "If you're going from $4.5 trillion of dollar volume to $7.5 trillion of dollar volume…you just got taxed, ladies and gentleman. You know, the government didn't impose it on you, but they secretly did it through the central bank…your purchasing power has eroded."

4. "My first bitcoin was super hard to buy; that was my story, but once I owned my first bitcoin and I realized what was going on, I'm like 'oh my god, I don't own enough of this.' So every month, I try to buy a little bit more for myself or my family."

5. "Long-term, there's no reason why this can't be a half a million-dollar coin. But I do think you can still get to $100,000 this year just knowing what I know about demand and potential saturation levels. But I do want to emphasize what Cathie said about leverage…I'm going to remind everyone about something Warren Buffet said about leverage. It is a dagger coming out of the steering wheel of your sports car. And you're traveling down an icy road in the winter, so when you need to hit the brakes, that's when leverage is going to hurt you the most."