A lot of people are going, oh man, this cycle sucks because it's like 2025 and we're at the same price.
It's like, yeah, but chop guys, chop solidation.
When this thing goes, it's proven that we're now a $2 trillion asset.
The next move is $3 trillion.
And if we go through another 12 months of sideways, the next stop is $4 trillion.
I think expectations, not earning enough Bitcoin because they're in shit coins,
not earning enough Bitcoin because they're in treasury companies,
they're the big three that I think have got people frustrated.
If we go up to $150 and we chop solidate for another like 6, 8, 12 months, that thing just keeps drifting higher because $150, $140, $130 becomes the base.
As we chop around in that zone, people buy, people sell, people transact.
Suddenly people don't even think about $75.
$75 is a long lost memory.
The same way that $1,000 is a long lost memory.
So over time, these like smaller prices disappear and they just become irrelevant.
We never think about that again.
We're going to find out within the next 30 to 90 days because every single previous cycle has topped.
Like if we're still going by like 2026, then we've probably busted the four year cycle because we've more or less followed it from both the cycle low and from the cycle higher perspective.
When we talk about this time is different, I think it's important to recognize what that actually means.
The human psychology is the same.
Bubbles will always look very, very similar.
They're constructed in the same way.
People behave the same way.
Human behavior is ultimately the great constant in markets.
I've seen a lot of people actually saying,
like, I'm so disappointed in this cycle.
It sucks that it's topped.
It's like, you're just basing that off the fact
the four years is going to continue.
What if it doesn't?
You know, what if we do in fact go to 150 from here
and then we chop sideways for a year?
And then we go up again.
Has the cycle ended?
And that's what chop solidation is so interesting for
because it kind of acclimates everybody to the new altitude.
100K felt normal kind of quickly.
I wouldn't say that these things are shit coins.
but let's just strip away the fact that they're orange washed companies the idea is that you want
to buy them for the three-month pump they're full of telegram groups that if you're not on the inside
you're going to get smoked like the characteristics of how they operate is shit coining it like it
literally has all the properties of shit coins so it's like functionally the machine is what it does
what are they they're shit coins just sit tight let the market do its thing like bitcoin's kicking
ass it's going to continue to kick ass chop solidation has a beautiful way of getting people
to sell their bitcoin out of boredom and frustration don't be the dude that loses it
because of boredom and frustration because if you miss those 10 days you miss what this whole thing
is about which is just like being there for those exciting repricing events and lots and lots and
lots of boredom where you get to go and live your life
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Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk.
I hope you don't mind. I am partaking in a little bit of wine right now.
Oh, my.
What are you drinking?
I am drinking Ben Justman's Peony Lane wine.
It's a Bitcoin wine.
So it is hard.
Like, it's hard to get here in Australia.
I mean, like, I'd love to get a bottle, but is it awesome?
It's fantastic.
We'll have to find a way to smuggle you some.
If Ben is, I think Ben may be joining this stream.
So hopefully he hears this, but it's fantastic.
And like, I love that he's doing things kind of like the right way.
Like it's fully organic.
He's, you know, really like he's, he put in his proof of work.
Like he's not taking shortcuts with it. And I think like a crazy percent, I'm forgetting what
the exact percentage is, but like a crazy big chunk of his revenue, it comes in in Bitcoin now.
Like he has been able to like, I mean, he's the Bitcoin wine guy. Like it just goes to show like
you can find your niche and it's, you know, yeah, you might have to like work your ass off for
something, but if you love doing it and you produce a valuable product, like Bitcoiners will
be happy to spend sats on it. Like they will part with their precious Bitcoin for a quality product
sold by a bitcoiner and like i think that's just like a beautiful thing so yeah yeah i know it's i
think he has difficulties shipping internationally even to canada uh peony lane wine has has
difficulties getting there so you're not alone uh being you know being down on oh don't worry
we've had the uh we call it the australia tax or it used to be much bigger but the australia tax
was if you wind back the clock maybe like a decade kind of pre-amazon really kicking off
we didn't have any of that shit so like you actually couldn't import stuff to australia
So everything costs, you know, 30, 40 bucks to bring in and it was just impossible to get things.
So like that was a real thing just, you know, maybe 10, 15 years ago.
Yeah.
You know, it's, it is just kind of ridiculous.
Like we're, we're at this point, I feel like Americans, we often forget how, like how easy it is for us to get basically everything through Amazon.
And obviously it has gotten a lot easier in other parts of the world, but like still, when I talk to like friends in Europe, it's like, they can't just get something.
Like I can get stuff, like I can order it right now and it'll be on my doorstep like tomorrow morning.
Like that's like, and ridiculous things too.
Like I could order a tiny home and it would like be delivered tomorrow morning.
Like it's just, you know, maybe it's gone too far.
I'm not sure.
I mean, every so often, because I mean, I spent a lot of time like studying macro and
all that.
And that's like, everyone talks about America and it makes sense, right?
The more I've gone down the rabbit hole of like learning how big America is dollar wise
in terms of capital, like your tax base, your tax base is like 50% of all profit in the world,
like from one country.
And like, you just come to the realization of how big America is.
And I was watching, you might've said there's a Netflix documentary on the Dallas Cowboys.
I watched that recently.
And like, just the size of the numbers.
And then like, I go back and look through the most expensive sports teams in the world.
And it's just America, America, America, America.
It's all NFL, NBA.
And you're like, my God, like just the sheer capital in the US.
It leaves everyone else for dead, like just by sheer numbers.
It's quite remarkable.
It really is.
Well, and it's like, you know, because sometimes people will give you a grip of like, like if you're talking just, you know, kind of exclusively through like an American lens from an economic perspective.
And it's like, well, yes, I hear that.
But it's also that that is the lens.
And it is also the global reserve currency.
And in addition to being, you know, a just massive, massive pile of capital.
So it's like, yeah, it makes sense.
It's like a lot of other stuff is a rounding error.
And let's not say there isn't interesting and important things happening.
It's just that like if you're, you know, if you need a heuristic like that, that is a pretty good one to operate.
and i guess that's what makes this period in history so interesting because you have
really the first time that america's had a challenger in china it's really it is literally
the first time and that's what makes this on a macro's landscape so interesting like these are
also you know they're also a monster but they're on two sides there's the producer and there's the
consumer and you know they're trying to make each other do the opposite thing but like it's a
fascinating time in history it's a turning point that's for sure it's it's going to be interesting
I mean, there's been all this constant talk about, you know, these BRICS nations getting together and having their gold-backed currency, which everyone seems to be very certain is going to happen very soon.
I'm not sure how much you've looked into all that, but I think it's very interesting when you look at that whole paradigm through the Bitcoin lens where it's like, huh, America is uniquely positioned in that both as a nation state and as a corporate base and as an individual citizen base, we have the most Bitcoin.
like we we do uh and relative like our bitcoin holdings relative to our gold holdings relative
to other countries bitcoin and gold holdings like bitcoin is a much bigger strategic advantage for us
if we wanted to monetize something rapidly uh and kind of change the global paradigm it would make
much more sense to do it in bitcoin than to do it in gold because if you try to do it in gold it's
like well china and russia have quite a bit of gold um or so they say anyway i know china probably
has a lot of fake gold too but that's a different story i don't know it's gonna it's gonna be a very
like these next 10 20 years i think are gonna be kind of mind-blowing like i don't know
what the future is gonna look like when my you know son is like entering the workforce and
i don't know it's it's wild it is and and like i actually like i'm i am increasingly becoming
a gold bug like i know that if bitcoin didn't exist i definitely would be but like gold is
still 10% of my holdings. I've talked about why I own it. It's actually because I just want something
to preserve, not to grow. I know it's not going to be Bitcoin, but in a year's time, I might just
want that capital, right? Buy a house, whatever it is. I don't want to be selling Bitcoin at the
wrong time in a down market, or I'm pretty sure it's about to explode higher and I need 10 grand.
The gold goes, right? That's what it's for. But I'm increasing as I just look at this whole thing
playing out. I mean, we're literally watching gold breaking all-time highs as we speak.
it just is the shelling point and it was funny actually because i called my dad because he's
he's retired he's trying to work out like what do i buy right he doesn't have the timeline
to ride a bitcoin wave and you know there's only so many products i can really say this is the
right thing and he's already got a bitcoin position but for gold i was explaining to
he's like why gold i said it's a shelling point i said look we're in paris i tell you i'm going
to meet you at midday where are you going to be and he goes eiffel tower that's it that's exactly
right. We're all going to meet at the Eiffel Tower because it's the most obvious place. That's the
shelling point. It's like, everyone's going to look around the world and they're going to go,
fuck, it's a mess. What do I do? I'm going to buy gold because it's just like hands off,
step away. Currencies are getting smashed everywhere. It's funny actually, when I flick
through all sorts of different stocks, I mean, Australia is basically banking and mining. That's
all we do. And I've held various mining stocks over the years. I've never held a banking stock,
various mining stocks and like i've had some success but like not really because suddenly
there's a news headline and just it's down 50 or suddenly like they lost their land title or some
you know there's some thing that just happened some regulatory bullshit just like blows up it's
like a perfectly well functioning mine they have a flood you know these are the kind of things that
happen equities in all forms have these problems and you just kind of look at that's why people
just go into the index because they want to diversify but like gold is just hands-off shelling
point i'm gonna buy because i don't know what else to do and then also you've got you know the let's
call them the bricks they talk about this gold gold back currency it's just gold right there's
gonna trade in gold so they're just buying and when china decides i'm gonna buy a lot of this
thing it they just keep going right they don't care they're price insensitive they just buy buy
buy buy buy and it's i find it very funny that all the other gold bugs are saying like oh look at
Bitcoin getting captured by the government.
Like, bro, central banks are your buyer.
What are you talking about?
Like, back off.
So, you know, this is one of these interesting dynamics.
But like, I'm increasingly coming around to the fact that like gold has a very important
role.
It's going to be put back into the financial system.
Bitcoin is competing for it.
But let's face it, like the most probable outcome is that gold becomes the bedrock.
And then Bitcoin becomes like this liquid layer on top.
And over time, they'll become more used to it.
Like it's going to have a whole lot, a much better shot than it would have, obviously,
if it didn't exist.
But if Bitcoin launched today, I think it would have a hard time.
The fact it's got that 16 year history where it's like it's kind of made it already.
I think that's an interesting time.
It was just at the right place at the right time in time for this whole sovereign debt
shakeup.
It's fascinating.
I am definitely not a trader.
I'm trying to hold my Bitcoin for the long term.
And if you're like me, you need to make sure you keep that Bitcoin safe by going to bitbox.swiss slash walker and using the promo code walker for 5% off the fully open source Bitcoin only Bitbox O2 hardware wallet.
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so it's going to keep ripping higher but now is the best time for you to get your security locked
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trust me, you can go and verify that for yourself on their GitHub.
When you go to bitbox.swiss slash walker and use the promo code walker,
not only do you get 5% off, but you also help support this podcast.
So thank you.
Yeah, I mean, it's always fun to make fun of gold bugs.
But at the same time, gold has been extremely good at maintaining value
over thousands of years.
Like literally like it, you know, it's not, not great for increasing your purchasing power
relative to the actual goods, you know, hard goods that you were trying to buy, but it
is really good at maintaining.
You know, what is it like the thousand dollars or, you know, a thousand dollar suit of the
ounce, the ounce of gold suit, uh, you know, like, like a fine, fine tailored suit basically
was like an ounce of gold a hundred years ago.
And it's an ounce of gold today.
And you know that it's gotten much more expensive in fiat terms, obviously, but you still have
the same purchasing power if you saved in gold.
So it's like, yeah, I like taking shots at Peter Schiff as much as the next guy, maybe more than the next guy.
But, you know, it has its place.
I think that's interesting that you use it really just as like a that's your if I need to sell something, I don't want to sell my Bitcoin.
I think that's something I actually I haven't actually heard somebody else who's like, no, gold is the thing that I'm like, I just keep a little bit of it because I want to be able to have something that I don't have any qualms about parting ways with, which is basically where you're at.
Right.
Yeah, it's kind of my one to two year liquidity pool.
So it's cash that's not fiat, right?
If I need something in the next three months, cash, obviously.
If I need something in the next six to two years, six months, two years, then gold is the right asset for that because it's just going to preserve that purchasing power in this current environment.
And then Bitcoin is my longest duration.
So paying off, not starting the mortgage, paying off the mortgage.
Gold is there to start the mortgage.
Bitcoin is there to pay it off.
Putting kids through school, right?
that's a 12 plus year long liability that I don't have to deal with right now. Bitcoin,
that's where it's going. So that's how I like to think about it. And it is, it's there to be sold
because everything is a relative game. So for me, I talk about this a lot.
The house in Australia is a really, I mean, it's a hard thing to catch. In Sydney, particularly,
our median to median is like 13 median income to median house price. So it's like they have to
create a new bucket because five is what's deemed highly unaffordable. 13 is called impossibly
unaffordable. They've had to create a new tier for it. We're up there with Hong Kong and most
other Australian cities. So for us, it's like a good luck chasing it. Bitcoin is the only thing
that's allowed me to actually chase the housing market, but everything's a relative trade.
The housing market may have a spasm at some point. This can happen. And I may not want to
sell my Bitcoin because like many people listening, I also think it's going to a million bucks,
probably not tomorrow, but I think it's going there. Do I really want to sell my million dollar
future Bitcoin now to do that? Do I mind selling like a couple of ounces of gold to like get
started? Couldn't care less. So its job is there to be sold to take advantage of the gold to house
ratio. The Bitcoin is there to clear the mortgage to Bitcoin ratio. That's really the long term.
And it's just about timeframe. Most of the time when people disagree on stuff in markets, it's
they're not understanding each other's timeframe. And this is just a great example.
I think that's a really good point. I think one thing a lot of people do seem to agree on right
now at least people who don't just completely hate bitcoin is that gold is that canary in the
coal mine right it's letting when when gold is going up it's kind of letting everybody know
hey something is out of whack here people are feeling something is wrong there's big shifts
coming people are looking for something that is you know that is going to be okay uh you know at
least for the foreseeable future like if everything else you know uh you know just completely dies off
like gold gold's gonna have a little cold but it you know it'll be okay and it'll probably just
keep going up. Do you view gold as kind of that marker for where you see, okay, if gold's making
moves, you look for Bitcoin to follow? Because I think Bitcoin is still in its gold-denominated
value. It's still like, has it broken all-time highs yet? It briefly broke to all-time highs,
then pulled back. And this is another one of those things. So I think the gold, for me,
gold is actually the benchmark. So we often compare everything in Bitcoin terms. The problem
when you put any asset in Bitcoin terms, it just looks like the inverse of the Bitcoin chart.
Because of how powerful its old history is, it's kind of useless. It's honestly useless information.
What I do like to look at is everything priced in gold. You can look at the stock market. This
is a really, really popular chart. Look at the S&P 500 and it's rolling over and it tends to have
gold outperformance for roughly 10 years. And then you have like a 10 to 20 year type period
where it's equities. And it looks like we've just completed a 10-year equity phase and we're moving
into a 10-year gold phase, which is probably not a great sign for equities by and large, because
it's usually during these periods of loss of purchasing power, you get higher inflation,
it's harder for companies to continue to grow in those environments. So you get this kind of
lost decade. Now, whether it's a lost decade in fiat or only in gold terms remains to be seen.
certainly in gold terms is kind of my base case but if you compare fiat versus uh gold and i
actually like i've got a couple of charts on my website where i reference it to february 2022
because there's always a question of like where do you anchor this stuff and what i really like
one thing that really it's kind of a bit of a pet peeve is when you see people going oh bitcoin's
performance sucks measuring from like the picotop to the picotop it's like who cares about the picotop
if you're dcaing into any asset like that only matters for the guy who bought the absolute top
and then bought the absolute top and was like, why aren't I performing?
It's like, because you're a shit investor.
You know, I do better.
So like working out what is a correct anchor point is always tricky.
Now, if you look at Bitcoin's performance, if you anchor to the cycle bottom,
of course, it's going to look tremendous against anything.
It's kind of a bit disingenuous.
If you go from the cycle top, sure, you can see how it's performed up until the next bull.
And that's okay.
But really only matters to the guy at the bull top.
I've got a bunch of charts where I anchor to February, 2022.
because that's actually a major geopolitical event.
That's when the US froze Russia's reserves.
And if you look at all fiat currencies versus gold since then,
they're down somewhere between 40% and 60%.
The US dollar is down 51%.
So the US dollar has been cut in half in gold terms
since they froze the reserves.
It's like, okay, so that's starting to say
maybe we've got a shift going.
If you look at toilet paper, which is TLT, long duration bonds,
they're down 61%.
So that's it. I mean, that's more than being cut in half. That's pretty nasty. Stocks are down 25%. So gold's kind of kicking ass. Now, if you then introduce Bitcoin, what happened in February 2022? Well, we were on the precipice of going down to 15K. We didn't know it yet. We're trading at like 45, 50K. So the nice thing about this comparison is you pick up the Bitcoin bear. You're not saying I'm going to cherry pick from the Bitcoin bottom and say, look how good it's done.
No, I'm going to cherry pick from like early phase of the bear.
Luna collapses, three arrows collapses, FTX collapses.
And yet we've still recovered and we're up something like between 80 and 50%, depending
on where you want to measure it.
So Bitcoin is one of few assets that is beating the gold benchmark.
So it's actually a really genuine and fair comparison because you're saying, look, we
get some downside, but your fiat's getting killed.
Your stocks are getting killed.
Pretty much everything is losing to gold except Bitcoin.
and one or two of the high-flying tech stocks.
So you're really like talking about a very small pool of assets.
Everything's correlated right now.
So it's all one trade.
You know, at some point you're like, I look at NVIDIA.
NVIDIA is actually the only asset that I can, you know, big picture asset,
not penny stocks and the like.
NVIDIA is really the only asset that is beating Bitcoin on any meaningful timeframe.
And I'm like, is it going to go from $4 trillion to $8 trillion?
I can see Bitcoin going from $2 trillion to $8 trillion.
I don't even have to run any compute cycles.
This is going to happen.
NVIDIA's got a lot of work.
They've got to keep growing at a kind of unsustainable rate for a long time to justify an $8 trillion markup.
All the dollars are going to get cut in half.
Both of those things could happen, but I can see Bitcoin going to $8 trillion far easier.
So for me, it just becomes this like, I'm just going to put money in gold and Bitcoin.
Just wait because I know where they're going to go.
I understand the thesis.
It's really the same thesis, just different timelines.
sit tight, hands off, shelling point, let it do its thing.
You know, you mentioned that kind of the shite investor who basically, you know,
bought the very top and is now complaining about, you know, the lack of gains.
I mean, do you think that there's a lot of that in the current,
just vibes in the current sentiment out there?
Because we're still, let's see, right now, the time of recording,
we're a little over 111,000 infinitely printable, you know,
fiat cuck bucks per Bitcoin.
It's pretty awesome.
you know, in my book. It's pretty amazing. We crashed to 110K.
Yeah. Like it's amazing that this is boring or that this is a crash or that this is somehow
unsatisfactory to some people. Why are we seeing such just like a kind of a weird,
like just a weird vibe out there right now? What is your take on this?
Sentiment has been one of the most interesting things to cycle by far. And there's a few running
theses. It's very hard to prove what it is. It's probably a bit of all of it. I'll try and run
through a couple of things on my list. The first one, I think, which is worth noting, and I remember
back in 2023, would have been like mid-23, I think. I was working at Glassnode at the time,
and I heard many anecdotes from hedge funds, trading desks, average investors. If you wind
back the clock to that late 2022 bear market, early 23, ETH actually outperformed Bitcoin in
that process And I think a lot of people and I heard this a lot of trading firms go oh Bitcoin actually not going to make it now Let rotate and go And even if it does then we may as well be on the fastest horse which is number two
And then it got absolutely slammed.
So I think a lot of people got stuck in the shitcoin trade, expecting the capital waterfall
to happen.
ETH obviously got absolutely rinsed versus Bitcoin, just a horrible three-year persistent
decline.
and then I look this is just how markets work I can only imagine the disgust of people just going
I'm done they rotate out and then it pumps right suddenly it's at all-time high again
I can only I mean like I don't know how the future is going to play out but poetry and I don't like
poetry but poetry would be ethereum tagging its all-time high by like 50 bucks as it's done and
that's it it's over it's done but all those people who bought it at the bottom watched it go lower
finally sold it and then buy back into the top and are probably now going to ride the next wave
down that's one area so i think people just call got caught in the wrong shit coins under allocated
to bitcoin i think the other one is treasury companies people saw the meteoric rise of mstr
there's a bunch of guys out there and well done for being on that train very very early
and riding that wave up i think there's two things that have really crushed people let's say three
things that have really crushed people's sentiment. One, MSTR has not really gone anywhere in some
time since November last year, and most of it's gone down. So I think a lot of people got kind of
crushed on MSTR. I think more people got crushed buying call options on MSTR, and they're probably
discovering that call options, if you just hold the stock, it might come back. Call options literally
go to zero. If they don't end up in the money, they literally go to zero, and they go to zero
quickly. So I think that's been a capital destruction. And I think a lot of people
saw MetaPlanet, missed it, and then jumped on every other shitcoin with a
cold card. And they're now down 60 odd percent plus
and still going. So I think the treasury companies have probably incinerated
quite a lot of capital. People didn't quite understand the premium compression
angle to this whole thing. What is that? That's actually the same
story as the previous point, which is people just under allocated to Bitcoin.
not enough people actually just own spot corn now there's the other one of and i think this is
actually very meaningful i don't believe that i think this is generally people who are inexperienced
in markets have this view but i see it a lot people think it's been a shit cycle because it
hasn't gone up enough hasn't gone up as much as they expected that's got nothing to do with the
market that's because people's expectations were just very very wrong like bitcoin is just much
bigger now. Now, personally, I ran a study, I think it would have been like January, February.
And I try to look at the capital flows and how much I think has to come in to justify moves to
different levels. And anyway, when I ran that study, we're about 100K. And I said, what's it
going to take to get us to 150? From 2 trillion to 3 trillion, what's that move going to require?
And my estimation was that the ETFs probably had to double from where they were back then.
I think they've been up like 60, 70%.
But if you add in MSTRs buying since then,
you've actually kind of got the amount of capital
that I thought we needed to get to 150.
Now, that doesn't mean that I'm right,
but I think we belong at 150, honestly.
And I think we kind of belong there
and we should stay there.
I just think a lot of people don't understand
that markets are a process, not a result.
Just because you get to a price
doesn't mean that you've earned the right to stay there.
MSTR got to what, 500 bucks.
but it just didn't have, you know, it can't really sustain a 3X premium. It can't really
grow its Bitcoin stack by 3X. It's probably not going to happen. So if you like Bitcoin's really
got to go on a serious run before that expands. So I think people's expectations outrun reality.
A lot of folks, I think, feel like the Bitcoin market, because of the bears, probably the bears
suck, they're brutal, that doesn't mean the market owes you a retirement. You know what I mean? Like
markets are not ATMs. You've got to give the market, it's like the tide, the tide, if you swim
against it, it's going to drag you out to sea. You can wish all you want what your expectations
should be, but like the market just is, it's just a force of nature and you just kind of have to go
along with the ride. So, you know, if for example, we pull back to, I don't know, 100K, 90K,
and we bottom out there, is everyone going to go, hey, that was a bear market?
Like in my book, that's a bear.
I think if we actually pull back to like 90, 80, 75, to me,
that's starting to look like bear market floor type material.
That's my gut feel.
If we were to bear out here, I think that's a bear market.
So then is everyone going to like correct their charts and say, oh yeah,
we actually bottomed in November 2025 and that was it.
And then are people going to be like ready to adjust their cycle theory?
And like, if you just keep punching to new highs, does suddenly the cycle not suck anymore?
So it's just about like understanding that things are a process.
Markets take time.
When it's going up, it's actually not because people are buying shitloads of coin right now.
It's because they bought shitloads of coin for the last like five, six, seven, eight,
nine months.
And then the sellers dry up.
You still got the same amount of demand, but suddenly there's no one
willing to sell. So, you know, if I go back to 2024, that move from 50K to 100K when Trump got
elected, without that eight months of sideways, choppy, boring, frustrating, sideways price action,
without that chop solidation, you don't go from 50 to 100. And if you do, you probably come back
down because that eight months of chop is the base from which that move comes from. And if we look at
our current performance, a lot of people are going, oh man, this cycle sucks because it's like 2025
five and we're at the same price it's like yeah but chop guys chop solidation when this thing goes
it's proven that we're an hour two trillion dollar asset the next move is three trillion and if we go
through another 12 months of sideways the next stop is four trillion and it's like and i don't
believe this kind of stair-stepping can go on indefinitely but it's a process so i think
expectations not earning enough bitcoin because they're in shit coins not earning enough bitcoin
because they're in treasury companies they're the big three that i think have got people
frustrated. Maybe the fourth one I should just add, there's less volatility. People expect the
high octane old school Bitcoin, which is probably the way they went into treasury companies.
It hasn't given them that high octane. It's given my old man his, hey, I actually quite like Bitcoin
anymore. It doesn't seem to go down. Think about that sentiment in Wall Street, in pension funds,
in retirement accounts. If you've got the high octane, you can kind of lose those people.
The fact that we don't have that is actually opening doors and taking away one of the biggest
pieces of FUD that's ever been around for Bitcoin, which is it's too volatile.
It's like, well, we got rid of that too.
You know, like what FUD is left?
There is no FUD left.
Let's go.
Honestly, Bitcoiners right now are coming up with the most FUD for Bitcoin.
Like that's what I'm seeing.
It's no longer, you know, the external.
That's the most amazing part.
Okay.
There's so much there I want to unpack.
One of the things maybe to start with is just because you mentioned kind of that, like,
you know, earning that, uh, you know, or you feel that, you know, we should be at somewhere around
one 50. And I've got to say though. So the last time we talked, it was February of this year.
You like, I don't know if you remember this, but you perfectly called that. Like you didn't get
that, you know, say what the exact time would be, but you were like, I think we probably go back down
to 75 or so. And if that happens, I'm backing up the truck. Lo and behold, like a month later,
we, you know, blast down to 75. Everyone's like, what's going on? And I'm just sitting there like,
oh, checkmate did say this was probably going to happen. And then you're like, but I think that
the top is somewhere around 150 this cycle.
Are you still like,
is that still like,
do you think that was like the bottom?
Do you think we retouch that,
that March,
April low again,
or go below that is,
is 58 K a magnet or,
or have we,
you know,
those days gone by us.
And then on the other side of that is your kind of top target for this
cycle still looking at that 150 marker is that we're looking at,
or have there been things that have come to light in,
you know,
in the past say,
you know,
half a year basically since we last talked that have changed that in terms of what you think we
might be able to achieve this cycle? All really good questions. So I'll talk through why I thought
we were going to go to 75. And again, it's not because I can predict the future. I certainly
can't. There was what I call an air pocket. So we did the 2024 chop solidation. And in fact,
I should actually wind back the clock one more step. In 2021, we got to a trillion dollar market
cap, it's about 50K, 50, 60K twice. The first time in March, April, and then we got slammed down to
29. Then we tried it again in November, October, and we got slammed down to 15K. The market said,
sorry, mate, you're not ready for a trillion dollars. Try again next time. So we did. We
tried again next time with the ETFs in tow, right? We've cleared out all the dead wood. We've had a
complete Bitcoin equivalent of a GFC. We've smoked all the three arrows, the block fires, they're
gone. Suddenly we're in, hey, we got these ETFs and they're taking in billion dollars a day on a
consistent basis. Massive numbers. Oh, by the way, they're actually like the most successful ETFs ever.
Suddenly we're at 73. Now the market ran a bit too hard, too fast. We chopped around for eight
months. Every time we went below, not above, below 50K, we got bid every single time. The yen carry
trade happened, 49, straight back up again. We come down to 53, the German government sells 50,000
coins, straight back up again. The market said, no, you did it. You made it. You're a trillion
dollar asset now. So the ceiling of that, what I call the top of the chop, 75K. Now from 75 up to
86 in November, there was basically no coins at transit. We literally just zipped way too quickly.
So the move higher was built off that base, that 2024 base.
But yet very, very often markets will come back and retest major all-time higher breakouts.
But also those air pockets, I don't know why it is.
It's the same as CMR gaps.
There's just like these things in markets I've seen enough times.
I'm just like, look, be aware.
We might go down and touch it.
We might just go and find out, hey, I know you've bought all these coins at 95 and 100.
Do you still like it at 75?
And the market said, yes.
Now, the reason I like this like 75 to 80K region right now, by the way, I actually think there's a much lower probability that we go there.
I actually don't want us to go there because I think that would be just from a technical perspective, quite damaging to the chart.
So I don't want us to go there.
I don't think we go there.
But if we do, sailors cost basis at 74K.
The average, there's an on-chain model I use called the true market mean, which is the average cost basis for people who are actually active in the cycle.
That's at 78.
The ETFs are at 80.
So you've got 80, 78, 74.
Imagine the headlines.
Imagine the smell of the price going back down to 75.
You've got the top of the chop.
Just imagine that happening.
It would be absolute chaos and only the Bitcoin believers would be like, I mean, sale are about to be liquidated.
ETF investors get wrecked.
Like pick your headline, bottom form and stuff, guys.
Like that's nasty.
We have earned our right as a trillion dollar asset.
We don't belong at 50K.
Now, if we go there because anything in this world can happen, that's deep value.
Like, I'm sorry, but that's just deep value.
I'm selling the couch, right?
Whatever you got to do.
Once you get down there, it doesn't make sense.
It's too oversold.
So I'm just trying to like think through these scenarios in advance.
And then once you, well, for me at least, once I've satisfied myself that, you know what?
anything below that level is deep value i go well how low could we actually go if like if you look
at things on like a risk reward perspective we're at 100 if we go to 75 that's 25 correction from
here from or from 100 okay it's like another day in bitcoin you know what i mean like as long as i
didn't put my whole net worth in at 124 like yeah that would suck but like okay 25 30 whatever
What if we go up to 150, 180?
So now let's look at the upside.
As chop solidation occurs, now, if we spoke in February,
there's been a lot of coins that have changed hands,
both on the sell-off down of 75, on the rally back up again,
on the multiple consolidations we've had,
on the pullback we're currently having.
We've gone nowhere.
We've chop solidated for another nine months.
Imagine all the coins that have changed hands.
And actually, it's a huge amount.
uh i'll try i'm pretty sure the numbers are if you price every utxo based on when it last moved
on chain i think it's 50 it's either 50 or 45 something like that around half of every dollar
that has ever been if you price the utxos is above 95k above 95 that's the floor that's like
where bitcoin's home is now so that's the kind of magnitude that we're talking about
the people's mental investment cost basis. If you think about all these Wall Street investors
and the ETFs, all these pension funds, they don't care that Bitcoin traded $100 or $10 or $15.
Their cost basis is $55 IBIT, $62 IBIT. And all they see when they log into the chart is an
uptrend. They literally don't know that Bitcoin has bear markets unless they kind of recall from
the news. So from that perspective, we've reset the entire Bitcoin psychology to like 75k plus.
75k is like old news now, bear market territory. Everything above 95, normal, normal, normal,
normal behavior. So then you go, okay, well, where can we go before people start getting
too profitable? When are they going to start selling? So that was 150 when we spoke last.
as more capital changes hands, if you've got a bunch of people with a cost basis that used to
be 50, but they sold it to some guy whose cost base is now a hundred, well, for him to hit his
profit target, it's no longer 150, it might be 180, it might be 200, right? The market's got to go
higher to create the incentive for people to sell. So from memory, the 150 level we spoke about
before, I think right now will be floating around 180 or 185, something like that. And again, that's
not a target. That's just where statistically speaking, there's a 5% chance we keep going.
If you just look at mean reversion, there's only a 5% chance that we get there and then keep going
past it. But if we go up to 150 and we chop solidate for another like six, eight, 12 months,
that thing just keeps drifting higher because 150, 140, 130 becomes the base. As we chop around in
that zone, people buy, people sell, people transact. Suddenly people don't even think
about 75. 75 is a long lost memory, the same way that a thousand dollars is a long lost memory. So
over time, these like smaller prices disappear and they just become irrelevant, right? We never
think about that again. And we start always looking ahead because people are naturally optimistic.
So that's the way I like to think about things. Chop consolidation is the most important like
market structure dynamic. It's a function of lots of things, ETFs, derivatives, the whole lot.
but this chop solidation thing that we're experiencing is why bitcoin keeps climbing
higher and it's why this cycle kicks ass because we've never seen this before it really is a whole
different thing very healthy very stable actually much easier to read honestly like if i went brought
myself back and tried to restudy the 2021 cycle you had to know that blockfire was playing silly
games you had to know that three arrows capital was borrowing a billion dollars for zero collateral
You had to know all this like weird esoteric stuff.
Now, all we have to just look at is like, you know, where has the market proven?
Where have we got the confidence that we belong at that level?
And for me, it just seems to be much, much easier to read on those levels.
Oh, okay.
I mean, I love that.
First of all, that it's just kind of the chop solidation.
You've really brought me around this from the last conversation.
Obviously, you've talked about it a lot.
you know and it you know uh uh dr jeff ross would you know his version that is like the crab market
right or the bull crab market just kind of crabbing along and it's and it's boring and it bores you
just long enough to where you're kind of like okay you know screw that and then that's when
it melts your face off i'm curious though you know could because you mentioned okay there's
also this chance of we maybe we have this pullback maybe there is like a november 2025 uh bear market
and then and then that's the bottom of the bear like do you where are you at with the whole four
your cycles thing you know because we talked about this a little bit last time one of the
things you said was yeah conditions might change i'm paraphrasing here conditions might change but
human nature doesn't change and obviously there's other you know factors that play into this there's
global liquidity cycles as well right there's all these different things so where are you at with us
or with this is this time different from that cycle perspective uh or do we you know is it is it
a little bit different but it still follows the the general framework you know it doesn't repeat
itself, but it rhymes. How do you look at this? How are you kind of planning for that as we go
forward? What's your model there? That's a great question. And there's a few angles to this. The
first one, we're going to find out within the next 30 to 90 days, because every single previous cycle
has topped. If we're still going by 2026, then we've probably busted the four-year cycle, because
we've more or less followed it from both the cycle low and from the cycle higher perspective.
A lot of people like to share that chart.
I think it's a good one that just kind of maps each cycle's performance since the bottom,
since the top.
I really dislike the one since the halving because I think the halving was completely
and utterly irrelevant, both from a market perspective, but also it's just kind of an
arbitrary date.
Cycle bottom, cycle higher makes a lot more sense because that takes into account the
duration that people go through, like the investor psychology of going through a bear,
hammering out a bottom finding the actual like conviction to buy it going through the recovery
hitting the euphoria and then just going oh man i'm getting rich and then everyone makes decisions
on those types of time frames now no matter which way you want to measure it we're somewhere between
30 and 90 days away from like hitting where all previous cycles have topped out now if we've
already topped out which is always a possibility i don't it's not my base case but it's possible
if we've already topped out it was kind of a normal cycle honestly like we got the diminishing
returns you know we went for about the same duration it's in between the duration of 2017
and 2021 so like there's a lot of things that are kind of in line so it still has a lot of
characteristics of the four-year cycle however it is also different structurally measurably
observably it's very very different it has a lot of the characteristics of the 2016-17 markets
spot driven, I think is a key part of that. Then the ETS are a big role. If you look at any mean
reversion oscillators, whether technical or on-chain, it has the same pattern and flow as 1617,
different amplitude and it oscillates around means rather than kind of finding support on them. So
it's got a different character. 2018 to 22 was a very, very different period. Boom, bust, straight
up, straight down, like with leverage, very, very different creature. So it is different,
But it also, when we talk about this time is different, I think it's important to recognize what that actually means.
The human psychology is the same.
Bubbles will always look very, very similar.
They're constructed in the same way.
People behave the same way.
Human behavior is ultimately the great constant in markets.
So the four-year cycle, there will be a lot of people who behave, sell, act.
I've seen a lot of people actually saying, I'm so disappointed in this cycle.
It sucks that it's topped.
It's like, you're just basing that off the fact that four years are going to continue.
What if it doesn't?
You know, what if we do in fact go to 150 from here and then we chop sideways for a
year and then we go up again?
Has the cycle ended?
And that's what chop solidation is so interesting for because it kind of acclimates everybody
to the new altitude.
100K felt normal kind of quickly.
Now in 2017, you never had time to get used to 3K and 5K and 7K and 10K because by the
time you've worked out what price you're at, you're 2x higher. So people didn't actually have
time to acclimatize to new altitudes. Here, we've acclimatized to 100K for nine months.
People are now used to 100K as being like a normal level. If we go to 95, in fact, even at 108,
I was like, kind of feels like a discount, right? I'm a hodler who's been in this market for a long
time. We always feel like we're late and it's expensive when we buy. I now feel comfortable
buying at 108K, right? Tell that to my like 12 month old self, like 12 months ago. Insane. When
you're trading at 50K, you're like, by the way, it's going to feel really normal to buy 108K
pullback. And by the way, you'll have been there for a year. You're like, what? You know, when you
put all this stuff in perspective, Chop Solidation is doing a really, really good job of just helping
people get used to the ascent, right? It's like going to Base Camp 1, spend some time there,
get your oxygen right go to base camp two once you're comfortable base camp two you can start
seeing the summit it's still a long way up but you can start thinking about the summit
yeah i mean it is interesting to think of like uh how quickly these things become the new normal
like and it just feels like you said like it's you know it went down to 108k and i'm like oh
well great i'm you know add a little bit add a little bit actually a couple a couple little
smash buys here with the the fiat that you know that i've got lying around you know i've got my
my dca just keeps on cooking but a little extra they're feeling frisky and it's like wow it feels
like a feels like i got a great deal on that on those sats they're like fantastic right but it's
again that like if you would have told me that at 50k i would have been like well i'm backing up the
truck even more now there's nothing like the truck is gone i've sold all the tires in the truck there's
nothing left for it but here but if i you know i'm going to somehow limp it along to back it up more
but it so i think it's interesting does that does that necessarily mean then that like are you
generally the theory, I should say that like any bear, quote, bear market or any drawdowns will be
less severe and less, they won't be as long. Is that fair to say that you're kind of in that camp?
Can we have a protracted bear market still? Yeah, yeah. It very much depends on the bull.
So it's very hard for me to construct a nasty 80% down bear market from here. It's very hard for me
to construct that because I do believe, and again, these are just beliefs, but I do believe we have
proven that Bitcoin's a trillion dollar asset. Bitcoin doesn't belong down below 50K. It's just
not, it's out of bounds. So once you go to that process, you're like, we literally haven't gone
high enough to justify an 80%. Okay. What happens if we go high enough? How high do we have to go
before an 80% makes sense? You wake up tomorrow and you're at 500K or a million bucks. Yeah,
we're coming down. It's going to be hard, right? That descent's going to suck. So that's where
Like a lot of folks I see say, oh, but it didn't hit my 300K price target.
It's like, yeah, but you need to be sitting there on the sell button when it gets there
because it's not going to be there for very long, right?
Unless the whole world is just imploding and, you know, that's a whole different edge case.
But the most likely scenario is that we just go through this market cycle and we hit peaks.
There will be a bear at some point I suspect it will be protracted I think we still get a lengthy period but it really depends on the pathway up For me as an analyst it much easier
and I think most people would agree with this, it's much easier to spot an insanely euphoric bull
where funding rates are through the roof, lots of profit takings happening, the narrative is there
is no ceiling, MSTR is just mooning, every treasury company and shit coins going through the roof.
we've all been there we've seen it we know what it looks like it's easy to spot euphoria how high it
goes is a whole different animal because a lot of people sell and then it goes keeps going higher
and then they buy back in because like oh no i'm wrong and they end up buying the top again so that's
a very common behavior what actually concerns me as an analyst is that we just like roll over it's
like this just like sad little it just doesn't have the euphoric boom that you would expect that's
much harder to spot because you're really looking at just like a softening out of demand. Now,
the truth is right now, as we're talking, the ETFs are pretty soft. We've seen about three or
four weeks where they just haven't seen significant inflows. It's not bearish. They're just not
bullish either. We get a little bit of an outflow. We get a little bit of an inflow.
One thing that I find quite comforting with the ETFs is that we've seen very, very little
sustained week after week, billion dollar out, billion dollar out. We haven't seen that.
We get the occasional patch, but it's an event.
Everything's been quite event-based, which I think is very good.
We're not getting like a loss of confidence of holders.
That's a good thing.
Treasury company bid has just evaporated completely.
And that's because a lot of these companies don't have an MNAB anymore.
They have no premiums, so they have no capacity to buy.
You've got Saylor who's meaningfully backed off the – he can't sell as much of these preferreds anymore.
He was raising $2 billion, $1 billion, $3 billion.
He did like $400 million.
Now, $400 million is still a lot of money, but it's not $2 billion.
It's quite sizably less than $2 billion.
So even Saylor doesn't have the buy side.
So the treasury company bids evaporated, really.
So really, all you're left with is just classic Bitcoiners buying in spot markets.
When you look at the amount of sell side, I also don't encourage people to whale watch.
I certainly don't whale watch.
But Sani, who's from Time Chain Index, he's done tremendous work, and he's got all the
labels to track this stuff.
he can see all these like oh 24 000 bitcoin comes back to life 24 000 bitcoin comes um galaxy just
cleared 80 000 bitcoin like these are very very big clips and there's a lot of them we're not at
90k we're not at 80 we're not at 70 we're at 110 111 like bitcoin's doing pretty all right
considering the etfs are soft and the treasury companies are doing absolutely nothing
That's quite remarkable.
There's a lot of Bitcoiners out there just stacking actual sats.
It's not going to be all retail.
There's going to be like institutions and funds and firms and all that.
But there's demand out there that I think a lot of people aren't like.
It should be lower given how much sell side there is and how little the obvious demand
vectors are contributing.
It's quite remarkable, actually.
It's interesting.
It reminds me because one of the things we talked about last time again was the kind
of market manipulation narrative.
of this idea that, oh, clearly there's market manipulation and paper Bitcoin being sold and
all these things because the price isn't doing what I want right now. And your response to that
again at that time, which I think was pretty prescient given the very large and public whale
sales that we've seen of late, I just mentioned a couple of them, is that you were like, look,
there's a lot of OG whales with massive stacks of Bitcoin. And for them, anything over 100k looks
pretty great because they've held it from a few bucks or from you know from whatever it is like
they are massively massively unbelievably in profit and they're they want to take some of that
like who knows these may not even be their their whole clips they're you know all of their stacks
like they may have other ones like like and i i feel like people just still i mean it's hard for
me to fathom having you know like one person having billions of dollars of bitcoin but like
it's out there and and there's more of them than we realize that and the other thing is like you
you know this guy who's going to sell 80 000 bitcoin they're like why would you do that we're
about to go on like the monster of all bull runs mike bro he bought in 2011 he's had the monster of
all bull runs he's up 10 billion dollars like he needs to hire a legal team to sort out his estate
like that's how much money this dude has he can buy an island don't worry about him he's going to
be just fine and who knows how many more of these clips he's got uh he probably doesn't want to keep
on a fucking cold wallet anymore.
You know, that's a whole mission.
So it is an interesting angle,
but it's not only just the whale OGs.
They're definitely an interesting component
that we've seen in like the recent months.
But the other thing that's like even more interesting,
there's just hodlers
and people have held for six months,
12 months, two years, three years.
People have just been around
for a cycle and a half or a cycle.
A lot of these guys are selling as well.
And they always sell,
these coins come back to life.
And this is the thing.
When we look at on-chain data, we don't know that a coin was sold.
We can see that a lot of them go in and out of exchanges.
On an average daily basis, approximately a billion dollars goes in and out of exchanges,
which is pretty massive.
Somewhere between like 60% and 80%, when you actually look at like adjusting the transaction
volume and you get rid of all like the exchange internals and all that stuff, somewhere between
like 60 and 80% of the real economic volume of Bitcoin are coins going in and out of exchanges
for trade. Now, of course, someone may buy a coin and then not exactly withdraw it on that day.
They may also send a coin and not sell it on that exact day. It really doesn't matter. They come back
to life. Old coins with the most profit always come back to life when the market is going up
harshly, right? When the market is really ripping, people sell. They bring coins back to life. Now,
it could also be that they've all got a telegram chat and they go, now's the day we're going to do
UTXO consolidation. Let's all do our management today because the price is 100K. No, they're
taking profit or they're doing something in the market. They could be taking a loan. It doesn't
matter. The pattern is lots of old coins come back to the market and then the market stops going up.
It's just kind of the way things work. So we don't need to be perfectly precise,
but we can get a decent read that there are a lot of these coins coming in.
But my favorite, one of my favorite insights,
everything is Newton's third law, equal and opposite.
Every sold Bitcoin is a bought Bitcoin.
When you measure sell side, you're actually measuring demand.
And this is the thing for me that's been,
I look at the sell side and you've got to like,
you know, it's all about developing a bit of a gut feel.
I call it like your Bitcoin instinct.
And by the way, trust your Bitcoiner instinct because you'll be amazed.
I wrote a piece on this literally yesterday on how much your Bitcoiner instinct lines
up with what's going on in the on-chain world.
If you can like, really, I just view on-chain data as a way to visualize all of us.
All of us Bitcoiners, what are we doing?
What are we feeling?
How in profit are we?
More often than not, your Bitcoiner instinct will align with what's going on.
And my Bitcoiner instinct for this pretty much whole cycle, look at all of that sell
side and the price is doing this over months.
Yeah, it swings up and down, but guys, we're at $110K and we're taking billion dollars a day of sell side.
Right now, it's $2 billion a day of OG whales and long-term holder sell side.
$2 billion a day.
And the market's down 10% from the highs.
We have serious, serious demand in this market.
And I think a lot of people miss that.
They miss Newton's third law.
Every solid Bitcoin has a buyer.
And the buy side is absolutely tremendous.
shouldn't be discounted. No, absolutely. And just following up on that, somebody asked in the
live stream chat on Noster, is there a way of kind of that you project when sellers, these OG
sellers will reach a point of exhaustion? Is there something you look at that kind of informs that?
And how do you know if we're getting towards the end of that? Is there something that can tell you
that? Absolutely. Yeah. So there's a metric that I use called sell-side risk ratio. It's one of my
favorites, actually. When we talk about realized profit and realized loss, when I say coin,
just think UTXO for the nerds in the room. When I say coin, every coin has a cost basis.
That's the price when the UTXO was created. When did that coin last move on chain?
If that's your cost basis, and your cost basis is 100K, for example, and the price is at 110K,
Technically speaking, that person's up 10%.
When they spend that coin, we can measure the delta.
We can also do it on the downside.
So realize profit, realize loss.
Now, when people are taking profit, locking in coins, they bought at a thousand bucks
and spending them at 110K, they are signaling to the market that they think we are no longer
at equilibrium because if we're at equilibrium, they would hodl because they're like, no,
I think we have further to run.
Now, if someone's capitulating a loss, it is also sending a signal that they do not think we're at equilibrium because they think it's going lower.
At bear market bottoms, if you can believe it, we get top buyers naturally taking massive Ls, long-term holder top buyers.
You get the people who bought last week thinking it was the bottom.
They capitulate as well.
But then you also get long-term holders who lock in profits at bottoms because they're terrified it's going to go lower.
So add up all the profit and loss,
the delta between those cost bases,
how much has been locked in by the coins that are moving
and compare it to how big the market is, right?
So it's a ratio of the disturbing force,
which is the profit and loss versus how big Bitcoin is,
which we use the realized cap,
which values every coin based on when it last moved.
This metric looks identical to options implied volatility.
So options implied volatility is measured purely from the options chain.
It wouldn't know that Bitcoin is a blockchain.
It has no idea about on-chain data.
And yet these two metrics are identical.
So when we see that everyone who is going to take profit and everyone who is going to
take loss has done so, cell-fied risk goes down because you've got this, your disturbing
force is now very small.
Bitcoin is very big, but no one's taking profit or loss.
All the coins that are transacting on-chain, if we're at $110K, that will last acquired
at 109 or 109.50 or 106.
They're not acquired at 10K or 5K or 30K.
The delta is small.
So whenever we get this like volatility compression, the options market usually goes to sleep and
funding rates usually quieten down.
So you get this really nice confluence where everyone just thinks that this boring sideways
nothingness is going to continue.
And what usually happens for me, that's like ding, ding, ding, setting off all these bells
going, guys, market's about to move. The market is ready to go. I don't know when it's going to go,
but we have coiled up this spring that there's no more profit and loss taking happening. The market
has to go somewhere, somewhere else to either make people panic and capitulate losses or rip to the
upside so people start taking profit because we have now reached equilibrium. It's one of my
favorite metrics because there's so much of this like, it's a simple oscillator, but it's got so
much lore and density to it in terms of the actual signal about what it's telling you. It's just
telling you what our investor's doing. It's ready to go. Let's move. I love it. And honestly, I'm
cool either way. Would love a rip for the upside, but I'd also love some cheaper sats. I think that's
the beauty of the mindset shift that happens. It's like, yeah, I love seeing NGU, but I like
seeing number go down as well because that means my dirty fiat buys just a few more sats. I'm
curious on the, just because you mentioned options here and it reminded me of something you mentioned
before the show to talk about the IBIT options data that you started looking at. You want to get
into that a little bit and kind of what that's telling you? Yeah. So I haven't written my piece
on it yet, but it's actually very hard to get good TradFi data. So I've been digging around for ages
to try and find a decent read on the IBIT options chain because my base case was, I know that IBIT
options must be big. They must be significant because we've seen a lot of like the cash and
carry trade where people long the ETF short the futures. Now, the IBIT options went live in
November. If you look at the total flows into all of the ETFs excluding IBIT, they have been dead
flat since January. None of the other ETFs have seen any inflows on net since January. And yet,
the ETF inflows are ripping to the upside. IBIT is now 58% of the AUM in all of the ETFs. It's
just tearing away so i'm looking at this chart being like holy shit the options like that has to
be the options there's no other there's no other reason for it and options tends to be a market
that is winner take all no one wants to trade the second biggest options chain so i was like okay i
gotta go and find because like i'm obviously missing a big part of the leverage in the system
and for me like yes a lot of people know me for my on-chain work but like really i i'm a bitcoin
an analyst on chain is one meaningful but one part of my puzzle futures options but now i've got
options on the etf so like what i love about that in the on-chain world we look at like short-term
holders long-term holders as a good cohort people have been around for a long time and speculators
but we also now have like funding rates that's like real institutions aren't trading funding
rates degenerate gamblers are trading so you've got like the speculators in the crypto native world
and then you can go to the CME. CME is like your buttoned up Mr. Wall Street trading futures over
there. We've got Deribit options and now we've got IBIT options. And both of these are telling
us about these different subsets or cohorts within the market. So we get a bit of a view
of what everyone's doing. Now, I had to rerun the numbers and I may have made calculation errors,
but I'm pretty sure it's right. I've got AI to double check these things for me.
there's like 30 billion dollars in open interest and for a bit of a bit of a sense of scale here
ibit in the since november is now as big if not bigger than deribit so deribit has been like 95
percent market dominance ibit has just exploded out of um by far the biggest in terms of volume
in terms of open interest if you take the ibit um aum so the amount of bitcoin that's in there
the options are now 40 percent so for every ibit btc unit of bitcoin in there there is 40 cents
worth of options open interest applied to these things so the leverage ratio is getting very very
big very very quickly so this was actually a bit of a missing piece for me because i'm like
leverage was already going higher but i'm like i just feel like there's more if you want to talk
about paper Bitcoin, these options are, you know, you could argue that they're paper Bitcoin.
They're also part of Bitcoin maturing. But here's the other thing. You know, these are the two-sided
coins. We are going to see volatility capture strategies, people selling and buying call options
and put options and whatever. This is going to extract volatility from the markets, what they do.
They can also backfire and create volatility spikes if the market wants to rip through them.
So this can also happen. But also, when you've got this big of an options market in like, what,
what, eight months, nine months? When we're this far in and the options are this big,
big capital allocators, if you've got $30 billion worth of total size, they can now hedge
serious risk. It actually makes it much easier for big institutions to allocate when they can hedge
out $100 million and not be concerned. The size of these options, yes, it's leverage in the system.
but it's also insurance. It's a market for insurance. So the big allocators can now buy
Bitcoin knowing that they can spend a little bit of premium to insure the car just in case it
crashes. So that actually is going to reduce the chance they're going to just like market sell
their ETF because they can hedge the risk in the option space and speculators can take that risk.
So really, really interesting dynamic. I still do a big deep dive on it. It's meaningful. It's a
really, really big event. And it kind of shows that Wall Street is absolutely here.
And I mean, is that that's kind of another piece in the puzzle of like decreased potential downside
volatility? Like, I mean, just decreased volatility in general, as you said, it's not
just downside volatility, it's the upside volatility as well, which is that we like the
upside volatility. We don't like the downside volatility so much, but they necessarily must
go hand in hand, right? Totally, totally. And that's the thing. Everything is a pull and
to and fro, right?
Equal and opposite reaction.
You can take volatility out of markets for a while,
but it can come right back again
because all that leverage,
this is what I was talking about sell-side risk before,
when implied volatility gets super low,
everyone goes,
oh, that's all right.
I can take more risk
because the market doesn't go anywhere.
Bitcoin is just a boring old stable coin at 110K.
I'm going to sell on shit.
I sold too many call options.
Bang, away it can go.
So things can really move.
Yes, it may be less frequent and it may not be as high octane all the time, but it can also get people on the wrong side of the boat and things can really start to move because they've got to cover their positions.
And the thing with options, if you're an options writer and you're selling those puts or calls, you have infinite risk.
You have unlimited risk and a limited upside.
So when you're selling options, you have unlimited risk, which means if you've got unlimited risk, you've got to cover.
They don't have a choice.
They've got to get out of those positions if they're wrong.
That's on the directional side.
There's obviously traders who just don't care where the price goes.
They're just extracting volatility.
The market's going to get increasingly complex.
And really, like for me as an analyst, this is amazing because you're kind of watching the true monetization and a market's coming up out of nowhere.
We didn't have EBIT options in November.
Now we do.
Now we're starting to see how Deribit trades relative.
How does a crypto native exchange trade relative to TradFi and start speaking the same language?
you know it's i mean it's really fascinating i guess uh you know bitcoin's uh bitcoin's gone
mainstream your favorite band is now uh now your neighbor likes it too and uh you know it's not a
not cool and hipster anymore but you just you got to deal with it right it's a real thing yeah
so kind of on that trad fi side of things i want to talk a little bit more about the bitcoin treasury
companies because i do think that you mentioned earlier and i completely agree with the analysis
that essentially a lot of the weird sentiment we're seeing just recently even though bitcoin's
at $110,000, $111,000 per coin, which is just wild and seems pretty great to me still.
You see all this negativity.
And I do agree.
I think you're exactly right, is that people were either too, I mean, on the crypto side,
they've been way under allocated to Bitcoin for a long time.
We know that, right?
That's been very obvious.
And I think it's becoming obvious to them now, finally.
But they'll probably still do the same thing over and over again as they claim that whatever
shitcoin they have is going to totally replace Bitcoin.
The flipping is going to happen this time, guys, I promise.
But on the Bitcoin treasury company side, it seems that there's a lot of folks who, again, came in chasing those gains.
I think it was American Hoddle said this the other day on Danny's show when he had Hoddle and Lubka on.
It was basically like people think that they can kind of like teleport or take a time machine to be an OG.
That you can, if you lever up and you take these risks and you kind of gamble on some of these more speculative proxies for Bitcoin,
and that you can somehow go back in time and it'll be just like you bought
Bitcoin,
you know,
in 2015 with,
you know,
or sometime around there.
And he's just like,
that's just not the case.
Like you're,
you're not going to be able to do it and you're probably going to get
wrecked.
And I feel like,
like,
I'm not saying that,
uh,
I think strategy is going to do just fine.
I think,
uh,
meta planet's going to do just fine just because of the size they have a few
others that'll,
that'll do just fine.
The Bitcoin miners that have a lot of Bitcoin in their balance sheet,
I think will be just fine,
but it seems like there is a lot of these kind of smaller ones that are were great for the people
that you know got in uh at the very you know at the ground floor not so great for the people the
retail that bought it thinking it was going to you know 10x overnight and maybe went up a little
bit and then it dumped back down so how are how are you looking at this is this in any way i mean
i think this sort of thing was inevitable this was going to happen bitcoin's a success of course
companies want it. Of course, nation states want it. Everyone wants it. But how are you looking at
this? Does this factor into your analysis at all in terms of how much money is flowing into Bitcoin
via these proxies? Or are you paying less attention to this? Yeah. So I've gone through
the loops and the calculations to just get a bit of a read on my feel for these things.
There's a number of levels. So the first one is I think we need to make a very clear distinction.
When I talk about treasury companies, I'm talking about those trying to play the sales
strategy book, right? If we're looking at just a company that puts Bitcoin in the balance sheet as
like a savings asset, they're just sweeping cashflow, like our business, we do that,
that whole different thing. Totally fine. Perfect, perfect solution. We're talking about the entities
that want to go the all-in approach. Now, if they're going to go the all-in approach, strategy
is obviously the most all-in, completely and utterly all-in. Their operating business is
completely irrelevant. They are a Bitcoin entity to their core. MetaPlanet is going from a hotel
business and they're transitioning away from the operating company towards a Bitcoin treasury
company. Now, they also have the advantage of being in the Japanese market, right? Which is,
again, big capital industry. I don't think that we have, like Australia, we just don't need a
treasury company. There's nothing special about Australian capital markets that would necessitate
us needing one down here. I can buy a strategy with no problem. And I actually don't need an
Australian one because when you go to a small scale, so I'm certainly short the idea we need
one in every jurisdiction. I'm short that idea. I don't think that we do because there is a leak.
And that leak is anybody who wants to buy a Bitcoin treasury company, they're not going to
buy the 200th biggest one with 12 Bitcoin on the balance sheet. They're also not going to care if
You've got 1,000 Bitcoin.
It just doesn't matter because there's entities out there with several thousand.
Now, there's another angle of how much buy side of these treasury companies applied.
I've played around with this, honestly.
Delete strategy.
And that's, sorry, if you take away strategy, there's no buy side.
So many of these big entities, and again, I won't call out names and single them out.
It's left pocket to right pocket, right?
One company has a bunch of Bitcoin.
They move it into a corporate entity.
they didn't buy anything they moved bitcoin from one entity to another there was a tax
arbitrage or whatever it was a lot of them haven't actually bought bitcoin and if they have
we're talking about small potatoes here they're not they're not serious like tens of thousands
of bitcoins a week it's just not how this is playing out so there's a lot of fugazi there's
a lot of like weird deals where it's like you know you're a whale i'll take your bitcoin and
And if we hit certain levels, I'll give you shares.
Again, left pocket to right pocket.
If you get on the inside, that's wonderful.
Most people don't get it on the inside.
These things are like, who is actually going to buy a 5, 10, 15, $20 million treasury company?
Here's an exercise.
Look at the market cap of your favorite treasury company and then go on coin market cap and find how far down and the the shit coin peers that you living with there is no institution that
wants to do this like i did this for a couple of companies and they're next to companies like like
tokens like octopus token and like you know um shill me your coin token like all this stupid
shit you're like this is there's no institutions buying this this company doesn't have access to
debt. They don't have access to preferred markets. They only have access to selling shares,
hoping that they're at a premium. And we're watching those premiums just get crushed.
Now, let's imagine your treasury company number 55 and your premium has gone from 12x when you
first announced to 1.1 or 0.9. Who's going to buy your stock? Truly, who's actually going to buy
your stock because most of your investors are trapped at two, three, five, six, 10 MNAVs and
going, I just want to out of this thing. Give me my money back. Who's going to restart the engines?
You can't issue debt. You can't issue preferreds. I'm really just like, I'm really short the idea
that we need many of these things. It's going to be a win or take almost all market in my view.
There'll be a couple of patches, like even Metaplanet. It's in the maybe bucket for me.
I think it probably is going to be okay, but I think it's in the maybe bucket.
can it get back to a 6x premium maybe maybe that's a lot of coin they're going to buy to justify that
kind of move so um now once you get to the other end of the spectrum they start small with a huge
premium because going from one bitcoin to two bitcoin is very possible going from two to 20 is
also possible going from 620 to 1.2 million is a different animal the bigger they get the premiums
will naturally compress. Metaplanet is a small company with a relatively large premium.
Strategy is a massive company with a small premium. That's the trajectory. The MNAV,
gravity, and I've been saying this forever since I first studied strategy,
it was MicroStrategy at the time, MNAV gravity is towards one in all circumstances. It's where
it wants to go. So therefore, timing these things is absolutely a function of what is the Bitcoin
price doing, because that's the beach ball that's inflating underneath the company.
If that's increasing, then the chance that MNav expands is also higher. If Bitcoin is contracting
and we're down 10% from the all-time high, some of these TECOs are down 70, 60, 80%.
We've got our 80% correction, folks. It's just in stock tickers, not in the Bitcoin price.
that's where I think the damage and the pain is being felt. So I'm really kind of bearish on the
whole thing. I've also been listening to Danny's podcast. I know he's trying to like work his way
through it. And every time he's like, I just, I'm not quite there yet. Can you explain this bit?
I'm like, yeah, man, I'm not there either. It's all fugazi. It's bullshit. There's a handful of
these companies that make a lot of sense. I'm very short the idea we need thousands of these things,
even hundreds no i'm i and you know again i think that you're you made the important distinction
at the start which is there's a huge difference between a business that is just stacking bitcoin
with you know excess uh cash flows that they want to be able to save to preserve and grow their
purchasing power that's great and prudent and and you know any business it would behoove them to do
that two thumbs up people who are yeah fantastic like that is natural and you should do that
versus these companies that are like, it's, it's a, it's a marketing play for them. It's,
it's, you know, they're, they're, they want to be able to pump their stocks. And a lot of times
it's either, you know, it's because they've got a failing or flailing company and they, you know,
you need just, just one last pump, bro, you know, just, just to juice it a little bit, you know?
And of course I know a lot of the people who are in some of these other companies too,
as I'm sure you do as well. And like, I know really great people in them and it's,
this is not a knock on them at all. It's just, I agree with you that I think this is a, you know,
winner take all winner take most type of situation strategy I think is pretty
uncatchable at this point like they like I mean maybe not but boy that would take a lot of fiat
to catch them at this point and and he's still going right and he has other instruments on top
of this right it's and it's kind of pioneering that side of things and I think that honestly
what I keep beating the drum about for folks is like I have no problem with these strategy
companies I own you know some small exposure to some of them with money I'm expecting to lose and
have you know uh suffered losses from already especially relative to bitcoin because i'm a
terrible trader and i know this but i like to punish myself every now and again just to remind
myself it reminds you oh it's so important to remind yourself with a few letters you got to do
it you got to you oh you think you're you think you might be smart like no no let's get punished
by the market a little bit because you're not and that's why the like you should just stack bitcoin
you should just stack bitcoin get a decent sized utxo transfer it to cold storage and and then you
can just live your life and not worry about it because you're, if you're like me, you're,
you're probably not a great trader. You may have made a couple of decent trades, uh, over time,
but most of my decent trades have just been buying things and then holding them. It's not,
you know, it's like timing the market is really, really hard. It's, it is really, really hard.
And we're in uncharted territories here. And so I think it's like, it's one, again,
I don't tell anyone what to do with their money, but like for me, my strategy has remained, you
know besides a little bit of play money that i'm very prepared to lose it's like nope i'm gonna
stack bitcoin i'm gonna try to create value i'm gonna podcast really hard and you know fiat mine
really hard and i'm gonna i'm gonna stack sats and i'm gonna call storage yep and odell really
gave the most sage advice with that because i think that that is legitimately the best strategy
unless you are able to get in unless you're a somebody who is throwing some serious coin at
these companies in the, you know, fundraising rounds, you're going to have a really hard time
outperforming Bitcoin on any timeframe that is longer than, you know, less, I mean, I don't know,
longer than a year, four years. Yeah. Like it's just going to be really hard for you to outperform
Bitcoin. You're not up from Bitcoin right now. And you probably almost certainly won't. Maybe
there's going to be a couple of exceptions. And I think strategy may outperform over, over four
years. Like that's what, you know, their goal is essentially. And they've got a good chance at it.
couple others maybe most of them i think you're gonna have a really hard time doing that you may
trade and the other game that people are playing it all depends where you buy on the mnav let's
imagine a world where strategy sees its mnav go to 0.9 0.95 yeah it's probably gonna outperform
bitcoin on the return right on the return higher i don't know where if that happens bitcoin's
probably in a bit of a dumps as well but the timing of that you know and this is the thing
yes, I wouldn't say that these things are shit coins,
but let's just strip away the fact
that they're orange washed companies.
The idea is that you want to buy them
for the three month pump.
They're full of telegram groups
that if you're not on the inside,
you're going to get smoked.
Like the characteristics of how they operate
is shit coining.
It literally has all the properties of shit coins.
So it's like functionally,
the machine is what it does.
What are they?
They're shit coins.
That's what they are.
And really the secret sauce of any of this stuff, go in eyes wide open.
It is all about the MNAV that you are stacking at.
This is literally what Saylor does too.
He doesn't want to sell when the MNAV is 0.9 because it's not favorable to him.
He does when it's at three or two.
So therefore you can start to say, well, there's only so high this thing can go.
So if I'm buying it at MNAV of 0.9, then if it goes to 1.5, I'm very happy.
If I buy it 1.5 and it goes to 1, I'm wrecked.
So you are actually trading the MNAV premium and you're trading the Bitcoin price.
It's a double-edged sword.
And as you can see, 10% down the Bitcoin price means a 60% down and a MNAV compression from
6 to 1.
It's tough, right?
It's really, really tough.
Yeah.
And I think, again, it's like, I get it because I would love to get in a time machine and go back to being an OG.
I would love to go back and buy Bitcoin the first time I ignored Bitcoin like an idiot in 2014, right?
But I wasn't ready.
I didn't deserve it yet.
I wasn't even close to deserving it.
I didn't deserve it in 2017 when I ignored it again.
Like, I didn't deserve it until I actually started doing the work and going down the rabbit hole during the COVID times.
Like, that's when I finally earned it, right?
up until then it's like no no like you're not gonna you you don't deserve to teleport to be
an og you don't deserve it anyway it's okay you you we get bitcoin at the price we deserve and
you can live with that and trying to play these games to you know reenact that og moment it it's
just gonna it's gonna leave you in some pain and you know the secret sauce is i mean you you know
the answer to this but basically daily dca you know why because if you start daily dcaing and
like with VibeCoded and played around to try and like, even a lot of the tools that I use,
they're fantastic at picking tops and bottoms. Even if you like save your daily DCA and you only buy
the absolute bottom of these things, you might only beat it by like five, 10%. That's like a good
run. Daily DCA from the moment that you like work out, oh, Bitcoin. Once you work that out,
just being on like a daily DCA wagon, that is how you teleport because you're then getting the
most average price from that point on and it destroys everything else and the reason why we
actually tried to back test and find out like why is it so just unbeatable it's because when bitcoin
actually goes when it rips it spends most of its time doing absolutely nothing it's dead boring
drives you mad but there's like five to six days ten days in the whole cycle where it just rips
and all these people who are trying to trade in and out and getting in and out.
If you miss, I ran this study a little while back.
If you miss those 10 best days, you are down on the whole cycle.
You make zero money.
Like your Bitcoin cycle chart is just straight to the floor.
If you're there for those 10 days, you get the whole return profile.
So once Bitcoin moves, it like literally reprices.
It just goes to a new altitude.
And that's what I think happened when we went up to 100.
from 75 to 100, we repriced, we now belong up here, right?
When we went from 40K and the ETS went live to 73,
that was a repricing event.
New altitude, new level.
See you later.
Thank you very much.
Daily DCA is how you teleport back in time
because it gives you, since you worked it out,
the most average price from that point onwards.
It's the best way.
Consistency is the secret.
That's actually the answer to this whole thing.
I mean, you know, it's the old cliche.
It's time in the market, not timing the market, right?
I mean, it's, it's just like, it's the reason these things are cliched.
It's because it's, they're, they're true.
Like they're, you know, that's, that's, that's why they're there.
You know, it's, it's, I think people have a, I was just talking about this in the literature
recently, people have difficulty realizing that it can just be that simple.
Like that the answer isn't some complex process.
The answer isn't jumping through all these different hoops.
It's just like, set it and forget it.
And, you know, sit on your hands, you know, like just little, do less, right.
Do less.
because we've been taught to think that we have to do all these things and jump through all these
hoops just to have a chance at beating the you know the rate of fiat debasement right and so i so
i get it why like it's hard for me to just sit on my hands and do nothing and that's why i give
myself you know a little bit of money that i'm like you're probably going to lose this dude and
if you don't you better get it into bitcoin you know because otherwise if you don't put it into
bitcoin you haven't taken you know uh any real profits like you're just you're still kind of in
fiat land and pay your taxes and do all that. And, and at the end of that, maybe you've,
what outperformed Bitcoin by how much, maybe a couple of percent if you did it really well,
but like, you know, so again, it's a reminder, but like you can just, you can just daily DCA
and you'll, you'll do great, but that's hard. It's hard to do nothing.
And the amount of, um, the amount of dot eats in my time, they've been like, oh, but you can't do
anything with your Bitcoin. You're like, I know, I know that's, yeah, it's great. Isn't it? I love
it. That's exactly the right thing. I don't want to do anything with it. Like, why don't I move my
shit around all the time. It's like, I just want to pine hold, man. My favorite book, if you are
interested in market psychology, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator is just a great read just
in general, but it's my favorite book on markets because I've read plenty of trading psychology
textbooks or just people are pining on it. It's all just rehashing the stories told in that book.
And he's got this great line that I refer to all the time where he goes, I'll paraphrase,
was like, I never made money in the markets buying and selling and trading this thing.
I made most of my money by sitting tight and doing nothing. You got that? Sitting tight and
doing nothing. It is, I mean, you talk to any great investor and they'll say, yeah,
I didn't make any money from like trying to swing trade in an hour. It's like,
what does Warren Buffett do? And again, sure, he doesn't understand Bitcoin, but I mean,
he found high value companies that he did the work on and he just buys a stack of them when
they need capital and then he just sits on it forever. What a great strategy, right? The less
you do, the better off you're going to do because once you know what you're betting on, right? And
really for me, I'm betting on Bitcoin, a little bit of gold. That's my bet. And I just watch that
basket really, really, really closely. I mean, I don't experience the volatility. To me, it's a
puzzle. I'm just trying to work out like, which way do I think it's going to go next? It's not
actually about being like, oh, I want to give the right calls. It's like, to me, it's just like a
fascinating puzzle that's always changing and I want to keep solving it. It's a hobby for me.
Just sit tight. Let the market do its thing. Bitcoin's kicking ass. It's going to continue
to kick ass. ShopSolidation has a beautiful way of getting people to sell their Bitcoin out of
boredom and frustration. Don't be the dude that loses it because of boredom and frustration.
Because if you miss those 10 days, you miss what this whole thing is about, which is just like
being there for those exciting repricing events and lots and lots and lots of boredom where you
get to go and live your life which which is kind of the whole point right of having better money so
you can actually don't have to have a second job being a investor trader gambler you can just go
and live your life uh so yeah and touch a lot of grass and spend time with your family that's like
that is literally what it's all about and get plenty of sunshine as well and walk uh so maybe
last thing and then i'll i'll let you because this has been as usual extremely information dense and
I appreciate this.
Super stoked to be back in the show.
Is there,
is there anything else that you're like really watching that,
that is kind of like behaving in an unexpected way?
Maybe that something that you're looking at,
any of these signals that you're looking at where you're saying,
this is something that's a little bit like I wasn't expecting this or I
don't,
you know,
this is giving me signals that I'm not exactly sure to interpret anything
that's kind of like really out of the ordinary or surprising in terms of
this current time in the market.
And,
and these many,
you know,
these myriad signals that you look at.
Yeah. The main one is actually the fees. There's just no one transacting on chain. Like blocks are mostly empty. So generally speaking, and we can wade into it if we want, but a lot of people say that like high fees are a bad thing for adoption.
whenever i look at the chart and i look at fees versus the market cap the market cap rips to the
upside when fees are high because when people are using bitcoin it's a good thing highly congested
blocks means people are using it now in our current environment fees have been dead since i'm gonna
say february maybe march let's just to be safe i'll say april since that sell-off in april fees
has just been dead. Now, on-chain transaction volume is actually quite high. So we've got very
few transactions, but lots of big Bitcoins moving around. Now, obviously some of these are these
big whales, but they're also like, you only move 24,000 Bitcoin once or twice. Go to an OTC desk,
go to an exchange, it'll get consolidated somewhere and then it's done. It's part of the mix.
So we're just seeing consistently very, very high transaction volume, trending higher, multiple billions of dollars a day, but very few transactions.
So this is a very interesting dynamic.
So generally speaking, Bitcoin has what's called a positive skew.
When you look at the statistics of how things work, median represents the majority.
It's where the most number of people are.
and the mean, the average, can be skewed by very, very large things. That's why when we look at
housing, you don't want it to get skewed by the multi-million dollar mansions because there's not
as many of them, but they're worth a shitload more than all the other ones. Now, in the Bitcoin world,
it's always had this dynamic and it's still true, but lots and lots of retail transactions,
lots of $100 and $1,000 and $10,000, a handful of billion dollars, right, transactions.
what we're seeing at the moment is less of the median there's much far fewer retail type behavior
there's a lot more even though if the whales i would say they're probably a little bit higher
but their dominance is much much bigger because there's just less of the retail so i've been
trying to puzzle over this i don't spend too much time like worrying about it but we definitely have
fewer plebs moving coins around now some just like ideas of what could cause it maybe lightning
maybe but i don't think so because it's going to be a small factor but i don't think that's like 90
of the problem i don't think plebs are moving around 90 of the value on lightning maybe some
of it uh maybe there's less people dcaing i definitely think there's less speculators
probably fewer people are sending their coins in and out of binance to trade shitcoin a and shitcoin
b and treasury companies maybe they're speculating over there instead i think my my like biggest
argument would be that there's just less speculation using on-chain Bitcoin,
retail-sized speculation. I think that's the case. I also think that the altcoiners don't
quite understand that, and I'm pretty sure this is still true, FTX really, really did a mess.
I don't think altcoiners really understand how, I think forever, the damage for that industry is.
I just don't think people care anymore. This is why they can't get any of their tokens to
actually get lift off because no one actually cares anymore so i think the speculative side
is the main reason and i see it from a few different lenses but definitely just the dead
quiet chain whilst we're at all-time high and honestly aside from you know there's a few things
i'm like yeah i'm cautiously watching and i am cautious at the moment but i'm not bearish i'm
i mean the bears haven't even taken out my first line of defense it's about 109k they're not even
below that. So like, it's hard for me to be too bearish, but like the chain's just quiet.
So that's the main thing that I'm like, that's interesting. That's intriguing. And it's been
that way for a while. So I don't know if that's going to exert force at some point,
but that's definitely one I'm watching. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's basically been,
been cheap as hell to transact on Bitcoin all, all summer long. I mean, longer than that,
even it's been, it's pretty wild. It's been a great time to, if you want to consolidate UTXOs
or move things around, it's a, been a heck of a time to do that, but apparently not a ton of
people taking advantage of it. But yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting. Well, I want to thank
you again. This was fantastic. Always giving me new things to think about. And I always appreciate
the way that you break things down for folks. Cause I think it's just in a really digestible
manner and you always come back to, Hey, just, you know, like keep it simple, stupid and, and,
and stack Bitcoin, like, which I think is the best message of all. Yeah. Embrace the chop
solidation. It's, I love the smell of chop solidation in the morning. Let's, let's, let's
get some more of it. Where do you want to send folks? They should subscribe to your newsletter,
but yeah, send them anywhere you want to or anything new you're working on that you want to
pitch out there. Yeah. So head over to checkonchain.com so you can subscribe to our newsletter.
But also with all the charts I talked about, I mean, granted, it's a bit of a mess in terms of
the site. It's a handwritten HTML by yours truly, but literally every Bitcoin chart that I use in my
newsletter and like my daily analysis, it's all free. It's all there. We've got ETFs. We've got
strategy. We've got IBIT options now. We get all sorts of stuff. It's a maze of things you can find.
And that's all free. All those charts are free. So jump in there, play around. I try to make the
charts fairly self-explanatory. When something bad's happening, the chart lights up red. I try
to simplify these things. But it's a good way just to familiarize yourself with, again, even if you're
not a trader, I think this is the one thing I want to leave people with. I don't talk to traders. I
actually don't care that much about traders. I don't write for traders. I write for hodlers
because there's a gap in the market of like,
we're all long this thing.
We're like a max long this weird internet money.
Just understanding why it moves the way it does.
When you see narratives on Twitter,
like can you actually back that up with data
or is it just people going,
oh no, price should be higher because.
It's like, okay, Mr. Central Planner,
what should the price actually be?
You can kind of distill these narratives and say,
is it actually happening or is this all just fugazi?
And that's really what I find so interesting.
So it's about helping navigate
the volatility and just understand why the market does what it does because it's a it's a fascinating
puzzle uh yeah amen to that and it's uh you know while you're sitting on your hands and not trying
to trade this thing you got to do something so you may as well figure out uh you know why it's
moving the way it's moving as much as you can uh you'll learn about checkmate yeah exactly i appreciate
you man appreciate the work that you do and uh yeah uh thanks for this time and thanks to everybody
who joined on the live stream.
This was kind of impromptu.
You're already living in the future
there down under.
So you're a day ahead of me.
I don't know if the price is different
for you over there in the future,
but I think we're still seeing the same price.
But thanks to everybody who joined today in the US.
Well, boy, that sounds nice
when they denominated in your, you know,
Fiat Cuck Bucks.
Yeah, mate.
We'll be over 200K Aussie dollars
by the time we talk next.
There we go.
I look forward to it
and we'll see where we're at on the US side.
But it's going to be an interesting ride.
And yeah, appreciate you helping us break it down.
Talk to you soon, man.
Thanks, Matt.
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