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Digital Social Hour
Michael Terpin: What Billionaires Aren’t Telling You About Bitcoin’s Next Cycle | DSH #1622
01:01:12
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Podcast Host 1
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Podcast Host 2
Extra value meals are back. That means 10 tender juicy McNuggets and medium fries and a drink are just.
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Michael Turpin
$8 only at McDonald's for a limited time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska, and California. And for delivery, there was just Satoshi saying, this is going to change the world. And if you believe it. I mean, he has a famous saying where he was trying to explain to me. He said, if you don't believe it or don't get it, I'm sorry, I don't have enough time to explain it to you. There's another saying that was not by him, which is that people get bitcoin at the price that they deserve. So who learned about it really early and got it and kept it? They're billionaires. Now you have 10,000 bitcoin. Do the math. And again, buy at the bottom, sell at the top. And people forget that, as Warren Buffett once said, you can only tell when the water's gone out who's been swimming naked.
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Podcast Host 3
Okay, guys, we got Michael Turpin. Look at the outfit he's brought today.
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Podcast Host 4
Let's go represent.
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Michael Turpin
Yeah, I'm happy to be here. That's. So this. The story behind this outfit is I have a tailor in Shenzhen who's. Who's awesome. And he does a lot of the stuff that I used to get from the tailors in Hong Kong, but about, like, a quarter of the price. And it's in this place called Luhau City that's got, you know, 100 tailors and then like a half an acre. No more. Acres and acres of fabric.
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Podcast Host 3
Wow.
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Michael Turpin
And so his wife and my girlfriend went looking around for something that would have tigers on it. Because, you know, when I'm in Vegas, I do live in Tiger Mansion, as we call it, which is the former Mike Tyson home where he kept his tigers. And I bought that a number of years ago, and we use it as a great event spot.
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Podcast Host 3
Yeah, your team has phenomenal events there. I've been to some of them, and it's so cool seeing the Tiger pits. I mean, we saw those in Movies growing up and. Yeah, that must have been a bucket list item for you, huh? To own that house.
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Michael Turpin
Yeah, you know, I mean, I never, you know, sort of dreamed of like, you know, sort of having iconic celebrity mansions, but when it came up, you know, it seemed like the thing to do and it took some renovation. But I feel like I'm a historical kind of custodian of it. I try to keep it, you know, very close to what, you know, Mike Tyson's original vision was respect. We really have kind of not really changed anything, just sort of, you know, updated it and not updated, just sort of like restored it. Yeah.
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Podcast Host 3
You still have all the old photos on the wall, right?
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Michael Turpin
Yep.
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Podcast Host 3
The ancient paintings, they're pretty old.
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Michael Turpin
Yeah. And also, you know, the giant life size lions that he had commissioned, I believe was from Versace on the, on the top floor. And the big mural that has all the paintings of all these boxers that's an entire story tall and. Yeah, it's just in the lion fountain when you first walk in. And. Yeah, so he bought it, you know, in the mid-90s. It was actually originally owned by the Damani family that built the Tropicana.
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Podcast Host 3
And.
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Michael Turpin
And he just sort of like did his own Mike Tyson touches to it and turned it into something far more iconic.
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Podcast Host 3
I love it. And with your events, what's sort of the mission with having those? Because there's some high quality people that attend those.
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Michael Turpin
Yeah, you know, I mean, it's everything from. I mean, it's two acres, it's got an 80,000 gallon swimming pool in it. It's tigermansionlv.com so you can see some of the things and you know, we've done everything from 500 person events that are just like wild, crazy.
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Podcast Host 2
Hello, friends. Guess who? That's right. It is I, the replacer. Once again, I've been called on so you can play the new Call of Duty Black Ops 7. With three expansive modes, 18 multiplayer maps, and the tastiest zombie gameplay you've ever freaking seen.
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Michael Turpin
Call of Duty Black Ops 7 available now.
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Podcast Host 2
Rated M for mature.
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Podcast Host 1
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Michael Turpin
The indoor outdoor parties with the, you know, music and, you know, Fire dancers and things like that. I mean, obviously we have security, keep it like, you know, tame within the neighborhood boundaries, just like the Michael Jackson mansion does in the historic district of town. I think that's sort of our other kind of like, you know, sort of quote unquote competition for like, you know, iconic events. And, you know, it's. I think Vegas just, you know, needs to have more of these, you know, kind of homes off of the Strip that could be used for. For events, mainly corporate events, you know, movie shoots, influencer, you know, activations and everything down to like just private dinner parties. You know, I mean, we've got a group in this week that's just, you know, coming in and doing something for about like 40, 50 people. So otherwise. So anything from, like, you know, dinner in the iconic sort of dining room with all the chandeliers to. To, you know, more of a, you know, larger event that, you know, we can hold about, you know, 500 people and actually a little bit more if I sort of spill over into the. The home next door that I bought with my ex wife and we still have a deal where I can expand over to that at times. And that's, you know, that. That's what he bought as his entourage home. So he bought two homes when he got out of prison in the mid-90s and had a lot of checks waiting for him to fight Holyfield, et cetera.
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Podcast Host 3
Wow.
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Michael Turpin
And yeah, so there's a great story behind it and just trying to, you know, keep the tradition living.
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Podcast Host 3
Did you get to talk to him when you bought the property?
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Michael Turpin
No, because I didn't buy it from him. I bought it from the person who bought out a bankruptcy 20 years earlier.
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Podcast Host 3
Got it.
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Michael Turpin
But, you know, I've met him a couple times. I've not talked to him since this happened, but I've let people who he works with know about it. And so I'm presuming at some point he might want to see what we've done to restore it.
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Podcast Host 3
Did you tell him about bitcoin to buy some?
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Michael Turpin
Well, you know, he has actually been involved in bitcoin in the past. He had a Mike Tyson bitcoin ATM a number of years ago. And so he certainly. And he of course, had his. He sold millions of dollars of nft. So he is not. He's no stranger to the crypto world. Good segue, by the way.
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Podcast Host 3
Yeah, smooth. Right. You're still all in on bitcoin? You're still pretty optimistic about it?
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Michael Turpin
Absolutely. So I'm not a bitcoin maxi I call myself a bitcoin preferentialist. So I realized. So bitcoin maxis, and I know a lot of them because I've been in Bitcoin for over 12 years, are the ones who basically are. Bitcoin is like the holy trinity. It's the be all, end all. As Michael Saylor says, there is no second best. And some get to the point where they're like, you should arrest Vitalik. Everybody who does anything other than bitcoin as a criminal. You should throw them in jail. I basically believe that bitcoin is the original blockchain. It's the original digital asset. It's the one that everything else is built upon or at least influenced by. But I don't think since Ethereum never had the flippening back in the ICO era, I don't think that anything will ever pass Bitcoin in terms of overall market cap. I think it's store of value. If you look at gold, gold is bigger than, you know, pretty much anything out there in the stock market. And it's continuing to grow. You know, assets, asset classes are different than sort of companies. And, you know, bitcoin is an asset class and it is growing faster than gold. So at some point it will overtake gold. I mean, gold right now is about, I think, almost $20 trillion as an asset class. Bitcoin, if it gets to a million dollars, would be that size. Of course, gold by then will probably be higher. So maybe it's got to get to a million, five, two million. But that's all, I think, an if and not a when it's proven itself. Now, the other, you know, tens of thousands of digital assets, you know, are kind of a different couple of categories. They're called altcoins. And, you know, I believe that they certainly have a place in terms of, you know, Ethereum, for example, which I was involved in the launch of.
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Podcast Host 3
Yep.
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Michael Turpin
You know, it is something that Vitalik was a, you know, bitcoin, you know, early bitcoiner, and actually one of the founders, when he was 16 years old, of Bitcoin magazine.
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Podcast Host 3
Wow.
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Michael Turpin
Yeah. And, you know, he wanted to build things on bitcoin, but found it frustrating because, you know, I mean, it is intentionally sort of calcified in its code so that, you know, it's hard to be changing all the time and still be a store of value. And so he wanted to go and build. His vision was to have a world computer where he could actually program on a blockchain.
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Podcast Host 3
And.
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Michael Turpin
And that's what Ethereum's vision was and that's really what they've done. And you know, they've been remarkably successful in building, you know, several hundred billion dollar market cap around that, you know, Defi was not built on Bitcoin, NFTs were not built on bitcoin. Although you have ordinals now. You know, many of the most iconic things that have been built in the web 3world have not been built on bitcoin. They've built built on Ethereum and now there's contenders to the sort of Ethereum throne in terms of Salon and some other ones. And so I think it's healthy to have the marketplace of ideas. And you know, the bitcoin maxis, they've now gone and built things in what they call bitcoin layer two and they're like, hey, everything will eventually be on bitcoin, default be on Bitcoin, etc. That's their vision. It may take a long time, it may be not as fast, but you know, if you're able to go and settle on bitcoin, certainly you don't have to worry about the underlying platform going away.
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Podcast Host 3
I saw on another interview someone asked you, do you think bitcoin will hit a million dollars a coin? And I think you said yes, absolutely, it's pretty high.
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Michael Turpin
Yeah. Well, you know, I remember when bitcoin first came out and it first hit $1,000 and some wall street analysts started to cover it. And Gil Luria I believe his name was, who was with Wedbush Morgan at the time, he wrote a report saying that bitcoin will either go to zero or to a million dollars. And he put the chance of it getting to a million dollars to be 1/2 of 1%. And people thought that was outrageous.
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Podcast Host 3
Wow.
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Michael Turpin
If you took that bet, you made a pretty good bet. Of course the bet you would have made would have been to buy Bitcoin at $1,000. You're up 100x right now. And that was actually even a high for that cycle. I mean it had started the year when it hit $1000. It started the year at $11, went all the way up to 1200 and then a year later it crashed down to 171. And then the next cycle it ended up going to 20,000. And that's really what the four year cycle is all about. And I've tried to explain that to investors, you know, very smart people who are investors successfully in real estate, in commodities, in tech startups. And they never quite got what I was talking about. Maybe so they didn't understand the white paper. I have the white paper in my book and I annotate it because sometimes people will get thrown off by the equations in the middle of it. That was just showing off to other cryptographers. I mean, the juicy stuff is in the first and the last pages. And if you just read that and understand what he says, you can see that he really created something novel that, you know, is changing the world.
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Podcast Host 3
Yeah. I mean, these days you could buy a lot of things with crypto, and.
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Michael Turpin
It'S not so much about what you can buy. It's really. So Satoshi's original vision, peer to peer cash, failed, but it enabled what has become peer to peer cash, stablecoins. If there was no bitcoin, there would be no tether. And I helped with the launch of Tether too.
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Podcast Host 3
Wow.
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Michael Turpin
And the people who launched it originally in the United States in Santa Monica, California, Brock Pierce and Reeve Collins and Craig, the cto, Craig Sellers, they ended up selling it because they were afraid of regulation. So they sold it to Bitfinex, which then spun it off to. It's now out of El Salvador. And the people who ended up buying it and now running it are now multi billionaires.
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Podcast Host 3
Crazy.
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Michael Turpin
And I mean, the idea that Brock had originally was just, you know, hey, you know, have a coin that can be used to have a US dollar equivalent. Because in the early days of trading, you know, you had to go and if you wanted to go buy bitcoin and trade it for Ethereum or trade it for Litecoin or whatever, you know, you had to go. And it would take sometimes two or three days to go and settle through a bank account if you wanted to arbitrage between, you know, the premium that you were paying for periods of times in, say, Korea, they call it the kimchi premium. You know, there was a time where you could buy in Canada and sell in Korea or in China and make like a 20%.
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Podcast Host 3
I remember that. Yeah.
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Michael Turpin
Right. And so, but the only people were able to take advantage of the were ones who were dual citizens of, say, Canada and China because they would have both bank accounts. Tether took away that, that arbitrage and it basically made it that you just simply, you know, exchange it on any exchange for a US dollar denominated coin and not have to deal with the banking system that was, you know, one of the whole purposes of bitcoin was to not have to deal with the banking system. The white paper was written, you know, right at the height of the financial crash in, you know, October of 2008.
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Podcast Host 3
You mentioned people were scared of regulation back then. Is that still the case with crypto and the Trump administration?
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Michael Turpin
You know, the early people in any technology want something different than the mainstream. If you ask the, you know, the degens that came in the. The crypto, anarchists, et cetera, they're like, no, this is to bring down the system. This is to, like, get away from banks. This is to collapse the governments. This is to, you know, this is following the ethos of the cypherpunks. And I have a whole chapter in the cypherpunks, who, you know, were 30 years before the creation of bitcoin, but they sort of set the whole idea of that code allows you to go and have an entire economy that is separate from the state. Money and state. We're separated for millions of years or thousands of years. As long as civilization's been around. People had gold. People had, you know, fur pelts. They had. They had seashells. They weren't issued by the government. Gold is really what started then, letting the government buy the gold and issue coins and then governments over time. And, you know, there's a very good book that, you know, sold over a million copies that I mentioned a few times in my book, which is the bitcoin standard that's always number one on the. On the Amazon list. I have a hard time getting above number three because they're number one and they count Michael Lewis's books on FTX as being a bitcoin book. So it's usually number.
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Podcast Host 3
Number three ain't bad, though.
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Michael Turpin
Number three is not bad. And I get there whenever. Whenever there's a good podcast that people go out and buy the book.
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Podcast Host 3
I love it.
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Michael Turpin
I had one recently with Bonnie Blockchain that just like actually sold out Amazon for. For a while.
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Podcast Host 3
Wow. Yeah. We'll link this in the video for people watching.
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Michael Turpin
Fantastic.
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Podcast Host 3
Yeah, it's a good book, man. I read it on Audible. Bitcoin Super Cycle. I mean, you called this years ago. It's impressive.
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Michael Turpin
Thank you.
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Podcast Host 3
I mean, this has been like, was it a calculated risk for you when.
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Podcast Host 4
You first got into it?
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Podcast Host 3
Like, did you see it becoming where it is now?
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Michael Turpin
I saw it becoming this way, but I didn't go as all in as some people do. So when I still diversified into real estate, my ex wife is a real estate maximist. And so we were always kind of having conversations about how much, hey, bitcoin just went from 100 to 1,000. How much do we cash out and put into a home? And she'd Be like all of it. And I'd be like, no, no more than half, you know, that type of thing. And so Michael Saylor was like one of the first people to say diversification is not a good thing. If you have the best asset, why do you want to sell for a second best or third best or fourth best asset? And I had that philosophy. I would have thousands of more bitcoin right now, but I'm still doing okay and I've got some great homes.
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Podcast Host 3
Yeah, can't complain. Right. And you were early on Ethereum, you said, and Tether, which is even crazier.
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Michael Turpin
Yeah, Tether. Obviously, you know, you couldn't buy Tether and like have a go. 100x was a stablecoin, right?
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Podcast Host 3
Yeah.
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Michael Turpin
And I wasn't an equity owner of Tether. I just, I just helped with their marketing.
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Podcast Host 3
Got it.
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Michael Turpin
I launched Ethereum. So again, my way of getting into bitcoin and that led me into crypto, was in, you know, I started hearing about it in 2012, but I didn't really go all in until early 2013 when I got invited to the first Bitcoin foundation conference by Brock Pierce. And, you know, I then all of a sudden saw the light sort of, you know, because about a year earlier I was invited to go to a, you know, sort of a Future of Money conference in San Francisco. And they had somebody from one of the earliest bitcoin exchanges that got shut down because of regulation in 2012 called Tradehill. And I had a conflict. So I sent the head of my San Francisco office of my PR firm and I said, I'm interested in this bitcoin. What do you think? And she's like, oh, it'll never work. They are so smoking crack now. Had I gone, I would have probably had the same reaction I did a year later, which is like, oh my God, this is going to change the world. And as one of the co founders who's a friend of mine now, Ryan Singer of Trade Hill, said, yeah, not only would you have had the same reaction, but you would have started buying Bitcoin at $4 instead of 120.
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Podcast Host 3
Jeez.
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Michael Turpin
And of course, people who got in a year earlier than that were buying at a dollar. That was like, for example, Roger Vere, you know, Roger Vere, you know, he famously, you know, learned about bitcoin. He was living in Japan. He read the white paper. He was like, this can't be true. If this is true, it's going to change the world. He literally spent several days, I've heard Him tell this story. And I talk about my book. He spent several days trying to disprove it. He literally stayed up night after night to the point that he got hospitalized for exhaustion. And this is a young guy in his early 30s who, you know, was a martial arts fighter. And he got exhausted to the point that he had to be hospitalized. When he got out of the hospital, he put a quarter of a million dollars of the bitcoin at a dollar a bitcoin.
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Podcast Host 3
Wow.
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Michael Turpin
Yeah, that's back what it was. That's what it was back then.
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Podcast Host 3
And he still has it.
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Michael Turpin
Well, he's a multibillionaire. He unfortunately had some disputes with, with the US Government over taxes. You can Google it. And you know, I think it's kind of crazy. They're not just simply saying, here's the amount, pay your penalty, etc. But they're, you know, he's right now in, in easy and sort of confinement, not in prison. But you can't leave Spain.
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Podcast Host 3
I think I heard about this, actually. Yeah, yeah, that's nuts.
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Podcast Host 4
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Podcast Host 3
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- [19:25]
Podcast Host 3
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- [19:26]
Podcast Host 4
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Podcast Host 3
Yeah, I saw you say on another show only 5% of the world population owns bitcoin or no.
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Michael Turpin
That is something that is fundamental to why I believe we're going into a super cycle. So there's three reasons that I bought that I wrote the book, and two sort of messages that should come out of it. I guess three if you include the first one. First one is I was frustrated that traditional business people, investors didn't get what I was saying? Or they would run it past their stockbroker. Well, if you want to pass your stockbroker in 2013, he's going to say, this is like a road to, like, bankruptcy. They'd be like, or I can't talk about it. I'm not allowed to talk about it. Or this is a con game or whatever. And if their trusted advisor, who's not allowed to sell something, says that it's a con or it's a fraud or it's a Ponzi or whatever. And of course, they'd never read the white paper. They'd never investigated. They just simply. That was what their boss's boss's boss said. And of course, going back to the earliest days, places like J.P. morgan, you know, famously, you know, Jamie Dimon had said, I think in 2015, if anybody was stupid enough to buy Bitcoin at JP Morgan, he would fire him on the spot. And then there's reports of, like, other divisions of JP Morgan buying it up as soon as the price crashed. You know, so it's like, watch how I'm running my book. Not what I say.
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Podcast Host 3
Right, right.
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Michael Turpin
And this has been a secret of short sellers for generations.
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Podcast Host 3
Yeah. They use the media to induce fear and then they buy at lows, and then that's correct. Put pause, the media behind it and repeat.
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Michael Turpin
And I think you can see now that all of a sudden the prices in, you know, 100,000 plus all the institutions are just like, you know, jumping in. And of course, they'll be the first ones to say it's going to go down when they want to buy more. But, you know, the biggest thing that happens, though, so the first reason I wrote the book was to. It's not bitcoin for dummies. It's bitcoin for investors that haven't done enough research.
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Podcast Host 3
Right.
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Michael Turpin
Or the right research. And so that's who it's for. And that's sort of the message, is that bitcoin, it's not accidental that it's the best asset class of all time. I mean, literally, there's no other asset class that went from a tenth of a penny in 2010 to over $100,000.
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Podcast Host 3
What is that, a 10,000x?
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Michael Turpin
Way more. It was a millionx when it went to $1,000. So it's 100 millionx.
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Podcast Host 4
Holy crap.
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Michael Turpin
100 million. There was only one sale at the tenth of a penny. That was Marti Malki, who is Satoshi's intern, I call him. He was a college student in Finland. 19 years old that read the white paper. The white paper was, you know, there for anybody to see who, like, subscribe to these, you know, obscure cryptography groups. And he, you know, Satoshi had his email on there, you know, satoshi gmx.net or whatever, and he said, hey, I really like what you're saying. And, you know, I know how to build websites. Can I help you build a website? Because, you know, Satoshi went and, you know, took out, you know, bitcoin.org and he's like, yeah, I can use some help. I'll pay you in bitcoin. But what I really use help is I'd like somebody else to be mining all the time so that I know there's at least two people mining all the time. And, you know, Hal Finney also, you know, started mining a few days later. But if you look at the number of wallets, I mean, a year into bitcoin, there was less than 100 people mining. Wow.
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Podcast Host 3
That's it.
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Michael Turpin
That's it. Because it just was not very well publicized. You know, there wasn't any foundation, there wasn't any PR firm. You know, there was just Satoshi saying, this is going to change the world. And if you believe it, I mean, he has a famous saying where he was trying to explain something he said. He said, if you don't believe it or don't get it, I'm sorry, I don't have enough time to explain it to you. And it's just like there's another saying that was not by him, which is that people get bitcoin at the price that they deserve. So the people who learned about it really early and got it and kept it, I mean, they're billionaires now. I mean, you have 10,000 Bitcoin, do the math.
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Podcast Host 3
Crazy.
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Michael Turpin
And when it gets a million dollars, you have a thousand bitcoin, then you're a billionaire. And so the effect of all these extremely wealthy people who were like bartenders and just crypto anarchists or libertarians, who put $100 into Bitcoin when it was a nickel, or put $1,000 at a dollar and had the fortitude to hold no matter what, these are the people who put Trump into office, quite frankly. Because if you look, I mean, money talks and BS walks in politics, right? I mean, the influence of money on politics is unmistakable. It's too bad, but it is what it is. And if you look at historically the US Presidential campaigns, the biggest dollar participants have been big pharma and the big banks. And you can see how policy has gone right. This last election cycle was the first time that those two were not the top categories. Crypto was the biggest investor. 48% of all funding for the presidential election was from the crypto industry.
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Podcast Host 3
Is that on the right or the left?
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Michael Turpin
They contributed to both sides, but mainly they contributed to the Trump campaign because Trump said, I'm pro bitcoin. And Kamala was like, well, you know, we're going to look at it. And of course, they were the same party that just had a war on crypto with Gary Gensler, Elizabeth Warren. So even though they were saying, we'll look at it, you know, it was very. I mean, I think the most positive thing that Camel ever said was she said, well, I understand that black men are making some money on crypto, so there must be something good here. But, you know, the whole identity politics, that kind of cost the election as well for the woke.
- [25:21]
Podcast Host 3
Yeah, there was a crypto ball in D.C. i remember. You were probably there.
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Michael Turpin
I was there. I was there.
- [25:25]
Podcast Host 3
Yeah. It was like a quarter million to get into that or something crazy.
- [25:28]
Michael Turpin
You know, I got in just because I contributed to meet President Trump. Get a grip and grin shot at Bitcoin 2024. So when he was a candidate, he spoke in Nashville, and I was a speaker at that conference. David Bailey, who's a friend of mine since the early days, brilliant entrepreneur, and he bought Bitcoin magazine, which was originally owned by Vitalik and a few other people, and they were just kind of doing other things that wouldn't run anymore. And he was running a print magazine called why Bitcoin? That was sort of like, for newbies. And he comes from a family of publishers, so he knows that industry.
- [26:07]
Podcast Host 3
Nice.
- [26:08]
Michael Turpin
But he basically went and really, when he bought it, I think he was trying to make it into, like, the shiny, glossy bitcoin magazine. And then he realized, whoa, the website is really where it's at. And he's just done an amazing job of growing the conference. And, you know, bitcoin conference now, you know, gets like 25, 30,000 people. And of course, last year, like all great conferences, they have to move to Vegas.
- [26:30]
Podcast Host 3
Yeah, right.
- [26:30]
Michael Turpin
When you get to the certain size, you can't go anywhere else.
- [26:33]
Podcast Host 3
I was there. It was a very impressive turnout.
- [26:34]
Michael Turpin
Yeah.
- [26:35]
Podcast Host 3
I think one of the Trump spoke. I was really impressed. They started a fund, I believe Trump Jr. And Eric.
- [26:40]
Michael Turpin
Right.
- [26:40]
Podcast Host 3
A bitcoin fund.
- [26:41]
Michael Turpin
They've done a lot of things in the bitcoin space. They also started a bitcoin mining company called American Bitcoin. They Started a stablecoin. I mean, the family is like all over the asset class. Wow.
- [26:54]
Podcast Host 4
They just started a mining company or they had one.
- [26:58]
Michael Turpin
They did a very interesting deal. They bought a company called Griffin Mining that I was actually an advisor and a shareholder in. And they basically rolled it into what's going to become called, I think, the American Bitcoin company.
- [27:11]
Podcast Host 3
Interesting.
- [27:12]
Michael Turpin
And, you know, and so that was, you know, kind of a reverse merger type thing. But stocks spiked and I was happy with that.
- [27:19]
Podcast Host 3
Wow.
- [27:20]
Michael Turpin
And so, yeah, no, I mean, the Trump family has been in crypto for quite a while. And you know, and obviously the president, because of his family being in crypto for quite a while, I mean, it's nice to have somebody who's educated about the asset class and really sees the importance in terms of freedom, in terms of America being a leader. I mean, you know, he also, I mean, is brilliant appointing, you know, David Sacks as The crypto and AIs are because, you know, Europe is very, I wouldn't say anti crypto, but they seem to be going down the path of the nanny state. You know, their big concern about AI is safety. Ooh, what's going to happen if AI, you know, does this and that? We better have a lot of regulation to be able to make sure that AI doesn't do anything bad. Well, while you're hamstringing all these companies from innovating, the rest of the world that's not under the same regulations as taking over the technology. And the US wanted to make sure that that's not China because they don't have AI safety regulation. They let people innovate.
- [28:21]
Podcast Host 3
Are you pretty optimistic? I'm sure you're investing in some AI companies right now.
- [28:24]
Michael Turpin
Yes, that's my other asset class and technology that I'm bullish on. And I'm also very bullish in terms of the future of the two coming together. Decentralized AI. Because AI agents are sort of a big area in the future, not just LLMs. And, you know, if you've got an agent going out and executing on your behalf, do you want it to be owned by Microsoft?
- [28:47]
Podcast Host 3
Probably not.
- [28:47]
Michael Turpin
Right. So, And I mean, OpenAI is 40% owned by Microsoft. You know, you know, even the open source stuff that LLAMA is, is developed by Meta. I mean, you know, Google, obviously there. I mean, the big, the big LLMs are all either majority owned or at least significantly owned by, you know, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Meta, and, you know, Elon Musk.
- [29:12]
Podcast Host 3
Yeah.
- [29:13]
Michael Turpin
And so these are, you know, very profitable centralized organizations that have A history of, you know, doing things for the shareholders and not necessarily for. For the users. And, you know, and if you're. One answer is to overregulate stuff, another one is to decentralize it. And obviously, what Bitcoin did with decentralization, what the Internet did with decentralization, I mean, the Internet really was sort of the original kind of decentralized organization. And in the early days, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I still have a T shirt somewhere from the early days that said the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it. And so the whole idea was that when the defense industry, it was a DARPA project originally in the 60s, so that during a nuclear war, if you had 1,000 nodes that needed to somehow connect with each other for national security and 900 were damaged because of warfare, nuclear or otherwise, you could still. Because there was no central hub that most client server architectures and mainframe architectures rely upon, as long as you had like three or four nodes anywhere in the country, they could find each other.
- [30:27]
Podcast Host 3
Wow.
- [30:28]
Michael Turpin
And so that was what the Internet strength was. And when I first learned about that, I was all in on that. I particularly got all in on that when the web came out. And I saw that with the graphic interface in the early 90s that was developed as a college project at the University of Illinois, Champaign, Urbana. And. And Mark Andreessen was the student there who was the lead student in charge of the project. Larry Smaras is the person that got the government grants that was. You know, I have these. I like to have the blessing and curse of being a little early in projects. They say you can tell the pioneers and the ones with the arrows in the back, but it's a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing that you see where things are going. You just don't have to run and invest before sort of like shaking out the details. Bitcoin was the opposite. You could have invested as early as you wanted. Right. Because it wasn't like there was going to be a fight between VHS and Beta. I mean, I think it was clear that Bitcoin was going to be the winner from the beginning. Even though Ethereum said there's going to be a flipping. But it never got close.
- [31:31]
Podcast Host 3
Doesn't look like it's close at all, right?
- [31:32]
Michael Turpin
Not close at all. It's like 60% of the asset class and I think the closest one is Ethereum, and that's maybe a little over 10%, I think. So. Yeah. No, it's. It during certain section sectors, they run away with it. You know, I think that for the foreseeable future, there'll still be 50% or higher, you know, during, during certain, you know, we're right now, you know, I mean. So the other two things that I wrote about in the book was I wanted to explain the cycles because most traditional investors understand the cycles in their asset class. If you're a real estate investor, you understand the cycles, right? You wouldn't have gone and fomoed and bought real estate in Las Vegas in 2007. Right. Because you could see that the bubble was about to pop. Whereas tons of people like went in and like, you know, mortgaged. I mean, they just went, you know, it was easy money and people were making money and then they got wrecked. Right. Because they had these programs where you could go in and do, you know, I mean, Vegas in particular got really harmed by this. You know, people with no income would do these no DOC loans, right? And they would say, oh yeah, I'm a cocktail waitress, but I'm going to buy a $5 million home because there's no money down. And my realtor said, well, you know, when the, when the bill comes due, it'll be worth double as much and you just, you know, cash out or refinance it. And of course that ruined, you know, I mean, at one point, 70 something percent of all the home sales in Vegas were foreclosures.
- [32:57]
Podcast Host 3
Holy crap.
- [32:58]
Michael Turpin
Yeah, I was in Vegas.
- [32:59]
Podcast Host 3
That was in 08.
- [33:00]
Michael Turpin
That. No, it was after. That was when. It was when the wreckage happened. That was like 2011 and 2012.
- [33:06]
Podcast Host 3
Oh, my gosh.
- [33:06]
Michael Turpin
Yes. It started. I mean, it took a while for it to. And you know, I was on the other side of that equation. I was buying those homes.
- [33:13]
Podcast Host 3
Yeah, you had liquid capital ready.
- [33:15]
Michael Turpin
Liquid capital. Yeah. And, yeah, and. But I mean, I think that morally the government should have actually just helped the homeowners stay in their homes instead of, you know, just, you know, hey, here's your easy money. Oops, you didn't do it. Okay. We're just like mass foreclose and give to the investor class.
- [33:32]
Podcast Host 3
Yeah, it's crazy. That was only 12 years ago. That's not too long, I know.
- [33:36]
Michael Turpin
No. And again, buy at the bottom, sell at the top and people forget that. So, you know, Lord Rothschild, you know, the Rothschild banking family is the one who said a couple hundred years ago, you must buy when there's blood in the streets. And the full quote was, even if it's your own blood.
- [33:56]
Podcast Host 3
Wow.
- [33:57]
Michael Turpin
And that has, I mean, for example, the one metro market that actually got Hurt worse than Vegas was Miami. Miami at the bottom had I think five years of inventory unsold.
- [34:12]
Podcast Host 3
Holy crap.
- [34:13]
Michael Turpin
And you know, in a healthy market you're a matter of months, right? I think Vegas was about three years at that point, but it was five years. And I remember, you know, looking at buying some stuff, I was like begging my ex like, you know, please let's buy a couple place in Miami. She's like, no, I want to concentrate in Vegas. But I mean, you could have bought a three bedroom home in South Beach, a little, you know, older home, but for about $60,000. What, and those are worth like a million now?
- [34:38]
Podcast Host 3
Yeah, Miami's booming right now.
- [34:39]
Michael Turpin
Miami's booming. And so again, you just have to look. And so the same thing with bitcoin. The best times to buy bitcoin is when it crashes. I mean there's a New Yorker style cartoon out there that basically has a line says bitcoin for sale. $60,000 people around the block. Bitcoin for sale a year later, 15,000 crickets.
- [35:00]
Podcast Host 3
I've seen that one.
- [35:01]
Michael Turpin
Yeah, right. And so that's really the third lesson. I mean, sort of part of the lesson of the book on the cycles is again, you want to go and retail has a tendency to fomo in at the top and then say, oh my God, I was so stupid. And they then they sell at a loss.
- [35:17]
Podcast Host 3
Right.
- [35:17]
Michael Turpin
That then opens up the door for, you know, the sophisticated investors to go and, you know, buy when retail selling and then sell when retail is buying. And the cycles in the stock market, if you're a stock market investor, you've been around for a while. I certainly did this, you know, things like selling may and go away. That's something that I actually did for years. Over a 75 year period. If you sold your portfolio every May, stayed out of the market in the summer and the early fall when a lot of the crashes happened, then bought back either the same stocks or rebalanced your portfolio. November, going into the Santa Claus rally and the January rally, you would have significantly outperformed. I think it was some crazy number like 2.5x over a 75 year period.
- [36:01]
Podcast Host 3
Wow.
- [36:02]
Michael Turpin
On the other hand, if you did the opposite and you basically sold in November and bought back In May over 75 years, you would have barely made money. You would have missed most of the gains. Because if you look, the big crashes were like the 29 crash and in October, the 89 crash was I think in late September. I mean, September and October have been horrible months for the 09 crash, right, the 0809 crash. That was in September. October.
- [36:24]
Podcast Host 3
Interesting.
- [36:25]
Michael Turpin
So, you know, history has a tendency to repeat, or as Mark Twain allegedly said, I mean, there's doubts whether he actually said it, but he's referred to as saying it, which is history may not repeat, but it tends to rhyme.
- [36:36]
Podcast Host 3
Right.
- [36:37]
Michael Turpin
And it's been true in the stock market, it's been true in other asset classes. That's certainly true. Even more so in bitcoin. And so I noticed this early on and around 2015 I developed this concept called the Four Seasons of Bitcoin. Satoshi in the white paper says that as long as every four year cycle. So there's 33 cycles that are four years where the amount of new bitcoin gets cut in half. So the first cycle is around 10 million bitcoin and that was 7200 per day. And then after 210,000 blocks, it got cut in half. So all of a sudden now there's only 3,600 a day. So about 5 million over that four year cycle. And then one day it gets cut in half again. So now it's only 1800 a day. About two and a half million over the four years. And then four years later gets cut in half again. Now it's 900 a day. About 1.1 something over a four year cycle. We're now in the fifth cycle. So we are now at only 450 Bitcoin a day. The first four years it was 7200 Bitcoin a day and not many people mining. If you were a miner back then, you could just turn on a laptop and you were going to get maybe 100 Bitcoin a day.
- [37:47]
Podcast Host 3
Holy crap.
- [37:48]
Michael Turpin
With, with difficulty of 0 of 1 level was 1. You could just have a laptop sit there and you know, get 100, 150 Bitcoin a day. Mark Carpelis, who I got to interview last year at the Korea Blockchain week, he started Mount Gox.
- [38:03]
Podcast Host 3
Yeah.
- [38:03]
Michael Turpin
And he's known for like building that up and exploding it, etc. Etc. Being sued and all sorts of things happen there. He actually started out in payments, he actually ran a payments company and he also had a web hosting company as a young man in his 20s, Frenchman living in Tokyo. And he got a call one day from someone who was a Frenchman living in South America, Peru I think it was, and he said, hey, can you exchange bitcoin for euros? And he's like, what's a bitcoin? And he researched it, found out and found somebody who was willing to go and pay euros for bitcoin. This is around 2010. So it was probably one of the first sales of bitcoin. And then he, after he did that, he said, hmm, I'm a techie. Why don't I know about this bitcoin? So he went, read the white paper, downloaded the software. Back in those days, the software actually had mining built in. You would just turn on your computer, boot up the software, and it would start mining for you. Within an hour, he had 50 Bitcoin.
- [39:00]
Podcast Host 3
Holy.
- [39:01]
Michael Turpin
And he's like, well, I guess it must not be very valuable if it's this easy to get bitcoin. He's like, but you know what? Somebody was willing to pay for it. So I guess I should probably put it on a few more computers. And because he also had a hosting company, he was a partner in a payments company, but he owned a hosting company. He probably had 30, 40 computers. He loaded the bitcoin software on every one of them.
- [39:21]
Podcast Host 3
Oh, my gosh.
- [39:22]
Michael Turpin
Within about four months, while the Bitcoin difficulty was still level one, he mined 200,000 Bitcoin. Holy crap. And he has none of them now, he claims, he says he put him in Mount Gox because he thought it was safer there.
- [39:37]
Podcast Host 3
Wow.
- [39:37]
Michael Turpin
He just kept them in his wallet, kept the private keys. He'd be one of the richest people on the planet right now.
- [39:43]
Podcast Host 3
That's nuts.
- [39:43]
Michael Turpin
Yeah, there's a lot of stories like that about the early days of bitcoin.
- [39:46]
Podcast Host 3
That's nuts. Yeah, a lot of people, like, I feel like, had it early on, but never held this this long.
- [39:52]
Michael Turpin
This is true. The people who, you know. And again, when you get an investment, let's say it's a stock or something, and you go 10x, you're told you should take some stuff off the top or don't get greedy or whatever, especially if it then crashes. But I'm now not a proponent of Hodling, and I'm not a proponent of just selling when it doubles or whatever. I think you need to look at the cycles and the most successful strategy, even though Hodling did really well. Hodling, I explained in the book, is sort of based on a meme from a number of years ago where somebody misspelled the word hold when he was drunk on a famous post on Bitcoin Talk, which was Satoshi's little chat board. But if you were to buy, let's say you weren't super early, you didn't know about it in 2010, 2011, but you learned about it at the end of 2012, that was actually almost a year after I'd first heard about it. So November 2012 was the first halving. It was at $12. So if you bought it at $12 or in early 2013, it was $11. But let's say you bought it the first halving end of 2012 and you put $12,000 in. That would have gotten you 1,000 Bitcoin. So that thousand Bitcoin for $12,000 investment, if you did nothing but hold it between then and now, is now worth $115 million today. Can't think of any other investment that would do that well over a 12 year period, 12 and a half year period or so. And on the other hand, if you did what I propose in my book, which is hold bitcoin for three years and hold fiat for one year, that way you're able to sell at the top of the cycle and then buy back at the bottom. Now 2012 was near the end of the cycle, so you would have only had to hold another year. Went up 100x went from 12 to 1200. Now you probably weren't going to go and guess the exact high but. And that first cycle is probably the, the hardest one to guess because there was limited information the first having. But if you were able to get out at around 1,000 bucks, you would have turned your, your $12,000 investment into a million dollars. You hold onto that for a year. Crash, crash, crash, crash, crash. I kind of knew that the bottom was in at about 171 because it was just even the short sellers like saying I don't know if I wasn't really much short selling going on then other than some foreign exchanges, but even the ones that were sort of like bears were like saying I think this is probably as low as it's going to go. And it stayed. It takes forever to crawl back from that. That's what I call bitcoin winter. And so you had several months, you could have gotten back in around 250 bucks. So if you'd sold at a thousand and bought back at 250, now you have 4,000 bitcoin, you hold that for three years. It went up to almost $20,000. Let's say you cost averaged out over the last couple of months of the, of the bull market, you got out at 16,000. You then held on to that cash for a year. It was literally a year minus three days later that went down to 3200. Let's say you missed that 3200. You got back in at 4000. Now you have 16,000 Bitcoin. And you repeat that one more cycle, you could have actually done another 4x. But I was saying the cost average, you would probably would have done a little bit less than that and you'd have 60,000 bitcoin. So by doing that strategy today, When Bitcoin is 115,000, your $12,000 investment isn't worth $115 million. It's worth a little over 5 billion.
- [43:11]
Podcast Host 3
Holy crap.
- [43:12]
Michael Turpin
Yes. And by the end of the cycle, if it gets to where I think it's going to go, it could be 12 billion. Yeah, 12,000 to 12 billion. I don't know anything's ever done that.
- [43:20]
Podcast Host 3
That's nuts. That's really good advice for people. So just keep an eye on bitcoin. And what do you consider a crash, like a 30% dip?
- [43:26]
Michael Turpin
No. So it's, it's, it. You know, my subhead of the book is, you know, how the crypto calendar can make you rich. And it is based on the calendar so far, it is a four year cycle. It's actually 210,000 blocks. It hasn't been exactly four years. The first one was 47 months. The second one was the shortest one because there was disruption in mining, because China really cracked down on miners. And so you ended up going, instead of having it be in November, which would be an exact four year cycle, it was in July. And so because the difficulty, and I have a whole chapter on mining that explains all this, it adjusts to make it about a 10 minute block. And so it'll make it longer or shorter based on sort of the number of people mining. And it wants to go and have it so that if there's a lot of people transacting and a lot of people mining, that there's not a powerful computer that can take over the network.
- [44:22]
Podcast Host 3
Got it.
- [44:22]
Michael Turpin
And so it has to be more and more difficult. And the difficulty is the easiest way to explain. It's called a nonce, a number used only once. But it's, it's effectively, when it was difficulty one, it asked the question of the math processor along the lines of what's the square root of nine? Anybody can answer that, right? So it's three. Now it's something along the lines of what's the square root of 7,427,000. Right. So it takes, it takes, you know, legions of, you know, dedicated math processors all strung together. And so the difficulty level in bitcoin, which is how hard it was to go and get A new bitcoin for the first year and a half was, was one. So again, you were getting at the mark. Carpelis just turn on a laptop and, you know, get 200,000 Bitcoin if you had 30 computers running. And so there were other people who had multiple computers running. And a lot of those people are, you know, we think bitcoin that never moved. So these are multibillionaires. I mean, obviously the person who just sold 80,000 Bitcoin a couple of weeks ago, $9 billion, had never moved it since he mined it in 2010. And it was 10,000 here, 10,000 here, 10,001 here, 10,000 here. How many other 10,000 Bitcoin wallets does he have?
- [45:34]
Podcast Host 3
That's nuts. No one knows who that is.
- [45:36]
Michael Turpin
Nobody knows who it is.
- [45:36]
Podcast Host 3
That's crazy.
- [45:37]
Michael Turpin
Including the tax authorities.
- [45:40]
Podcast Host 3
That's so cool.
- [45:42]
Michael Turpin
I'm sure they're going to probably look for it now.
- [45:44]
Podcast Host 3
So now to mine, you can't just do it off a laptop.
- [45:47]
Michael Turpin
No. So again, for about a year and a half it was difficulty level one, which you could do on a laptop. And then what made the difficulty increase was the same guy who basically was responsible for the bitcoin pizza, Laszlo Hynich, who was a gamer, 19 year old gamer in Jacksonville, Florida. He figured out how to take one of his gaming cards and mine bitcoin with it. And he got much better, you know, throughput, right? I mean a game, a GPU is more powerful than a cpu. And so all of a sudden he was getting tons of bitcoin. He was like solving the, the, he was solving the math problem quickest because he had a stronger processor. So if all of a sudden the math problem is really easy and boom, he gets it first, right? And so that ended up triggering the algorithm to go, oh, we need to double the difficulty to level two. A month later it went to level three, triple the difficulty. A month after that it was, it was 5,5x the difficulty. A month after that it was 8. During this rapid run up, Satoshi emailed him and said, I know I can't stop you, but we're not supposed to increase the difficulty this early before people know about bitcoin. And of course, Laszlo didn't stop. He ended up mining over a hundred thousand bitcoin.
- [46:57]
Podcast Host 3
That was the guy that bought pizza.
- [46:59]
Michael Turpin
The guy bought 10,000 pizza for me. Sorry, two pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoin.
- [47:04]
Podcast Host 3
Oh, so he's doing fine then because people on the Internet, he's not doing.
- [47:06]
Michael Turpin
Fine because he sold all of his bitcoin and he bought pizza a few more times, and then when it got to about a dollar, he ended up buying a computer.
- [47:14]
Podcast Host 3
No way.
- [47:15]
Michael Turpin
There's no bitcoin left.
- [47:16]
Podcast Host 3
That's crazy. When was the last time someone heard from Satoshi, like, he emailed someone like that?
- [47:23]
Michael Turpin
So it depends what you believe. Satoshi sort of disappeared from public view around the time that one of his core devs, Gavin Anderson, went and did a presentation to the CIA because they asked.
- [47:38]
Podcast Host 3
Oh.
- [47:38]
Michael Turpin
And all of a sudden, he just, like, you know, posted and said, I'm busy working on other projects. You won't be hearing me for a while. And that's the last.
- [47:46]
Podcast Host 3
Now, when was that?
- [47:47]
Michael Turpin
That was around 20. I think it was late 2010. Late 2010. Early 2011. Around there. I mentioned the date in the book. And, you know, there was the only other time that a wallet that was linked to him posted was when there was a Newsweek reporter who said they found Satoshi and it was a guy called Dorian Nakamoto.
- [48:09]
Podcast Host 3
Oh, wow.
- [48:10]
Michael Turpin
Who basically lived in California, didn't speak great English, and she had grilled him. And he basically said. Didn't understand the question. Said, oh, yes, I involved in that project. And he didn't understand the question. He was not Satoshi. And so a wallet associated with. After this, like, I mean, literally, reporters chase this guy around the block was big news. Satoshi's wallet, I mean, rather an email address associated with him said, I am not Dorian Nakamoto. And that's the last time that anybody's heard from him, assuming that that was him who posted that.
- [48:43]
Podcast Host 3
Interesting.
- [48:44]
Michael Turpin
If he did, that means Satoshi is still alive and. Well, we have no idea whether he still has the bitcoin. There's a lot of different theories on that. We don't know if he has the private key still.
- [48:53]
Podcast Host 3
Yeah, I saw something. It's like, if bitcoin hits a million, he's the first trillionaire in the world or something. Something like that.
- [48:57]
Michael Turpin
That would do it. Yes.
- [48:59]
Podcast Host 3
Crazy. Wow.
- [49:00]
Michael Turpin
Million times. He's got. He's got access to about 1.1 million. Bitcoin.
- [49:03]
Podcast Host 3
No, CIA. Meaning. Now I see where that conspiracy theory comes into play, how the CIA started bitcoin.
- [49:08]
Michael Turpin
Yeah, I think that's a unlikely. I just. Just all the artifacts, all the things. It just is unlikely that that's true. You know, I think the CIA studied. I think they know a lot about it, etcetera, But I don't think that it was the CIA that started this just to. I don't know. To do what to go and get people to get rich and then like say aha. I mean, I don't think that's likely.
- [49:34]
Podcast Host 3
Yeah, it's changed a lot of people's lives for sure.
- [49:35]
Michael Turpin
Yes.
- [49:36]
Podcast Host 3
Michael, this is fun, man. I can't wait to get to know you and come to your events. Anything else you want to close off with here?
- [49:43]
Michael Turpin
Yeah, we got about five more minutes. So the super cycle didn't really talk about that. So the four seasons of bitcoin is what? So satoshi said in the white paper that as long as the amount of new bitcoin every cycle exceeds. Sorry, the amount of new. The amount of new users buying bitcoin exceeds the amount of new bitcoin put into the system, which gets cut in half every time the price has to go up. And so, sure enough, first halving, it was $12. Second having was $670. Third halving was 8,700. Fourth having was 64,000. Every single time it went up. There's 33 halvings overall. We're in number five or sorry, yeah, we're in cycle number five. Fourth having. And so my addition to that is, yes, it goes up and not in a straight line between the halvings, which so far has been basically the perfect price of bitcoin. It's not too high, not too low. You have four quadrants that are associated with human fear and greed. Right. And so I call them the four seasons of bitcoin, which is what I originally wanted to call the book. My publisher, like bitcoin super cycle was another part of the narrative. So bitcoin spring is the day of the having. You can see it coming a mile away. That's when the seed of the new cycle narrative is planted. And that's in one day, bitcoin miners go from being profitable to unprofitable, about 20% profitable on average to 30% unprofitable. And yet the price doesn't drop, it stays flat. Because if any miners are selling, usually they have financing at this point. You know, there's somebody else saying, I see the price is going to go up. I'll buy it up. But they wait until there is movement to prove you're in a bull market before they really fomo in. And that is the first day of bitcoin summer. Bitcoin summer is what I've named the day that the all time high is reached. So it passes the high of the last cycle every single time that's happened when it passed $30 in 2013, which is the high of the first cycle, when it passed 1200 in 2017, which was the prior cycle when it passed 20,000 in the end of 2020. And when it passed 73,850 last year, every time that's happened it takes off like a rocket ship. This time it went from 73,000 after being flat for six months, it went up to 100,000 within three weeks. And so that is what I call bitcoin summer. And it's usually lasted between 9 and 11 months. Gets a little bit longer. Bitcoin spring is only four to seven months. Been getting a little bit longer. So we could be as long as 12 months this time. So November 5th is when we hit the all time high of last year. I don't think we're gonna hit it this month because, you know, nine months from November would have been August. I think we're still kind of in this, you know, sort of this, this year looks a lot like 2017, which is the one year you didn't have a double bubble. 2013, it went from $12 to like 250, crashed back down to $50, stayed flat in the summer, ended up at 1200. This last time it went from like, you know, in 2020, 21, it went from like 8,700. We had Covid around, it still ended up going to 64,000. Then it crashed during the summer down to the 30s and then went up back to 67,000 in 2017. It, you know, it started around, you know, 670. Took a while to get up to the, to the all time high of the prior cycle, which hadn't been over 1000 in three years. And when it hit 1200, it still took until that was in February, I think end of February, early March. By the end of July it was still only 1900, but yet by the end of December it was 19,000. And so I think this year is going to look like that. So we started the year around 100,000. We're still, I mean, on January 19th it was 119,000 a day. It's 115,000. So it's been pretty flat for the last eight months. But, but I believe that we're going to be around 200,000 by the end of the year, which would be about three times the halving price because the first time was 10x and then an 85% drop, sorry, 100x the halving price, then an 85% drop. The second halving was 30x and then 83% drop should have been 10x I thought, because it was sort of a logarithmic drop in diminishing returns and then an arithmetic drop in diminishing losses. But we had bad macro, we had Biden's war on crypto, Elizabeth Warren, Gary Gensler, and we also had a rapid rise in interest rates. And so that tamped it down to only be 8x. And then you had a little blip at the end when they approved the ETFs to 9x. And then you had a 75% drop from the 2021 high to FTX. And to me, it's not a coincidence that all the bankruptcies and all the drama, et cetera, happened the third year of the cycle. Because you have the having the first year, you have the parabolic run up when people get greedy, people over leverage. And then when the bubble pops, as Warren Buffett once said, you can only tell when the water's gone out who's been swimming naked. And that happened in the only three years, in the 16 years of Bitcoin that you could have lost money between January and December were 2014, 2018, 2022. And you're probably gonna lose money in 26, but not after you have a nice run up the rest of this year. And so that's what I call the four seasons of bitcoin. Oh. So bitcoin falls by the most important season and it's the hardest to judge because you can tell bitcoin spring is on the calendar. It's when the having happens. You can tell bitcoin summer's first day about calculator. Are you above the last season's high? You have to tell the new high and whether it's going to go higher or not. If you can judge that that's the end of bitcoin summer and the start of bitcoin fall. And then it takes about one year to just drop like crazy. This last time it was one year of the day. The November 10th of 2021 was the all time high. November 10th of 2022 was FTX.
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Podcast Host 3
Wow.
- [55:21]
Michael Turpin
And was the low for that cycle. And you know, and so I just put all this together in charts and graphs in the book. And so that's where I get that. I think we're going to be at about 3x plus or minus macro. If the tariffs keep on causing havoc, maybe we only get to 150k before the bubble pops. If the good regulation, the amount of money being put in bitcoin treasury companies. Michael Saylor just bought $2.1 billion. I mean, he bought more bitcoin than the miners sold in months in one day. Right? And so we are buying way more right now than the amount of supply. And so at some point you have a supply shock. And so where the super cycle comes and so the final season, so it lasts about a year. So you got about six months of bitcoin spring, you got about a year of bitcoin summer, and you got a year of bitcoin fall. That leaves about 18 months for Bitcoin winter. Bitcoin winter is not when things are dropping, it's when they've already capitulated. So that's the best time to buy. When things have dropped, there's blood in the streets and it takes about 18 months to then go back to the having got it. So you have to be patient. But it's been the most profitable time to buy. And so that's the big lesson in the book. Bitcoin super cycle is very simply that 5% and 95%. When you realize that 95% of all the bitcoins mined and only 5% of the world has any, what happens when we have 15% of the population? Where's the bitcoin coming from? In other run ups, the S curve of adoption happens in almost every disruptive technology. There's a great photo of Times Square, I believe it was 1903 that showed all horses in one car. 1913 it was all cars. And maybe it's not going to happen that quick in bitcoin, but right now we're kind of at that tipping point that you had the Internet, you had mobile phones, where all of a sudden it's not the early crazy guys that is doing it. It's like, you know, your mom and dad put it in their IRA, you know, or they. The ETFs is helping making this easy. The GUI gets much easier. You can go now and buy bitcoin in your Charlotte Schwab. You didn't used to be able to do that before. Now your broker is saying it's safe because he's selling the product. Right? And so the S curve of adoption usually is once you get about 5%, 5 to 8% of any new technology may take you 15 years to get there. Usually within about a decade you get over 50% and maybe another decade you get to 80 or 90%. So 95% of all the bitcoin has been sold and it's going to take 115 years to solve the last 5%. Where's that new bitcoin going to come from? When the Internet went through that made companies like Cisco and Microsoft rich. They just made more software, made more hardware. Miners can't make more bitcoin. They only have 450 a day. And after 2028, they're going to only have 225 a day. And after 2032, they're only going to have 112 a day. And yet demand is going to be going up. Let's say you have 5% of the world. You know, 400 million today is sort of an estimate. Let's say in four years you have a billion. That's two and a half times as much. Where's that bitcoin coming from? Has to come from the sale, from existing holders, and they all have their number. Some are going to say, never, I'm going to give it to my grandkids. If it goes to a million, it goes to 10 million. Great. Others are like, yeah, I'll sell some at 200,000, I'll sell some at 500,000. And so that tends to be that the Pops, when everybody's fomoing, are at the end of bitcoin summer, which would be this year. And if it doesn't hit a million this year, which I don't think it will, if we go into the bitcoin super cycle, that would mean that, like, Coinbase runs out of coins for a day. They can't find any. Right. Everybody's scrambling to find coins and the price just keeps going up and there's a short squeeze and you could see 300, 400,000 this cycle. And then people are going to FOMO in and say, oh, it's going to go to a million by the end of the year. And that's when they get wrecked. So you need to look on chain. I talk a lot in the book about how to identify these things. I also have a fund that's coming out where we do it using algorithmic technology and my strategy. And the super cycle, I think, is going to be about three cycles where you reverse the diminishing returns. It's happened in gold and silver. It happened in gold in the 70s when, you know, the price of gold because of a fundamental change, quadrupled in a decade. And that's because, you know, the US got off the gold standard and simultaneously they let Americans start owning gold again. And the 90s, it happened across commodities when China started buying everything. And so I think that's happening in bitcoin now because. Because people just like buying gold. You know, they're afraid of all the debt and they're diversifying. And so it's only a matter of time that we end up having this supply shock.
- [59:59]
Podcast Host 3
Yeah.
- [60:00]
Michael Turpin
And if it doesn't happen this year, it's going to happen four years from now.
- [60:03]
Podcast Host 3
Michael, thanks for your time. I learned a ton, guys. Check out this book. It sounds like it could be life changing for a lot of people. And check out Michael's event at the Tiger Mansion. We'll link it below. Thanks for coming on again, man.
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Michael Turpin
Thank you so much.
- [60:12]
Podcast Host 3
Yep.
- [60:14]
Podcast Host 4
I hope you guys are enjoying the show. Please don't forget to like and subscribe.
- [60:17]
Podcast Host 3
It helps the show a lot with the algorithm. Thank you.