Loading summary
Transcript30 lines
- [00:00]
Amazon Voice
Hey prime members, have you heard? You can listen to your favorite podcasts ad free. Good news. With Amazon Music, you have access to the largest catalog of ad free top podcasts included with your prime membership. To start listening, download the Amazon Music app for free or go to Amazon.com adfreepodcast that's Amazon.com adfreepodcast to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads.
- [00:25]
Instacart Voice
The holidays are all about sharing with family meals, couches, stories, Grandma's secret pecan pie recipe, and now you can also share a cart. With Instacart family carts, everyone can add what they want to one group cart from wherever they are. So you don't have to go from room to room to find out who wants cranberry sauce or whether you should get mini marshmallows for the yams or collecting votes for sugar cookies versus shortbread. Just share a cart and then share the meals. In the moments, download the Instacart app and get delivery in as fast as 30 minutes. Plus enjoy free delivery on your first three orders. Service fees and terms apply.
- [01:03]
Michael Turpin
Decades have always been stock advice. You know, don't buy when your shoeshine boy is buying, right? The grocery clerks, Rothschild said famously, you must buy when there's blood in the streets, even if it's your own blood. And so the cycles have been very consistent. You end up having the having where you have a new reality that you have half the bitcoin that you had before. So the miners are losing money every day. Takes a few months for that to equalize and the price to go up to the last all time high. At that point, all of a sudden, everyone's in profit. They have no idea where it's going to go next. So all of a sudden there's massive speculation and it pushes the price up very fast. And then retail pays attention and they start buying right near the top and that's the worst time to buy.
- [01:51]
Jen Sanasi
Hello and welcome to Markets Daily, hosted by me, Jen Sanasi. On the show, we navigate the currents shaping the crypto markets, providing insights against the broader financial landscape. So whether you're actively treating or simply fascinated by the volatility that is the crypto markets, this show is your compass to understanding where we are, where we're going, and where we have come from. On today's show, we are joined by the CEO of Transform Ventures, Michael Turpin. Michael, welcome to the show.
- [02:17]
Michael Turpin
Happy to be here.
- [02:19]
Jen Sanasi
Awesome. Well, I've started probably every show for the last two weeks saying what an exciting time it is to be watching the crypto markets. I want to get your perspective here. What are you watching as we head to the end of the year?
- [02:33]
Michael Turpin
Sure. So I'm watching how exactly we're performing in what I call bitcoin summer, which is the second phase of the four phases that I call the four seasons of bitcoin. Bitcoin spring is the day of having. It usually stays flat for four to seven months after that, which it did this time as well. And then as soon as you pass the all time high for the prior cycle, which was $73,850, that's when it takes off like a rocket ship. That happened on election day and we went straight up to the cusp of 100,000, which these large numbers are often very hard to push past. And so we saw a little bit of a rotation, a little bit of a pullback, but we're certainly going to be passing that in the near future.
- [03:14]
Jen Sanasi
Well, tell me a little bit more about that. How near of a future do you anticipate that we'll be passing that? What can we expect? Expect, let's say, towards the end of the year and throughout 2025.
- [03:24]
Michael Turpin
Sure. So we'll certainly be passing 100,000 in the next two weeks. And a lot of anticipation is around what is going to happen on January 20th when President elect Trump takes office. He's made a lot of promises to the crypto industry and so far he's been following through in terms of his appointments, being crypto friendly. And with him having both the Congress and this and the Senate gop, he should be able to push through a lot of his initiatives. The first one, of course, that people are looking for is what's going to happen with the strategic reserve for bitcoin that has been mentioned by both him as well as Cynthia Lummis in the Senate.
- [04:05]
Jen Sanasi
Talk to me a little bit about this strategic reserve for bitcoin. This is something that the industry is very excited about. You've obviously been following the industry for a very long time. Is that something that surprised you when Senator Lummis announced to this concept at the bitcoin conference in the summer?
- [04:22]
Michael Turpin
Did not surprise me that she did. It surprised me a little that, you know, President elect Trump would, you know, sort of double down on that. Now he has been a little bit less aggressive to date in terms of, you know, his, his focus has been on taking the bitcoin that has been seized and not going insolidly into the market. And so right now we have over 200,000 bitcoin in that camp. Historically, prior presidents have just auctioned it off. And in fact, if you go to like the big Silk Road auction that Tim Draper bought for about $700 per bitcoin, I think the US government wishes they had those 30,000 bitcoin today at closes approach prices approaching about $100,000.
- [05:02]
Jen Sanasi
We've talked about, I guess, a few catalysts there. If we zoom out a little bit, we look at things from macro level, what are the catalysts you're waiting for? If we look maybe outside of President elect Trump coming into office in January.
- [05:17]
Michael Turpin
Well, that basically creates good macro. And the most important thing in the cycles is actually, you know which cycle we're in. The first cycle was 100x after the first halving. I mean, the first cycle prior to the having was crazy. It was like 3000x from the first price to Bitcoin of a tenth of a penny up to $30 and then down to a dollar. The second cycle, which is after the first halving, we went up 100x and then down 85%. The second cycle we went up 30x and then we went down 83%. The third cycle, I thought we were going to go to 10x. We ended up going to 9x, but still pretty close despite really horrible macro with the rapid rise of interest rates from the inflation, et cetera. Now we've got pretty much good macro on our side. So we have tailwinds instead of headwinds. And with the diminishing returns that happen every cycle, we're looking probably at an average of about 3x the having price, which would put us about 193,000 by the end of next year. I think we'll beat that.
- [06:13]
Jen Sanasi
Well, that's interesting you say that. I heard you say that recently, that $190,000 target, but you noted that the range could actually be between 200,000 and $300,000 if the environment improves. What needs to happen for us to beat that $190,000 target you just mentioned?
- [06:28]
Michael Turpin
I would say a couple of things. First and foremost, that the next head of the SEC is friendly rather than the extreme unfriendliness that we'd seen under Gary Gensler. Number two, there's a big difference between the strategic reserve, the way that President elect Trump has postulated it with just simply not selling bitcoin, and how Lummis and RFK Jr have said that we actually go and print money to buy bitcoin. It's also been suggested by a number of different pundits, Pomp included. That day one, they should just take 250 billion and buy bitcoin. Other nations would start following what the US does and there'd be a race for bitcoin that would just, you know, be a domino effect that could shoot us very quickly up to 300,000.
- [07:15]
Jen Sanasi
Everyone listening to this show would be very happy people if Bitcoin hit $300,000. So here's the hoping that your prediction comes true. I want to talk a little bit about the book that you recently launched. It unpacks some of the things that we're talking about that we have spoken about so far on the show. It's called Bitco super cycle. How the crypto calendar can make you rich. Talk to me a little bit more about what is in the pages of the book and what folks who are looking at the crypto markets can take away from it.
- [07:46]
Michael Turpin
Sure. So I wrote it for two audiences. First and foremost, for traditional investors in tech startups, real estate, you know, all other categories of investment were really smart, sophisticated investors. They were willing to learn about new markets like nanotech or clean tech, but yet they never tried to learn about bitcoin to the extent of even reading the nine page white paper. So in there I explain why bitcoin is so important. Why is becoming this dominant asset class that should be in every portfolio. What it actually is, how it works. I put the entire white paper in and I annotate it so you can understand what Satoshi's vision was and how it's coming to pass. And then I go and I explain the four seasons of bitcoin. Most investors don't realize that there are cycles in bitcoin that are absolutely as consistent as those in the stock market in real estate, if not more so. And then I just sort of talk about how I believe that an investor should play it, which is not how most Bitcoin OGs do it, which is buy it, buy more and never sell it. Give it to your grandkids. You actually do much better if you go and buy it near the low of the cycle at the start of what I call bitcoin fall, sorry, the bottom of the cycle, which is the end of bitcoin fall, start of bitcoin winter. That's when the prices fall. It's only been three years out of 15 that you could lose money in bitcoin. And it was always the third year of the cycle, 2014, 2018, 2022. That's when everybody's screaming that bitcoin is dead. That's the exact moment they should have been buying if you bought anytime in the few months after FTX, you would have been in Bitcoin at under 20,000 and you're already up almost 5x from there. And so really buy low, sell high. It's not a novel concept.
- [09:28]
Jen Sanasi
Tell me a little bit more about what you just said. You know, many investors don't realize that bitcoin is similar. The real estate market, tech market. Talk to me a little bit more about that. The similarities and why. Maybe traditional investors don't see the correlation or the similarities.
- [09:46]
Michael Turpin
I'd say that they haven't been educated in terms of the consistency of the cycles. They just say, oh, I saw it dropped 80%, it's going to drop 80% right after I buy it. And that may be true if they buy when the headlines are the highest. I mean, stock market is similar as well. I mean, if you go back, you know, decades have always been stock advice, you know, you know, don't buy when your shoeshine boy is buying, right? The grocery clerks, you end up buying. You know, Rothschild said famously, you must buy when there's blood in the streets, even if it's your own blood. And so the cycles have been very consistent. You end up having the having where you have a new reality that you have half the bitcoin that you had before. So the miners are losing money every day. Takes a few months for that to equalize and the price to go up to the last all time high. At that point, all of a sudden everyone's in profit and they have no idea where it's going to go next. So all of a sudden there's massive speculation and it pushes the price up very fast. And then retail pays attention and they start buying right near the top and that's the worst time to buy. And the extra liquidity of retail coming in means that some of the smart whales start exiting and they know they can buy back for a lot less a year later.
- [10:55]
Jen Sanasi
You talk to a lot of investors, what's the. Or what's a common misconception that investors who are entering crypto markets have.
- [11:03]
Michael Turpin
I think the most common misperception is that there's no predictability. And there is maybe not to the very day, but definitely to the cycle.
- [11:11]
Jen Sanasi
And we're talking a lot about bitcoin, obviously we are. It's hit new all time highs, although there has been a little bit of a pullback recently. Are you watching any other cryptos or. For a traditional investor who has dabbled in bitcoin, where do you usually tell them to look next?
- [11:28]
Michael Turpin
Sure. So I'm not a bitcoin maximalist. I call myself a bitcoin preferentialist. At the end of the day, I want to have more bitcoin. But I recognize that a lot of the new platforms, I mean, I was heavily involved in the marketing of the launch of Ethereum, the launch of Tether. So I go way back to the very first ICO in the, in 2013, that bit angels, a group that I started, pretty much bought most of the supply there. And you know, innovation is happening much faster on non bitcoin platforms. It's slowly happening on bitcoin. But there are a lot of things that, you know, you can make 100x in something new if you get it at the right time, but you can also lose everything Bitcoin, you're not going to lose everything. I mean, it's obviously a very small percentage that's going to go to zero at this point, bitcoin. But you're not going to make 100x this cycle. Whereas you can in some altcoins. If you just want to set it and forget it, you can go buy bitcoin, look and study just literally twice every four years when to buy and when to sell more. And, and that's, that's going to be a return that beats the stock markets handily going forward for at least the next few cycles, particularly as we're going into what I call a super cycle, which is when we're going to sort of modify the diminishing returns because we're going to have a lot more of the population owning bitcoin. And it is a limited and fixed supply of 21 million, of which we've mined almost 20 million already.
- [12:53]
Jen Sanasi
Any altcoins you're watching?
- [12:57]
Michael Turpin
Yes. I don't want to show them on tv, but you know, I basically, obviously you can't, you know, ignore the meme coin cycle at this point. And there have been some tremendous narratives that have gone from 20 or 30 thousand dollars to a billion. And everybody's trying to figure out what that next narrative is. And that's something that usually happens as the start of a cycle, happens sporadically within it. We haven't really seen the altcoin surge yet. You know, sort of top 50 altcoins are at depressed prices compared to even the spring of this year. And so the typical rotation is Bitcoin will go up first, then Ethereum, then sort of the top 50, and then finally the smaller altcoins and then, and then the bubble pops.
- [13:52]
Jen Sanasi
Now the last thing I'm going to ask you is about an article that we published on CoinDesk today. CoinDesk journalist Amkar Godbull wrote three reasons why Bitcoin risks falling below $90,000. The reasons that he outlined in the article were Bitcoin traders purchase protective put options in response to Monday's 5% decline. The Coinbase Premium indicator highlighting a decline in demand for Bitcoin in the US Market and the daily chart reveals a bearish RSI divergence signaling potential weakness in price momentum. I want to get your thoughts there. Do you think we're going to see a pullback for these three reasons that were mentioned below 90k before we hit some of those numbers you mentioned at the top of the show?
- [14:31]
Michael Turpin
I did read that article. He's an excellent analyst. It's certainly possible that we'll pull back below 90. It's not going to mean the end is near, although we'll certainly show up in the Fear and greed index going back, you know, under 80. I think that that's a buying opportunity because it's unquestionable that we're going to be over, you know, 100. So if you want to make a quick 10%, that's the way to do it. You know, we ended up going briefly under 50,000 not that long ago when, you know, the reaction to the yen trade and that was exceptional buying opportunity. People almost double their money within a few months. So you have to remember that in past markets we had much bigger pullbacks after, you know, on the way up we would have 30 and 40% pullbacks. 10% is nothing.
- [15:17]
Jen Sanasi
Michael, thank you so much for joining Markets Daily today. It was a pleasure having you on and congratulations on the launch of your new book.
- [15:25]
Michael Turpin
Thank you so much and thank you.
- [15:26]
Jen Sanasi
To our audience for watching and listening. If you enjoy listening to Markets Daily, subscribe to the Coindesk Podcast network that is available on all podcast platforms. And if you enjoy watching the show, we are on YouTube like this video. Subscribe to our channel and we'll see you tomorrow.