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A
You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all, all the central banks going nuts.
B
So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
A
I mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin.
B
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Probably should be. Probably should be. James.
A
Check. We meet here in the bottom fifth of this bear market of this capitulation. Where are we?
B
It's time for the eulogies, mate. It's bitcoin. Obituaries are going to be flying left, right and center. Peter Schiff's having the best day of his life. Bitcoin has died once again. Yeah, here we are. It's, it's, it's amazing watching. I mean socials, socials are just a cesspool at the moment. It's just noise, everything. But yeah, look, it's, it's a hell of a sell off. I think a lot of people are probably caught by surprise. You know, at a minimum, getting down to 70k wasn't too much of a surprise. I think a lot of people are now shocked that we're back in the 2024 chop solidation range. We're trading at like 63k as we speak. But as you said, like if you look at things from a mean reversion perspective, I know you had Matthew Mazinskas on recently. You know, you can look at a law, you look at realized price, you can look at 200 day moving average. The 200 day moving average, in terms of the deviation, we are below it. Only 4% of all days in bitcoin's history have ever been further below the 200 day moving average. All these mean reversion models, I checked a bunch of them this morning. We're in like, you know, 18% of days are lower, 15% of days are lower, 20% of days are lower. So we're like in that bottom, bottom 20% of a lot of these long term mean reversion models. And I mean look, my general framework, there's a lot of people. My inbox is just absolute chaos. I got people coming at me from all angles, terrified, scared. DMs are going crazy. That's usually a good sign that we're at where, at the real fear part. Right. People are now questioning their thesis. Bear markets are A horrible thing because they just keep going until we run out of sellers. You just got to exhaust the sellers. And there's some combination of price down time, pain, and also just people watching their unrealized profits get eviscerated. Some combination of those. And I want to add in another one. We could probably talk about this, but parabola envy. I think the thing that actually, like, I know, I know crypto minced people, I know treasury companies mince people, but you know what really just like caused a mental rift is watching gold go up. People just got smoked by watching gold go up because there was this expectation that the world was going to choose bitcoin on round one. The Romans used gold. Guys like, I'm sorry, they weren't going to choose bitcoin round one. But I've just got this, like simple framework. Look at it as a decision tree. If bitcoin is dead, this is a fundamental question. If you truly believe that bitcoin is now dead and the path is towards zero, then this bear market has no floor and therefore turn it all off, walk away, you know, it's over, who cares? None of this matters. If on the other hand, and I would wager that pretty much everyone listening to this, except for you, Peter Schiff, everyone listening to this believes the other path, which is it's probably not dead, then you go, well, where are we in the bear? In the bottom, 20% based on every mean reversion model you can possibly imagine. Technical on chain, the whole thing. Are we at the bottom? Who knows? This is probably likely to inspire some capitulation based on the fear that we've got. So, like, we've got a lot of the recipes in there for, and the ingredients for creating that capitulation. It'll take time, it'll probably go down more, it'll be choppy, it'll be painful. You get bear market rallies, they get the hope back in, you'll buy that rally, then it will sell back off again. It's going to be a process. But unless your decision tree is a bitcoin is dead, this bear market has an end. And we've done a lot of the work, in my view. We've done a lot of the work. I used in my, my piece recently, I used two analogies. One, I like the idea of like the bison. Bison. When the storm comes, a snowstorm or a storm, they turn and face it and they basically go through it because it's the fastest way to get to the other side. Or everything else runs away from the storm and Gets rinsed the whole way. And the other one is you've got your, you know, your mate on a desert island and he swims 80% of the way back to shore, gets tired, decides to turn back around. It's like go the last 20% push through.
A
Yeah, I think. What are you seeing on chain in terms of the archetype of seller out there? Because I think there's a lot of speculation. Obviously I'm sure you've seen on X over the last couple days, many are saying Bybit and Binance are blowing up. There's bodies that are about to surface on top of the water, dead bodies at that. Is there any validity to these theories in your mind?
B
Look, I've not done enough of a deep dive to give you like a. I'm very confident what I have. Like, I had a quick check finance had like a 0.5% outflow of their Bitcoin. Like, doesn't look insolvent to me. Again, you know, I'm not going to make a claim about what's going on the inside of buyers, but I'm pretty sure they have a regulator sitting in the office, you know, tracking all this stuff. So, you know, this to me feels like people looking for a reason for why we're down. Lots of people want to know what's the news? Why is price down? Price it down because it's a bear market. So from a just like a big picture perspective, for the last couple of probably months, since I would say at least November, I've been talking about this thing like air pockets. How many times have you and I talked about air pockets? And for those who don't know what I mean by that, in the on chain world, you can also see it in the technical world if you look like a volume profile where you've got long periods of price history. Lots of coins change hands, lots of demand has been there. People have traded the coin, people have traded the asset. True. For all assets in the on chain world, we can then see, well, where do people still have a cost basis? Where do they buy their coin and still hold them? 80% of all the dollars that are invested are well and truly under what? It's probably more than that now, actually. And then there's a chunk of about 10% of the supply in the 2024 chop solidation range between like 50 and 70. Between 70 and 80, which we just broke through. And I think this is actually an important element for people to get head around. Tom, breaking through that 80 floor, you probably noticed there was a Shift. People now accept that it's a bear market. We got to that final stage of grief where people now accept. Why was 80k important? First it was obviously the low set in November and people were hoping it was like a one and done sell off. Printed a bear flag. Bear flags tend to break lower. But the other thing is there's an on chain model called the true market mean which is really statistically speaking the middle of the bitcoin cycle. It is the long term cost base of active investors. It gets rid of satoshi and lost coins. And the more dormant a coin is, the less it's considered active coins that are moving around and transacting. All those Hodlers who sold. That's what's beautiful about this stuff. It will auto correct because those old coins that were previously discounted come back to life and we now know they're alive. So 80k is about 81. But 80k was that average cost basis for everyone. And it was also 82 and a half is the average cost basis for the ETFs. So breaking below that level, suddenly everyone realizes that everyone's underwater. It's like a common knowledge event. Everyone now accepts it's a bear market. And that supply air pocket between 70 and 80 which had no price history like it just shot straight through in November last year. No, 24 just shot straight through. We never really tested it during the tariff tantrum and these things, I don't know why it is, you know, same as CME gaps, they supply airbox. They just want to get backfilled. Back in 2022, the Air Pocket that we had back then went from 30k down to 10k. Where do we backfill 15? Right. We backfilled the vast majority of it. So from my perspective the move down to at least 70 was very predictable. Just because it's bitcoin just does these things. You're in a bearish trend. Bear flag, supply air pocket. And I described in my piece yesterday, I think the easy part of forecasting this bear is now over. And what I mean by that, as we were breaking down from 110, I think we spoke when we broke through 110. I said if we go below there, the risk just compounds exponentially until you get to 95. Once you're at 95 you're probably going straight to 80 and you know you get your framework becomes bear market. Before that. That part was easy enough to at least have a framework for the air pocket down to 70. Also easy enough to have a framework for we're now in that LA again, that last fifth of the price action. I would, I mean based on mean reversion stats, whatever. We're in that last fifth of the price action where you gotta hammer out a floor, you gotta find where that bottom is. It's a process. It sucks. Everyone now believes it's going lower. Everyone's now lowering their price targets. Everyone's now pulling their bids, everyone's gone. And what will happen? This is what I've been waiting for for a long time. You, you want to see the capitulation by on chain, on the on chain side of things. You'll see a massive week, couple of days, whatever it is. The ETFs will just be flushed. You will see so much panic and fear when this happens. Realize losses are going through the roof. We're already seeing right now long term holders who bought the top and have huddled through this whole thing. They're now starting to capitulate, Their losses are starting to spike higher as well. All this stuff, it sucks. But this is how bear markets end. It's a process just push through to the other side. Because unless your decision tree is Bitcoin is dead, things going to end. And it's a journey between here and there. Yeah.
A
Now if you look at the backdrop of the macro landscape as well, particularly here in the United States, you're looking at case Shiller PE ratios near dot com bubble levels. You're seeing a bunch of deleveraging with this geopolitical uncertainty that's out there. And it just seems like a chaotic time. You get the Epstein files, you got the ice stuff going on here. You've got Greenland, Venezuela, Russia, Ukraine. Very uncertain time there.
B
Yeah. What's not to love? Why wouldn't everything be going straight up in a vertical line? Yeah.
A
And it is a crazy time in markets and bitcoin. And that's what I think really riles up the animal spirits too because you have not only the uncertainty of where Bitcoin is going to find its floor but you have this external uncertainty that only seems to be building as well. It seems like a big get risk off the table moment globally.
B
Yeah. And I mean there's a very reasonable and rational interpretation that Bitcoin was just telling the world that this was coming. For months it's been saying there's something wrong out there, it just ain't going all well. And it was kind of masked by there's a bunch of capex spend in AI precious metals are doing well. Everyone's like, you know, stock market's kind of hovering around all time highs and a lot of people just, you know, the human condition is people want to be optimistic and long. That's the default position. So when you see bitcoin doing something you're like, ah, it's just bitcoin. It's like, no, but what if it's actually information? What if it's actually telling you what's going on? Likewise, we've got this bear flag. How many folks and just, you know, markets are a psychological journey. Something that I have learned and I think is really valuable is just like a market lesson. The only thing you can control in markets is your decision. So whenever you're feeling something, it's generally because of decision that you did or didn't make. You can only control your decisions. Right. Markets are just purely information and your emotional response to it is a function of the decisions that you made up until this point. So when it broke 80k and you get this like sinking gut feeling, is that because you never thought 80k could possibly go, there was some reason it couldn't go and people ignore that. It looks like a bear flag retested the short term cost basis and failed at 98. There's all these things like it kind of looks like it's not going higher anytime soon. So then when it goes below 80, you know, this is how I like to think about things. Sure, my net worth goes down but I'm prepared for it. I'm just like, I'm mentally getting ready and I'm not doing anything stupid. So I don't regret my decisions of just buying a fat stack thinking 80 is the bottom and then it goes lower. You know, having that plan in place and just saying what could happen. There's this story about this we did. I was at the conference here in Australia in would have been after the 80k sell off and this. I did my talk and there's a bunch of people around me asking questions and this bloke comes up to me and he goes, I've done something stupid. I said, oh yeah? And he goes, yeah, I started leverage trading. I said, oh, that is stupid. Right. Bit of a chuckle. And he goes, yeah, I kind of put my like house money into a PER at 110 or 105 or something and like liquidation level at 70. And I was like, I can't, like I can't give you a, a tip for that. But all I can say is like 70k is in play. Don't. If you're going to regret something going to 70k you go in front. What have you got to do? Go through the motions. But like got to prepare for these things even if they suck.
A
Get out of that trade. I hope he got out of that trade.
B
It's. Well he's out now.
A
Yeah. The. So if we're in a bear market, I think a lot of the discussion is are the four year cycles just replaying? Was it a gotcha moment? Getting to 125 not going as high as many people thought. People thinking the institutions are here. We got the green light from the US government. Bitcoin is here to stay. It's going to be implemented into the financial system. There's no way we're going to have these four year regimented cycles like we've had in the past. It seems like that may be playing out in, in terms of finding a bear market bottom and crawling through that bottom. Do you expect it to be similar to cycles past where we make it to the next having. And then six months later things start creeping up again?
B
Yes, I mean my general framework. So first things first, I do not actively look at the four year cycle and say this is how I'm going to design my analysis because in my view I think it's anomalous. I think we've got a bunch of series of beautiful coincidences. You can explain just about everything in the bitcoin market structure, right? I mean some Cliff notes, 2017 was just a pure organic market. People are speculating on everything under the sun like pure parabola. Barely had a trading view chart right at that point in time. You can look at 2018 we've got an overhang from a 100x move and many hundredx's and everything else was in that, in that cycle. And also no one really knew what bitcoin crypto was going to be. 2019 you've got the plus token Ponzi followed by the distribution by the Chinese government of those plus token coins. Then you've got Covid and the stimulus. Then you've got rate hikes and FTX and just a complete evisceration of the lending markets. Choose your weapon. Economy doing good. Economy not doing good. I think you can explain just about everything 2025, why we stopped going up. Bunch of people sold. Why'd they sell? Doesn't really matter. They sold. So from my perspective we're looking for whether it's on a four year timeline. Honestly, like I think people get lost in the source just saying, oh it has to bottom in October, must bottom in October. November always bottoms in November maybe. But if you take away it must do this thing. Don't impose your expectations that it must do this thing. What we're looking for is that capitulation event where there are no sellers left. The only people left in the trenches are people who actually want to own and hold bitcoin and we'll get there again. Unless your decision tree is Bitcoin is dead, you've probably turned off the pod. If it's not, then at some point we're going to flush out all the long term holders who bought the top on all the bear and they also had a loss. At the same time, short term holders get washed out. And really I don't know if we'll see this. We may, but I don't think it's as likely. But it's nice to have the third thing that happens at like the bottom is you get long term holders in profit sell because they're afraid it's going to go lower and they're cutting their losses. Right. They're afraid that their $20,000 bitcoin is going to get, you know, hit that level as well. So you see people take profit at the bottom as well. That's like your perfect capitulation signal. I need to check the data this afternoon to see whether we've, we've got something like that. I don't think so, but that would be a good signal that it's the low is truly in.
A
Do you think there's any treasury company overhang as well?
B
Oh no, no question. Now look, I mean I don't think and again, going into the deep dive of like you got to study each one of these things in depth and frankly I just don't care enough to do that. Strategy is going to be fine. They've got a, you know, billions of dollars of cash, they can service all the dividends. So I think strategy is fine. You made a planet. And like they're going to be fine that once you go down the list and you get beyond the big ones, not like the market, to the best of my knowledge, the market just didn't really give these companies any leverage. There's a bunch of pipe deals which means a bunch of insiders got cooked. There's a bunch of like the initial hype cycle and equity sales. But a lot of it is just like it's going to come out in the share price less so in the fact that like the company has to sell all the bitcoin. Even if they do, I don't think there's that much coin there to be sold. And you know what this reminds me of? This is just your 2026 version of the minor capitulation that happens every cycle. Right. The miners hoddle all the way into the top. Now the miners are fine because they've got AI revenue and stuff ticking over in the background. We'll see if some of these treasury companies consolidate. I mean, let's face it, it was a silly idea. I think everyone's kind of aware of that. There'll be some phoenixes that rise from the ashes. But this idea of thousands of treasury companies, I'm just not, I just don't think it's makes any sense. So we'll see some consolidation, we'll see a bunch of them capitulate. But I'm not too concerned about that being like a FTX grade, you know, send it all to zero type event.
A
Yeah, yeah. I mean they have the ability to be a bison and run through the store storm and just sit tight and.
B
Do nothing to their bitcoin. As long as you have any debt and you got no leverage creeping up, you just need to run whatever zombie company you had before and just keep treading water.
A
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B
Yeah, no, it's not like. So my general view, let's, let's just start with like my general view on quantum. So I spent, I've spent meaningful time. Again, Quantum is one of those things where if you know what's going on with Quantum, I think you're lying because no one knows what the hell is going on with Quantum. No one, no one understands this. I've done enough research to at least satisfy where my current thinking's at. I do not believe that Quantum is coming in the next two years. I think that's not happening. I also understand that there's been meaningful developments in the field. Right. They talk about logical qubits and error correction, all this kind of stuff. Different fidelities of these things. Again, if anyone pretends to understand this stuff, I think you're lying because no one understands any of it. I think there is a credible case. So first of all, there is no question some people are not allocating to Bitcoin. You know, some of these big tradfi guys will probably sell because very simply, if you don't understand something, you should know. And if people don't understand the risk of it to their portfolio, they're probably not going to want it. So there's going to be capital on the sidelines and capital that's selling, no question, because of Quantum. There is no chance in my mind that it is the thing that has caused us to go down to 63k. Right. I just don't, I just do not believe that that is the reason we're in a bear market. We saw a tremendous amount of sell side. It's going to take months for all of those coins because remember when A long term holder sells, right? They've sold to some new guy. He's probably not going to huddle it. It's going to go to the next guy and then he's going to capitulate lower. He's going to buy the dip. Not the dip, not the dip. Keeps going. Eventually those coins will find a cold card. So my general view is that it's just going to take time to absorb that, like digest all of the sell side. So, you know, again, more than I have to check the numbers. More than 80% of the dollars invested in Bitcoin are underwater. That's a lot of people. It's a lot of capital. Like it's nasty. There's a lot of people who are going to be panicking. I've got multiple messages this morning saying I'm terrified. So that's where we're at. So let's go back to quantum. I am of the view there's, there's obviously two issues when it comes to Bitcoin and Quantum. There's what to do with the lost coins and what do you do with quantum secure algorithms? Lost coins. If I can just put one like, let's actually think about this rationally. The lost coins debate is going to be the least productive, most destructive. We will never ever reach consensus on that. All breath spent on that before we have solved the other part, which is the quantum secure address concept is just people arguing on Twitter and it's just going to be a distraction. So on the probably more important issue, we have to as Bitcoin be able to give people an option. And this is where you get to a fork in the road. There's many folks credibly who say there has been no progress in quantum. And for a measurable, like, what are the problems that they're solving? Has Shor's algorithm being run? The answer is no. But could it be run? If they get there, yes. And this one of these ideas that if. Because right now with the quantum, the qubits and all this stuff, there's too much error to actually run Shor's algorithm in the first place. So they kind of got to, when they do factor 15 or 21, they kind of have to like give it the answer and be like, oh look, it solved it. So but once you get to a certain if, if and once you get to a certain level of fidelity and noise reduction, suddenly SH's algorithm can start doing stuff. Now I would suspect that we will see that incremental progress. But then you have the problem of it Takes time to upgrade bitcoin. It takes time for us to argue online, it takes time for us to move the coins. So from my view, the most sensible thing truly is to look at what they do. I think bip 360 is very sound because even if you pretend quantum isn't a thing, just pretend quantum isn't a thing. Bit360 actually makes taproot better. So bit360 purely as a sensible update to taproot makes a lot of sense. And for the Ray DeLeo's out there who don't understand it in the first place, you can now say it's quantum secure because they're going to care. Like that's you've done something, you've shown that we've done something. I actually think that supporting bit 360 makes a lot of sense because it's totally benign from like a bitcoin without quantum perspective. It makes a lot of sense because it just like makes Taproot a bit better. And you're then going to waylay a lot of these fears by the folks who don't understand and still won't understand, but they'll believe it's solved. So you're going to solve that element just by actually doing a sensible upgrade that is useful even without quantum. And then you argue about like what happens when quantum comes live. Now from my perspective, first and foremost, do not reuse addresses because you want to be quantum secure. Don't reuse addresses as long as you're using like segwit modern wallets, you're not using legacy pay to pub key, your coins are safe. The only place they're not safe is if you do address reuse and in theory short range attacks in the mempool. But let's, let's be real here. Is Google going to invent a quantum computer and hack my thousand dollars I'm trying to send for my DCA into my wallet? No, no. They might go after like Binance moving their massive hot wallet. But like finance has got engineers that are going to be aware of this. I think they're going to solve for it. If we see the incremental steps, then you go down the path of saying do we actually need like quantum secure signatures? Let's just start with something like bit360 makes a lot of sense to me, makes Tapri better. Even without quantum way later fears keep working on and preparing for and planning for. So even for the quantum naysayers, I think it actually makes a lot of sense to have a plan Have a credible plan. There are people working on it. This is great. I disagree with a lot of this rhetoric that like the developers are just completely asleep at the wheel. It's like they literally had a quantum conference, like they're writing quantum papers. Sure, some people don't believe it. I don't, frankly, I don't believe it. I don't know how anyone kind of can. Sounds all a bit fantastical. However, we should at least account for the threat if we think about things in terms of a risk matrix. What is risk? Consequence times probability. Probability I'd say is almost nothing. But the consequences is really bad. So therefore you have to wait that thing and say we at least need a credible plan. Nothing wrong with having a credible plan in motion on the table ready to go and there will be people that want to work on this. So that's my angle.
A
Yeah, I think the biggest if thing around quantum specifically, like to your point, I was following the thread that you were in with Charles earlier today and it's just like he was, I mean in my observation seemed like it was given like roundabout like beating around the bush. But it's like if you're handing the sort of quantum researchers like a hard coded variable that gets them to solve a logical qubit or factor 21, it's like you're cheating so you don't actually have actual quantum. But to your point, if it is a Worry, I think bip360 is the best way to do it.
B
Right.
A
Because it's opt in. So for those who are unaware, bit360 put forward by Hunter Beast would basically allow you to manipulate a script in the tap leaf that creates an address that you can put bitcoin in that is quantum resistant.
B
Yeah. Because taproot by default exposes the public key. I think they undo that and makes taproot quantum secure. Great. And remember, I think what's really important, the, the, the fear merchant side of this whole thing, credit to it, it has sparked the conversation. Good, that's excellent. It is now in my opinion, well over its skis. We're now at the level where it's like the, the coins are going to get market dumped and it's happening in two years and you know, 15 researchers who are paid by quantum firms believe Quantum is coming. That, that one of my big issues with it and I spent a lot of time with Gemini and Groq because how else are you going to bloody search this stuff? I'm not going through all the paper send you like you know, Arvix Research papers. You're like, I'm not reading that. Get out of here. Not a quantum physicist. So I basically just talk to the LLMs, test them against each other, see what they come back with. The general framework. And I've read a number of articles just saying like, you know, quantum is bullshit. And the consistent feedback that I got from the LLMs, both of them, and they kind of checked and said I generally agree with each other. The general feedback was up until like 2025, pretty much all the critique saying it's all horseshit was true and very credibly defensive. There's apparently been some Updates in late 25 about error correction and all these things which starts to look like maybe that's now an engineering problem rather than a can't be done problem. So that's why I think at the minimum, even if you are skeptical, spend half an hour just pinging these LLMs and just like see what it comes back with. Because I actually found it quite useful and exercise a good use case for AI, I suppose. But again, I think this doom merchant side of like everything's going to get market sold and Bitcoin's dead because of Quantum. And I actually think we're now well and truly into the counterproductive stage because a lot of the evidence, a lot of the evidence that is proposed is Quantum company says Quantum is coming. Quantum expert who works for Quantum company says Quantum is coming. We surveyed seven of them, so they all think it's coming. They're also paid by a Quantum company. You can look at some government bureaucracy. Agency committee says Quantum is coming. Who's probably advised by those same experts who work for the Quantum Company. There's like a whole lot of things with like this guy, this smart dude over here said it's coming. And the skeptics go, well, I understand that there's a bunch of people who say it's coming. Can you factor a number bigger than the fingers on my hand? Can you do this? And maybe there's breakthroughs that need to happen, but the gap between where we currently at and what is needed for breaking ECDSA is quite large. There's assumed growth rates and expansion rates. And again, I'm not smart enough or deep enough in this stuff to properly handicap it. But if I just think about this from like a pragmatic. If I was an engineer and I was going to just solve this social problem, have the plan, this bip360 looks pretty benign. Solve some stuff that we need to do anyway, waylay the fears and get the conversation moving and just keep an eye on this thing. And once we get developments, we should already have a quantum secure signature scheme planned out, mapped out. Bitcoin is going to upgrade, you know, like, and if it really comes to fruition and they start cracking keys, yes, I will support giving people an option to have secure Bitcoin. Like I'm not going to nuke my own net worth. And I'm sure there's a lot of bitcoins listening who would do the same. Even if you're skeptical, the moment you see a key start getting cracked and then the next one getting cracked, you know you're on that journey. And if you, you want to have the plan ready to go before that happens because then there is no capital that can say I shouldn't invest in this thing because of quantum. Just that the whole thing goes away.
A
Yeah, it's, it's exhausting because it has been FUD for quite some time. People have been focused on it within Bitcoin, within the development community. As you mentioned, there was a whole conference about it last year. But then like to your point, it's like 99.8% of climate scientists agree that cataclysmic climate change is right around the corner. Nine out of 10 dentists say you should use this toothpaste. It's like okay, what are the incentives behind all that? But correct.
B
So look, I mean I think risk consequence times probability, consequences dire probability is not large. Some will argue about. That's where people can debate the end of the day, what's the correct solution? In my view, start the process, have the plan be ready, waylay all the fears, show that bitcoin is going to be fine and then what case is there against it? Just nuke the FUD with really, you don't even have to probably change bitcoin bit360 sure we can debate whether we do that but like you don't have to roll out quantum secure signatures until there's like a known threat. We just need to have the plan ready.
A
I mean that's having talked to Jonas, Nick and Mikhail Kudinov who wrote the hash based quantum resistant or hash based signatures for Bitcoin which would is a way to bring quantum resistant addresses to bitcoiners. You think about all the standardization that's been built around hardware wallets and coordination via multisig lightning channels. If you just poured in, it's not an easy lift. No, the, the people fudding Bitcoin because of the quantum risk and under appreciating that Sort of massive lift of standardization and transition that will be necessary on the other side, if you sort of rush toward a quantum resistant address structure is not in anybody's best interest at the end of the day. Because that's the other risk too. If you rush something and it's not a. Not as big as. Not as big of a threat as we thought it was. Maybe we have 30 years, 50 years, maybe it never comes and you make all these rash changes that severely deprecates their experience of bitcoiners. Like get the fact of that out as well.
B
Yeah, exactly. And you know, at the highest level, you segwit coins unless you're reusing addresses and you don't expose your. And this is the other thing. There's a whole series of things that just from a user experience, right? X Pubs He McCormack had his whole thing where he's like X pubs. The hell is an X pub? And rightfully so. No human alive should really need like just a typical user should ever need to know what an XPub is. How many people have put your XPub into a tax accounting software that just tracks your Bitcoin wallet? Guess what? If that tax accounting software gets hacked and Quantum comes to fruition, all of your coins are now exposed, right? Public keys exposed. So there's stuff like that that just completely nukes the user experience of whole thing. So consequence massive probability up for debate. Solutions going to take a long time to roll out. And I think to the credit of the folks who are pointing this thing out because of how big the lift is, that's why you need a significant lead time, which is also why you probably don't want to wait for it to start like cracking keys that are close to Bitcoin to do something. It's going to take a long time to do this. But I also think a lot of the in my view, the rhetoric around we should do absolutely nothing is wrong. The rhetoric that we need to do everything tomorrow is wrong. The answer is somewhere in the middle, as it usually is. That gray zone is really what we should be talking about. Even if you're skeptical of Quantum, just consider the magnitude of the risk. And then even if you are for Quantum, telling people that Satoshi's coins are going to get market dumped on a Tuesday next week is completely and totally counterproductive. You're actually wasting everyone's time by making people dislike you. Therefore your message stops getting hurt. Work within the middle here because that's how you actually get to a solution.
A
Yeah, and I think the developers focused on this product problem have been operating in that middle sort of middle path that you're describing.
B
Yeah, that's the engineering path. You got to find the optimal solution given the constraints that you have in front of you.
A
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B
Yeah. So give a bit of a, a road map of where we are. So we're in the 2024 chop zone. We're 63, almost 64k. Now this is underneath the 2025 zone. This is the next biggest supply cluster transfer volume, trade volume. Like this is. This is where Bitcoin spent 8 months every time it went below 50k which is about a trillion dollar market cap. The market bid it, right. So on the downside we've got the realized price. This is the average cost basis for all coins. Everyone, Satoshi, the whole lot that. So the realized price is derived from the realized cap. And I'll explain what these things are for folks in the audience. The realized cap is actually in my opinion the most important metric in bitcoin because it is a measure of how much people have saved. Actually dollar value saved in bitcoin. The coins you bought back in 2019 at 8k, they're saved at 8k. They saved at the price when they were last moved on chain. Not a perfect measure, but even if you run the most magical entity adjustments and all that kind of stuff, the realized cap never deviates by more than 5%. It's one of those things where like at an individual level there's error bars around it. But in aggregate doesn't matter if finance is consolidating stuff. Doesn't matter if you're moving from a coal card to a ledger or back. The overall aggregate doesn't move by more than 5% over all of its history. So that number, the amount of capital the bitcoiners have saved in bitcoin measurably is $1.1 trillion. That is about a 52. Oh no, sorry, be 55.55k. So if we go down to 55k, you've got the 200 week moving average of like 57. That's like every bear market wicks on that level. And by the way, there's no reason that every bear market of the past is indicative of the future. Bear. This is one of those classic things in markets. But if you just think about this from a core fundamental standpoint, it's kind of nice. The 200 week moving average, all the technical boffins out there are going to look at that and say that's where it's going to bottom the realized price at 55. That is where everyone has invested their capital. Let's think about this from a value investor perspective. You know a company like ExxonMobil is trading at an M nav, right, an equivalent book value of 0.9. They've spent all this money building all of the infrastructure to pump oil. They've got all the smarts, all the people, all the hardware or the drilling rigs or the pumps, everything. And you're going to sell that to me for less than what people paid for it? That's where bitcoin is at 55k. We as bitcoiners have invested $1.1 trillion into this thing. At 55k you are buying bitcoin at its all time book value. The actual book value for people who are real, like not satoshi who doesn't transact and move and lost minor coins and all that stuff. That's the true market mean at 80k. So we're already below the average cost basis for normal people who are actually alive in the cycle and active. So we're in that, I would say, I mean in my opinion, personally, I think we're in the deep value zone. Below 70 I deem to be deep value because we're in that bottom 20% of all price history across all models. Once you get down to the low 50s, you're now the territory where it's like, please make me a case that isn't a bottom. You are. You have to actually really go down the first path and say no, bitcoin is dead. Once you get down to those low 50s, you are now saying something is wrong with bitcoin and we are truly going to zero. So that's kind of, that's the framework here. Now if we go below 50, imagine the capitulation week. But you're still going to ask yourself that question, am I buying an asset that's truly going to zero or are people just kind of overselling this thing? And it comes back and I didn't stay humble at this point. What am I doing?
A
What would need to be the conditions for the answer to the question of is this thing going to zero? What would, what would it take for that to be. Yes, in your mind?
B
Yeah, it's a very good question. I mean, like you. I mean, you could argue that the, the quantum thing, if suddenly there's quantum break tomorrow. Yeah, we're in trouble. No question. No doubt. So if quantum does manifest tomorrow, yeah, it's probably, probably over. Right? That's. That's hard to come back from. I mean, I've been staring at this thing. I mean, I dedicated my career to this thing. Not because I'm like, oh, yeah, I want to just jump on the bitcoin trains. Like, I spent hours and hours and hours and I still spend hours and hours and hours studying this thing. I'm like, you know, really? What are the two things that kill Bitcoin? Well, let's say three, there's one overarching. There's something like a quantum. Could be a cryptography break, could just be like a code bug. You input same thing. I put that in the same bucket. Developers go and rush something, they put something in the code truly just kills it. That's. That's probably a zero mode, right? That's not good. No one wants that. So something where like the fundamental properties of bitcoin are eviscerated, that's a problem. I would also say that, like, I mean, apathy is kind of the parent of a lot of this stuff in terms of just like, people just don't care. And that's maybe where we can start talking about where gold is fits into this picture. Because I think a lot of people have this parabola envy over gold. I really think the gold rally cooked people because they thought. But they didn't choose my coin, they chose the old coin. Right? Assuming that they were going to choose the new coin first time, they were never going to choose bitcoin first time. Again, Roman money. So it's pre Roman money. So I think from that perspective, I think there's a lot of people who are saying, has the bitcoin macro thesis broken down? And my simple answer to that question is maybe. However, if bitcoin bottoms and starts rally, how quickly do you think that narrative will drop off the map? Just like it does every time. Bitcoin was dead for a decade in November 2022, that was the narrative. Sova finished. FTX has completely nuked every reason why anyone would own this thing. It's like, in my view, we're going to find a flaw, we're going to look back at this period and go, oh yeah, yeah, it didn't die. How interesting, right? Security budgets one but like we did. No one's selling bitcoin because of security budget, you know what I mean? Like that's, that's, that's years and years in the future, right? Miners as we've found. Miners are mining, they're making a ton of money. Some of their stocks are at all time high. So you know, this is, this is.
A
Part of the industry that, and it's funny that we're going through this, this capitulation. I mean I think we're in the process of capitulation right now. And I know we've talked about this in the past about AI you were just mentioning going back with the models. But I've been playing around with openclaw for the last two weeks and have had my little agent spin up a Phoenix D server. I've got it trading, just play money just to see. I really want to see if it could ln URL auth into LM markets without me having to set up any credentials. And it can.
B
Wow.
A
The point being, it's fascinating to me that we're in this capitulation process where we have something emerging that could be this incredible demand driver for bitcoin, which is the machine payable web that we've been talking about for over a decade finally manifesting because the tooling and the infrastructure is finally there to make it viable.
B
Would you mind giving it some of my silver coins and seeing if it can, you know, make some money out of that or, or have we got a problem there?
A
Yeah, exactly. Hey, maybe Tether will, will launch the, the equivalent of Tether Gold and Tether Silver and it could use that. It could choose that. Maybe it'll prefer, maybe we'll prefer tokenized shares of, of stretch. Who knows?
B
Yeah, maybe, maybe. Yeah, but I mean that's awesome. That's, that's, that's one of those things where like, and you know, having held precious metals, still hold precious metals. I know that bitcoin is better in every possible way. You know, like it's 2026. You know, like gold has its place. It's important. It's going to continue to be an important bedrock of the, of the, of the world and the financial system. But like bitcoin is just better in every way. You know, you can teleport around the world. It's no storage cost. It's, you know, it has trade offs. There's user experience challenges. But like, you know, I think about my son, is he going to have a, you know what's a bad user experience? Going to the gold bullion dealer. That's a bad experience. Like, you know, I don't mind it. You get a cup of coffee. It's part of a process. I don't mind it, but like it's, it's a job. It took my whole morning. It was, it was, it was a bit of a process. Bitcoin is trivial. Is he going to be able to use a bitcoin wallet on a, on a mobile app? Yes, of course. To be second nature to him. He's not even to think about it. So user experience is a, is a process and it gets solved over time. But don't bet against the young because they're going to outlive you.
A
Yeah, my five year old knows how to use a bitcoin wallet already. He's giving me a cash wallet.
B
Has he bought any silver coins yet? No. Oh really? Why not?
A
Yeah, not yet, not yet. But I mean, speaking of this, the bullion dealer, I mean you had a great anecdote on Twitter, I think it was last week. But you experienced the animal spirits for yourself in line waiting to some of your physical silver. Let's walk through that experience and your view of the animal spirits around that market particularly.
B
Yeah, I mean it was some time back, I'm pretty sure we had a pod and I saying like, I think platinum, platinum was my like speculative play, but I ended up adding a bit of silver and again we're talking about a small like 5% of my precious metals, which is like 10%. So that's, you know, we're not talking about serious money here. But I wanted to just like have a couple of silver bars. I got a couple of silver coins, a little kangaroo here that I have next to me. Yeah, I like it. I think precious metals are great. However, silver is an industrial metal. I'm now, I'm under no illusions here. So with platinum, precious metal, but also industrial metal. And my simple thesis was gold's going to go up for all the reasons that make sense. People are going to just go and buy poor man's gold because that's what they do. People love to trade shitcoins, just how it works. So I was like, silver's at some point going to run. And my thesis was fairly simple. I didn't know the exact kind of frameworks were like gold silver ratio goes down to like 40, 45, 50. It's kind of the lowest level it gets to in my lifetime. It was Lower back when it was pegged, has been pegged for a long time in the post 1970s gold standard era, getting down to a gold silver ratio of like 50 is unlikely. And if it does stick the landing, it's for a couple of days and then it's over. So my view was, I'll trade a little bit of it, sell some of the bars and just get out of it. Anyway, I started seeing every community on Twitter was just becoming a silver bug community. You just see froth. The price is going parabolic. And for a bit of context, it was on the Friday, the Monday was Australia Day, 26 of January. And obviously everything's closed on a public holiday. There's no nothing open. And I'm watching it on Friday. I'm like, I made the decision over the weekend. I'm probably going to go and sell. I'm up 3x. I mean, go and sell a third of my silver and then I'm just risk neutral. I'm totally clear, Never have to care. I can hang on to the shiny coins that I like and I've got a couple of bars that I'll flog off later on. Australia Day comes and that's when silver had like the full parabolic, like vertical move, you know, adds two and a half trillion dollars in a day. SLV. The ETF traded like 36 billion more than the stock market did. So, like, I was like, oh my God, this is just chaos. I was like, this thing's going to top, but I can't do anything about it because it's Australia, right? American markets are open, but I can't do anything because Australia isn't. So then I was like, okay, I'm going to go in first thing in the morning because the people in the comments of my anecdote of my thread, all the gold bugs and silver bugs, like, oh, dude, you should have called your dealer and just negotiated a better deal. It's like, yeah, on what day? On what day? It's a public holiday. Everyone's closed. Like, what do I do, go on ebay? So my view was, I'll go in there first thing in the morning. My mate who uses the same bullying deal that I do, he's like, there's just lines out the door all the time. I was like, okay, I'll go in. They open at 9, I'll go in at 8, get a coffee stand there. 8:30, I'm standing in the line, I'm the first one there. I was like, kind of surprising, but very soon after I got there the line starts forming and it's wrapping down the stairs and all the rest of it. Fairly closed knit place. And I'm just listening to the banter, just listening to people talk. There's like a dude who's telling him, oh, I've been telling all my friends, no one's been buying in, they didn't get it. You know, I'm like, are you a bitcoiner talking about silver? Oh yeah, I just bought, you know, the lady next to him, I just bought, you know, these silver coins the other day. I'm already up $4,000. Like I'm making so much money this ground, like, oh my God. And it's just like confirming whales here. And actually I should add another point. As I was counting out and working out which of the silver I was going to sell, I got a message from one of my other mates who's very attuned with markets and he goes, so uranium is doing well. He's like, my uranium group is just all, all silver. And I was like, oh, I'm getting another bar out because like it just, something's wrong here. Anyway, so I've got all this chatter going on behind me and I finally go in and I'm watching the spot price again Tuesday morning, Australia time. And in the line I'm waiting there, I can see them setting up the shop and like I'm, I lost like a thousand bucks on this. Just waiting in the line for this thing to happen. Go in, go to start, you know, counting out all the coins and selling them. And there was one other bloke who was in there to sell and he pulls up this just massive bag, thumps it on the table and he's just counting out bar after bar after bar. Dude was a pretty, it was a pretty serious looking dude. So like I know he's been stacking for a long time and the lady next to me was saying, I want new coins, I want new coins. And they said, we're completely out, we've only got these ones second hand. She was, no, I want new ones. Anyway, they go and find some other brand that they've got and she's like, oh, I like these. I sold it like 2% below spot, like 150 Aussie. And she was buying with like 220 Aussie. So the premium on the coins right next to me, I'm looking at this thing, I'm 2% below spot. She's paying a huge premium. And she said, more, more, more. And she's pointing over to my coin saying, I Want those ones? I said, we can't sell those ones. Pawn broker license, we're going to hold them for 14 days. You can't actually sell in case they're stolen. You know, stuff like that. So my, like, thesis was froth, gold, silver ratio, parabolic move. I'm standing in line. I've got people saying they're making a ton of money of the coins they bought, like, two days ago. The person next to me after that lady, the next one didn't know what a troy ounce was. So I'm like, I've got people who don't know what a troy ounce is willing to pay a $70 premium. My cost basis was $50. Like, I was buying silver at $50 Aussie. He's paying a $70 premium on coins today. It's more than my original cost basis. And the only other guy selling looks like he has 10 shotguns and a big safe at home. I think I'm in the right place. I think I'm making the right move.
A
Well, you highlight the benefit of bitcoin's fungibility there. You're sitting there right at the dealer. So you can't buy these coins. This coin 70% more or $70. 70 Aussie dollars more. And that was another thing. I don't know if Brent Johnson was trolling people, but he sent out a tweet like, ah, nobody's going to buy my silver. Like, does anybody have a. Or somebody wants it to sell me 10, 10 below spot. Does somebody have a better deal?
B
So, you know, it was like 2 to 20 kilos. Like a massive amount. Like 200 kilos or something. Right. Some big chunk of silver.
A
Yeah. For bitcoin, you have These liquid markets, 3, 24, 7, 365, sent over the Internet. You know these fungibility problems.
B
Yeah. The only problem is it's down 50 when you want to sell it. But you know, who's counting?
A
Yeah. What should we tell the freaks out there? How. How long do you see this persisting?
B
Look, bear markets come to. Unless you can come through that decision tree and say the bitcoin is dead and choose, there's no shortage of fud. Right. Apparently Epstein wrote something and I just. The moment that I saw people associating Epstein with bitcoin, I literally muted Epstein. I don't want to hear that shit.
A
It's not powerful.
B
I was just like, this is a political distraction if I've ever seen it. So there are going to be FUD narratives oozing out the walls. It's going to be it's going to be a shit show unless you can really. And I come back to this all the time. There's two things that really anchor me around bitcoin. The first one is having spent a considerable amount of time analyzing how us as bitcoiners behave as shown by the bitcoin ledger. Nothing that I'm seeing right now is abnormal in any way, shape or form. It looks like every bear market of the past I find very like as an anchor. When I look at how people behave in bitcoin. I'm sorry, but there's people with extraordinarily high conviction in long term holder supply. Right now it's like 14 point something million, 72% of the supply. It's almost at 2020 levels before the bull. So if we just think about like all the coins that aren't moving, there's a ton of them that are just static. People are hanging onto their supply markets. Bear markets are a process. But the first one, when I look at all of the data that we see, it's so organic, it's so human, it's so real, it's natural, it looks normal. It looks like people doing what people do, just following their emotions. So I find that just the fact that on chain data is such a clean, crisp signal of humans being humans to me just tells me there's something about bitcoin that attracts. It just feels very real. It feels like a real, real thing. It's a reminder consistently. And the other one, how many bitcoiners have you met where you're like, oh, that guy's a mora. No, you meet bitcoiners, you're like, you did what? You're an astrophysicist or you're a doctor or whatever. Some of the smartest people I've ever met. I'll never forget at the Chico conference last year, and we're at the football, the men's game and there was like, I don't know, 15 of us left over. And you know, we're fairly sourced. But we were talking about how the moon was like really weird. Like, there's just weird things about the moon. Anyway, there's this bus of like 15 of us going back to, back to Bedford and people just like lean over and go, oh, oi. You know about this. You're a physicist. Like just tap some dude on the shoulder. You're a physicist. What do you think about the moons? Like, oh, yeah, no, the moons are really weird. And you just like have this conversation with people who are all super interesting, right? And you just look at the macro minds like, you know, the Lynn Alden's that come into the space. You're like, you're telling me that all of these engineer types who are super bright in their own field, in an environment by the way, where the whole world was telling them that bitcoin's a scam, it's wrong. The media, the government, your weird uncle, everyone is telling you that bitcoin is just going to zero and that you're an idiot. All of these super smart engineer type people came to a conviction saying no, I, I think you're wrong and I'm going to keep buying this thing. You're telling me they're all wrong, they're all just like suddenly wrong and they all just like missed something. The people in bitcoin is the most bullish thing about it. So unless you can convince me that all of those people are wrong and therefore the decision tree is a bitcoin is dead, then the decision tree is at some point this bear market is going to bottom out and then it's just a journey of where are we in that process? Right? And the only thing you can control is your decisions. That's the only thing. So if you're feeling emotions based on the price, go and think about why that is. Is it because of the buyers? Is because your net worth is down, is because you allocated too much? These are lessons that you learn. But once you can expunge those feelings from your life and just look at the prices information, where is it in this overall cycle? Based on my current assessment with somewhere in that bottom fifth, what do I want to do in the bottom fifth of every single previous bear market? Do I regret buying at a K6K 4K in 2018, 2019? No. Do I care about 20K 22, 21, 17, 15? No, I don't care. Because over that long arc of time they were extremely high value, high probability, highly stretched to the downside. Yeah, it's months. Could be months of just chopping around. It could be further downside. For another piece of context from my perspective in an on chain view judge June, I think it was 2022 when three arrows blew up. We had 17.6K. We went down like the minor cost basis was down there. There's a bunch of things that process from June through to November pre FCX had bottom formation characteristics in every way. Looks like a bottom. Then FTX show up and took us down to 15. Right. And we stuck down there for another two months. It was like a hyper extension type Event, Do I really care, like now, Do I really care about that process? Sucks at the time. Sucks at the time. Be the bison, go through the storm. We're in the value zone, probably going to go lower, probably going to be. Take a long time. It's probably going to suck. There'll be narratives at the everywhere. Come back to your original conviction, say, why am I here in the first place? And are all these people around me wrong? Because if they're not wrong, stay home.
A
What is the other. What is the other option on the table to get through this to gold? Silver could fall back on that.
B
I'm a. I'm a big advocate for a lot of bitcoiners. Probably should have bought more gold. They probably have none. And here's the rationale, like, and again, this is my personal circumstance, but I think it's a nice illustrative reason for why I started buying gold, platinum and silver. Purely speculative. I'm just there to play them, play the price. They're the numbers on the screen. Gold has a very particular role. Most of my holdings is an etf and I mean, for me, I'm an Australian, I'm saving for a house. Our housing market is like many places, but particularly bad. It's just an asset that just keeps running its way. The number is too big. The number to buy a house is just too big. The gold. What happens if I did happen to find a place that I did want to buy, like now, I would kick myself forever for having to sell bitcoin to pay for that deposit. It would just kill me because I know it's a terrible trade. Gold is doing exactly what I needed to do, not be down 50% when I might need it. The gold is ballast in my portfolio. Its job is the exact same trade as bitcoin. It's going to go up sometimes. When bitcoin doesn't, it's going to go down sometimes a bitcoin doesn't, but I know it's not going to be down. Horrifically, I don't mind selling gold down 20% because its job is to be that house deposit when I need it. So I think a lot of bitcoiners would have benefited this cycle from having some ballast in your portfolio. In many ways, having ballast allows you to not sell your bitcoin. When gold goes through a tear, I'm happy because gold's gone through tear. Bitcoin wasn't doing so great, but gold was doing fantastically. And, you know, when I think about, like, you know, diversification is one of These things. But I'm also of an age where concentrated bets are also generally the framework, which is why I'm like, just give me sound money assets. Let me just sit tight. But, you know, I'm increasingly interested in like commodity markets. You know, I think just again, replacement value. How much does it cost to replace an oil producing company? A lot. Do we need oil? Yes. You know, is it going to be value there? In a commodity cycle? Yes. Are they a dominant part of my portfolio? Not yet, probably not. But just having that extra ballast that allows you to hoddle, to actually not be completely 100% emotionally anchored to the bitcoin price is going to help you actually huddle through it. Just a. It's just an easier strategy. So have some ballast. I think it's important.
A
Have some ballast freaks. Make sure you subscribe to James's newsletter. Called a lot of this, called these levels, told people to watch out for them. We're here now. If you're reading newsletter, you're not shocked, so go check it out. Highly recommend doing the paid subscription. I've got my little agent. I hope you don't mind.
B
I'm forwarding it. That's all right.
A
I'm forwarding it to him again, like, all right, what do you. What's James saying? What do I need to look out for? He's done a pretty good job.
B
Yeah. And like, you know, I often think about. Sometimes I'm a bitcoin therapist, right? You know, just helping people, like rationalize stuff. But what I, what I love about Bitcoin and all the data that we have, whether it's futures, ETFs, options on chain, it just tells us what everyone else is doing. We're all sitting at the big poker table of life. You can't see all the cards, but you can see how many people are bluffing. You can see how many people have been playing for a long time. You can see how many people who are brand new to the game are really, really bad at bluffing. You just get this like, big picture view of, like, what are the different cohorts doing? I don't need perfect precision. You just don't need it. You just need to get enough of an ebb and flow and say, here's where things are likely. And, you know, a lot of folks think like, oh, do you trade? I'm like, no, I don't trade. Trading's terrible. Trading is a horrible experience. Everyone who's done it knows. It's just like a. It melts your mind in terms of how much stress it induces. I very much write for Hodlers because at the end of the day, like this way, our catchphrase is your bitcoin personal trainer. You got to go to the gym, do the reps, and then none of this stuff should surprise you. And ultimately what I'm trying to help people do is eliminate the uncertainty component, right? If you can get rid of uncertainty, whether the price moons to a hundred k tomorrow or goes to 55k tomorrow, doesn't matter which way it goes, you're gonna have a level of uncertainty. But if you thought about why that might take place before, when it happens, you're like, okay, cool. Now I just focus on my decisions. And I've probably already made those decisions, right? Either sit tight, stack whatever. Whatever it is, your decisions are the only thing you can control. Make them before the move. It doesn't matter if the move doesn't happen, but you prepared for it.
A
Be prepared. Freaks. James, thank you for starting your morning with us here. Happy Friday to you. Hope you enjoy your week.
B
Thank you. Good on you mate.
A
And we'll do this again. Hopefully. Hopefully. We're in the the ninth inning, bottom of the ninth of the bear market the next time we talk, but we'll see.
B
Stay humble Stack sets age old wisdom. There is, there is never a better time for that to apply than right now. Be the bias and go through the storm.
A
Cash flow, Bitcoin and cold storage. Stay humble Stacks ats Peace and love freaks. Okay, thank you for listening to this episode of tftc. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to Fountain FM to find that $5 a month get you every episode a day early ad free helps. The show gives you incredible value, so please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time and until next time.
Episode: #713: Bitcoin Was Warning Us for Months with James Check
Host: Marty Bent
Guest: James Check
Date: February 7, 2026
In this episode, Marty Bent sits down with James Check to dissect the recent dramatic downturn in Bitcoin’s price, the broader macroeconomic backdrop, and the narratives circulating in the Bitcoin and crypto community. They dive into on-chain data, market cycles, the role of psychological capitulation, Bitcoin's response to macro uncertainty, and tackle the misunderstood fear of quantum computing as a risk. James shares actionable market frameworks, personal anecdotes, and level-headed advice for long-term holders.
The conversation is analytic, self-aware, and practical with streaks of humor and stoicism. Both speakers maintain perspective, ground their observations in data, and stress the importance of long-term conviction and mental preparation. James’ analogies (‘be the bison’, ‘decision tree’) drive home his rational, big-picture approach.
This episode provides a thorough, honest, and calming framework for understanding the current Bitcoin bear market and responding to both external and internal FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt). James Check breaks down complex market mechanics and psychological patterns, debunks sensational narratives around quantum risk, and shares both personal and general lessons on how to “be the bison” through the storm—reminding listeners that capitulation is an inevitable step before recovery if the long-term Bitcoin thesis remains intact.
Bottom line:
Stay humble, be prepared, hold your conviction, and cultivate a portfolio that allows you to weather volatility without losing sleep.