← THE Bitcoin Podcast
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- [00:00]
A
A lot of people are going oh man, this cycle sucks because it's like 2025 and we're at the same price. It's like yeah, but chop guys, chop solidation. When this thing goes it's proven that we're now a $2 trillion asset. The next move is 3 trillion. And if we go through another 12 months of sideways the next stop is 4 trillion. I think expectations not earning enough bitcoin because they're in shitcoins. Not owning enough bitcoin because they're in treasury companies. They're the big three that I think have got people frustrated. We go up to 150 and we chop solidate for another like 6, 812 months. That thing just keeps drifting higher because 150, 140, 130 becomes the base. As we chop around in that zone. People buy, people sell, people transact. Suddenly people don't even think about 75. 75 is a long lost memory the same way that $1,000 is a long lost memory. So over time these like smaller prices disappear and they just become irrelevant. Right. We never think about that again. We're going to find out within the next 30 to 90 days because every single previous cycle has topped like if we're still going by like 2026 then we've probably busted the four year cycle because we've more or less followed it from both the cycle low and from the cycle higher perspective. When we talk about this time is different. I think it's important to recognize what that actually means. The human psychology is the same. Bubbles will always look very, very similar. They're constructed in the same way they people behave the same way. Human behavior is ultimately the great constant in markets. I've seen a lot of people actually saying like I'm so disappointed in this cycle. It sucks that it's topped. It's like you're just basing that off the fact the four year is going to continue. What if it doesn't? You know what, what if we do in fact go to 150 from here and then we chop sideways for three year and then we go up again. Has the cycle ended? And that's what shop solidation so interesting for because it kind of acclimates everybody to the new altitude. 100k felt normal kind of quickly. I wouldn't say that these things are shitcoins but let's just strip away the fact that they're orange washed companies. The idea is that you want to buy them for the three month pump. They're full of telegram groups that if you're not on the inside, you're going to get smoked. Like, the characteristics of how they operate is shitcoining. It literally has all the properties of shitcoin. So it's like, functionally, the machine is what it does. What are they? They're shitcoins. Just sit tight, let the market do its thing. Like bitcoin's kicking ass, it's going to continue to kick ass. Chopsolidation has a beautiful way of getting people to sell their bitcoin out of boredom and frustration. Don't be the dude that loses it because of boredom and frustration. Because if you miss those 10 days, you miss what this whole thing is about, which is just like being there for those exciting repricing events and lots and lots and lots of boredom where you get to go and live your life.
- [02:55]
B
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin Podcast. Bitcoin continues to create new blocks every 10 minutes. The value of one bitcoin is still one bitcoin. And if you're listening to this right now, remember you are still, still early. If you're not already, go ahead and subscribe to this show wherever you're watching or listening and share it with your friends, family and strangers on the Internet. If you want to follow me in the show on Noster and X, just head to the Show Notes to grab the links. If you're enjoying the bitcoin podcast and want to support it by becoming a paid subscriber, you can download the Fountain app, search for the bitcoin podcast and subscribe. By paying with bitcoin via Lightning or Fiat via card, you'll get access to ad free episodes and early releases of select content. Plus you'll help support this show. Head to the Show Notes for product discount links, go to walkeramerica.substack.com to get episodes emailed to you and head to bitcoin podcast.net for everything else. Without further ado, let's get into this bitcoin talk. Hope you don't mind. I am partaking in a little bit of wine right now because for me.
- [04:11]
A
What are you drinking?
- [04:13]
B
I am drinking Ben Justman's Peony Lane wine. It's a bitcoin wine.
- [04:18]
A
It is hard. Like it's hard to get here in Australia. I mean, I'd love to get a bottle, but is it awesome?
- [04:23]
B
It's fantastic. We'll have to find a way to smuggle you some if Ben is. I think Ben may be joining this Stream. So hopefully he hears this, but it's fantastic. And I love that he's doing things kind of like, the right way. Like, it's. It's fully organic. He's, you know, really, like, he's. He put in his proof of work. Like, he's not taking shortcuts with it. And I think like a crazy percent, I'm forgetting what the exact percentage is, but like a crazy big chunk of his revenue, it comes in. In bitcoin. Now, like, he's been able to, like, I mean, he's the bit. He's the bitcoin wine guy. Like, it just goes to show, like, you can find your niche and it's, you know. Yeah, you might have to, like, work your ass off or something. But if you love doing it and you produce a valuable product, like, bitcoiners will be happy to spend SATs on it. Like, they will part with their precious bitcoin for a quality product sold by a bitcoiner. And, like, I think that's just like a beautiful thing. So. Yeah. Yeah, I know it's. I think he has difficulties shipping internationally, even to Canada. Peony Lane Wine has. Has difficulties getting there. So you're not alone being, you know, being down on.
- [05:22]
A
Oh, don't worry. We've had the. We call it the Australia tax, or it used to be much bigger, but the Australia tax was, if you wind back the clock maybe like a decade kind of pre Amazon really kicking. We didn't have any of that shit. So, like, you actually couldn't import stuff to Australia. So everything cost, you know, 30, 40 bucks to bring in and it was just impossible to get things. So, like, that was a real thing just, you know, maybe 10, 15 years ago.
- [05:45]
B
Yeah, you know, it's. It is just kind of ridiculous. Like, we're at this point, I feel like Americans, we often forget how, like, how easy it is for us to get basically everything through Amazon. And obviously it has gotten a lot easier in other parts of the world. But, like, still, when I talk to, like, friends in Europe, it's like, they can't just get something. I can get stuff. Like, I can order it right now and it'll be on my doorstep, like, tomorrow morning. Like, that's like. And ridiculous things too. Like, I could order a tiny home and it would, like, be delivered tomorrow morning. Like, it's just, you know, maybe it's gone too far. I'm not sure.
- [06:15]
A
I mean, every so often because, I mean, I spent a lot of time, like, studying macro and all that, and that's like everyone talks about America and it makes sense, right? The more I've gone down the rabbit hole of like learning how big America is dollar wise in terms of capital. Like your tax base, your tax base is like 50% of all profit in the world like from one country. And like you just come to the realization of how big America is. And I was watching, you might have seen there's a Netflix documentary on the Dallas Cowboys. I watched that recently and like just the size of the numbers. And then like I go back and look through the most expensive sports teams in the world. It's just America, America, America, America. It's all NFL, NBA. And you're like, my God, like just the sheer capital in the US it leaves everyone else for dead. Like just by sheer numbers. It's quite remarkable. It really is.
- [07:05]
B
Well, and it's like, you know, because sometimes people will give you a groove of like if you're talking just, you know, kind of exclusively through like an American lens from an economic perspective. And it's like, well that's the lens, but it's also that, that is the lens and it is also the global reserve currency. And in addition to being, you know, a just massive, massive pile of capital. So it's like, yeah, it makes sense. It's like a lot of other stuff is, is a rounding area that's not say there is an interesting and important things happening. It's just that like if you're, you know, if you need a heuristic like that, that is a pretty good one to operate.
- [07:35]
A
So, you know, and I guess that's what makes this period in history so interesting because you have really the first time that America's had a challenger in China. It is literally the first time. And that's what makes this on a macro landscape so interesting. Like these are also, you know, they're also a monster, but they're on two sides. There's the producer and there's the consumer and they're trying to make each other do the opposite thing. But it's a fascinating time in history. It's a turning point, that's for sure.
- [08:01]
B
It's going to be interesting. I mean there's been all this constant talk about these BRICs, nations getting together and having their gold backed currency, which everyone seems to be very certain is going to happen very soon. And I'm not sure how much you've looked into all that, but I think it's very interesting when you look at that whole paradigm through the bitcoin lens where it's like, huh, America is Uniquely positioned in that both as a nation state and as a corporate base and as an individual citizen base, we have the most bitcoin. We do. And relative our bitcoin holdings relative to our gold holdings, relative to other countries, bitcoin and gold holdings, Bitcoin is a much bigger strategic advantage for us. If we wanted to monetize something rapidly and kind of change the global paradigm, it would make much more sense to do it in bitcoin than to do it in gold. Because if you try to do it in gold, it's like, well, China and Russia have quite a bit of gold, or so they say. Anyway. I know China probably has a lot of fake gold too, but that's a different story. But I don't know. It's going to be a very. These next 10, 20 years I think are going to be kind of mind blowing. I don't know what the future is going to look like when my son is entering the workforce. And I don't know. It's. It's wild.
- [09:19]
A
It is. And, and like I actually like, I'm, I am increasingly becoming a gold bug. Like I know that if bitcoin didn't exist I definitely would be. But like gold is still 10% of my holdings. I've talked about why I own it. It's actually because I just want something to preserve, not to grow. I know it's not going to be bitcoin, but I, in a year's time I might just want that capital, right? Buy a house, whatever it is. I don't want to be selling bitcoin at the wrong time in a down market or a. I'm pretty sure it's about to explode higher and you know, I need ten grand. The gold goes, right, that's what it's for. But I'm increasing as I just look at this whole thing playing out. I mean we're literally watching gold breaking all time highs as we speak. It just is the shelling point. And it was funny actually. Cause I called my dad because he's retired. He's trying to work out like what do I buy, right? He doesn't have the timeline to ride a bitcoin wave. And you know, there's only so many products. I can really say this is the right thing. And he's already got a bitcoin position but for gold. I was explaining to, he's like, why gold? And I said it's a shelling point. I said look, we're in Paris, I tell you, I'm going to meet you at midday where Are you going to be? And he goes eiffel Tower. That's it. That's exactly right. We're all going to meet at the Eiffel Tower because it's the most obvious place. That's the shelling point. It's like everyone's going to look around the world and they're going to go fuck, it's a mess. What do I do? I'm going to buy gold. Because it's just like hands off, step away. Currencies are getting smashed everywhere. It's funny actually when I flick through all sorts of different stocks, I mean Australia is basically banking and mining, that's all we do. And I've held various mining stocks over the years. I'd never hold a banking stock. Various mining stocks. And like I've had some success but like not really because suddenly there's a news headline and just it's down 50% or suddenly like they lost their land title or some, you know, there's something that just happened, some regulatory bullshit just like blows up. It's like a perfectly well functioning mine. They have a flood. You know, these are the kind of things that happen. Equities in all forms have these problems and you just kind of look at. That's why people just go into the index because they want to diversify. But like gold is just hands off shelling point. I'm going to buy because I don't know what else to do. And then also you've got, you know, let's call them the BRICs. They talk about this gold backed currency. It's just gold, right? This is going to trade in gold. So they're just buying. And when China decides I'm going to buy a lot of this thing, they just keep going, right? They don't care, they're price insensitive, they just buy, buy, buy, buy, buy. And it's, I find it very funny that all old bugs are saying like oh look at bitcoin getting captured by the government. Like bro, central banks are your buyer. What are you talking about? Back off. So you know, it's one of these interesting dynamics but like I'm increasingly coming around to the fact that like gold has a very important role. It's going to be put back into the financial system. Bitcoin is competing for it. But let's face it like the most probable outcome is that gold becomes the bedrock and then bitcoin becomes like this liquid layer on top and over time they'll become more used to it. Like it's going to have a whole lot A much better shot than it would have obviously if it didn't exist. But if bitcoin launched today, I think it would have a hard time. The fact it's got that 16 year history where it's like it's kind of made it already, I think that's an interesting time. It was just at the right place at the right time in time for this whole sovereign debt shakeup. It's fascinating.
- [12:33]
B
I am definitely not a trader. I'm trying to hold my bitcoin for the long term. And if you're like me, you need to make sure you keep that bitcoin safe by going to Bitbox Swiss Walker and using the promo code Walker for 5% off the fully open source Bitcoin only Bitbox 02 hardware wallet. Then get your bitcoin off the exchange and into your own self custody. Bitcoin is chopsolidating right around 100k, but we have companies, nation states and a whole lot of plebs like you and me who are stacking harder than ever. So it's going to keep ripping higher. But now is the best time for you to get your security locked down tight with Bitbox Plus. And I can't emphasize this enough, the Bitbox 02 is just easy as hell to use. Whether you're brand new to bitcoin. It's your first time setting up a hardware wallet, so you're a little bit nervous. It's understandable. Or you are a well seasoned psychopath. You will have no problem with the bitbox. And again, it's fully open source and bitcoin only. But you don't have to trust me. You can go and verify that for yourself on their GitHub. When you go to Bitbox Swiss Walker and use the promo code Walker, not only do you get 5% off, but you also help support this podcast. So thank you. Yeah, I mean it's always fun to make fun of gold bugs, but at the same time, like gold has been extremely good at maintaining value over thousands of years. Like literally like it, you know, it's not great for increasing your purchasing power relative to the actual goods, you know, hard goods that you were trying to buy. But it is really good at maintaining what is it like the thousand dollars or, you know, $1,000 suit or the, the ounce of gold suit, you know, like, like a fine, fine tailored suit basically was like an ounce of gold 100 years ago and it's an ounce of gold today. And you know that it's gotten much more expensive in fiat terms obviously, but you still have the same purchasing power if you saved in gold. So it's like, yeah, I like taking shots at Peter Schiff as much as the next guy. Maybe more than the next guy. But you know, it has its place. I think that's interesting that you use it really just as like a. That's your. If I need to sell something, I don't want to sell my bitcoin. I think that's something you actually, I haven't actually heard somebody else who's like, no, gold is the thing that I'm like, I just keep a little bit of it because I want to be able to have something that I, you know, don't have any qualms about parting ways with. Which is basically where you're at, right?
- [14:55]
A
Yeah, it's kind of my one to two year liquidity pool. So it's cash that's not fiat. Right. If I need something in the next three months, cash, obviously if I need something in the next six to two years, six months, two years, then gold is the right asset for that because it's just going to preserve that purchasing power in this current environment. And then bitcoin is my long, like longest duration. So you know, paying off, not starting the mortgage, paying off the mortgage. Gold is there to start the mortgage. Bitcoin's there to pay it off. Putting kids through school, right? That's a 12 plus year long liability that I don't have to deal with right now. Bitcoin, that's where it's going. So that's how I like to think about it. And it is, it's there to be sold. Because everything is a relative game. So for me, I talk about this a lot. The house in Australia is a really, I mean it's a hard thing to catch. In Sydney particularly, our median to median is like 13 median income to median house price. So it's like they have to create a new bucket. Cause 5 is what's deemed highly unaffordable. 13 is called impossibly unaffordable. They've had to create a new tier for it. Right. We're up there with Hong Kong and most other Australian cities. So for us it's like, good luck chasing it. Bitcoin is the only thing that's allowed me to actually chase the housing market. But everything's a relative trade. I may, the housing market may have a spasm. At some point this can happen and I may not want to sell my bitcoin because like, you know, like many people listening, I also think it's going to a million bucks. Probably not tomorrow, but I think it's going there. Do I really want to sell my million dollar future bitcoin now to do that? Do I mind selling like a couple of ounces of gold to get started? Couldn't care less. So its job is there to be sold to take advantage of the gold to house ratio. The bitcoin is there to clear the mortgage to bitcoin ratio. That's really the long term and it's just about timeframe. Most of the time when people disagree on stuff in markets, it's they're not understanding each other's timeframe. And this is just a great example.
- [16:49]
B
I think that's a really good point. I think one thing a lot of people do seem to agree on right now at least people who don't just completely hate bitcoin is that gold is that canary in the coal mine, right? It's letting, when gold is going up, it's kind of letting everybody know, hey, something is out of whack here. People are feeling something is wrong. There's big shifts coming. People are looking for something that is, that is going to be okay, at least for the foreseeable future. If everything else just completely dies off, gold's going to have a little cold, but it'll be okay and it'll probably just keep going up. Do you view gold as kind of that marker for where you see okay, if gold's making moves, you look for bitcoin to follow. Because I think bitcoin is still in its gold denominated value. It's still like has it broken all time highs yet?
- [17:34]
A
It briefly broke to all time highs but it's then pulled back and this is another one of those things. So I think the gold, for me, gold is actually the benchmark. So we often compare everything in bitcoin terms. The problem when you put any asset in bitcoin terms, it just looks like the inverse of the bitcoin chart. Because of how powerful its old history is. It's kind of useless. It's honestly useless information. What I do like to look at is everything priced in gold. You can look at the stock market, this is a really, really popular chart. Look at the S&P 500 and it's rolling over and it tends to have gold outperformance for roughly 10 years. And then you have like a 15, 10 to 20 year type period where it's equities. And it looks like we've just completed a 10 year equity phase and we're moving into a 10 year gold phase, which is probably not a great sign for equities by and large because it's usually during these periods of loss of purchasing power you get higher inflation. It's hard for companies to continue to grow in those environments. So you get this kind of lost decade. Now whether it's a lost decade in fiat or only in gold terms remains to be seen. Certainly in gold terms is kind of my base case. But if you compare Fiat versus gold and I actually like, I get a couple of charts on my website where I reference it to February 2022 because there's always a question of like, where do you anchor this stuff and what I re like one thing that really it's kind of a bit of a pet peeve is when you see people going, oh, bitcoin's performance sucks. Measuring from like the pico top to the pico top, it's who cares about the pico top if you're DCA into any asset, like that only matters for the guy who bought the absolute top and then bought the absolute top and is like, why aren't I performing? It's like, because you're a shit investor, you know, like do better. So like working out what is a correct anchor point is always tricky. Now if you look at bitcoin's performance, if you anchor to the cycle bottom, of course it's going to look tremendous against anything. It's kind of a bit disingenuous. If you go from the cycle top, sure, you can see how it's performed up until the next bull, that's okay. But really only matters for the guy at the ball top. I've got a bunch of charts where I anchor to February 2022 because that's actually a major geopolitical event. That's when the US froze Russia's reserves. And if you look at all fiat currencies versus gold since then, they're down somewhere between 40 and 60%. The US dollar is down 51%. So the US dollar has been cut in half in gold terms since they froze the reserves. It's like, okay, so that's starting to say maybe we've got a shift going. If you look at toilet paper, which is TLT long duration bonds, they're down 61%. So that's, I mean that's more than being cut in half. That's pretty nasty. Stocks are down 25%. So gold's kind of kicking ass. Now if you then introduce bitcoin, what happened in February 2022? Well, we were on the precipice of going down to 15k. We didn't know it yet, we're trading at like 45, 50k. So the nice thing about this comparison is you pick up the bitcoin bear, you're not saying I'm going to cherry pick from the bitcoin bottom and say look how good it's done. No, I'm going to cherry pick from like early phase of the bear. Luna collapses, three arrows collapses, FTX collapses. And yet we've still recovered and we're up something like between 80 and 50% depending on where you want to measure it. So bitcoin is one of few assets that is beating the gold benchmark. So it's actually a really genuine and fair comparison because you're saying, look, we get some downside but your fiat's getting killed, your stocks are getting killed. Pretty much everything is losing to gold except bitcoin and one or two of the high flying tech stocks. So you're really like talking about a very small pool of assets. Everything's correlated right now. So it's all one trade. At some point you're like, I look at Nvidia, Nvidia is actually the only asset that I can big picture asset, not penny stocks and the like. Nvidia is really the only asset that is beating Bitcoin on any meaningful timeframe. And I'm like, is it going to go from 4 trillion to 8 trillion? I can see Bitcoin going from 2 trillion to 8 trillion. I don't even have to like run any compute cycles. This is like going to happen. Nvidia's got a lot of work. They're going to keep growing at a kind of unsustainable rate for a long time to justify an $8 trillion market cap or the dollar's got to get cut in half, both of those things could happen. But like I can see bitcoin going to 8 trillion far easier. So for me it just becomes this like I'm just going to put money in gold and bitcoin just wait because I know where they're going to go. I understand the thesis. It's really the same thesis, just different timelines. Sit tight, hands off shelling point, let it do its thing.
- [22:03]
B
You know, you mentioned that kind of the, the, the shite investor who basically, you know, bought the very top and is now complaining about, you know, the, the lack of gains. I mean, do you think that there's a lot of that in the current just vibes in the current sentiment out there? Because it's, we're still, I Mean, let's see right now the time of recording. We're a little over 111,000, infinitely printable, you know, fiat cuck bucks per bitcoin. It's pretty awesome, you know, it is pretty awesome.
- [22:30]
A
It's pretty crashed to 110k.
- [22:32]
B
Yeah. Like it's amazing that this is boring or that this is a crash or that this is somehow unsatisfactory to some people. Why are we seeing such, just like a kind of a weird, like just a weird vibe out there right now. What is your take on this?
- [22:46]
A
Sentiment has been one of the most interesting things this cycle by far and there's a few running theses. It's very hard to prove what it is. It's probably a bit of all of it. I'll try and run through a couple of things on my list. The first one I think which is worth noting and I remember back in 2023 would have been like mid 23, I think I heard many. I was working at Glassnode at the time and I heard many anecdotes from hedge funds, trading desks, average investors. If you wind back the clock to that like late 2022 bear market, early 23, ETH actually outperformed Bitcoin in that process. And I think a lot of people, and I've heard this, a lot of trading firms go, oh, bitcoin's actually not going to make it now. Let's rotate and go. And even if it does, then we may as well be on the fastest horse, which is number two. And then it got absolutely slammed. So I think a lot of people got stuck in the shitcoin trade expecting the capital waterfall to happen. ETH obviously got absolutely rinsed versus Bitcoin. Just a horrible three year persistent decline. And then look, this is just how markets work. I can only imagine the disgust of people just going, I'm done. They rotate out and then it pumps right. Suddenly it's at all time high again. I can only, I mean like I don't know how the future's going to play out but poetry and I don't even like poetry, but poetry be Ethereum tagging its all time high by like 50 bucks as it's done and that's it, it's over, it's done. But all those people who bought it at the bottom, watched it go lower, finally sold it and then buy back into the top and are probably now going to ride the next wave down. That's one area. So I think people just call, got caught in the wrong shitcoins. Under allocated to Bitcoin. I think the other one is treasury companies. People saw the meteoric rise of mstr. There's a bunch of guys out there and well done for being on that train very, very early and riding that wave up. I think there's two things that have really crushed people, let's say three things that have really crushed people's sentiment. One, MSTR has not really gone anywhere in some time since November last year and most of it's gone down. So I think a lot of people got kind of crushed on mstr. I think more people got crushed buying call options on MSTR and they're probably discovering that call options, if you just hold the stock, it might come back. Call options literally go to zero if they don't end up in the money. They literally go to zero and they go to zero quickly. So I think that's been a capital destruction. And then I think a lot of people saw Meta Planet, missed it and then jumped on every other shitcoin with a coal card and they're now down 60 odd percent plus and still going. So I think the treasury companies have probably incinerated quite a lot of capital. People didn't quite understand the premium compression angle to this whole thing. What is that? That's actually the same story as the previous point which is people just under allocated to bitcoin, not enough people actually just own spot corn. Now there's the other one of and I think this is actually very meaningful. I don't believe that. I think this is. Generally people who are inexperienced in markets have this view but I see it a lot. People think it's been a shit cycle because it hasn't gone up enough, hasn't gone up as much as they expected. That's got nothing to do with the market. That's because people's expectations were just very, very wrong. Like bitcoin is just much bigger now right now. Now personally I, I ran a study, I think it would have been like January, February and I try to look at like capital flows and how much I think has to come in to justify moves to different levels. And anyway when I ran that study, we're about 100k and I said what's it going to take to get us to 150 from 2 trillion to 3 trillion? What's that move going to require? And my estimation was that the ETFs probably had to double from where they are at the moment, from where they were back then. I think they've been up like 60, 70%. But if you add In MSTRS buying since then, you've actually kind of got the amount of capital that I thought we needed to get to 150. Now that doesn't mean that I'm right, but like, I think we belong at 150, honestly, and I think we kind of belong there and we should stay there. I just think a lot of people don't understand that markets are a process, not a result. Just because you get to a price doesn't mean that you've earned the right to stay there. MSCR got to what, 500 bucks, but it just didn't have, you know, it can't really sustain a 3x premium. It can't really grow its Bitcoin stack by 3x. It's probably not going to happen. So if you like, bitcoin's really got to go on a serious run before that expand. So I think people's expectations outrun reality. A lot of folks, I think, feel like the bitcoin market because of the bears, probably. The bears suck. They're brutal. That doesn't mean the market owes you a retirement. You know what I mean? Like, markets are not ATMs. You've got to give the mark. It's like the tide. The tide, if you swim against it, it's going to drag you out to sea. You can wish all you want what your expectations should be, but like the market just is. It's just a force of nature and you just kind of have to go along with the ride. So, you know, if for example, we pull, yeah, we pull back to, I don't know, 100k, 90k and we bottom out there, is everyone gonna go, hey, that was a bear market. Like in my book, that's a bear. I think if we actually pull back to like 90, 80, 75. To me, that's starting to look like bear market floor type material. That's my, like my gut feel. If we were to bear out here, I think that's a bear market. So then is everyone gonna like correct their charts and say, oh yeah, we actually bottomed in, you know, November 2025 and that was it. And then are people gonna be like ready to adjust their cycle theory and like, if you just keep punching to new highs, does suddenly the cycle not suck anymore? So it's just about like understanding that things are a process. Markets take time when it's going up. It's actually not because people are buying shitloads of coin right now. It's because they bought shitloads of coin for the last like five, six, seven, Eight, nine months, and then the sellers dry up. You still got the same amount of demand, but suddenly there's no one willing to sell. So, you know, if I go back to 2024, that move from 50k to 100k when Trump got elected, without that 8 months of sideways, choppy, boring, frustrating, sideways price action, without that chop solidation, you don't go from 50 to 100. And if you do, you probably come back down because that eight months of chop is the base from which that move comes from. And if we look at our current performance, a lot of people are going, oh man, this cycle sucks because it's like 2025 and we're at the same price. It's like, yeah, but chop, guys, chop solidation. When this thing goes, it's proven that we're in our $2 trillion asset, the next move is 3 trillion. And if we go through another 12 months of sideways, the next stop is 4 trillion. And I don't believe this kind of stair stepping can go on indefinitely. But it's a process. So I think expectations, not owning enough bitcoin because they're in shitcoins, not owning enough bitcoin because they're in treasury companies, they're the big three that I think have got people frustrated. Maybe the fourth one, I should just add, there's less volatility. People expect the high octane, old school bitcoin, which is probably the way they went into treasury companies. It hasn't given them that high octane. It's given my old man his, hey, I actually quite like bitcoin anymore. It doesn't seem to go down. That's that. Think about that sentiment in Wall street, in pension funds, in retirement accounts. If you've got the high octane, you can kind of lose those people. The fact that we don't have that is actually opening doors and taking away one of the biggest pieces of FUD that's ever been around for bitcoin, which is, it's too volatile. It's like, well, we got rid of that too, you know, like what FUD is left? There is no FUD left. Let's go.
- [30:31]
B
Honestly, bitcoiners right now are coming up with the most FUD for bitcoin. Like, that's what I'm seeing, right? It's no longer, you know, the external.
- [30:37]
A
That's.
- [30:37]
B
That's the most amazing part. But okay, there's so much there I want to unpack. One of the things maybe to start with is just because you mentioned kind of that like earning that or you feel that we should be at somewhere around 150. And I've got to say so the last time we talked it was February of this year. I don't know if you remember this, but you perfectly called that. You didn't get that. Say the exact time would be. But you're like, I think we probably go back down to 75 or so and that happens. I'm backing up the truck. Lo and behold, like a month later we, you know, blast down to 75. Everyone's like, what's going on? And I'm just sitting there like, well, checkmate did say this was probably going to happen. And then you're like, but I think that the top is somewhere around 150 this cycle. Are you still like, is that still like, do you think that was like the bottom? Do you think we retouch that, that March April low again or go below that? Is, is 58K a magnet or, or have we, you know, have those days gone by us and then on the other side of that, is your kind of top target for this cycle still looking at that 150 marker? Is that what you're looking at? Or have there been things that have come to light in the past half a year basically since we last talked, that have changed that in terms of what you think we might be able to achieve this cycle?
- [31:49]
A
All really good question. I'll talk through why I thought we were going to go to 75. And again, it's not because I can predict the future. I certainly can't. There was what I call an air pocket. So we did the 2024 chopsolidation and in fact I should actually wind back the clock one more step. In 2021 we got to a trillion dollar mark cap to about 50k. 50, 60k twice the first time in March, April and then we got slammed down to 29. Then we tried it again in November, October and we got slammed down to 15k. The market said, sorry mate, you're not ready for a trillion dollars. Try again next time. So we did. We tried again next time with the ETFs in tow. Right. We've cleared out all the dead wood. We've had a complete like bitcoin equivalent of a gfc. We've smoked all the three arrows, the block fires, they're gone. Suddenly we're in. Hey, we got these ETFs and they're taking in billion dollars a day on a consistent basis. Massive numbers. Oh, by the way, they're actually like the most successful ETFs ever suddenly we're at 73 now the market ran a bit too hard, too fast. We chopped around for 8 months. Every time we went below, not above below 50k we got bid every single time the yen carry trade happened. 49 straight back up again. We come down to 53. The German government sells 50,000 coins straight back up again. The market said no, you did it, you made it, you're a trillion dollar asset now. So the ceiling of that, what I call the top of the chop, 75k. Now from 75 up to 86 in November, there was basically no coins at transfer. We literally just zipped straight way too quickly. So the move higher was built off that base, that 20, 24 base. But yet very, very often markets will come back and retest major all time high breakouts. But also those air pockets, I don't know why it is. It's the same as CMA gaps. There's just like these things in markets I've seen enough times, I'm just like, look, be aware we might go down and touch it. We might just go and find out, hey, I know you've bought all these coins at 95 and 100. Do you still like it at 75? And the market said yes. Now the reason I like this like 75 to 80k region right now by the way, I actually think there's a much lower probability that we go there. I actually don't want us to go there. Cause I think that would be just from a technical perspective quite damaging to the chart. So I don't want us to go there. I don't think we go there. But if we do say as cost basis at 74k the average, there's a on chain model I use called the true market mean, which is the average cost basis for people who are actually active in the cycle. That's at 78. The ETFs are at 80. So you've got 80, 78, 74. Imagine the headlines. Imagine the smell of the price going back down to 75. You got the top of the chop. Just imagine that happening. It would be absolute chaos. And only the bitcoin believers would be like, I mean sailor about to be liquidated. ETF investors get wrecked. Like pick your headline bottom Foreman stuff. Guys like that's nasty. We have earned our right as a trillion dollar asset. We don't belong at 50k. Now if we go there because anything in can happen that's deep value. Like I'm sorry but that's just deep value. I'm selling the couch right Whatever you gotta do once you get down there, it doesn't make sense. It's too oversold. So I'm just trying to like think through these scenarios in advance. And then once you. Well, for me at least once I satisfied myself that you know what, anything below that level is deep value, I go, well, how low could we actually go? If like, if you look at things from like a risk reward perspective, we're at 100. If we go to 75, that's 25%. Correction. From here, from or from a hundred. Okay, it's like another day in bitcoin, you know what I mean? Like as long as I didn't put my whole net worth in at 124, like, yeah, that would suck. But like, okay, 25%, 30%, whatever. What if we go up to 150, 180. So now let's look at the upside as chopsolidation occurs. Now if we spoke in February, there's been a lot of coins that have changed hands. Both on the sell off down of 75, on the rally, back up again on the multiple consolidations we've had on the pullback we're currently having. We've gone nowhere. We've chopsolidated for another nine months. Imagine all the coins that have changed hand and actually it's a huge amount. I'm pretty sure the numbers are. If you price every UTXO based on when it last moved on chain, I think it's 50%. It's either 50 or 45, something like that. Around half of every dollar that has ever been. If you price the UTXOS is above 95k. Above 95, that's the floor, that's like where bitcoin's home is now. So that's the kind of magnitude that we're talking about, the people's mental like investment cost basis. Like if you think about all these Wall street investors in the ETFs or these pension funds, they don't care that Bitcoin traded $100 or $10 or $15. Their cost basis is $55ibit, $62ibit. And all they see when they log into the chart, they literally don't know that bitcoin has bear markets unless they kind of recall from them, from the news. So from that perspective, we've reset the entire bitcoin psychology to like 75k. Plus 75k is like old news now. Bear market territory. Everything above 95, normal, normal, normal, normal behavior. So then you go, okay, well where can we go before people Start getting too profitable. When are they gonna start selling? So that was 150 when we spoke last. As more capital changes hands, if you've got a bunch of people with a cost basis that used to be 50, but they sold it to some guy whose cost basis is now a hundred, well, for him to hit his profit target, it's no longer 150. Might be 180, might be 200. Right. The market's gotta go higher to create the incentive for people to sell. So from memory, the 150 level we spoke about before, I think right now will be floating around 180 or 185, something like that. And again, that's not a target. That's just where, statistically speaking, there's a 5% chance we keep going. If you just look at mean reversion, there's only a 5% chance that we get there and then keep going past it. But if we go up to 150 and we chop solidate for another like 6, 8, 12 months, that thing just keeps drifting higher because 150, 140, 130 becomes the base. As we chop around in that zone, people buy, people sell, people transact. Suddenly people don't even think about 75. 75 is a long lost memory, the same way that $1,000 is a long lost memory. So over time, these like smaller prices disappear and they just become irrelevant. Right. We never think about that again. And we start always looking ahead because people are naturally optimistic. So that's the way I like to think about things. Chopsolidation is the most important, like market structure, dynamic. It's a function of lots of things. ETFs, derivatives, the whole lot. But this chop solidation thing that we're experiencing is why bitcoin keeps climbing higher. And it's why this cycle kicks ass. Because we've never seen this before. It really is a whole different thing. Very healthy, very stable. Actually much easier to read, honestly. Like, if I went, brought myself back and tried to restudy the 20, 21 cycle, you had to know that Blockfi was playing silly games. You had to know that Three Arrows Capital was borrowing a billion dollars for zero collateral. You had to know all this, like, weird esoteric stuff. Now all we have to just look at is like, you know, where has the market proven? Where have we got the confidence that we belong at that level? And it's just it for me, it just seems to be much, much easier to read on those levels.
- [39:28]
B
Okay, I mean, I love that first of all, that it's just Kind of the chopsolidation. You've really brought me around this from the last conversation. Obviously you've talked about it a lot, you know, and it, you know, Dr. Jeff Ross would, you know, his version of that is like the crab market, right? Or the bull crab market, right. Just kind of crab it along and it's, and it's boring and it bores you just long enough to where you're kind of like, okay, you know, screw that. And then that's when it melts your face off. I'm curious though, you know, could, because you mentioned. Okay, there's also this chance of we, maybe we have this pullback. Maybe there is like a November 2025 bear market and then, and then that's the bottom of the bear. Like do you, where are you at with the whole four year cycles thing? You know, because we talked about this a little bit last time. One of the things you said was, yeah, conditions might change. I'm paraphrasing here. Conditions might change but human nature doesn't change. And obviously there's other, you know, factors that, that play into this. There's global liquidity cycles as well. Right. There's all these different things. So where are you at with us or with this? Is this time different from that cycle perspective? Or do we, you know, is it, is it a little bit different? But it still follows the general framework. It doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. How do you look at this? How are you kind of planning for that as we go forward? What's your model there?
- [40:40]
A
That's a great question. And there's a few angles to this. The first one, where are going to find out within the next 30 to 90 days because every single previous cycle has topped. If we're still going by 2026, then we've probably busted the four year cycle because we've more or less followed it from both the cycle low and from the cycle higher perspect. A lot of people like to share that chart. I think it's a good one that just kind of maps each cycle's performance since the bottom. Since the top. I really dislike the one since the halving because I think the halving was completely and utterly irrelevant. Both from a market perspective but also it's just, it's kind of an arbitrary date. Cycle bottom, cycle higher makes a lot more sense because that takes into account the duration that people go through like the investor psychology of going through a bear, hammering out a bottom finding the actual like conviction to buy it. Going through the recovery, hitting the euphoria and then just going, oh man, I'm getting rich. And then everyone makes decisions on those types of timeframes. Now, no matter which way you want to measure it, we're somewhere between 30 and 90 days away from like hitting where all previous cycles have topped out. Now if we've already topped out, which is always a possibility. I don't, it's not my base case but it's possible if we've already topped out. It was kind of a normal cycle honestly. Like we got the diminishing returns. You know, we went for about the same duration. It's in between the duration of 2017 and 2021. So like there's a lot of things that are kind of in line. So it still has a lot of characteristics of the four year cycle. However, it is also different structurally, measurably, observably. It's very very different. It has a lot of the Characteristics of the 201617 Market Spot Driven I think is a key part of that. Then the ETFs are a big role. If you look at any mean reversion oscillators, whether technical or on chain, it has the same pattern and flow as 1617 different amplitude and it oscillates around means rather than kind of finding support on them. So it's got a different character. 2018-22 is a very very different period. Boom, bust, straight up, straight down, like with leverage. Very, very different creature. So it is different but it also like when we talk about this time is different. I think it's important to recognize what that actually means. The human psychology is the same. Bubbles will always look very, very similar. They're constructed in the same way. People behave the same way. Human behavior is ultimately the great constant in markets. So the four year cycle there will be a lot of people who like behave, sell, act. I've seen a lot of people actually saying like I'm so disappointed in this cycle. It sucks that it's topped. It's like you're just basing that off the fact the four is going to continue. What if it doesn't? You know what, what if we do in Fact go to 150 from here and then we chop sideways for, for a year and then we go up again. Has the cycle ended? And that's what chop solidation so interesting for because it kind of acclimates everybody to the new altitude. 100k felt normal kind of quickly. Now in 2017 you never had time to get used to 3k and 5k and 7k and 10k because by the time you've got worked out what price you're at, you're 2x higher. So people didn't actually have time to acclimatize to new altitudes here we've acclimatized to 100k for nine months. People are now used to 100k as being like a normal level if we go to 95. In fact, even at 108 I was like, kind of feels like a discount, right? I'm a Hodler who's been in this market for a long time. We always feel like we're late and it's expensive when we buy. I now feel comfortable buying at 108k. Right. Tell that to my like 12 month old self like 12 months ago. Insane. When you're trading at 50k, you're like, by the way, it's gonna feel really normal to buy 108k pullback. And by the way, you'll have been there for a year. You're like, what? You know, when you put all this stuff in perspective, chopsolidation is doing a really, really good job of just helping people get used to the ascent. Right. It's like going to Base Camp 1, spend some time there, get your oxygen right, go to Base Camp 2. Once you comfortable Base Camp 2, you can start seeing the summit. Still a long way up, but you can start thinking about the summit.
- [44:53]
B
Yeah, I mean it is interesting to think of like how quickly these things become the new normal. And it just feels like you said it went down to 108k and I'm like, oh well great. Add a little bit extra, couple of little smash buys here with the Fiat that I've got lying around. I've got my dca, just keeps on cooking but, but little extra there, feeling frisky and it's like, wow. It feels like, feels like I got a great deal on that, on those SATs there, like fantastic. But it's again that like if you would have told me that at 50k, I would have been like, well, I'm backing up the truck even more now. There's nothing left. Like the truck is gone. I've sold all the tires in the truck, there's nothing left for it but here. But if I, you know, I'm going to somehow limp it along to back it up more. But so I think it's interesting. Does that necessarily mean then that like, are you generally the theory, I should say that like, like any bear quote, bear market or any drawdowns will be less severe and less. They won't be as long is that fair to say that you're kind of in that camp or do you still. Can we have a protracted bear market still?
- [45:52]
A
Yeah, yeah, it very much depends on the bull. So it's very hard for me to construct a nasty 80% down bear market from here. It's very hard for me to construct that because I do believe, and again, these are just beliefs, but I do believe we have proven that bitcoin's a trillion dollar asset. Bitcoin doesn't belong down below 50K. Like, it's just, it's just not, it's out of bounds. So once you go to that process, you're like, we literally haven't gone high enough to justify an 80%. Okay, what happens if we go high enough? How high do we have to go before an 80% makes sense? You wake up tomorrow and you're at 500k or a million bucks. Yeah, we're coming down. It's gonna be hard, right? That, that descent's gonna suck. So that's where like a lot of folks I see say, oh, but it didn't hit my 300k price targets. Like, yeah, but you need to be sitting there on button when it gets there because it's not going to be there for very long. Right. Unless the whole world is just imploding. And that's a whole different edge case. But the most likely scenario is that we just go through this market cycle and we hit peaks. There will be a bear at some point. I suspect it will be protracted. I think we'll still get a lengthy period, but it really depends on the pathway up. For me as an analyst, it's much easier and I think most people would agree with this. It's much easier to spot a insanely euphoric bull where funding rates are through the roof, lots of profit taking is happening. The narrative is there is no ceiling. You know, MSTR is just mooning every treasury company and shitcoins going through the roof. We've all been there, we've seen it, we know what it looks like. It's easy to spot euphoria. How high it goes is a whole different animal because a lot of people sell and then it goes, keeps going higher and then they buy back in because like, oh no, I'm wrong and they end up buying the top again. So that's a very common behavior. What actually concerns me as an analyst is that we just like roll over. It's like this just like sad little. It just doesn't have the euphoric boom that you would expect that's much harder to spot because you're really looking at just like a softening out of demand. Now, the truth is, right now, as we're talking, the ETFs are pretty soft. We've seen about three or four weeks where they just haven't seen significant inflows. It's not bearish. They're just not bullish either. We get a little bit of an outflow. We get a little bit of an inflow. One thing that I find quite comforting with the ETFs is that we've seen very, very little sustained week after week. Billion dollar out, billion dollar out. We haven't seen that. We get the occasional patch, but it's an event. Everything's been quite event based, which is, I think, is very good. We're not getting a loss of confidence of holders. That's a good thing. Treasury company bid has just evaporated completely, really. And that's because a lot of these companies don't have an MNAV anymore. They have no premium, so they have no capacity to buy. You've got Saylor, who's meaningfully backed off the. He can't sell as much of these preferreds anymore. You know, he was raising 2 billion, 1 billion, 3 billion. He did like 400 million. Now, 400 million is still a lot of money, but it's not 2 billion. Right. It's quite sizably less than 2 billion. So even Saylor doesn't have the buy side. So the treasury company bids evaporated, really. So really all you're left with is just classic bitcoiners buying in spot markets. When you look at the amount of sell side, like, I also don't encourage people to whale watch. I certainly don't whale watch. But Sani, who's from Time Chain Index, he's done tremendous work and he's got all the labels to track this stuff. He can see all these like, oh, 24,000 Bitcoin comes back to life. 24,000 Bitcoin comes. Galaxy just cleared 80. Like, these are very, very big clips and there's a lot of them. We're not at 90k, we're not at 80, we're not at 70, we're at 110, 111. Like, Bitcoin's doing pretty all right. Considering the ETFs are soft and the treasury companies are doing absolutely nothing, that's quite remarkable. There's a lot of bitcoiners out there just stacking actual sats. It's not going to be all Retail, there's going to be like institutions and funds and firms and all that. But there's demand out there that I think a lot of people aren't like, it should be lower given how much sell side there is and how little the obvious demand vectors are contributing. It's quite remarkable, actually.
- [50:05]
B
It's interesting. It reminds me because one of the things we talked about last time again was the kind of market manipulation narrative, this idea that, oh, clearly there's market manipulation and paper bitcoin being sold and all these things because the price isn't doing what I want right now. And your response to that again at that time, which I think was pretty prescient given the very like, large and public whale sales that we've seen of late. I think just mentioned a couple of them, is that you were like, look, there's a lot of OG whales with massive stacks of bitcoin. And for them anything over a hundred K, like, looks pretty great because they've held it from a few bucks or from, you know, from whatever it is. Like, they are massively, massively, unbelievably in profit. And they're, they want to take some of that. Like, who knows, this may not even be their, their whole clips. They're, you know, all of their stacks. Like, they, they may have other ones. Like, like, and I, I, I feel like people just still, I mean, it's hard for me to fathom having, you know, like one person having billions of dollars of bitcoin, but, like, it's out there and, and there's more of them than we realize that that happens. And the other thing is, you know.
- [51:07]
A
This guy who's going to sell 80,000 Bitcoin, they're like, why would you do that? We're about to go on like, the monster of all bull runs. Like, bro, he bought in 2011. He's had the monster of all bull runs. He's on $10 billion. Like, he needs to hire a legal team to sort out his estate. Like, that's how much money this dude has. He could buy an island. Don't worry about him. He's going to be just fine. And who knows how many more of these clips he's got. He probably doesn't want to keep it on a fucking cold wallet anymore. You know, that's a whole mission. So that's a, it is an interesting angle, but it's not only just the whale OGs, they're definitely an interesting component that we've seen in like the recent months. But the other thing that's like, even more interesting, there's just, there's just Hodlers and people have held for six months, 12 months, two years, three years. People have just been around for a cycle and a half or a cycle. A lot of these guys are selling as well, and they always sell. These coins come back to life. And this is the thing. When we look at on chain data, we don't know that a coin was sold. We can see that a lot of them go in and out of exchanges. On an average daily basis, approximately a billion dollars goes in and out of exchanges, which is. Is pretty massive. Somewhere between like 60 and 80%. When you actually look at, like adjusting the transaction volume and you get rid of all, like, the exchange internals and all that stuff. Somewhere between like 60 and 80% of the real economic volume of Bitcoin are coins going in and out of exchanges for trade. Now, of course, someone may buy a coin and then not exactly withdraw it on that day. They may also send a coin and not sell it on that exact day. It really doesn't matter. They come back to life. Old coins with the most profit always come back to life when the market is going up harshly. Right when the market is really ripping, people sell, they bring coins back to life. Now, it could also be that they've all got a telegram chat and they go, now's the day we're gonna do UTXO consolidation. Let's all do our management today. Because the price is 100k. No, they're taking profit or they're doing something in the market. They could be taking a loan. They could be. Doesn't matter. The pattern is lots of old coins come back to the market and then the market stops going up. It's just kind of the way things work. So we don't need to be perfectly precise, but we can get a decent read that there are a lot of these coins coming in. But my favorite, one of my favorite insights, everything is Newton's third law, equal and opposite. Every sold Bitcoin is a bought Bitcoin. When you measure cell size, you're actually measuring demand. And this is the thing for me that's been. I look at the sell side and you've gotta, like, you know, it's all about developing a bit of a gut feel. I call it like your bitcoiner instinct. And by the way, trust your bitcoiner instinct because you'll be amazed. I wrote a piece on this literally yesterday on how much your bitcoiner instinct lines up with what's going on in the on chain World if you can like really I just view on chain data as a way to visualize all of us, all of us bitcoiners, what are we doing, what are we feeling? How in profit are we? More often than not your bitcoiner instinct will align with what's going on. And my bitcoiner instinct for this pretty much whole cycle. Look at all of that sell side. And the price is doing this over months. Yeah, it swings up and down. But guys, we're at 110k and we're taking billion dollars a day of sell side right now. It's $2 billion a day of whales of like OG whales and long term holder sell side. 2 billion a day and the market's down 10% from the highs. We have serious, serious demand in this market. And I think a lot of people miss that. They miss Newton's third law. Every sold bitcoin has a buyer and the buy side is absolutely tremendous. Shouldn't be discounted.
- [54:46]
B
No, absolutely. And some just following up on that, somebody asked in the live stream chat on nostr, is there a way of kind of that you project when sellers, these OG sellers will reach a point of exhaustion. Is there something you look at that kind of of informs that and you know, how do you know if we're getting towards the end of that? When. Is there something that can tell you that?
- [55:05]
A
Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. So there's a, there's a metric that I use, it's called sell side risk ratio. It's one of my favorites actually. We look at. When we talk about realized profit and realized loss, every coin or utxo. When I say coin, just think UTXO for the nerds in the room. When we, When I say coin, every coin has a cost basis, right? That's the price when it la. When the UTXO was created. When did that coin last move on chain? If that's your cost basis and your cost basis, 100k for example, and the price is at 110k, technically speaking, that person's up 10% when they spend that coin. We can measure the delta. We can also do it on the downside. So realize profit, realize loss. Now when people are taking profit, locking in coins they bought at a thousand bucks and spending them at 110k, they are signaling to the market that they think we are no longer at equilibrium. Because if we're at equilibrium they would hoddle because they're like, no, I think we have further to run. Now if someone's capitulating a loss, it is also sending a Signal that they do not think we're at equilibrium because they think it's going lower. Right at bear market bottoms, if you can believe it, we get top buyers naturally taking massive Ls long term holder top buyers. You get the people who bought last week thinking it was the bottom, they capitulate as well. But then you also get long term holders who lock in profits at bottoms because they're terrified it's going to go lower. So add up all the profit and loss, the delta between those cost bases, how much has been locked in by the coins that are moving and compare it to how big the market is, right? So it's a ratio of the disturbing force, which is the profit and loss versus how big bitcoin is, which we use the realized cap, which values every coin based on when it last moves. This metric looks identical to options implied volatility. So options implied volatility is measured purely from the options chain. It wouldn't know that bitcoin is a blockchain. It has no idea about on chain data, and yet these two metrics are identical. So when we see that everyone who is going to take profit and everyone who is going to take loss has done so sell side risk goes down because you've got this. Your disturbing force is now very small. Bitcoin is very big, but no one's taking profit or loss. All the coins that are transacting on chain, you know, if we're at 110k, they were last acquired at 109 or 109, 50 or 106, they're not acquired at 10k or 5k or 30k. The Delta is small. So whenever we get this like volatility compression, the options market usually goes to sleep and funding rates usually quieten down. So you get this really nice confluence where, where everyone just thinks that this boring sideways nothingness is going to continue. And what usually happens for me that's like ding, ding, ding, setting off all these bells going, guys, the market's about to move. The market is ready to go. I don't know when it's going to go, but like we have coiled up this spring that there's no more profit and loss taking happening. The market has to go somewhere, somewhere else to either make people panic and capitulate losses or rip to the upside. So people start taking profit because we have now reached equilibrium. It's one of my favorite metrics because there's so much of this, like it's a simple oscillator, but it's got so much law and density to it in terms of the actual signal about what it's telling you. It's just telling you what are investors doing? It's ready to go, let's move.
- [58:26]
B
I love it and honestly I'm cool either way. Would love a rip to the upside, but I'd also love some cheaper sats. I think that's the beauty of the mindset shift that happens. It's like, yeah, I love seeing ngu, but I like seeing number go down as well because that means my dirty fiat buys just a few more sats. I'm curious on the. Just because you mentioned options here and it reminded me of something you mentioned before the show to talk about the IBIT options data that you started looking at. You want to get into that a little bit and kind of what that's telling you.
- [58:55]
A
Yeah, so I haven't written my piece on it yet, but it's actually very hard to get good tradfi data. So I've been digging around for ages to try and find a decent read on the IBIT options chain. Because my base case was I know that IBIT options must be big, they must be significant because we've seen a lot of like the cash and carry trade where people long the etf, short the futures. Now the IBIT options went live in November. If you look at the total flows into all of the ETFs excluding IBIT, they have been dead flat since January. None of the other ETFs have seen any inflows on net since January. And yet the ETF inflows are ripping to the upside. Ibit is now 58% of the AUM in all of the ETFs. It's just tearing away. So I'm looking at this chart being like, holy shit. The options, like that has to be the options. There's no other, there's no other reason for it. And options tends to be a market that is winner take all. No one wants to trade the second biggest options chain. So I was like, okay, I gotta go and find. Cause like I'm obviously missing a big part of the leverage in the system. And for me, like yes, a lot of people know me for my on chain work but like really I'm a bitcoin analyst. On chain is one meaningful but one part of my puzzle, futures options. But now I've got options on the etf. So like what I love about that in the on chain world we look at like short term holders, long term holders as a good cohort. People have been around for a long time and speculators. But we also now have like funding rates. That's like real institutions aren't trading funding rates. Degenerate gamblers are trading. So you've got like the speculators in the crypto native world and then you can go to the CME. CME is like you buttoned up Mr. Wall street trading futures over there. We've got deribit options and now we've got IBIT options. And both of these are telling us about these different subsets or cohorts within the market. So we get a bit of a view of what everyone's doing now. I had to rerun the numbers and I may have made calculation errors, but I'm pretty sure it's right. I've got AI to double check these things for me. There's like $30 billion in open interest. And for a bit of a sense of scale here, here. IBIT in the since November is now as big, if not bigger than Deribit. So Deribit has been like 95% market dominance. Ibit has just exploded out, by far the biggest in terms of volume, in terms of open interest. If you take the IBIT aum. So the amount of bitcoin that's in there, the options are now 40%. So for every Ibit BTC unit of Bitcoin in there, there is 40 cents worth of options open interest applied to these things. So the leverage ratio is getting very, very big very, very quickly. So this was actually a bit of a missing piece for me. Cause I'm like leverage was already going higher, but I'm like, I just feel like there's more. If you want to talk about paper bitcoin, these options are, you know, you could argue that they're paper bitcoin. They're also part of bitcoin maturing. But here's the other thing. You know, these are the two sided coins we are gonna see volatility capture strategies. People selling and buying call options and put options and whatever this is gonna extract volatility from the markets. What they do, they can also backfire and create volatility spikes if the market wants to rip through them. So this can also happen. But also when you got this big of an options market in like what, what, eight months, nine months, when we're this far in and the options are this big, big, big capital allocators, if you've got $30 billion worth of total size, they can now hedge serious risk. It actually makes it much easier for big institutions to allocate when they can hedge out $100 billion and not have a concern. 100 million and not be concerned. The size of these options. Yes, it's leveraging the system, but it's also insurance. It's a market for insurance. So the big allocators can now buy Bitcoin knowing that they can spend a little bit of premium to insure the car just in case it crashes. So that actually is going to reduce the chance they're going to just like market sell their etf because they can hedge the risk in the option space and speculators can take that risk. So really, really interesting dynamic. I still need to do a big deep dive on it. It's meaningful. It's a really, really big event. And it kind of shows that Wall street is absolutely here.
- [63:14]
B
And I mean, is that. That's kind of another piece in the puzzle of like, like decreased potential downside volatility? Like, I mean, just decreased volatility in general? As you said, it's not just downside volatility, it's the upside volatility as well, which is that, you know, we like the upside volatility, we don't like the downside volatility so much. But they, they necessarily must go hand in hand, right?
- [63:33]
A
Totally. Totally. And that's the thing. Everything is a pull and pull and to and fro. Right. Equal and opposite reaction. You can take volatility out of markets for a while, but it can come right back again. Because all that leverage. This is what also meant sell side risk before. When implied volatility gets super low, everyone goes, oh, that's all right. I can take more risk because the market doesn't go anywhere. Bitcoin's just a boring old stablecoin at 110k, I'm gonna sell on shit. I sold too many call options. Bang away it can go. So things can really move. Yes. It may be less frequent and it may not be as high octane all the time, but it can also get people on the wrong side of the boat. And things can really start to move. Cause they've gotta cover their position. And the thing with options, if you're an options writer and you're selling those puts or calls, you have infinite risk. You have unlimited risk and a limited upside. So when you're selling options, you have unlimited risk. Which means if you've got unlimited risk, you gotta cover. They don't have a choice. They gotta get out of those positions. If they're wrong, that's on the directional side. There's obviously traders who just. They don't care. Where the price goes, that it's extracting volatility. The market's going to get increasingly complex. And really like for me as an analyst, this is amazing because you're kind of watching the true monetization and a market's coming up out of nowhere. We didn't have IBIT options in November. Now we do. Now we're starting to see how deribit trades relative. How does a crypto native exchange trade relative to tradfi and start speaking the same language.
- [65:04]
B
You know, it's, I mean, it's really fascinating, I guess know bitcoin's. Bitcoin's gone mainstream. Your favorite band and now, now your neighbor likes it too. And you know, it's not, not cool and hipster anymore, but you just, you got to deal with it. Right?
- [65:15]
A
It's a real thing.
- [65:17]
B
Yeah. So kind of on that tradfi side of things, I want to talk a little bit more about the bitcoin treasury companies because I do think that you mentioned earlier and I completely agree with the analysis that essentially a lot of the weird sentiment we're seeing just recently, even though Bitcoin's at 100 and you know, 110, $111,000 per coin, which is just wild and seems pretty great to me still you see all this negativity and I do agree, I think you're exactly right, is that people were either too, I mean, on the crypto side, they've been way under allocated to bitcoin for a long time. We know that.
- [65:48]
A
Right.
- [65:49]
B
That's been been very obvious and I think it's becoming obvious to them now finally. But they'll probably still do the same thing over, you know, over and over again as they claim that, you know, whatever shitcoin they have is going to totally replace bitcoin and the flipping is going to happen this time, guys, I promise. But on the bitcoin treasury company side, it seems that there's a lot of folks who again came in chasing those gains. I think it was American. Hodl said this the other day on Danny's show when he had Hodl and Lubka on. He was basically like, people think that they can kind of like teleport or you know, take a time machine to be an OG that you can, if you, if you lever up and you take these risks and you kind of gamble on some of these more, you know, speculative proxies for bitcoin that you can somehow now go back in time and it'll be just like you bought bitcoin, you know, in 2015 with, you know, or sometime around there. And it's just like, that's just not the case. Like you're, you're not gonna be able to do it and you're probably gonna get wrecked. And I feel like, like I'm not saying that I think strategy is going to do just fine. I think Meta Planet's gonna do just fine just because of the size they have a few others that'll, that'll do just fine. The bitcoin miners that have a lot of bitcoin in their balance sheet I think will be just fine. But it seems like there is a lot of these kind of smaller ones that are, were great for the people that, you know, got in at the very, you know, at the ground floor. Not so great for the people the retail that bought it, thinking it was going to, you know, 10x overnight and maybe it went up a little bit and then it dumped back down. So how are you looking at this? Is this in any way? I mean, I think this sort of thing was inevitable, this was going to happen. Bitcoin's a success. Of course companies want it. Of course nation states want it, everyone wants it. But how are you looking at this? Does this factor into your analysis at all in terms of how much money is flowing into bitcoin via these proxies, or are you paying less attention to this?
- [67:37]
A
Yeah, so I've gone through the loops and the calculations to just get a bit of a read on my feel for these things. There's a number of levels. So the first one is I think we need to make a very clear distinction. When I talk about treasury companies, I'm talking about those trying to play the sale of the strategy book. Right. If we're looking at just a company that puts bitcoin in their balance sheet as like a savings asset, they're just sweeping cash flow. Like our business, we do that, that whole different thing. Totally fine. Perfect, perfect solution. We're talking about the entities that want to go the all in approach. Now if they're going to go the all in approach, strategy is obviously the most all in. Completely and utterly all in. Their operating business is completely irrelevant. They are a bitcoin enterprise to their core. Metaplanet is going from a hotel business and they're transitioning away from the operating company towards a bitcoin treasury company. Now they also have the advantage of being in the Japanese market. Right. Which is again, big capital industry. Like, I don't think that we have like Australia. We just don't need a Treasury company. There's nothing special about Australian capital markets that would necessitate us needing one down here. I just, I can't. I can buy strategy with no problem. And I do, I actually don't need an Australian one because when you go to a small scale. So I'm certainly short the idea we need one in every jurisdiction. I'm short that idea. I don't think that we do because there is a leak. And that leak is anybody who wants to buy a bitcoin treasury company, they're not going to buy the 200th biggest one with 12 bitcoin on the balance sheet. They're also not going to care if you've got 1000 bitcoin. It just doesn't matter because there's entities out there with several thousand. Now there's another angle of like how much buy side of these treasury companies applied. I've played around with this. Honestly, delete strategy. And that's. Sorry, if you take away strategy, there's no buy side. So many of these big entities. And again, I won't call out names and single them out. It's left pocket to right pocket, right one company has a bunch of bitcoin, they move it into a corporate entity. They didn't buy anything. They moved bitcoin from one entity to another. There was a tax arbitrage or whatever it was. A lot of them haven't actually bought bitcoin and if they have, we're talking about small potatoes here. They're not, they're not serious. Like tens of thousands of bitcoins a week. It's just not how this is playing out. So there's a lot of fugazi. There's a lot of like weird deals where it's like, you know, you're a whale. I'll take your bitcoin and if we hit certain levels, I'll give you shares. Again, left pocket to right pocket. If you get on the inside, that's wonderful. Most people don't get it on the inside. These things are. And like, who is actually going to buy a 5, 10, 15, $20 million treasury company? Here's an exercise. Look at the market cap of your favorite treasury company and then go on CoinMarketCap and find how far down and the shitcoin peers that you're living with. There is no institution that wants to do this. Like, I did this for a couple of companies and they're next to companies like tokens, like octopus token and like, you know, shill me your coin token. Like all this stupid shit. You're like this is, there's no institutions buying this. This company doesn't have access to debt. They don't have access to preferred markets. They only have access to selling shares hoping that they're at a premium. Premium. And we're watching those premiums just get crushed. Now let's imagine your treasury company number 55 and your premium has gone from 12x when you first announced to 1.1 or 0.9. Who's gonna buy your stock? Like truly, who's actually gonna buy your stock? Because most of your investors are trapped at 2, 3, 5, 6, 10 MVAVs and going, I just want out of this thing. Give me my money back. Who's gonna restart the engines? You can't issue debt, you can't issue preferreds. I'm really just like, I'm really short. The idea that we need many of these things, it's gonna be a winner. Take almost all market in my view. There'll be a couple of patches like even Meta Planet. It's in the maybe bucket for me. I think it probably is gonna be okay, but I think it's in the maybe bucket. Can I get back to a 6x premium? Maybe? Maybe. That's a lot of coin they gotta buy to justify that kind of move. So now once you get to the other end of the spectrum, they start small with a huge premium. Because going from 1 bitcoin to 2 bitcoin is very possible. Going from 2 to 20 is also possible. Going from 620 to 1.2 million is a different animal. The bigger they get, the premiums will naturally compress. Sorry. Metaplan is a small company with a relatively large premium. Strategy's a massive company with a small premium. That's the trajectory. So the M Nav gravity, and I've been saying this forever, since I first studied strategy, it was microstrategy at the time. M Nav gravity is towards one in all circumstances. It's where it wants to go. So therefore timing these things is absolutely a function of what is the bitcoin price doing. Cause that's the beach ball that's inflating underneath the company. If that's increasing, then the chance that M nav expands is also higher. If bitcoin is contracting and we're down 10% from the all time high, some of these ticos are down 70, 60, 80%. We've got our 80% correction folks. It's just in stock tickers, not in the bitcoin price. That's where I think the damage and the pain is being Felt. So I'm really kind of bearish on the whole thing. I've also been listening to Danny's podcast. I know he's trying to work his way through it and every time he's like, I just, I'm not quite there yet. Can you explain this bit? I'm like, yeah, mate, I'm not there either. It's all fugazi. It's bullshit. There's a handful of these companies that make a lot of sense. I'm very short the idea we need thousands of these things, even hundreds.
- [73:35]
B
No, again, I think that you made the important distinction at the start, which is there's a huge difference between a business that is just stacking bitcoin with excess cash flows that they want to be able to save, to preserve and grow their purchasing power. That's great and prudent and, and you know, any business, it would behoove them to do that. Two thumbs up people who are, yeah, fantastic. Like, that is natural and you should do that. Versus these companies that are like, it's, it's a, it's a marketing play for them. It's, it's, you know, they're, they're, they want to be able to pump their stocks. And a lot of times it's either, you know, it's because they've got a failing or flailing company and they, you know, you need just, just one last pump, bro, you know, just, just to juice it a little bit, you know. And of course I, I know a lot of the people who are in some of these other companies too, as I'm sure you do as well. And like, I know really great people in them and it's, this is not a knock on them at all. It's just, I agree with you that I think this is a, you know, winner take all, winner take most type of situation. Strategy, I think is pretty uncatchable at this point. Like they, like, I mean, maybe not, but boy, that would take a lot of fiat to catch them at this point. And, and, and he's still going. Right?
- [74:41]
A
Right.
- [74:41]
B
And he has other instruments on top of this. Right. It's. And is kind of pioneering that side of things. And I think that honestly, what I keep beating the drum about for folks is like, I have no problem with these strategy companies. I, I own, you know, some small exposure to some of them with money. I'm expecting to lose and have, you know, suffered losses from already, especially relative to bitcoin because I'm a terrible trader and I know this. But I like to punish Myself every now and again, just to remind myself.
- [75:05]
A
It's so important to remind yourself of the fuel lessons. You got to do it.
- [75:08]
B
Yeah. You got to do you. Oh, you think you're, you think you might be smart, like, no, no, let. Let's get punished by the market a little bit because you're not. And that's why the, like, you should just stack bitcoin. You should just stack bitcoin, get a decent sized utxo, transfer it to cold storage and. And then you can just live your life and not worry about it. Because you're. If you're like me, you're. You're probably not a great trader. You may have made a couple of decent trades over time, but most of my decent trades have just been buying things and then holding them. It's not, you know, it's like timing. The market is really, really hard. It is really, really hard. And we're in uncharted territories here. And so I think it's like, it's one again. I don't tell anyone what to do with their money, but like, for me, my strategy has remained, you know, besides a little bit of play money that I'm very prepared to lose. It's like, nope, I'm going to stack bitcoin, I'm going to try to create value. I'm going to podcast really hard and know, fiat mine really hard. And I'm going to. I'm going to stack sats and I'm going to cold storage. Yep. And Odell really gave the most sage advice with that because I think that that is legitimately the best strategy. Unless you are able to get in, unless you're somebody who is throwing some serious coin at these companies in the, you know, fundraising rounds, you're going to have a really hard time outperforming bitcoin on any timeframe that is longer than, I mean, I don't know, longer than a year, four years. Yeah. It's just going to be really hard for you to outperform bitcoin. You're not out from bitcoin right now and you probably almost certainly won't. Maybe there's going to be a couple of exceptions. Again, I think strategy may outperform over four years. That's what their goal is essentially, and they've got a good chance at it. A couple others, maybe most of them, I think you're going to have a really hard time doing that.
- [76:51]
A
You may trade and the other game that people are playing, it all depends where you buy on the M Nav. Let's Imagine a world where strategy sees its M nav go to 0.9, 0.95. Yeah. It's probably gonna outperform bitcoin on the return, right? On the return, higher. I don't know where. If that happens, Bitcoin's probably in a bit of a dumps as well. But the timing of that, you know, and this is the thing, yes. I wouldn't say that these things are shitcoins, but let's just strip away the fact that they're orange washed companies. The idea is that you want to buy them for the three month pump. They're full of telegram groups that if you're not on the inside, you're going to get smoked. Like the characteristics of how they operate is shitcoining. It literally has all the properties of shitcoins. So it's like functionally the machine is what it does. What are they? They're shitcoins, that's what they are. And really the secret source of any of this stuff, stuff go in eyes wide open. It is all about the M Nav that you are stacking at. This is literally what Saylor does too. He doesn't want to sell when the m nav is 0.9 because it's not favorable to him. He does when it's at three or two. So therefore you can start to say, well, there's only so high this thing can go. So if I'm buying it at m nav of 0.9, then if it goes to 1.5, I'm very happy. If I buy it 1.5 and it goes to 1, I'm wrecked. So you are actually trading the M Nav premium and you're trading the bitcoin price. It's a double edged sword. And as you can see, 10% down the Bitcoin price means a 60% down and a M nav compression from 6 to 1. It's tough, right? It's really, really tough.
- [78:34]
B
Yeah. And I think again it's like I get it because I would love to to get in a time machine and go back to being an og. I would love to go back and buy bitcoin. The first time I ignored bitcoin like an idiot in 2014. Right. But I, but I wasn't ready. I didn't deserve it yet. I wasn't even close to deserving it. I didn't deserve it in 2017 when I ignored it again, like I didn't deserve it until I actually started doing the work and going down the rabbit hole in, you know, during the COVID times like that, that's when I finally earned it right up until then, it's like, no, no, like you're not going to. You don't deserve to teleport to be an og. You don't deserve it anyway. It's okay. We get bitcoin at the price we deserve and you can live with that. And trying to play these games to reenact that OG moment, it's going to leave you in some pain.
- [79:23]
A
Do you know what the secret source is? I mean, you know the answer to this, but basically daily dca. You know why? Because if you start daily DCA and like we've vibe coded and played around to try and like even a lot of the tools that I use, they're fantastic at picking tops and bottoms. Even if you like save your daily DCA and you only buy the absolute bottom of these things, you might only beat it by like 5, 10%. That's like a good run. Daily DCA from the moment that you like work out. Oh, bitcoin. Once you work that out, just being on like a daily DCA wagon, that is how you teleport. Because you're then getting the most average price from that point on and it destroys everything else. And the reason why we actually tried to back test and find out like why is it so just unbeatable? It's because when bitcoin actually goes, when it rips, it spends most of its time doing absolutely nothing. It's dead boring, drives you mad. But there's like five to six days, 10 days in the whole cycle where it just rips. And all these people who are trying to trade in and out, getting in and out, if you miss, I ran this study a little while back, if you miss those 10 best days, you are down on the whole cycle. You make zero money. Like your bitcoin cycle chart is just straight to the floor. If you are there for those 10 days, you get the whole return profile. So once bitcoin moves it like literally reprices, it just goes to a new altitude. And that's what I think happened when we went up to 100, from 75 to 100, we repriced. We now belong up here. Right? When we went from 40k and the ETS went live to 73, that was a repricing event. New altitude, new level. See you later. Thank you very much. Daily DCA is how you teleport back in time because it gives you, since you worked it out, the most average price from that point onwards. It's the best way consistency is the secret that's actually the, the answer to this whole thing.
- [81:19]
B
I mean, you know, it's the old cliche. It's, it's time in the market, not timing the market, right? I mean, it's just like, it's the reason these things are cliche because it's, they're true. Like they're, you know, that's, that's, that's why they're there. You know, it's, it's. I think people have a. I was just talking about this on another show recently. People have difficulty realizing that it can just be that simple like, that the answer isn't some complex process. The answer isn't jumping through all these different hoops. It's just like set it and forget it and sit on your hands. Just do less.
- [81:49]
A
Right?
- [81:49]
B
Do less. Because we've been taught to think that we have to do all these things and jump through all these hoops just to have a chance at beating the rate of fiat debasement. Right? And so I get it why it's hard for me to just sit on my hands and do nothing. And that's why I give myself a little bit of money that I'm like, you're probably going to lose this dude. And if you don't, you better get it into Bitcoin because otherwise if you don't put it into bitcoin, you haven't taken know, any real profits. Like, you're just, you're still kind of in fiat land and pay your taxes and do all that. And, and at the end of that, maybe you've what, outperformed Bitcoin by how much? Maybe a couple percent if you did it really well. But like, you know, so again, it's a reminder. But like you can just, you can just daily DCA and you'll, you'll do great. But that's hard. It's hard to do.
- [82:33]
A
And the amount of, the amount of DOT eats. In my time they've been like, oh, but you can't do anything with your bitcoin. You're like, like, I know, I know. That's. Yeah, it's great, isn't it? I love it. That's exactly the right thing. I don't want to do anything with it. Like, why? Don't want to move my shit around all the times. Like, I just want to pine hold, man. What? My favorite book, if you are like interested in market psychology, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator is just a, it's a great read just in general, but it's my favorite book on markets because you I've read plenty of like trading psychology textbooks or just like, you know, people are pining on it. It's all just rehashing the stories told in that book. And he's got this great line that I refer to all the time where he goes, I'll paraphrase, but it's like I never made money in the markets buying and selling and trading this thing. I made most of my money by sitting tight and doing nothing. You got that? Sitting tight and doing nothing it is. I mean, you talk to any great investor and they'll say, yeah, I didn't make any money from like trying to swing trade in an hour. It's like, what does Warren Buffett do? And again, sure, he doesn't understand bitcoin, but I mean he found high value companies that he did the work on and he just buys a stack of them when they need capital and then he just sits on it forever. What a great strategy, right? The less you do, the better off you're gonna do. Because once you know what you're betting on, right? And really for me, I'm betting on bitcoin, a little bit of gold. That's my bet. And I just watch that basket it really, really, really closely. I mean, I don't experience the volatility. To me, it's a puzzle I'm just trying to work out. Like which way do I think it's going to go next. It's not actually about being like, oh, I want to give the right calls. It's like to me, it's just like a fascinating puzzle that's always changing and I want to keep solving it. It's like it's a hobby for me. Just sit tight, let the market do its thing. Like bitcoin's kicking ass. It's going to continue to kick ass. Chopsolidation has a beautiful way of getting people to sell their bitcoin out of. Of boredom and frustration. Don't be the dude that loses it because of boredom and frustration. Because if you miss those 10 days, you miss what this whole thing is about, which is just like being there for those exciting repricing events and lots and lots and lots of boredom where you get to go and live your.
- [84:38]
B
Life, which is kind of the whole point, right, of having better money so you can actually don't have to have a second job being a investor, trader, gambler. You can just go and live your life life. So yeah, and touch a lot of grass and spend time with your family. That's like that is literally what it's all about. Get plenty of sunshine as well and walk. So maybe last thing and then I'll let you. Because this has been, as usual, extremely information dense and I appreciate this. Super stoked to have you back in the show. Is there anything else that you're like, really watching that is kind of like behaving in an unexpected way? Maybe that something that you're looking at. Any of these signals that you're looking at where you're saying, saying this is something that's a little bit like, I wasn't expecting this or I don't, you know, this is giving me signals that I'm not exactly sure to interpret. Anything that's kind of like really out of the ordinary or surprising in terms of this current time in the market and. And these many, you know, these myriad signals that you look at.
- [85:34]
A
Yeah, the main one is actually the fees. There's just no one transacting on chain, like blocks are mostly empty. So generally speaking. And this like, we can wade into if you want. But a lot of people say that like, high fees are a bad thing for adoption. Whenever I look at the chart and I look at fees versus the market cap, the market cap rips to the upside when fees are high, because when people are using bitcoin, it's a good thing. Highly congested blocks means people are using it. Now, in our current environment, fees have been dead since I'm gonna say February, maybe March to be safe, I'll say April. Since that sell off in April, fees have just been dead. Now on chain, transaction volume is actually quite high. So we've got very few transactions, but lots of like big bitcoins moving around. Now, obviously some of these are these like big whales, but they're also like, you only move 24,000 Bitcoin like once or twice. Go to an OTC desk, go to an exchange, it'll get consolidated somewhere and then it's done. It's part of the mix. So, like, we're just seeing consistently very, very high transaction volume trending higher. Multiple billions of dollars a day, but very few transactions. So that this is a very interesting dynamic. So if generally speaking bitcoin has a pot, what's called a positive skew, when you look at the statistics of how things work, median represents the majority. It's where the most number of people are. And the mean, the average can be skewed by very, very large things. That's why when we look at housing, you don't want it to be get skewed by the multimillion dollar mansions cause there's not as many of them but they're worth a shitload more than all the other ones. Now in the bitcoin world it's always had this dynamic and it's still true. But lots and lots of retail transactions, lots of hundred dollars and thousand dollars and $10,000. A handful of billion dollars right transactions. What we're seeing at the moment is less of the median. There's much, far fewer retail type behavior. There's a lot more. Even though if the whales I would say they're probably a little bit higher but their dominance is much much bigger because there's just less of the retail. So I've been trying to puzzle over this. I don't spend too much time like worrying about it but we definitely have fewer plebs moving coins around now. Some just like, like ideas of what could cause it. Maybe lightning maybe, but I don't think so because it's going to be a small factor but I don't think that's like 90% of the problem. I don't think plebs are moving around 90% of the value on lightning. Maybe some of it. Maybe there's less people dcaing. I definitely think there's less speculators. Probably fewer people are sending their coins in and out of binance to trade shitcoin A and shitcoin B and treasury companies, maybe they're speculating over there instead. I think my biggest argument would be that there's just less speculation using on chain bitcoin retail size speculation. I think that's the case. I also think that the altcoiners don't quite understand that. I'm pretty sure this is still true. FTX really really did a mess. I don't think altcoiners really understand how I think forever the damage for that industry is I just don't think people care anymore. This is why they can't get any of their tokens to actually get lift off because no one actually cares anymore. So I think the speculative side is the main reason and I see it from a few different lenses but definitely just the dead quiet chain whilst we're at all time high. And honestly aside from you know there's a few things I'm like yeah, I'm cautiously watching and I am cautious at the moment but I'm not bearish. I mean the bears haven't even taken out my first line of defense. It's about 109k, they're not even below that. So it's hard for me to be too bearish, but the chain's just quiet, so that's the main thing. And I'm like, that's interesting. That's intriguing. And it's been that way for a while, so I don't know if that's going to exert force at some point, but that's definitely one I'm watching.
- [89:36]
B
Yeah, I mean it's basically been cheap as hell to transact on bitcoin all summer long. I mean, longer than that even. It's pretty wild. It's been a great time to. If you want to consolidate UTXOs or move things around. It's a, a been a heck of a time to do that, but apparently not a ton of people taking advantage of it. But yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting. Well, I, I want to thank you again. This was fantastic. Always given me new things to think about and I always appreciate the way that you break things down for folks because I think it's just in a really digestible manner and you always come back to hey, just you know, like, keep it simple, stupid and, and, and stack bitcoin like which I think, yeah, embrace the chop solidation. I love the smell of chop solidation in the morning. Let's get some more of it. Where do you want to send folks? They should subscribe to your newsletter, but yes, send them anywhere you want to or anything new you're working on that you want to pitch out there.
- [90:31]
A
Yeah. So head over to checkonchain.com so you can subscribe to our newsletter. But also with all the charts I talked about. I mean, granted it's a bit of a mess in terms of the site. It's basically a handwritten HTML by yours truly. But literally every bitcoin chart that I use in my newsletter and like my daily analysis, it's all free. It's all there. We've got ETFs, we've got strategy, we've got Ibid options. Now we've got all sorts of stuff like you can, It's a maze of things you can find. So. And that's all free. All those charts are free. So jump in there, play around. I try to make the charts fairly self explanatory. When something bad's happening, the chart lights up red. You know, I try to simplify these things but you know, it's a good way just to familiarize yourself with. Again, again, even if you're not a trader. I think this is the one thing I want to leave people with. I Don't talk to traders. I actually don't care that much about traders. Right. I don't write for traders. I write for hodlers. Because there's a gap in the market of like, we're all long this thing. We're like a max long this weird Internet money. Just understanding why it moves the way it does. When you see narratives on Twitter, like, can you actually back that up with data? Or is it just people going, oh, no, price should be higher because it's like, okay, Mr. Central Planner, what should the price actually be? You can kind of distill these narratives and say, is it actually happening? Or is this all just fugazi? And that's really what I find so interesting. So it's about helping navigate the volatility and just understand why the market does what it does. Because it's a fascinating puzzle.
- [91:55]
B
Yeah, Amen to that. And it's a, you know, while you're sitting on your hands and not trying to trade this thing, you got to do something. So you may as well figure out, you know, why it's moving the way it's moving as much as you can. You'll learn about Checkmate, mate. Yeah, exactly. I appreciate you, man. Appreciate the work that you do. And yeah, thanks for this time. And thanks to everybody who joined on the live stream. This was kind of impromptu. You're already living in the future there down under, so you're. You're a day ahead of me. I don't know if the price is different for you over there in the future, but I think we're still seeing the same price, but we're at 170k.
- [92:27]
A
Of this part of the world.
- [92:29]
B
Well, boy, that sounds nice when they denominated in your know, fiat. Fiat CK bucks.
- [92:36]
A
Yeah, mate. We'll be over 200k Aussie dollars by the time we talk next.
- [92:40]
B
There we go. I look forward to it. And we'll see where we're at on the US side, but it's going to be an interesting ride. And yeah, appreciate you helping us break it down. Talk to you soon, man.
- [92:50]
A
Thanks, Matt.
- [92:59]
B
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin talk episode of the Bitcoin podcast. Remember to subscribe to this podcast wherever you're watching or listening and share it with your friends, family and strangers on the Internet. Find me on Noer@primal.net Walker and this podcast@primal.netcoin on X, YouTube and Rumble. Just search at Walker America and find this podcast on X and Instagram @tcoin podcast. Head to the show notes to grab sponsor links, head to substack.com walkeramerica to get episodes emailed to you. And head to bitcoin podcast.net for everything else. Bitcoin is scarce, but podcasts are abundant. So thank you for spending your scarce time listening to the Bitcoin podcast. Until next time, stay free.