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THE Bitcoin Podcast
CHOPSOLIDATION, ON-CHAIN ANALYSIS, & WHERE BITCOIN GOES NEXT | CHECKMATE (JAMES CHECK) (THE Bitcoin Podcast)
01:27:49
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- [00:00]
Checkmate
It takes 700 days to get over your PTSD and get over the damage that that bear market brought upon you. So it takes about that long. And once we get to that 700, 800 day period, suddenly the market's up, the critics are back in force and you start feeling really good. You're like, I was right. I was right to have bought those coins all that time ago. And then it just keeps going. And then you're like, I'm so right, I'm going to go all in again. And suddenly you end up buying the top. So you kind of get this like excitement acceleration phase. But a lot of it is human confidence. That's just how long it takes people to get over the previous market cycle. And I agree with Odell that like bitcoin is designed to go up forever, it's designed to pump forever, but it goes through these things in waves and processes. Now I think it's also important to remember that there's macro factors, right? The halving is also the election years right in the US there's liquidity cycles, there's all these different things. And I think bitcoin is increasingly becoming like a macro asset. In fact, I think it is a macro asset. My favorite thing is like you see some global event, a trade war or something breaks out on a Sunday and people who tradfi dudes who hate bitcoin, what do they post? The bitcoin price chart. Why? Because it's the only thing that actually sends a signal as to what your stocks are going to do on Monday morning. So everyone is now paying attention to it because it is the index for where the world is going.
- [01:24]
Walker
Greetings and salutations my fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is the bitcoin podcast. The bitcoin time chain is 882-480 and the value of one bitcoin is still one bitcoin. Today my guest is James Check aka Checkmate. Checkmate is an on chain analyst and creator of checkonchain.com we dug really deep into market sentiment. Where we're at in the current cycle, chop solidation and where bitcoin moves next on chain analysis and what it shows us. Hodling strategies versus trading tips for new investors, Market cycles in human psychology, Global liquidity and bitcoin's role Microstrategy altcoins and how they're complete garbage. The impact of bitcoin havings the bit life crisis and a whole lot more before we dive in. Do me a favor and subscribe to the bitcoin podcast wherever you're listening, and make sure to subscribe on YouTube or rumble as well. Just search Walker America, and if you find this show valuable, consider giving value by giving it a zap on Nostr or a boost on Fountain. You can find me on Nostr@primal.net Walker and find this podcast@primal.net Titcoin without further ado, let's get into this bitcoin talk with Checkmate.
- [02:46]
James Check
Okay, Checkmate. You know, I didn't realize that your name was actually James Check until, like, it took me way too long to realize that. And I was like, oh, damn, that makes the handle even cooler. But how you doing, man?
- [03:00]
Checkmate
Good, mate. Thanks for having me on. It's a. It's a funny one, actually, because way back in 2018. So that the reason the Checkmate came about is back in 2018, when I got into the market on chain analysis. Like, the idea is that once you get reasonably good at understanding bitcoin, doesn't matter what it is. But my field was obviously in analyzing it. People can assume that you've, like, been around for a long time. And back in 2018, a long time means like, 2013, right? Or 2012, you've got, like, a stack of bitcoin. And at the time, I was living in London, and I was like, I just don't want to be this full public figure if I know about this thing. Like, I don't want to get my kneecaps broken in some country. I'm going, I'm traveling. So I was like, I want to pick up some kind of a pseudonym. And the other angle for it is I like people challenging your ideas, not your face. So the idea was, you know, come and challenge the ideas that I'm putting out there rather than who I am. So that was kind of the framework. And then when I joined Glassnode, all these institutional clients I'm talking to are like, bro, what's with the pseudonym? I mean, it's easier because no one knows who James Check is, right? Because it's Checkmate, the name from there there. And I was like, okay, let's just make the name James Check. And then everyone understands, like, oh, cool. That makes sense. So it just solved all those problems.
- [04:10]
James Check
I can imagine the institutional clients were not quite as, like, they don't want that same kind of nim. Maybe, like, they want to know that, like, they're. Yeah, there's a human behind it. Maybe that'll change. Maybe we'll have institutions like, you know, preferring nimmed people in the Future? I don't know, that may be a bridge too far. Who can say?
- [04:29]
Checkmate
Optimistic?
- [04:29]
James Check
Yeah, yeah, it may be. But you know. Well, we've got some, I would say large institutional news coming today, like as we're recording this and I'll try to keep an eye on it, but I know the MicroStrategy earnings call is happening at as we speak right now, so it should be quite interesting to see what happens there. I know, I mean like their earnings per share, I saw they released beforehand, they're like, you know, they were expecting like $0.06 per share and it's like negative 326 or something. But like, I don't think anybody really cares about the earnings per share with MicroStrategy. It's more like, how much bitcoin are you going to stack? I don't know how closely? I mean, how closely do you follow Saylor and the microstrategy moves like as part of your larger research?
- [05:15]
Checkmate
Yeah, this was a topic that I got. Many of my subscribers were asking, hey, can you cover MicroStrategy? For a long time I just hadn't quite put it on the radar. So I wrote a piece called the Infinite Money Glitch. And just to give you a bit of an idea of like the scale of this thing. Usually with my reports I do written and video, but I do a tldr. So people who are short on time, they can read the TLDR and come back if they want later. And a lot of people really like that. The TLDR for this piece was. There is no tldr, folks. This thing's a whole meal. Because it just was like, it was really my just worked example of thinking it through. My like base case for MicroStrategy. If I kind of summarize my core points, it's obviously gonna be very good in the bull because you can issue more convertible debt, you can stack more bitcoin. Their product is volatility. So as long as they can generate excess volume on top of bitcoin, that's a, that's essentially what they do. They securitize volatility. The trade off to this is that in the bear market, they're not gonna be able to raise as much money. Their debt's not gonna trade at as much of a premium. There's not going to be as much demand. So I think that there's two cases here. One is the very long term and then there's the bear market. I think they both have the same characteristics. They're going to reach their bitlife crisis eventually, right? Everyone does. Everyone has a logarithmic supply curve because you can't stack more than 21 million, no matter who you are. So because everyone has this logarithmic curve, their growth metrics of bitcoin per share and yield by definition must go to zero. They have to go to zero by definition. I also like, I like Luke Grohman's approach was like, let's use the extremes to inform the mean. Let's imagine microstrategy. Stop doing anything. They just sit. What's their value going to be? Probably the ETF value of a nav of one. So they're constantly fighting the gravity. Gravity of that share is to go back to the bitcoin Treasury Valley. That's where it wants to go. If you don't do anything, their job and Saylor's job is to generate excess volatility to prevent that from happening. So that's how I view the stock. I think it's going to have booms, I think it's going to have some really nasty busts. But my base case is that gravity is always back to that ETF value.
- [07:23]
James Check
It is really interesting. Talk about that bitlife crisis. Can you explain that for people who are not familiar with that term and what that actually signifies?
- [07:32]
Checkmate
I think this is an American HODL special.
- [07:34]
James Check
I think there are many.
- [07:35]
Checkmate
Yeah. So the idea of the bitlife crisis and a lot of people go through this, right? You stick around for two, three cycles and eventually, you know, here in Australia, Bitcoin is $160,000. So 1000 bucks just doesn't go that far anymore. And, like, the longer you're in your journey, the more that thousand dollars makes a meaningless increase to your personal stack. So eventually you hit this point where you're like, do I keep buying this? And you're like, trying to. Do I keep buying this thing? Because, like, it's not increasing my bitcoin balance. I'm still putting dollars in. And yes, it's still going to perform and the percentage is good. But you've kind of gone through this journey where you flip to a bitcoin centric world. Everything is denominated in bitcoin. And then you start looking at your paycheck denominated in bitcoin, you're like, why do I work? Because this thing, like, it doesn't buy me anything anymore. But then you have to reacclimatize yourself to the new heights and you almost have to go back to kind of think about things in fiat because you have to remember, yes, you're still stacking bitcoin, but the percent of how much that's going to preserve and grow your value is still the best performing asset. So you kind of have to go from bitcoin centric world back to being like, oh, but I still earn dollars. And then like, it's a, it's a process.
- [08:47]
James Check
Yeah, it is. I'm definitely not at my bitlife crisis yet. Haven't been around quite long enough to, to have achieved that. But it is a, it is a funny thing. I mean, even as you just watch, you know, like SATs per dollar going below a thousand like that, that just you know, mentally, like for those of us that look at the SATs per dollar price, or US dollar, I should say not Aussie dollar. Yeah, yeah. Moscow time. Like, it's kind of like a. Whoa. Like this really just doesn't. This dollar does not get me very many sats anymore. It is not quite so satisfying when that, you know, DCA is hitting. And I'm realizing, okay, wow, that's. That's a shrinking amount of corn that I'm getting for that same amount of dollars. And I guess it's, it really does also put the, put you in the perspective of like, okay, is, you know, like Bitcoin's repricing the world, right? Like, this is the. Looks like. Yeah, Bitcoin's just a denominator that doesn't change or at least, you know, right now changes on a very even schedule, but ultimately the total denominator doesn't change. And we're just, as Eric Cason would say, like, our monkey brains cannot totally wrap themselves around that. It just, it just doesn't, it doesn't make sense. Like, the numbers are hard somehow. I don't know.
- [09:57]
Checkmate
No, and this is actually important. Like, even from like a market structure perspective, I'm a big advocate for, and I think everybody should observe your own emotional response to price because it is essentially, if you can take what you're feeling and extrapolate it, that's more or less what the rest of the world is doing at the same time. So if you look at like when we rallied up to the. I called it the chop solidation range back for most of last year, that chop solidation range, it took me, I don't know, probably about a month or two, April, May, I think, before I had to climatize myself to go, okay, when it goes to 50k and 60k, I'm happy. I'm actually happy to buy below 60k. I am not going to get 20k again. I just believe it's gone. So now I'm like, okay, I accept that value is now probably anything below 60. And then you start behaving that way. Well, now you've got to go through that process again and actually observe how you pay personally go through this journey because at 100k I'm starting, I'm not quite there yet, but I'm starting to get to oh look, it's 90 something. That's good, that's really good. Again. So like you have to re acclimatize yourself and if we just, you know, go up again and again and again, eventually people can't acclimatize themselves. They actually can't look at 200k and go, okay, I'll DCA this. And that's what puts tops in, right? Some kind of top. And I'm a big advocate for people like, which, where's the top? It's like which top, bro? Which is which one? Because if you're a day trader, it's the one that just liquidated your account. If you're a long term Hodler, there is no top. So like work out what top you're actually talking about because there are many of them. But you know, this is why markets eventually exhaust themselves on both directions but because people can't acclimatize themselves to that new level. And as a result, you know, you have to then correct and find where that acclimatization zone is.
- [11:39]
James Check
So on the chop solidation point, because you had a great definition for your definition that you had, you had posted, which is a period where the market chops would and trade sideways. After a powerful bull market advance, chop solidations tend to last just long enough for people to get bored and walk away and miss the rest of the uptrend. Which I think is just kind of like great. It's like that point where you know, like, it's like that meme of like, you know, you always manage to, you know, sell the bottom and buy the top. It's, it's essentially that, yeah, like you're just totally. Again, our monkey brains are really bad at trying to just game out. Okay, what's actually happening here? Is that fair to say?
- [12:15]
Checkmate
Absolutely. And you can kind of extend it, right? Chop solidation and a correction is more or less the same except you add in an extra line and deep enough, right? The correction goes just deep enough. That's the difference between chop solidation and correction. You get these nasty wicks and people go, oh, that's it. It's over, it's dead. Right. Bitcoin crashes to 105k. I'm out, finished. And then of course that's, that's the bottom.
- [12:36]
James Check
Do you, Are we in a. I mean this is a pretty intense chopsolidation phase right now. I'm curious, how does this compare to other phases of chop solidation? Are we, you know, are we getting to that point where people are getting bored and walking away? I mean even though it's sitting at whatever just below 100k right now, which you would think that would not be boring, but people are funny and somehow people are like, oh, you know, it's, it's crashed, it's down below 100k, like feeling bearish. Where do you think we're at with the just overall sentiment versus reality?
- [13:09]
Checkmate
Yeah, this is a great question. So I think I actually went back during the previous chop solidation period. I went back to the start of bitcoin's history on trading view and I put like full screen, probably about a year and a half worth of price. And I literally scrolled left to right and just explored bitcoin's history from start to finish, looking for previous examples of chop solidation. And the only one that even remotely resembled it was 2019. Right. Most of that year was what I would call a chop solidation. It was, however, there was more downside, there was a lot more nasty sell offs. And that kind of helped me understand the one that we had in 2024 which was a lot more controlled, very, very structured. I would say this whole uptrend has been very, very structured. So I actually think 2024 is quite unique. And my base case, just from like a sentiment perspective, there were a lot of people calling for a bear market at that point. Lyles the shittest cycle of all time. But when I looked at how the market was trading, I struggle to believe that people would be willing to accept a 73k all time high. So there's like this, this underlying, it ain't over. And I think that when you actually look through the data, we actually see this, this like buy the dip mentality. Market sells off, you get a little bit of ETF outflows followed by a lot of inflows. So there was this just like, no, we are going higher behavior. This current process, it has some of those similarities, but we are also at a higher altitude. So it's taking people a lot more work and a lot more to understand that hey, we are now a $2 trillion asset to go up to 3 trillion is going to be another trillion dollars of market cap. Now, as most people know, you don't need a trillion dollars to come in to move the market cap. There's like a money multiplier effect. My estimate, it's somewhere between like 3 and 5. It fluctuates and varies. But you can't go to 150k and add a trillion dollars without about 200 billion or so of real capital coming in. You can wick there, right? This is not just like some volatile random spike where it goes and comes back. This is the kind of thing it needs to get there. And I think what a lot of people miss is they go, oh, no, it can't possibly be that because we don't get $200 billion when it went from 73 to 100. It's like, no, but we had eight months of chop solidation. That process before and after is what allows the market to go from 73 to 100. Markets are a process, not a result. So you need accumulation period before and after to justify the rally. If you don't have it before, you usually don't get the rally. You get a sell off. And if you don't get it after, you go back from whence you came. Right. These are, this is just how markets work. So I think people just need to understand these kind of dynamics that markets are a process, not a result. It takes time to get places. As bitcoin gets bigger, this is just only going to get more real. So, you know, just kind of keeping that grounding anchor I think is important.
- [15:53]
James Check
Yeah, I mean, staying, staying grounded I think is often difficult even for the most hardcore bitcoiners. Like we like to talk about low time preference and everything, but then exhibit some, yeah, exhibit some very high time preference behaviors. And so, you know, I guess maybe a good place for us to kind of get into a little bit is just because, okay, we're, we're at this period right now that maybe has some historical parallels or you know, the chop solidation phase of 2024 had some historical parallels. And then we just, you know, pumped up to basically over 100k. I'm not sure exactly how high we got, like what, 106, 107 or was it one? There you go. Which is quite a move. And I think, you know, perhaps the sentiment now especially, I mean, I want to talk about the broader like crypto quote market sentiment a little bit too, because that's like even a whole different world from where bitcoiners are at.
- [16:45]
Checkmate
But influence is everything.
- [16:47]
James Check
Yes, I agree Right, right. And so, I mean, are we at a place now where obviously there's a lot of different narratives that are going on. There's a lot people are talking about the strategic reserve, you know, microstrategy is going to continue to buy more companies coming on that are, you know, trying to buy up bitcoins and pump the price of their stock because they saw, wow, this worked really well for Michael Saylor. We can get into that as well because I think there are different levels of, let's say, conviction among some of those players. But narratives aside, like what does the on chain data actually look like and how, I mean, how much stock can people put in on chain data? Because you know, they say like, okay, you know, like ta, like looking at just price charts is like astrology for men. Right. Is on chain data a slightly more accurate version of that astrology or what do you think?
- [17:37]
Checkmate
So it's based on the same stuff, right? Because at the end of the day, what is the only constant in markets? It's our hundred thousand year old monkey brains. That's the only thing that's constant. Interest rates change, the asset changes. Right? What the political climate is, that's all evolving. But the way that human beings respond to fear and greed will never change. So that's our base constant. We will always respond that way. You will always have smart money who buy low, have high conviction, patience, and they wait and they sell to people who buy into fomo. This is why you can't get your friends to give a rat about Bitcoin until it reaches some ridiculous level. Right? And it's also why when they sell the bottom and they capitulate everything, that's it, that's, that's the flaw because everyone does this at the same time. So at the end of the day, what is on chain data? And you know, I don't just look at on chain data. It's another thing, it's like I consider myself a bitcoin analyst. Yes, my expertise is in the on chain side. But at the end of the day, what we're actually doing is surveying the bitcoin population. Some of them transact on chain and 80% of coins moving on chain, typically speaking, are going in or out of exchanges. So every single one of those coins that's being deposited and withdrawn has a signature. How long did they hold it? What was the cost basis? How much profit did they lock in? Are they taking a loss? All those dynamics. So we survey that, the whole UTXO set. We then look at futures markets. What are they doing over there? What's all the metrics we can look at here? What about options? What about ETFs? What about spot? So suddenly you've got like five different populations and you don't need to door knock every single person to find out what their sentiment is. You just take a statistically significant subset and you say, hey, what's their story? And if on chain people, right, if you just look at the on chain data, if they're locking in really big profits and they're like really in the money and they've got fat green portfolios, I can guarantee you, you go to the futures markets and some guy is paying a 50% interest rate per year to go levered long at the absolute top. So you see this like parallel across all these markets. So you're like, okay, I have a consistent story from five different semi connected but also disconnected bitcoin populations. Now I can make a conclusion based on this. And at the end of the day, what I kind of view it as is you're looking under the hood of what's going on with bitcoin, what drives people to make decisions, profit or loss. So if you're seeing a lot of smart money with old coins taking large profits like we saw at 105k at the 73k peak in 2024, we had $55 billion a month in old supply that was dormant, had not moved, and then it ramped up selling into that peak, then we had eight months to digest it. We had $85 billion at the 105 peak and we are currently digesting it. So you know, some people like, oh, what, what about guys who are doing their UTXO consolidations? Like yes, $86 billion a month worth of people decided that 105k was the time to upgrade to a coal card. Like it's just no, as people are taking profit, like just this is just what's going on. And that's if you have that kind of insight. Again, my whole audience and I've actually asked them this question. Are you a trader? Are you a Hodler? Are you a professional? Like how do you view yourself? The latest stat we did was like 96% Hodler. A lot of these people, they just want to know why the market does what it does. They don't care about trading. I don't care about trading. What I care about is helping people understand why the market does what it does. Just because we have sell side doesn't mean it's bearish. It can be, but if you're Bearish. That's just an opportunity to not buy the top and wait for something to maybe, you know, just maybe not buy before a red 10% candle. And we've all done it and you know what it feels like. But if you can just reverse that and go, well, I can see that a red candle is probably likely. I'm just going to wait. Oh, there it is. Now I'm going to buy.
- [21:18]
Walker
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. It seriously blows my mind that there are bitcoiners who are not yet on nostr. Seriously, what are you guys doing? Just like you shouldn't need to ask permission to use your money, you shouldn't need to ask permission to speak freely, but that's exactly what you're doing if you're still stuck on centralized social media platforms on Nostr, you can't be censored, you can't be banned, and you can't be deboosted for saying words Elon doesn't like. And honestly, the vibes are just better. And there's nowhere else you can end up having a casual conversation with the likes of Jack Dorsey or Lynn Alden or, I don't know, little old me. Nostr also has bitcoin payments built in. They're called zaps. So when you post a meme, a hot take, or a photo of your steak, people will zap you bitcoin to show you they like it and find it valuable. And if you are a content creator, you can start monetizing your work immediately. Unlike YouTube X or any other centralized platform. You can find me on Nostr by going to primal.netwalker and you can check out this podcast on Nostr@primal.net Titcoin. Primal has a built in bitcoin wallet. So you can literally get zapped by people for your posts, then use those same sats to buy a coffee or whatever the heck you want, all from the same app. Search for Primal in the app store, go to primal.net or, or check out any of the hundreds of other Noster apps out there because you can freely switch between them anytime you want. So if you're done being a larp, come join the largest bitcoin circular community in the world and start zapping sats on Nostr.
- [24:08]
James Check
Yeah, it's, it's tough because like for me, I'm, I'm definitely not a trader. I'm not sophisticated enough to be a trader. I don't have the time to be a trader. I, I mean, I look at the bitcoin price probably more than I should, but certainly not a trader by any means. And I'm curious too, just as far as like strategy goes. I mean, do you think in general for the average Hodler is, is just kind of like a DCA and go away the best option for them? Because I know there's a lot of back and forth about like, okay, yeah, DCA works, like, works very well. But also like, if you are able to, you know, to lump in a little bit more at opportune times, that works obviously even better. But like, where, where do you sit on that in terms of like, okay, is there a, is there a best option? And then is there like a best option for most people when they're trying to figure out especially newer people who are just getting in, like, who are finally seeing bitcoin because it's in the news and who are saying, okay, do I just set up this, you know, $5 DCA? Like that doesn't seem to be adding up too much or like, but it seems safer. Or do I just ape in with everything I have right now and grit my teeth?
- [25:14]
Checkmate
Yeah. So again, all of these things are totally personal, right? And for a lot of people, if you just want to be hands off and just go and live your life and you actually don't spend that much time looking at bitcoin, just DCA and walk away. However, I would say that a very large majority of people, especially because it's streamed on Noster watching this, you probably look at bitcoin more than once per day. So let's just rethink about that. What parts of bitcoin are you looking at? A lot of it's going to be the narratives and, and the price chart and you know, they'll be the occasional trader who flicks past. And I'm not a trader as well. In fact, I don't target traders at all with my content because I don't particularly care. I don't care about stop losses and take profit levels. I break my Persona into two because I think it helps people because my audience is broad. We've got Hodlers who are in accumulation mode. You've got people who've been around for many years and it's now like their life savings and they want to understand what's going on. There's professionals who like have trading firms and they all want to all have the same problem. I want to know why the market did what it did. I don't care that it's up, I don't care that it's down. I just want to know why it did that because that helps me understand some of these dynamics. So the way I view data, just by and large it's information about what the rest of the market is doing. And it's kind of like having X ray vision at the poker table where you can see like 30% of the cards. You don't need to see all of them, but if you can see 30% of them, you're like, I can now start making more sound decision. So when I think about like what my biggest pain points are as a Hodler, it's buying when it feels great because that's what we all do. You FOMO buy because it feels awesome and it feels awesome for about three minutes and then you feel terrible because it corrects for the next two months. You're like, I could have bought so much more. And even though it doesn't matter on your relative long term time horizon, just imagine if you had have just looked at two metrics and gone, hey look, the smart money is taking a lot of profit right now and the dumb money is going levered long on futures exchanges. What is that a recipe for a red Candle, right. And that just, just wait. So the idea is like, just don't buy, right? So my two Personas is check the analyst. His job is to be very objective. This is my best read on what I think is going on. And people can kind of interpret that how they need. That's like my objective assessment. But then I often break into check the Hodge and I say, all right, Mr. Analyst, get out. I don't care about all your, you know, fine tuning fancy models. What do I, as a guy who just wants to see bitcoin go up? Well, how do I do this? Right, Yes, I know the price is higher, but I still want to accumulate, I still want to stack sats. I still believe bitcoin's going up forever. But now that I've got an objective assessment, what do I do? I either be more patient, I maybe just go, you know what? I think we're just going higher. So now anytime is a good time and you just kind of refactor it to being like, rather than just looking at bitcoin headlines, just add that extra layer of I'm going to think about what the market's doing, I'm going to visualize, I'm going to see it. And you really don't need that many tools to do this. It's just understanding how in profit are people, are they taking profits? Are people going to generate ape mode? If so, make a decision according to those.
- [28:10]
James Check
So, so where, where are we at with that right now? Like, are we, I mean, we're, we're chop solidating a little bit. Fair to say, but like, where, where do you see this going from here? Are there any kind of like either positive or negative warning signs that you're looking at where you're like, okay, this is going to get interesting in one direction or another?
- [28:28]
Checkmate
Yes, I think it is. And where we are at the moment, relative to the 2024 chop solidation, that was very structured. And I was of the view that we just needed to cool off from that rally. We basically went from FTX to 73 without even A. It was like, without a 15% correction. It was unreal. So then, I mean, we still only had like a 25, 26, right? We had one wick that was 32. So it's really the most controlled bull market we've in our current environment. How did we get here? There's obviously a lot of news with Trump, there's a lot of news with SBRs. There's a lot of things that I would put are not contingent on, but Anchored to politicians. Now, if anyone is going to tell me now, I know that the politicians, they seem to be doing what they said they were going to do. How long that lasts, how realistic this is, like, you know, like, let's be real here, they're still politicians. So I'm of the view that like all you're going to need is a string of, oh, it may not happen or, you know, this isn't, and then suddenly steam can come out. So at the moment I'm actually quite constructive. I think 2025 is going to be a good year. I still have a positive general view, but I do think it's going to be very choppy and you know, we're going to have swings left and right because the world's changing, right? We've seen like a 25 minute tariff war show up and the whole market kind of gets really jittery. So there's just a lot of things that the world has to adjust to. Change. Change is always creating uncertainty. And one thing to view about markets, they can go up on bad news and down on good news, right? Markets don't necessarily respond to news in the way people think they do. Markets don't like uncertainty. And I think we can all agree that there's a lot of things changing and that uncertainty is what's going to create jitters in markets. So at this point in time, whilst I'm constructive on 2025, I actually have two scenarios and I've painted these out. The first one is if we get to 120, 150, 50k, that zone as you go from 120 to 150, more and more models just get really overheated. And when I talk about these models, it's the level where the average bitcoiner has such a big green number in their portfolio that literally every single previous cycle they've sold into it. And I like to say, if you're listening to this and that's not going to be you, it's actually not going to be me. 150k is not my price either, but it's this guy's price and it's that guy's price and that guy just happens to be from 2013. He's got a lot more money than me and he wants to buy a house, he wants to live his life and this is just going to happen. So at 120 to 150, a lot of models get very overheated. That doesn't mean we can't go above that, doesn't mean it's over doesn't mean it's the top. It could be a top. I don't know. We'll have to see. But it's probably not going to be an easy move to just go to 200. It's probably going to take some work. The other scenario I've got is on the downside, which is, well, what happens if we undo all this political stuff? What happens if we go back to 75, right? I don't know. I'm not saying this is going to happen. I got no idea. And that's the first thing I do. I have no clue where the market's going to go. I don't predict anything. I can't predict anything. No one can. I can prepare for both of these scenarios. What am I going to do at 150 and what am I going to do at 75? At 150 if it's overheated, I'm just not going to buy as much. I'm going to wait and allow the market to cool off. If we go to 75, I'm not going to have any money in my bank account anymore. That's basically those two scenarios, right? So I kind of think about those two in advance so that if they happen, then I know exactly what to do. If they don't happen, great. I spent half an hour thinking about what I was going to do. Problem solved.
- [31:52]
James Check
So have a plan. Basically.
- [31:55]
Checkmate
It sounds easier than it is when.
- [31:58]
James Check
Emotions are involved and those emotions are centered around the money that you are for. I think most bitcoiners, like almost all in, like, yeah, you know, you understand why people are emotional. It is one of those things where it's like, it's so much easier said than done too. Like even if you, you know, have the best laid plans, emotions can take over once you actually get to that point and you think, oh, you know, for example, you know, it hits 150k and the guy that had the plan that says, you know, I'm selling, you know, I'm trimming off at 150 and that's that. But he sees 150 hit and it goes up to 155. He's like, you know, I'm. Never mind, like I'm riding this forever. Next stops a million. Let's let, let's go. So in terms of, like, in terms of cycles, because obviously the, we have the having cycles. It's a beautiful thing about bitcoin. It is predictable in terms of its issuance, right? You know exactly what that new issuance is going to be every four or so years. We can predict that. Do you think that the havings are. There's always debate about are the havings priced in because we always know about them or can they never be priced in because again, our monkey brains don't understand absolute scarcity? What's your take?
- [33:10]
Checkmate
Yeah, so my view is that the halving has been priced in forever and basically it doesn't matter. It hasn't mattered for a long time. And I was going to, I should actually run the numbers on this. But if you look at how much miners earn over the next year, right. Long term holders are sold approximately 15 times that in the last like three months. So like do the miners really matter if you've taken their entire yearly issuance and the long term holders have sold it? And that's just long term holders. Other people who've held their coins for a very short period of time, they're also selling. It doesn't really matter, you know what I mean? Like, and people like, oh, but miners are a one directional thing. They're always selling. It's like that's true. Long term holders buy in the bear market, they wait for three, four years and then they sell. They're also one directional, right at the extremes. So in many ways I don't think the halving has mattered for some time. The market's just much, much bigger than them. Now it's actually existing holders. I mean, you know, think about it from a rational perspective. There's a lot of bitcoiners who are like, never sell your bitcoin. It's like, okay, I'm going to turn up the speed dial. We're at 500k now we're at a million. Now we're at 2 million. I'll see that big green number, See that house you. What about five? How high do I need to turn this dial before you take one sat off the table and go and improve your life. Every single person has a price where it's going to improve your life. And again, it may not be you, but I can guarantee you that whilst you may be saying no, I want 10 million, some other guy took it at 200. You know what I mean? Like people have their levels and it's just important to recognize that that is reality. And we can use ideology and say I'm going to hold most of my bitcoin forever as well. But at the same time I know some other guy is going to sell. So as a result I need to behave knowing that that's going to be the case. So you just kind of think about what everyone else is doing. Even if it's not your decision, what is everyone else's decision that helps us frame things up.
- [34:58]
James Check
Do you think that the presence of more bitcoin lending and being able to take out debt against your bitcoin, do you think that changes that dynamic at all, especially for the long term holders?
- [35:10]
Checkmate
Yeah, no. This is actually really interesting and in many ways that is the perfect definition of a long term holder because those coins don't hit the market if you lock your coins up and take dead out against it, which I actually think is going to be a massive product and will happen, especially with SAAB121 getting rescinded. So I think this is absolutely going to happen. You now have the most strict definition of a long term holder. You're going to have to balance that by saying, well, how much debt did these guys take on and where's their scary liquidation price? Because that will also come into play. But that is the definition of a long term holder. They've taken dollars out and they've done something with them in the world. Those coins are not hitting the market. This is almost like a sailor esque strategy. It's a black hole for coins. So I think that's a real thing. But we do have to balance it with well, how much leverage is now building up in the system if and when that does become a problem at some point.
- [36:00]
James Check
So because you mentioned earlier saying that in your opinion the halvings are kind of don't matter as much as maybe people say they do, is it fair to say then that your opinion would be also that like are, are the site, like are the cycles just natural market dynamics of things getting overheated, blowing off, cooling off and they just seem to kind of align because you, you do see a lot of alignment with the havings, right in terms of when the price runs up. So is that just be like it just happens that way or, or why do we see those same kind of correlations in the market as they relate to the havings?
- [36:36]
Checkmate
It's a great question. And you'll often see, I'm sure most people can visualize it, but there's that chart where people like index to the halving and then you can see how each cycle performed from that point on. I don't like that particular version. I prefer the one that goes from the cycle bottom and if you use the one that goes from the cycle bottom, the last two cycles, the 2015, 16, 17 and the 2018, all the way through to 2021. Those two cycles are almost exactly where we are right now. We have following those paths from the cycle bottom. We are like put a pin right in the 2016 market. We are exactly there. Which is strange and uncanny. And I hold two views. I'm like, this four year cycle thing is going to continue until it doesn't. And I simultaneously hold the view that it's already broken. If there's ever a time for it to break, it's probably now. So when I look at that dynamic, how on earth do we get to the exact same position in those last two cycles? I discard the early ones because bitcoin was just too young, right? It's just a very different world back then. The reason is because when you have these capitulations, these like market washouts, which 2015 was, 2018 was, and then FTX, it takes time for the market to recover. Like everyone who's been through a bear market, there's like this period of about, well, it's actually about 700 days almost to the, to the dot. It takes 700 days to get over your PTSD, right, and get over the damage that that bear market brought upon you. So it takes about that long. And once we get to that 700, 800 day period, suddenly the market's up, the critics are back in force and you start feeling really good. You're like, I was right, I was right to have bought those coins all that time ago. And then it keeps going and then you're like, I'm so right, I'm going to go all in again. And suddenly you end up buying the top. So you kind of get this like acceleration phase. But a lot of it is human confidence. That's just how long it takes people to get over the previous market cycle. And I agree with Odell that like bitcoin is designed to go up forever, it's designed to pump forever, but it goes through these things in waves and processes. Now I think it's also important to remember that there's macro factors, right? The halving is also the election years, right? In the us there's liquidity cycles, there's all these different things. And I think bitcoin is increasingly becoming like a macro asset. In fact, I think it is a macro asset. My favorite thing is like you see some global event, a trade war or some thing breaks out on a Sunday and people who tradfi dudes who hate bitcoin, what do they post? The bitcoin price chart. Why? Because it's the only thing that actually sends a signal as to what your stocks are going to do on Monday morning. So everyone is now paying attention to it because it is the index for where the world is going. It is the liquidity index by and large. So I think there's a lot of factors at play, you know, as we move towards this like sovereign debt crisis, which again these things move at glacial pace and then they just happen. There's going to be phases where these cycles are going to break and we're going to get periods where they just have to put liquidity into the system. Right now it looks like they're starting to try and take some of that liquidity out. So we're going to go through these swings and roundabouts and I think it's just important to remember like just because the halving has happened before doesn't mean it's going to happen again. In terms of the cyclical behavior, if there's ever a time for it to break, it's now. But at the same time we are still following that four year cycle. So the reason I hold two views at once is I don't anchor to either of them by holding the view that the four year cycle will continue and it's already broken. I stop worrying about whether it will or won't happen. I just say, well it's interesting that it's still happening, but I don't look at the right hand side of the chart and it goes that means we're going to go up 100x right? I don't hold that view because it's, it changes your bias.
- [40:12]
James Check
Lyn Alden and Sam Callahan in one of their recent pieces, they basically called Bitcoin a barometer for global liquidity. And I think that that's such a great way of describing it because again it's the only real denominator that you have, right? So it's going to measure that the best. And to your other point just now about the fact that I mean we've been in actually a tighter phase of global liquidity recently than I mean obviously than during COVID But I mean we went and there was so much money pumped into this system during the COVID era and right after, and then they start, you know, like US M2 went down like it, they, they pulled liquidity out of the system. And the interesting thing was that around like that whole pulling liquidity out time, you know, now it's starting to go back in. But bitcoin was coming out of the bear at that time. Like bitcoin was actually was doing quite well, so I find that to be really interesting because it makes me wonder, okay, if bitcoin has done pretty damn well under situations that are. I mean, it was for the US it was the fastest rate hikes, you know, like, ever. Basically, their money was being pulled out of the system, which you hadn't seen in a while. If it did that well during that period. And we know that, for example, Donald Trump likes green candles. You know, he likes to see the stock market doing well. He likes to see asset prices doing well. He views that as, you know, his own barometer for how. How happy people are, how well he's doing something he can point to and say, look, you know, I delivered a great market for you. You know that that money printer's got to be turned on kind of full blast at some point. Especially you look at the interest expense on the debt in the US and, you know, all around the world. But again, the US Is the. The biggest kid in the playground, right?
- [41:54]
Checkmate
And one way that I frame things.
- [41:55]
James Check
Up is to gravity. How do you think about it?
- [41:57]
Checkmate
Okay, there's the gravity of the situation. For each asset, everything's got a gravity. You know, I've been tweeting about this recently, but there's like five prices that I look at. Oil price, because the more expensive oil is, the tighter everyone's liquidity is, because it's the input cost of everything, right? So oil, the dollar, because that's what everyone's debt is denominated in. Who's not America? Well, I mean, their debt is as well, but they can print it. So every other country, their debt's in US Dollars. So the more expensive the dollar is, the harder their debt is, the more they got to tighten the belt. Treasuries, because that's the benchmark interest rate. And then Bitcoin and gold, because those two are telling you they're the fire alarms that tell you where the overall liquidity picture is going. And for all of these assets, there's a gravity. Where does it want to go? Left to its own devices. And then there's the managed outcome. And I think it's important to note that aside from bitcoin and gold, because they're the fire alarm, the gravity for them is a result of the other three, by and large. So for the dollar, I think that Brent Johnson's milkshake theory is perfectly correct, where if you leave the world to its own devices, the dollar just goes up forever because there's this, like, structural bid for it. The debt must be repaid or serviced at the very least. And therefore the structural bid is for the dollar. What happens if the dollar goes too high? It breaks stuff because suddenly they can't pay their debt and then they've got to sell assets and that breaks things. So the managed result is that they have to weaken it. Same for Treasuries. The natural gravity is why on earth would I lend the government money? They're bankrupt, why would I lend them anything, especially for 30 years? So therefore, where's the gravity for yields up? What happens if yields go too high? Shit breaks. And if shit breaks, they have to weaken it, which means they've got to bring yields down, they've got to find buyers for bonds. If they can't find buyers for bond, then the Fed becomes the buyer for bonds. So there's like, where's the gravity and where's the managed result? And generally speaking, the managed result comes as a reaction to. So when they see things starting to break, then they start to do these things. And we saw this back in 2023, yields on the 10 year side to get towards 5%. That was a point of stress. Stuff started to break. Janet Yellen started issuing shorter term debt and pulling all that $2.3 trillion out of the reverse repo facility. Putting that money from COVID That black hole of money started getting pumped back into the system. Suddenly bitcoin starts going up. So that's the way I like to frame these things. What's the gravity of the situation and then what is the managed outcome? And generally speaking, the gravity is obviously always there. It wants to be pulling in that direction, but they've got to fight it. Right. If you go to the biggest picture, the Jeff Booth level, the gravity is deflation. Technology continues to make us more efficient. The gravity is deflation. The managed outcome is inflation. Right. So you've got to kind of understand where the market wants to go and how they're going to push it or pull it away from that result.
- [44:46]
James Check
Do you foresee, like just for this year? Kind of. It seems like things are going to get pretty wild. Like first of all, you never know what, what Trump is going to do. And the whole world pays attention to what the US President does. The one nice thing about Biden was that it was just like he was asleep. So, you know, there was not a whole lot to pay attention to. But yeah, extremely predictable. You know, he's going to sniff heads, you know, he's going to mumble a lot like you know exactly what you're getting with him. Trump's a bit of A wild card, like he will just do things. Are you seeing just a lot of like for bitcoin specifically, but also just kind of global markets? Are you seeing a lot of volatility on the horizon this year? Are you seeing just a lot of, again, uncertainty leading to some of that volatility?
- [45:29]
Checkmate
I think so. And if you think about my, my base case is that Trump is going to do what's best for Americans. Right. What I think Washington has been doing and will continue, that's the status quo, that's the gravity. What do they want to do? They want to benefit Washington. So you've kind of got the government trying to benefit the government by exporting dollars, exporting jobs. Right. Benefiting from all those things. I think Trump is going to go through the pro and he clearly is going through the process of trying to benefit Americans, which in the short term is actually quite chaotic because you are reshaping the way that the system works. And a lot of the rules that would have happened previously suddenly are going to flip and start moving, moving in reverse. So in the long term, that's going to benefit America. If you benefit the people, then you're going to benefit the country overall. But there is going to be short term pain. Markets are going to have to adjust. I think a lot of markets thought that these tariffs were a bit of a bluff. And in a way they are. As we saw with Colombia, as we saw with, you know, maybe with Canada, where it's basically like I'm going to just put, put it on the table. And they say this is how it's going to work now and you're going to kick and scream and then eventually you're going to bend the knee. So some of them is a bluff, some of them isn't. Right. He's obviously quite serious about putting this stuff into play. You're going to have a lot of the system that b. That's going to push back against it. He's going to get a lot more done than I think they, the system that be expects and markets expect. But he's also not going to get as much done as the Trump bulls think because he's eventually going to hit these roadblocks. And political capital is a finite resource. So I think a lot of these dynamics are just going to play out. Markets still have to adjust to these things. You know, again, I'm not an equity, I'm not an equity evaluation specialist. I don't spend any time looking at stocks. But if you just look at it on a broad picture, it's like these things are very, very expensive. Like there's a, there's a lot baked into these stock prices. Can they be maintained up there? We saw jitters just with deep seq, right? And again, I have no edge in AI whatsoever. But just the release of a model by another country, suddenly everything tanked by like 10% and Nvidia got absolutely crushed. And Nvidia is like, you know, what is it, the Mag 7, like 30% of the S&P 500. So there's just a lot of sensitivity out there and there's a lot of concentrated risk. I've said to my subscribers, just keep an eye on the gold price because gold doesn't go up when everything's all hunky dory. Gold goes up when stuff ain't quite right. And gold's going up. Gold's hitting new all time highs day after day. This is a sovereign. You know, other countries are basically buying it as the marginal buyer of Treasuries and then someone else has got to come in to buy those Treasuries, otherwise yields go up. So there's just a lot of things changing. And I think, you know, for my, for my view, when I really look at this problem, gold and Bitcoin are the only assets that make sense to me. Right. I just struggle to find anything else to be like, yeah, that makes sense. But at the same time I'm very, very aware. People probably seen that Mimic and Capital chart where it's like gold priced in the Weimar Republic. It goes up with a lot of swings to get there. And I think that's the correct framework. Think about this stuff.
- [48:25]
James Check
Yeah, I mean Peter Schiff is certainly very happy right now with, with the price of gold doing what it's doing. I'm curious just in terms of the like at the nation state level and we were mentioning cycles earlier, does the, does the enactment of a strategic bitcoin reserve in the US or in another G7, does that fundamentally start to change cycle dynamics? Like, does that start to kind of blow the doors off and make it just much harder to figure out what's coming next from your perspective?
- [48:56]
Checkmate
I think so. And I think Nick Carter did a really good piece. I forget exactly what it was called, but why he doesn't support a bitcoin strategic reserve and I generally align with that piece. Is it a tacit admission by the US government that something is wrong? And like when I frame this thing up, it's like for me as an individual, why do I buy bitcoin? Because it makes a Hell of a lot of sense for check on chain as a company. Why do we buy bitcoin? Because it also makes a hell of a lot of sense. Doesn't that extrapolate up to a sovereign level? Of course it does. But at the same time there's different types of sovereigns. There's sovereigns who. For example, if we look at what Russia has been doing, they've been buying gold for many years, same as China, because they're like these Treasuries can and did get frozen. So therefore it's kind of not your money. So makes perfect sense in the world for them to be buying gold and accumulating Bitcoin. Makes perfect sense. Does it make sense for the global reserve issuer to do it? I'm not sure I can quite get behind the idea that the bitcoin backs the dollar because, you know, as much as we all love bitcoin, it's a very, very small fish in a very, very big pond now. So look, there is some game theoretic aspects there. You could argue that every country will eventually go down this road, but at the same time, does the global reserve asset issuer have to do this? I'm not, I'm not that sure. So for me, I think the, the way I think about the bitcoin strategic reserve is that there's basically, it's a binary outcome. It either happens in which case number go up, everyone happy, you stacked as much as you could. Congratulations. So therefore that's kind of a. It's an easy answer as to what happens there. Good. If it doesn't happen for any reason or we get more of this announcement of announcement and we're going to think about maybe talking about potentially having a committee that we might think about. That's kind of what politicians do when they don't want to do anything. They have committees about committees. That seems to be the status that we're in if they choose not to do this. And if you think about the invisible hands that exist behind there, there's departments of defense, there's Treasuries, there's all these different groups who are going to say, hey, we probably shouldn't do this because we want people to buy our Treasuries, not Bitcoin. If it doesn't happen, that's what's more interesting because that's what takes all the steam out of the market. Anything that was pricing in this strategic reserve. There's a long road between now and there's. I also don't think I agree with Nick again. That the executive order approach here is probably not the right way to do it, because anything that gets signed in with an executive order gets signed out with an executive order. It's much better to go through US Congress and get voted on. But when I'm really honest and I just like, as an Australian commenting on Americans, you can correct me if I'm wrong here, but I would be shocked if you walk outside and pick 10 people from the street and say, hey, should the US government spend $500 billion on buying Bitcoin? I would be amazed. Unless they're wearing an orange shirt. I think they would probably say, what? I don't have a job, mate. Like, I don't give a shit about bitcoin. Can you please fix the economy? That's what I think the result's going to be. It's just a very low priority, guys. So that's my base case.
- [51:49]
James Check
No, I think it's a fair statement that if you did a man on the street, the majority of people would probably just regurgitate the same bitcoin talking points that they've been fed by the mainstream media for years. Because we are still very, very early in this. And, you know, it's gonna. It's gonna be interesting to see what happens. Like my, you know, from my perspective, it's like, if the US Government does it, great. If they don't do it, great, it doesn't change fundamentally why I use bitcoin. I have seen a lot of people talk about how it's like, oh, well, you know, you. This no longer is the separation of money and state. Bitcoin was supposed to be the separation of money and state. What is this? To your point earlier? It's like, if bitcoin is what we think it is, then of course sovereigns were eventually going to adopt it as well, because it's in their best interest to do it. Bitcoin doesn't care if you're you or me or a company or a sovereign. It doesn't matter to bitcoin. Bitcoin does not care. So that was always going to happen. But the important thing to remember is the separation of money, the creation of money from state still exists. The government can't print more bitcoin. And that's, I think, like the little bit of the nuance that gets missed there. It's like, just because the government starts using bitcoin doesn't mean that the government controls bitcoin. We know that's not how it works. And they can't print more, nor does the Game theory incentivize them to find a way to print more. So at least we have that. So switching gears a little bit because I think, you know, every now and then again people on YouTube, turns out they're altcoiners too. And so I think it's good to maybe to speak a little bit about just the absolute carnage in the altcoin markets as it relates to bitcoin dominance. Like even with bitcoin, you know, like on the tariff announcements, bitcoin dips a bit, right? Altcoins just got absolutely slaughtered. Bitcoin dominance is going up as price is going down. How are you looking at this? What do you think about it? What does it tell us about larger sentiment? And kind of are you seeing like two different worlds here where it's like the bitcoiners who, if you're, you know, if you're seeing bitcoin dip, if you're like me, you're like, oh great, my DCA goes a little bit further than it did yesterday. But for altcoiners who believe that their altcoins just chase bitcoin wherever it goes. And you know, if bitcoin moons, I mean, they, they've not had a good time this run, it seems.
- [54:11]
Checkmate
No, no, this has been a. And a lot of people like, why do you spend any time thinking about shitcoins? Like, I don't, but I'm an observer, I'm a market observer. And when I pay attention to this stuff, because it's interesting to just see where, where the rest of the market is. Because the reality is, and actually you can look at this, go and look at how many UTXOs on Bitcoin. More than like, you know, $100. It's like there's less than 25 million UTXOs. And I'd say most people listening to this, you probably have more than one utxo. So as a result, that's how many bitcoiners are on chain, right? It's an. It's in the single digit millions. It's not a lot. So that's your base case. Where's everybody else? Where's this other supposedly 300 million people? They don't hold bitcoin, they hold all the other shit, right? Or they're on exchanges and the like. So why do we pay attention to this stuff? Because it tells us information, it tells us where the market is. And I've been trying to work out why sentiment has been so shot at, crashing to 102k and everyone's just completely destroyed. And I'm like, eventually it comes pretty clear that this divergence between Bitcoin and crypto, both in narrative size, scale attention, is very, very real. So the first thing is that this whole bull cycle, we have seen capital inflows into Bitcoin at a tremendous rate. Just so that people can understand the scale of this thing, we use a metric called the realized cap. It's the on chain market cap. Rather than valuing every coin at the spot price, it values every coin at the time when it last transacted on chain. So the better way to think about this, it's the value saved in bitcoin. You bought one BTC back at $10,000, you invest $10,000 and you keep holding that UTXO, it's saved at 10,000, that's how much you saved in that asset. Now 45% of all dollars that have ever been invested have been invested above 90K. 45. That is the scale of where we're at right now. And that tells me two things. One, that's a shitload of demand. And second thing, that's also a lot of sensitive buyers, right? So if we go below 90k, don't be surprised if it gets a little bit hairy because all those 45% of dollars invested are going to be a little bit scared. Now if you look at the altcoin space, we have not seen that capital inflow. And I looked at a series of metrics like how many of the top thousand tokens are above their 200 day moving average? Profitable. Just literally more than 50% of people are in profit, more than 50% of coins are in profit. And there was another metric. We're seeing capital inflows over 30 days. In previous market cycles there was like a structural bull trend where more people go in a profit, the 200 day starts getting flipped, there's more people who are having a good time, more capital inflow into shitcoins. This cycle it's been like spike dead, spike dead. There just hasn't been. And that's. That spike is only just getting to like half of the top top thousand being not bearish, right? We're not talking about a good time here, we're just saying not complete dog shit. So the average altcoin investors had a horrible time. And what's really interesting about this, the money has come into Bitcoin first via spot markets, then via the ETFs. But it is simply not rotating. It is not rotating in the way that most people expected back in 2023, a lot of people and Particularly hedge funds and traders. I heard this from many sources and firsthand they bought ETH at the bottom, not bitcoin, because they expected the bitcoin eth l ones defi nft shitcoins like they, they expected that like long tail behavior and it went bitcoin, solana, shitcoins, right? But they didn't get the classic like waterfall behavior. They basically just. Money came into bitcoin and it just stayed there. And I think that's a really important insight. The money that's coming into bitcoin is not rotating. It doesn't want to rotate. Now as a result, people then look at the lofty valuations of like, I use eth as a punching bag because it's number two and it's the, it's the most obvious one for this. But if you look at how much bitcoin's market cap swings on an intraday basis, this is like the high and the low of the day. It moves an entire Solana every day. Salon is like 150, 60 billion. Bitcoin does that in a day, every single day. Just between the swings and the highs and the lows. Just like if you plot them over each other, you can't even see the Solana market cap because it's so big. We used to move on that same metric. We used to move 5% of an Ethereum back in 2021. We now move 20% of an Ethereum. So we're moving like when something is moving a fifth of your entire market cap just on like intraday wicks, you are officially irrelevant by comparison. You just don't, you don't count. No one cares. And now what I think is going on is a lot of these assets, particularly I think Ethereum is interesting because it's tried all the different narratives. It's tried the money thing, it's tried the smart contract thing, it's trying the data availability thing. Now these are all like the big streams. And it tried, it's still trying to do the money thing and the reality is it's just not working. So now investors look at it and go, well, how do I value this thing? How do I actually value if I can't value it as like a monetary asset? I know I'll do a discounted cash flow. Oh, that's a hundred dollar ETH price. That's the number I got out of this model. Let me run it again with more bullish numbers. Oh, $250 eth price. Shit. This thing's ten times overvalued. These are like the conservative numbers you come up with. And I think this is just echoing through the whole space. And you see it with meme coins. What are meme coins? Right. This is kind of Murad's thesis. It's basically just just tokenized community doing away with all the tech. You don't need devs. It's just complete shitcoins. But the thing with that is, like, how much energy does that really have? Trump then launches these meme coins, which has all sorts of questionable realities. I mean, that's. That. That itself is a bad sign, in my opinion. But, like, how do you beat that as a meme? It's hard to see. It's literally the sitting US President if that's the height, what comes next. So you kind of just realize that, like, the crypto world has had hundreds of billions of dollars and they've built stablecoins and casinos, and the casinos, yeah, they're going to always remain. But do they deserve a $400 billion market cap? Do they deserve 150 billion? I don't know. I don't know. And I think a lot of investors are just struggling and the narratives are struggling to justify the premium that is already baked in. And I, you know, if I kind of think about why sentiment is so bad, I think too many people owned not enough bitcoin. That's step one. They owned too many shitcoins, but more importantly, too many of the shitcoins that didn't go up, which is also painful. And then you go to the third rung, which is like, they're actually now questioning the valuation frameworks that they got there in the first place and going, oh, my God. It's like my favorite tweet at the moment is like, this is where bottoms will form if there is one. And it's like the. If there is one is doing a lot of listening here, because where is it? Where's the bottom, guys? Like, it just keeps coming.
- [60:55]
James Check
Well, I think they're all starting to kind of realize because you pointed out, like, ETH is going through all these different changing narratives. You know, the ultrasound money was the hilarious one. And now you just, you know, tweeted out either today or yesterday. ETH's net issuance now, since the merge, is now positive territory again. So even though it was supposed to be deflationary forever, it's like, oh, it turns out when you've got a foundation in charge of your money, that you can't believe anything that they say or plan in the future. And so none of these altcoins are actually alts at all. I mean, they are just shitcoins, because if they were alts, they would actually be alternatives to bitcoin. But they are not. They are just. They want their shitcoins. And the funny thing is that I think that people are starting to realize this now. They're realizing, oh, bitcoin is in a league of its own. Its competition is nothing. There is no second best. There is nothing competing with bitcoin. Now all of you meme coins, or all of you L1s and then all the meme coins built on top of you are all competing with each other.
- [61:56]
Checkmate
Yes.
- [61:57]
James Check
So now it's just infighting. You know, it's no longer. You know, you're kind of like poking the. The big king of bitcoin. It's like, no, no, no. The king moved on from you. There's no interest there. You are now fighting amongst yourselves and realizing that there is not enough new suckers floating in here for you to be able to rug.
- [62:16]
Checkmate
I think that's a really important point. The money that's come into this industry has been institutional and sophisticated. This is why bitcoin hasn't pulled back more than 25% on a serious closing basis. The money is very, very serious. And it looks at these things and goes, these aren't serious. So you're absolutely correct. It's kind of like ancestral money, where it's just all the crypto money fighting amongst themselves for which coin's gonna pump. And I can't help but feel, because I had this meme way, way back ago, you know, that meme where it's like the old man's leaning over, then he goes, but not for me. And he pulls out the gun. It was the concept, like the flippening, the flipping, but it's not for me. It's. It's. It's actually. Bitcoin's gonna be just fine. It's actually the top signal for the crypto market, in my view, if it hasn't already happened, is going to be when they all start fighting over which coin flips for number two. And they're all. You can imagine the fervor that's going to come out and that will be the final extinguishing light where they all realize we're just going to flip each other to zero. Because eventually we realize that there's just. There's just nothing here. It's a shame.
- [63:17]
James Check
And then maybe they'll finally realize the toxic bitcoin maximalists were right. And we're just Trying to look out for them, but maybe not. Okay, so I appreciate the perspective on the shitcoins. We'll leave them be for now. There's always room if you're shitcoining, for you to come over to Bitcoin. It's. It's not going to bite. And the people are not as toxic as you think. One thing I wanted to get into a couple of questions, because there were a couple of great questions asked on Noster and on X, and the first one of them was just about never getting a clear answer about Bitcoin balance on exchanges. Seeing multiple results for this. What can you tell us about this? Is this something people should look at or is this kind of a nothing burger?
- [63:59]
Checkmate
Yes. So exchange balances is one of the engagement farmers preferred tools. They have no signal whatsoever. So my colleagues back at glassnow, they actually released a report recently where they look at this as like this waterfall decline of exchange balances. Now, the reason why, when you go to data provider A, B, C, D, they all have different numbers is because tracking exchange balances is extremely difficult, extremely specialized, always changing forever, dynamic, never fixed. You have a whole team of data scientists who are constantly tracking all these UTXOs and often they're missing like one and a half million coins, two million coins. So what the, what my colleagues showed is that basically over time, the coins that, what looks like an exchange decline, they're actually just coins moving into the ETFs, which are just custody by Coinbase. So this is the thing. When you look at an exchange balance chart, what you need to realize is that data providers find new wallets all the time. And it's not as if, like they find this wallet, let's say they find a new Binance hot wallet. That wallet didn't just appear the day they found it. It's probably been around since like 2019. So they're like, oh, let's go and retrofit the data. So that exchange balance is always historically changing. It's never a fixed number, it's always changing and moving. And it depends on how good your labels are. So this waterfall decline, this supply squeeze that we're seeing are just coins going from Coinbase, the exchange into iBIT, Coinbase custody. It's literally just moving to the other side of Coinbase's ledger. It's not a supply squeeze. Right? So this is a really important thing. So my general advice, when you see people talking about exchange balances, they are engagement farming. They don't know what they're talking about. Very, very few people can actually tell you what it means and whether there's signal in it. And as someone who spent a lot of time with this data for the average pleb, pure 100% unadulterated noise. Get rid of it, remove it from your feed. It is completely useless. I can't stress this enough. The only people were exchanged metrics in general are useful is for high frequency traders, people who are building algorithmic bots and they want to see flows coming in and out of exchanges. Show me when people are depositing large amounts of coins and I'm going to trade around on the micro timeframes. If you're not doing that, you do not need to look at exchange metrics at all. They do not provide signal. So that's my like just base case for the average pleb out there. Don't look at it. Not useful.
- [66:29]
James Check
Are they at all useful in terms of. Is there any way to figure out if exchanges actually are selling paper bitcoin through these metrics? Or is that something that. No. So that's not even helpful.
- [66:40]
Checkmate
If you look at the 2022 bear market, what created the savageness of that last six months? It was all the off chain, all the hidden leverage that Celsius and three arrows and all these mobs actually had. There is no metric for this because the whole point of it is it's clandestine leverage. So if they're doing all this paper bitcoin, right? And I actually wrote a piece that I called paper Bitcoin. It's actually one of my favorite pieces I wrote last year. And there's this narrative that derivatives are suppressing the bitcoin price. And my take on it was, well, if you're a big asset manager and you want to allocate a billion dollars to bitcoin, if you can't hedge a billion dollars worth of risk in a liquid options market or a liquid futures market, you can't buy the billion in the first place. So my case on paper bitcoin is actually without derivatives and without big options markets, you can't have the big capital inflows to take us higher. You actually need the derivatives markets to get to 5, 6, 7 trillion dollar market caps. That's just how it is. So that was my like take on paper bitcoin. Whether exchanges are like short selling and all this kind of stuff. People, people moan about this all the time. Guys, we're crashing to $97,000. Where's the suppression, right? It's, it's, we're basically at all time high. The thing is one I should actually add this to my chop solidation definition. It is also a period where the biggest narratives about short selling and manipulation, every man and his dog is banging on about this. No one talks about manipulation and short selling and all this stuff when the market's going down or when it's going up, only when it's going sideways and nowhere. Which by the way, if you look at on a daily price action, bitcoin goes nowhere. And by nowhere, I mean less than 1% up or down 40% of the time. 40% of the time, Bitcoin literally goes nowhere on a daily basis. The other 30% it goes up and the other 30% it goes down. So if you're one of these short sellers, right, there's a 70% chance you're going to be wrong. Because 40% of the time it goes nowhere, you're wrong. And 30% of the time it goes up, you're wrong. So all this is why day traders get blown up all the time. But it's not manipulation, folks. We're a $2 trillion asset. It's going to take a lot of money to move to the next altitude. If we can't find that money, we go down to a lower altitude until we do. So this is just how markets work. Don't worry about boogeymen. You'll never catch them. And if you do catch them, what are you going to do about doesn't change your world at all. Let it go, move on.
- [69:00]
James Check
Just speaking of large numbers, because you touched on this briefly, but I know you wanted to talk about a little bit this kind of law of large numbers piece. You want to get into that in a little bit more detail maybe?
- [69:10]
Checkmate
Yeah, for sure. So I called it the law of large numbers, which is the whole idea of that concept is that things are basically mean reverting. When you run enough simulations, it goes back to some level. For that level, what is the gravity of bitcoin? It's the realized cap, in my view, it is the money saved in bitcoin on chain. If you go to an exchange and you just buy and you just leave your coins there, you're one button away from a cell. It's not really a capital inflow. When you buy and you take it in a cold storage and you huddle that thing for six months, a year, five years, you have saved money in bitcoin. So the realized cap, in my opinion, that is the metric. When people ask me is bitcoin being adopted, I show them the straight up chart of realized cap and say look at all this money being saved in bitcoin. It's up $480 billion in the last two years. That's how much money is going. Yes, it is being adopted. So my concept is in order to go, you know, we're at a 700, let's just say an 800 billion dollar realized cap right now and we're at 2 trillion. In order to get to a 2 trillion market cap, we needed $800 billion to go into the realized cap. The real number is 800 billion and the multiplier is then whatever that is up to 2 trillion. In order for us to get to 3 trillion, you probably need the realized cap to go to like 1 trillion or 1.2 trillion and add that extra capital flow to move higher. Where does those capital flows happen? During chop solidation periods, during corrections, during times when the market goes nowhere and trades around. And people, buyers and sellers are trying to work out what this thing is worth. People take profit. That revalues their $10,000 bitcoin to 100,000. Some other guy had to come in with $90,000 more than the original purchase price to acquire that same coin capital inflow. So that's the way I like to think about these things. Right. Just takes time. We were in the world of big numbers. Bitcoin is as we're talking about shitcoins. It is the biggest fish by, no, not even contended with the biggest fish in its pond, but it just swam out into the biggest pond in the world which is the macro market. So Whilst Bitcoin is $2 trillion and it's going to take time and big money to go to the next level. Gold added $6 trillion to its market cap last year alone. That's a 25% move, right? And I'd say most bitcoiners would be very disappointed with a 25% bull market. That's what it, that's what I mean. It's so. But 6 trillion, that puts just take Bit Gold's ad, just the amount that it went up last year. Bitcoin's $350,000 a coin at that market cap, just the amount of gold added. So we're in a world where bitcoin is the smallest fish in the biggest pond, which is the opportunity set. But the opportunity set takes a long time to get there. And a lot of people, I don't want to bring it up actually, but the power law, a lot of people talk about the power law, which I don't give any time or effort to. One thing that a lot of people ignore about the Power Law is its log time as well. To go up orders of magnitude, you need orders of magnitude more time as well. And that part I actually do agree with.
- [72:08]
James Check
It's. Yeah, I, I have not given too much attention to the, to the Power Law. You just saved me some potential time there. That, that's fantastic. So just building off that, another question we have was just about chop solidation and the question specifically was is this the highest weekly chop solid choppiness index that we've ever seen? Like are we at a period of extreme choppiness right now or is this just kind of par for the course?
- [72:35]
Checkmate
Yeah, no. So the reason that chop solidation has its name, it actually comes from. The only technical indicator I use is called the choppiness index. This Australian commodity trader invented it many years ago. And basically what it looks at is I use a 10 window period for weeklies. And the idea is take the last 10 candles and you can see the price is chopping around within that range. If all the candles are within a defined range, this thing will go very high. And the idea is it's basically saying it's like, like a fuel tank, we are ready to trend again. We've chopped around long enough that we're ready to go. And this thing works on daily and weekly and monthly time frames. It doesn't tell you a direction, it just tells you has the market chopped wood for long enough on that particular time frame. So yes, we've basically hit an all time high. Now again, I use a 10 week period. For mine the standard is 14. So all these things are variable. I use 10 because by my analysis we roughly 10 trend for about 10 weeks at a time and then we chop around. So that was just kind of my base case there. But the market looks like it wants to go. It, it does want to move which direction it goes. Well, I've got my upside 150k scenario and I've got my downside 75 case scenario. I got to look at both of them because it could be both, it could be one, we don't know. It could be one and then the other. So we'll have to wait and see.
- [73:48]
James Check
Do you think, you know, and I won't hold you to a price prediction or anything, but is that 150 case scenario, is that where you see like as in that's as high as we're going this cycle, like barring, like does that include the potential of nation states just deciding to ape in or is this, that's that's base case. Yeah. There may be some other, like all else being equal. That's kind of where you think we're going.
- [74:12]
Checkmate
Yeah. So I think the, the way to think about this is in terms of if we're just thinking about from like a probabilistic standpoint, the metrics that I've used to define that 150 zone. If we get to 150, only 5% of all those metrics, trading history is at a higher level than that. So we've gone there. 5% is not zero, but it's also. There's a 95% chance that they're kind of overheated. So it's one of those things where check the analyst, check the analyst looks at this thing and goes, for the foreseeable future, I can't tell where we're going to be in 10 years time. For the foreseeable future, I think 150k is everything will be overheated. And check the analysts just by, you know, I cannot have an opinion that is otherwise that is saying like, oh, suddenly all my models are broken. That's, that's fomo, right. That's me going, oh, I'm just going to ditch the models. Because my gut feel. So based on everything I look at, Hodlers have put tops in at the amount of profit we get to 150. Now the other thing that's important to remember, these are moving targets. 150 was 149 and 148 a couple of weeks ago. Because as demand comes in, as that realized cap climbs, the average cost basis lifts. I mentioned that there's 45% of all dollars invested above 90k. What happens if investors have just realized that this is now the floor and we get this period of reaccumulation that actually cools things off and raises this level. Right. So the idea is that we're trying to look for when are we stretched away from the mean. Right. Because you want to always go back towards that mean. That's what mean reversion is all about. I think the realized cap is an important mean reversion model. Unless we get that demand coming in, those models will just keep going higher and higher. But if we were to teleport tomorrow and I wake up, we're at 150 check. The analyst simply has to put out a piece saying, guys, we're overheated beyond belief. There's a 5% chance or a 4% chance we're going to keep going. That's not zero. But if we keep Going higher, the odds go from 4% to 2% to half a percent to nothing. And then you're like we're in rare air and maybe it's a new cycle, maybe this time is different. Maybe a million dollars is just a magnet. But the other framework I've got, which I think is important, if we wake up tomorrow and we go to a million dollars, I think most people listening to this can probably envision an 80% correction back to 200k. I can't envision an 80% correction from 100k back to 20k. Good luck. So you know the bull market authors, the bear that follows, the more we just grind up and sideways, up and sideways, the higher those models keep going. So slow and steady is actually going to get us to a much, much better place. Far more robust bear markets will be much more shallow. From 150, I don't think we go down 80%, I think we go down 40%, 50%. Right. That's the kind of environment where it's just not going to be bad enough to justify going back down 80%. So that's how I think about things. And we'll just have to read it as it comes, I suppose.
- [77:04]
James Check
Especially if that environment coincides with a very high liquidity environment from the fiat system that just seemed. Yeah, it's going to be an interesting recipe. One of the other questions that we had slightly different take was just about what, what do you think about recent kind of very, very low fee environment? It's a great time to consolidate those UTXOs. But like why do you think the on chain activity is so particularly slow at this moment? Not a lot of competition for block space.
- [77:34]
Checkmate
Yeah, I think there's two takes here. So the first one is that strictly speaking when fees go down like this and on chain volumes go down like this in every single previous cycle, it has been the start of a bear market. That's just check the analyst opinion is it is you would rather people using Bitcoin than not. So first things first, strictly speaking it's not. It's not great. We also have to temper this by saying we've probably had a low fee environment for some time. It's been all the shitcoin ordinals and all that kind of guff that's been going around which has basically just died with all the other shitcoins because that's now disappeared suddenly. We're just looking at monetary transactions. I wrote a piece the other day where I think runes was basically the number one since the halving has Been like the number one block space user basically went to zero almost overnight. That is why blocks have essentially emptied out. So now everyone's kind of left looking at this and going, well, where's all the demand? Where's all the. And it's still there, by the way, right? We still have, you know, $15 billion a day of old money taking profit. Someone else is buying them, we're crashing to $97,000. So I'm not, I'm not a bear actually. But I am also prepared for guys, this is not what you see during a rip roaring bull market. So just be tempered, right? If we were to go back down to 75, if we were to go back down to 80, if we go back down to 90, these are the levels where I am certainly paying attention to because again, check. The analyst is saying, hey, it's not strictly good. Check. The Hodler lights up and goes, oh, that sounds like I'm gonna have to empty my bank account soon. So therefore I gotta start thinking about that in advance so that when it happens I don't go, I just spent all my money at a high price. I'm like, there it is, thank you very much.
- [79:12]
James Check
Yeah, I mean, do you think also that there's the possibility of just inflows into the ETFs changing some of that volume in terms of on chain? Like a lot of people who would have been lighting up your on, you know, on chain metrics for this, those are now more consolidated because they're with an ETF issuer and then with Coinbase.
- [79:30]
Checkmate
Yes and no. Because in order for the ETFs to be filled, you still need an OTC transaction and some guy to sell. And you know, if you think about it, $1 going into the ETF is not $1 worth of UTXOs moving around. There's multiple transactions for it to, to go into the exchange, get sold, move to the otc, go to the authorized participant, then go into the custody. So there's like, there's like a sequence of money moving around. So what we're actually seeing is that there's just less activity. We've got less trade volume as well, that's also cooling off. So you just look at all. And that's why I say you look at what's going on, ETFs, what's going on, derivatives, what's going on in spot on chain. And you look at all of these things and they tell you the same story. We are substantially quieter today than we were at 100,000 when we first Hit it. So there has been a cooling off. That doesn't mean the top is in. It might, but it doesn't mean the top is in. Just means that right now it's a softer patch than where it was. Therefore I'm probably not expecting that we just teleport to a million dollars tomorrow. So therefore I kind of put that scenario as a low probability event and I start thinking about things that are more rational. Well, until things start to pick up, I assume that I can be a bit more patient.
- [80:36]
James Check
Does that trade volume get measured in BTC terms or dollar terms?
- [80:41]
Checkmate
Usually it's in dollar, it's usually in the quote. So if you're trading shitcoin versus btc, BTC is the quote currency. It will be in btc. If you're doing bitcoin versus dollar, it will usually be dollars.
- [80:52]
James Check
Okay, okay, that makes sense. So I want to be conscious of your time here, but I wanted to give a chance just, you know, you have a very rational way of looking at these things and I think it's very useful because again, emotions can run high when price is going up and when price is going down and seemingly even more so when prices chop solidating. So just, do you have any just general advice for folks on navigating this? Especially maybe, you know, for newer folks who like, I mean I'm pretty, pretty new myself. Like this is just like my first cycle that I've actually seen come through. You know, I. So like I, I'm new. There are people who are now just getting in. In the year 2025, we're minting new bitcoiners. What advice do you have for people who are new to this who are saying like, I don't even know how to, how to deal with all this. How should they handle it? How should they think about this going forward?
- [81:42]
Checkmate
Yeah, so I think that the first thing is that most people come in and they think they're a trader. We all go through this experience. You end up at some point blowing up an account somewhere and you realize, I hate this trading thing. I hate this trading thing too. I don't like doing it. I don't think it's fun. I don't write about it, I don't care about it. You know, entry, stop losses, it's just a different, don't worry about it. So have that long term perspective. I actually think that having a separation of you the analyst and you the Hodler, it may not be the analyst, but like you, the objective thinker, it's natural human behavior to take Our expectations for what should happen. Trump's in power. They're talking about strategic reserves. Bhutan's buying. Why aren't we at a million dollars yet? That's your expectation. Your expectation is not what is happening. Right? And it's very easy for people to apply their expectation to the price chart. The way this manifests is you take big information like, Trump's gonna get in and we're gonna win all this, you know, it's all gonna be fantastic. And then applying it to the next daily candle, right? And when it doesn't happen, you feel like something is wrong, and you keep trying to justify why the price is doing it, and then you go, oh, it's manipulation. That's why my expectations aren't happening. No, your expectations were incorrect, right? So don't allow your expectations to get in the way of what the market is actually doing. Markets are just information. That's all they are. They're just information. The only thing you can control is your decisions. So make your decisions before they happen, so that when, if, even if that scenario doesn't play out, you have made your decision in case it does. And if you just think about it from that perspective, it just improves the whole process. You are here for the long term. You don't have to be a trader. In fact, I recommend most people don't trade because it's a huge waste of your brain power. You probably won't win. The statistics show you probably won't win. Most people should not trade. But that doesn't mean that understanding what Bitcoin is doing isn't useful. So that's why I think on chain data, a lot of people like, oh, I don't want to trade. I'm not a trader. I don't trade either. But I study this thing because it helps me understand what my life savings are doing every single day. And if you're on Bitcoin Twitter or you're on Bitcoin Noster, or you're listening to podcasts, every day, you're spending more. If you're checking the price chart twice a day, add in some extra information, because it tells you the health of your asset. And a lot of this stuff isn't actually that complicated, right? There's like five metrics that really matter. There's obviously a skill in learning how to actually properly interpret them. But, you know, when people are in profit, they take them. It's not that hard, right? That. That's just kind of the framework. When people who buy high, they always sell low. To me, that's the whole point of this game.
- [84:17]
James Check
Well, you know, and speaking of getting that extra information, shill the service you provide, man, you were nice enough to come on here, share your time. What do people get out of Check on Chain?
- [84:27]
Checkmate
Yeah, so basically. So Check on Chain is a company that me and my best mates spun out. So it's a two man job. We've basically got two products. There's the newsletter which is me basically the way I view it. And I think most bitcoiners understand this. I've got my own expertise and proof of work coming to what I've you know, kind of worked out over the years. So basically what I do is I try to help people think about markets. I don't talk to traders, I talk to hodlers. I want people to understand why the market's doing what it's doing. Just help ground yourself in reality. So we do two posts a week, written and video. So some people like to watch, some people like to listen, other people do both. And then we also have a Charting website@charts checkonchain.com everything's free. Basically every bitcoin metric you possibly want. It's, it's all there. It updates once a day and it's, you know, I'm a big advocate for. Lots of people say hey can we have higher resolution? I say no, because you know what, you don't need hourly data. It's not useful. It's just noise. Again, unless you're a high frequency trader, daily is perfectly fine. All you want to do is look at these macro trends and understand how is the bitcoin market evolving. So they're the, basically the two services and yeah, check it out. If you've got any questions, you can always reach me.
- [85:37]
James Check
I appreciate it man. This was, this was a good grounding experience for me. My, my bullishness and bearishness is now perfectly tempered somewhere. Chop solidating in the middle. Anything else you want to leave folks with before we go? Do we. Did we cover everything? I know we went over a lot.
- [85:52]
Checkmate
No man, I think we got a lot. And you know, bitcoin, stay humble. Stack sats. That's, that's like the, at the end of the day, that's the end goal. One bitcoin is one bitcoin. We're going to be just fine. I can't think of anything aside from bitcoin and gold that makes sense. So you just, you know, all you got to do is survive the volatility. Volatility creates uncertainty. Solve that with education and knowledge and you'll be just fine.
- [86:14]
James Check
Amen to that. What a what a perfect note to end on Checkmate. Thank you for joining me. This was a pleasure. Thanks for putting up with my my post El Salvador voice as well. It is slightly huskier than usual, but it was chatting with you man. Look forward to doing it again.
- [86:28]
Checkmate
Good on you mate. Thanks a lot.
- [86:38]
Walker
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of the Bitcoin Podcast. If you are a Bitcoin only company interested in sponsoring the Bitcoin podcast, head to bitcoin podcast.net sponsor or send an email. Email to hello bitcoin podcast.net if you are enjoying the Bitcoin Podcast and find it valuable, give it a boost on Fountain a five star review wherever you're listening.
- [87:03]
James Check
Or better yet, share this show with.
- [87:05]
Walker
Your network so more people can learn about bitcoin.
- [87:07]
James Check
Or don't.
- [87:08]
Walker
Bitcoin doesn't care, but I sure do appreciate it. You can grab links in the show Notes to watch or list this show.
- [87:14]
James Check
Wherever you get your podcasts.
- [87:15]
Walker
Or go to bitcoin podcast.net SL podcast and you'll also find the links to follow me and the show on Noer and on X. Bitcoin is scarce.
- [87:25]
James Check
There will only ever be 21 million.
- [87:27]
Walker
But Bitcoin podcasts are abundant. So thank you for spending your scarce time to listen to the Bitcoin Podcast. Until next time, stay free.