Scott Melker (3:43)

But, yeah, yeah, I actually launched my podcast with Blockworks. Yeah. Was the person who reached out to me first, he said, you should do a podcast. And I said, what the. A podcast. That's literally was my response. So I. That. That's how knowledgeable I was.

Pete Rizzo (3:55)

But getting a deja vu about this conversation. Very similar.

Scott Melker (3:58)

Yeah. And when El Salvador announced their bitcoin strategy, Iago, I was sitting outside on a bench at that conference with you, and you were giving me a lecture on shitcoining. Yeah.

Edan Jago (4:12)

I've been very impressed by Arthur Hayes, actually. Arthur Hayes has been calling for exactly this kind of dip at exactly this time, for exactly these reasons for the last three or four months.

Scott Melker (4:22)

He has.

Edan Jago (4:23)

Very impressive. The other person who's been impressive, I think, is Check matey.

Pete Rizzo (4:27)

Yeah.

Edan Jago (4:28)

Who was talking about a gap between his air pockets.

Pete Rizzo (4:32)

Everybody knows air pockets now.

Edan Jago (4:34)

Yeah. And then the third, unfortunately for me, the third really impressive person is my wife, who took a. Who took a limit and started placing limit orders. And around 73k after we passed 73k. And I was like, you're never going to fill those orders. And now I'm going to be wrong with my wife.

Scott Melker (4:55)

Maybe not. I think 74. It'll bounce at 74.

Pete Rizzo (4:59)

I think that being on the periphery is the best place to trade, you know, and historically, you know, I've been in Bitcoin since 1314. It's the casual people who are like, you know, just. They have a little bit of an ear tune to it, but they're not in the weeds. They just seem to end up the best.

Scott Melker (5:13)

Right.

Pete Rizzo (5:13)

It's, you know, it's the constant information exposure that gets you. The people who are zooming out, I think, are able to maybe, maybe your wife's just, you know, she's got her finger on the pulse. She saw that third Dave Portnoy coin and she was just. She was like, she actually.

Edan Jago (5:27)

We have this thing that she makes a prediction at the beginning of every year what the price of bitcoin is going to be. And we open it up on Christmas. She's very good.

Pete Rizzo (5:35)

That's a very interesting tradition. When did you start?

Scott Melker (5:38)

Yeah, it's a good tradition.

Edan Jago (5:39)

About four years ago.

Scott Melker (5:42)

Yeah. I mean, to be fair, like, what.

Pete Rizzo (5:44)

Does the winner get? Do you have. Is there some sort of special prize or.

Edan Jago (5:47)

The prize. The prize is the best prize ever. You get to be right.

Pete Rizzo (5:51)

Ah, right.

Scott Melker (5:52)

It's the only prize that matters in marriage, that men. The men rarely. Honestly, even if you nailed the price to the penny, I'm sure there's a way you're wrong.

Pete Rizzo (5:59)

Is it not going over or can you go over or how does that. How does that work?

Edan Jago (6:03)

I said proximity. It's.

Scott Melker (6:05)

It's not like the price is right.

Pete Rizzo (6:07)

20,000 off. But as long as you're the closest.

Scott Melker (6:10)

One because there's a bid a dollar.

Edan Jago (6:12)

Because otherwise perverse incentives.

Scott Melker (6:15)

Yeah.

Dan (6:16)

Well, let me just say I don't.

Pete Rizzo (6:17)

Think we're going to see 70K. That, that would shock me, I think.

Scott Melker (6:20)

Well, 74 was that previous high from March 24th. I think that's why everybody started looking at it from the day that Iago's wife did, is that, you know, you get that retest of that key level. But with the 200 ma here, honestly, I think we just like stop here and frustrate a lot of people. But what do I know? Just a guy guessing about lines on things again.

Pete Rizzo (6:38)

I think we saw this in 2021. Let's go back to the history. You know, dropped 50. We had a summer doldrums, but, you know, we never saw 20k again.

Scott Melker (6:46)

Right.

Pete Rizzo (6:46)

And that was the previous. I don't think you're going to see a parody with a previous all time high here. That would, that would be pretty shocking. But you know, again, the fundamentals look good. Right? So what are the, I guess the question to the bears here would be, you know, what are the fundamentally negative catalysts? I mean we've got incumbents coming into the space bank of America CEO out yesterday talking about getting active in the market. Obviously legislation is going to cause the incumbents to come to the market. We know that's going to happen and we know all these new entrants, you know, they're noobs, they're not going to know what they're gonna buy and sell and, and they're gonna panic and you know, I think we'll have a big crash, you know, at the, at the end of this year again, but a lot of new people are going to come in, we're gonna see advertising, retail advertising like we've never seen before. Right. The, once the legislation has passed, these companies, exchanges, miners, you know, you're gonna, you're gonna see an exposure to these kind of companies that you haven't seen before. So I don't know, I'm looking at the, at the fundamentals here and the fundamentals seem very positive and this seems, this seems like a traders, this is just traders trading things and you know, retail being a bit, you know, turned off by the meme coin frenzy. But I don't know what's the fundamentally negative catalyst here? Is there one on the table?

Edan Jago (7:54)

Well, I think, I think there's overall a liquidity challenge in the market. Right. So the economy is in a weird place where it's slowing down, but unemployment is low. The Fed hate the government's guts and they don't want to introduce additional liquidity because it would be stagflationary.

Pete Rizzo (8:15)

And you're hitting me with the macro lens.

Edan Jago (8:19)

I'm hitting you with the macro. I, I, we could talk about air pockets, but I think, I think the macro. Look, I, that's why I say I've been so impressed by Arthur Hayes because, you know, I mean he, he's literally been drawing out both sort of what, where he anticipates the market to go, but also, you know, what, what are the indicators, the macro indicators he would be looking for? And, and so far his train's right on schedule.

Pete Rizzo (8:40)

But do you think that we're going to see 70K? Are you waiting to buy Bitcoin at 70K?

Edan Jago (8:44)

I, I just, I, I, you know. No, but I think I, I, I, I, I would, I, I would, I would say if we, if we were to get, you know, go all the way down to 70, you know, the low 70s, that wouldn't surprise me. It would be a lovely buying opportunity. Limit orders would get filled. But, but, but, yeah, I mean, I, it wouldn't, I, I don't think that would be surprising. I think actually hitting 70k, I think, would be the most extreme end of that.

Pete Rizzo (9:14)

Yeah, I can't see it going lower than that. Even. I think 70k would be surprising. I mean, again, it just feels like there's too many people trying to get in the uae, you know, pension funds that are looking at the market. There's just, it seems like there's too many hands around the table trying to grab a piece of stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if the 13F filings for, for Q2 or Q1, I think we're still going to keep on Q1. It looked like the institutions are just buying the step. They're looking for a good entry point. You know, to me, this feels like retail getting shaken out. You know, people who came in for the Trump wave, they bought high, they panic sold, you know, they bought some xlp, you know, because it was their friends.

Scott Melker (9:54)

I was gonna say all have read like bitcoin has performed exceptionally well relative. All coins have retraced the entire Trump pump and many of them more.

Pete Rizzo (10:02)

Well, I think the altcoin narratives have been largely, you know, I've been bearish on them for four or five years now, but largely pretty decimated. I, you know, again, I'm curious for the people who are, you know, bullish on Solana, like, you know, what they, what their thesis is at this point. But, you know, I, I do think that that's going to continue. Part of this, the, the Blockworks podcast that we're spinning up here, I think is a testament to that. Right. Blockworks is a crypto media. They do a conference permissionless with the bankless folks who are, you know, the eth bulls. And, you know, this podcast, I think, is about bringing that bitcoin conversation to the crypto forum because there's demand for it. Right. People are saying, like, why are my bags down? Why is bitcoin doing so well? We were supposed to, oh, it's a better technology. There was, there's better fun. You know, you can look, I mean, coins on this. Yeah, yeah.

Edan Jago (10:48)

I mean, it's very interesting because we started to see sort of like alternative assets, like what would usually have been considered like, Altcoins but emerging from the bitcoin space just over the next month, maybe six weeks we're going to see CORN launching on exchanges for the first time. We're going to see Bob launching on exchanges. Bit layer, Babylon, Portal. These are all bitcoin ecosystem projects that are sort of hitting the exchanges now. And, and they're, and, and many of.

Pete Rizzo (11:21)

Them are likely like more like a bit VM type construction. I haven't been following super closely. I'm actually very curious.

Edan Jago (11:28)

It's very very, it's the whole spectrum. Some of them are more like affinity because they're like, like Bob and Horn. So Bob is like an OP stack, bitcoin focused project. Corn is an, an arbitram stack. Bitcoin focused project. Babylon is bitcoin staking. I think Babylon is probably going to be the most important indicator to watch. Bit layer is like a roll up or intended to be a roll up. Utilizing bit VM and ZK type technology on bitcoin and Portal is an atomic swap cross chain sort of BTC trading system. But basically what we're overall seeing is you know this bitcoin ecosystem has been building and building and building but it's been latent pressure. None of them have had live tokens and March is going to be the, the big change. Right. And so many of them, not all of them but, but like, but this.

Scott Melker (12:27)

Is all points on bitcoin so this is going to give us a very good perspective as to whether there's an appetite in the market for that.

Pete Rizzo (12:35)

Well there's been you know altcoins on bitcoin for forever, you know and I think the term is just you know, arbitrary assets. Right. Going back to 2014 and 2015. The, you know there have been forever, you know it's just the question of whether there's demand and whether the user experience is good. So I'm actually going to dive into this a little bit on my pod upcoming teasing next week's guests, Dan Held's coming on who's doing you know I think he's like you. Eden is bullish on and has been telling me for six months you know there's going to be the Big Bitcoin Season 2 Comeback the Revenge of the of the ordinals trade traders who are now down 99. David Soroy who's working on some ZK roll up tech to bring it to bitcoin and then Jeremy Rubin who's of course more active on kind of the you know, core bitcoin layer trying to get things approved. But yeah. Curious to get their take. You know, we saw the promise with runes though, right, where there was a couple days and then, you know, the meme coin frenzy went over to Solana. So I think fundamentally my question to those folks is going to be, you know, does the market really care? Is Dave Portnoy's meme coin on Bitcoin versus on Solana? It's like if you're competing at pure user experience, the user experience competing at functionality.

Scott Melker (13:46)

Well, first of all, you're sitting with the guy who did the first zk on bitcoin@ Nashville live on stage. So that's a thing. Go ahead.

Edan Jago (13:57)

Look, I think the. I. I think people might be overly focused right now on meme coins in that.

Scott Melker (14:06)

I think that.

Pete Rizzo (14:07)

What else is there, Eden? There's no.

Edan Jago (14:09)

But this, this. I think. I think meme coin primacy might be over. And so the question is, what happens next? And I think, you know, I would. Right now, there's a lot of soul searching. It's actually very, very exciting to see, like, soul searching.

Scott Melker (14:26)

Come on, man. I thought the same thing.

Edan Jago (14:30)

We, we. This dislocation between BTC and all of these sort of other assets, some of them are doing okay, mostly not. And people are starting to ask themselves, like, what. What are we actually building in this industry? And I think a lot of people who have been building in the space, especially outside of the bitcoin space that I've been talking to, are really sort of wondering what the hell they've been doing with their lives. I think that's a really, really great moment because what that means is that we are in a certain trough of disillusionment. And from those troughs of disillusionment, you generally end up getting rid of a lot of this.

Pete Rizzo (15:04)

Is that just in the eth space though, or is it also in the Solana space? So I'm actually curious.

Scott Melker (15:08)

I think it's in the Solana space even more heavily now. I think Ethereum, for a while, it was just kind of fundamentally, why won't it catch up the existential woke crisis and malady or whatever Vitalik was doing. But right now, since Libra, first of all, I mean, the Trump. Trump launch is the exact top of Solana, if you look. So it's been basically an escalator straight down since that. And I think Libra took a lot of wind out of the sails. I mean, pump fund, nothing's bonding anymore on there. They're selling their Solana live on the open market. You can see them moving it. And I Think that people just aren't excited. Listen, when everybody wakes up and goes, wait, I'm playing in a casino, but the house actually has a 9 to 1 edge instead of a 50.9% edge, they eventually give up and say I'm going to go broke or I am. I think that people are very bearish on Solana right now because they don't think meme coins come back and they're not seeing other fundamental use cases. Well, I think the necessarily fair, but.

Pete Rizzo (16:03)

I think the asymmetry in these coins, right, people are waking up to the fact that, you know, if you're a lot they're fundamental problem of launching a new coin, right? And then you have these coins with the massive supplies for insiders. And that obviously is a teachable moment for bitcoin because you know, bitcoin, there are no insiders. Everyone who has bought or sold bitcoin has done so fairly. You know, whether it's the guy who mailed people, you know, single dollar bills in 2009 and you know, they sent bitcoin back, you know, to the people today who are mining with data centers. You know, people are, you know, trading in a market for bitcoin and they're doing so in I think a way that's fair and equitable. And it's. I, I just think the launch problem in the space, you know, just more apparent with these sort of meme coins. We'll see it maybe with Kanye. If he drops Swastikoin, I'm sure he's going to own 90% of the swastikoin supply. And so I think it's a, it's been a massive teachable moment for retail. You know, just realizing that this, the market is predatory. You're either an insider or you're not if you're not in bitcoin. And I, I don't know. I guess the question with I'd have to Eden is with these Bitcoin 2.0 projects is like how do you actually solve that? I thought ordinals actually had a creative way to solve that. But I don't know. These other projects, do they have to, do they have to launch?

Edan Jago (17:16)

I, I bottom line is I don't think they need to solve it. I think that that 80 of the. No, no, I mean this in a good way. Not being cynical for a moment. You know, you've got btc. BTC is a commodity asset unowned by any sort of entity and not trying to accomplish anything in sort of existing as an asset really. Everything else is A service or an application or a technology is basically equity. Right? It's, it's, it's, it's a way of routing around the sec. And, and so the SEC were right to try and want to go after all of these things as securities. Right? From a technical perspective, not from a moral, ethical, legal or.

Pete Rizzo (18:03)

Intending to be securities. I mean that's what I always say about the Ethereum foundations. The reason they have 80% of supplies, that they thought they were going to do other equity like a series A, B, C. Right, B, it just never happened. Right.

Edan Jago (18:15)

But fundamentally I think my point is that yes, all of these projects have insiders and actually that's what you want if, if the project is not a meme coin. You want insiders, you want highly motivated people who are trying to build something and hopefully you pick not just the right project but also the right insiders. You pick founders who are trying to build something, are actually mission driven, have a good understanding of the market, are fundamentally barking up the right tree and great things have been built in crypto. Right? Stablecoins are an amazing innovation. Dexes are an amazing innovation. The progress we've made in zero knowledge cryptography has been amazing. This is all being driven by crypto. And so, and so I think my dream, sort of my fans, is that we do build out this sort of alternate system for allocating capital towards innovation which is more global, more borderless in many ways, less corrupt because it has to be more transparent. We're not quite there yet, but I think, you know, we're on the path to building that.

Scott Melker (19:22)

Yeah, I've said this before. I think that what we're seeing in Solana is interesting. As bad as the meme coin craze was, it is interesting to see that the crypto space can somewhat self regulate. People just eventually get so sick of it that the interest diverts to other places and it, I mean, I guess we'll see what happens moving forward. But what Iago you're describing is more challenging from a regulatory perspective. Right? We've had Hester Purse obviously at the SEC for years proposing safe harbor. You start centralized, you have a three year period to effectively become sufficiently decentralized by whatever metric the SEC determines is appropriate. And then you don't have to be a security after you've passed through these tests and this period of safe harbor, maybe that's what is going to come from a regulatory perspective so that some of these can start more centralized, build something like a product funded by VCs but actually become decentralized and fair with.

Pete Rizzo (20:15)

Time become less predatory. Right. Like, I mean this is the problem I think with you know, why is the whole industry united against Ripple and XRP and what they're, what they've done and what they've, you know, continue, will continue to do. It's that ultimately, you know, a system where, you know, I thought the most damning critique of the Ripple company that was put forward was by Pierre Richard who was saying like, you know, why isn't Ripple buying xrp? If it's so valuable and you want to put it on America's balance sheet, why aren't you buying it? Right. You know, where's the Michael Thaylor who's buying billions of dollars where the next reason. I don't know. I'm curious what you're, you know, what you're thinking here. It's words like, I, I think like the insider nature of these markets, like is a problem. Like I think that's what people are waking up to with meme coins, that it's fundamentally predatory. Like Dave Portnoy, you're part of his audience, you are his exit liquidity. This is I think what led to meme coins, right, because it was the backlash against kind of the VC funded apparatus where the retail was the exit liquidity. But you know, how do you get out of that problem? It just, it just seems like if you move that market to Bitcoin and you are now just kind of trading Bitcoin back tokens, but these coins have fundamentally still the same problem where the insiders get rich and then retail gets fleeced. I don't, you don't see that as a problem?

Edan Jago (21:29)

I think we, we might start to see more transparency because the SEC have left the building. And the reason is that you basically couldn't provide transparency about what the project was trying to do. Could it potentially generate revenue in BTC or dollar if you told them, they'd.

Scott Melker (21:47)

Sue you just come in register. Yeah, right.

Edan Jago (21:50)

And so I think that's created an extremely toxic environment for basically the SEC have screwed over retail. They, they created, you know, if you look at the ICO era, sure there was a huge amount of birth, but there was, you know, if you had.

Pete Rizzo (22:05)

Just be clear, I'm on the bring Gensler back train. You know, we want to get him back.

Edan Jago (22:14)

Look what came out of, of the ICO period, right? You've got Chain Link and, and Binance and Ethereum and, and, and, and, and, and a large assortment of projects that have, you know, multiplied their value many, many thousands of times. Over and have made people very, very wealthy. And there was an opportunity for people to participate in that in aggregate. If you had just like spread your money across all of the ICOs, you would have done better than if you had invested in any other asset except for btc. Right. Any other asset class.

Pete Rizzo (22:50)

Despite the fact is that just a.

Edan Jago (22:53)

I've been working on an analysis on that exec. I, I'll share with you.

Scott Melker (22:58)

If you invested them at. Yeah. If you had got in at ICO, even as bad as these 99 drawdowns, RP, like those things were launching at thousand 2000 3000X and held till today.

Edan Jago (23:11)

Right. Not, not, you know, ANT shares.

Pete Rizzo (23:15)

If you bought ant.

Scott Melker (23:16)

Somebody showed me actually, if you bought xrp, which to be fair, like you really couldn't do in 2020, 2014 when it was launched, unless you were doing like IOUs on Mount Gox or something, but that you would have outperformed Bitcoin from ico price of xrp. It's all about time frame.

Pete Rizzo (23:31)

But I, you know, well, XRP was a giveaway, right.

Edan Jago (23:36)

I mean they, yeah, it didn't really have an ico. Yeah, yeah.

Scott Melker (23:41)

I, I, I was pre ico. It was pre ico.

Edan Jago (23:43)

I remember you would just go to a hackathon of theirs and they would throw XRP at you.

Pete Rizzo (23:49)

Yeah. But I think the core point here is just that there's a fundamental distribution problem with tokens. Right. The ICO kind of mechanism tried to solve that by having some sort of public sale. But then what we've seen is that if you control the supply that's issued at sale, you're just going to end with these big consolidations. Right. So I don't know how you get to. I mean, as long as we can argue that none of these coins can replicate what Bitcoin has been able to do, which is a fair launch, fair distribution, something where you should treat it as money. That I think litigating that problem is interesting, but I think your claim was specifically that like we don't need to solve that problem. But that's just, that's how.

Edan Jago (24:25)

No, I, it's not, it's not that we don't need to solve the problem. Like, I'm very interested in the question of resource allocation. Right. I think ultimately what, what finance has been the, the job of the financial industry is to allocate resources. That's its job. Right. And our current financial industry does a very, very poor job of that. And so if you are able to even slightly improve on that problem or even Introduce ways of allocating resources which otherwise would be unavailable. You create opportunities for innovation and productivity growth that would not be available. You create opportunities for people to improve their lives which would not be available. You create opportunity for entrepreneurs from places which are not insiders or groups that are not insiders to create productivity. It's a really important problem. It's one of the most important things we could be doing.

Scott Melker (25:16)

Right.

Edan Jago (25:16)

And crypto is like the place to do that. But unfortunately, for a number of reasons, because of the sec, because of extreme information asymmetries, and because people think they can get rich really, really quickly, we've mostly missed out on that opportunity. And I think with a bitcoin culture now building, we're starting to see projects that are building more fundamental stuff on bitcoin, but doing it with a more bitcoin culture. I think that we've opened the door to that opportunity again.

Scott Melker (25:50)

Yeah, it's the idea that everything else was a test net to come back to bitcoin, where the money lies and the security lies and obviously we'll have the highest tvl. I mean, we talk about the sec. I know we're about to run over time, but I'm going to keep going for a couple of minutes. SEC closed investigation into crypto exchange Gemini. They closed their investigation on Robinhood this week. They closed their investigation on Uniswap this week. They closed their investigation on Coinbase last week. If this stuff is going to work, now's our time to shine. Right. Because we have clearly the green light to build and launch whatever we want in crypto in the United States right now, as long as it's not outright fraud, which is what the SEC is clearly focusing on. So this is a real moment in time, y'all go for all those things to launch because Americans should be able to participate.

Edan Jago (26:35)

Yeah, the ace was just, I think it was yesterday or today that they announced they're dropping their case against uniswap.

Scott Melker (26:41)

Yeah.

Pete Rizzo (26:41)

Well, I would just say, I think the problem with the ICO era wasn't that people were able. Weren't able to participate because people did participate, broadly. Right. Like most. Most. I think there were Americans who invested in the Ethereum ico. There were Americans who were invested in a lot of IC different of the ICOs of that era. So I don't know. Look, I'm optimistic. I. I like the fact that the crypto stuff is coming back to bitcoin. I just think we have to kind of maybe ADM the problems that might exist in that market and you know, I mean, just because the SEC is stepping back, that doesn't mean that we should want. Shouldn't want get more fraud experience. Right? Like, you know, you want to have. You want to have users ultimately have trust in this kind of system. Right. Just overall, and I think, you know, it's good to call out bad actors, bad things, but then you need a common impression.

Edan Jago (27:25)

But, Peter, look, yes, you're. You're 100% right, and there is no sort of panacea here. But we. We've got a bit of. We as bitcoiners need to get a little bit more sophisticated, right? If you're going to be calling everything a scam and saying everything is useless, then you're not creating opportunity for a more sophisticated conversation. You're not actually educating anyone. The way I sometimes sort of analogize this is the Europeans were able to take over north and South America not because, you know, they had better armies or better technology or whatever. It's because they had better diseases.

Scott Melker (27:59)

I was saying better germs. I was hoping that's where you were going.

Edan Jago (28:02)

And they encountered a population which had.

Pete Rizzo (28:04)

Fascinating to see where this argument is going to.

Edan Jago (28:07)

The population had absolutely no inoculation, no immune system for sort of like all of the diseases that were coming. Now, I think what happened with crypto is that crypto has encountered the global population, everyone who have been living under this regulated, fiat standard, who have no inoculation, no immune system for a free market. And so. And so what has happened is that grift has won the virus, the disease of grift has won. And I think we, as bitcoiners, our responsibility is to sort of act as the antibodies. And right now we're doing a really shit job of it because we're so unsophisticated. We're just basically an autoimmune disease half the time.

Scott Melker (28:47)

Is this an MRNA vaccine or a classic vaccine? And have you proposed this theory to rfk? I have no RFK that bitcoin is the vaccine.

Edan Jago (28:58)

He loves bitcoin.

Pete Rizzo (28:59)

Fascinating. Yeah. Look, I think it'll be interesting to see what plays out. I'm excited for a second half in which the bitcoin builders are resurgent. I'm excited for new ideas. Bad ideas. You know, I was excited for runes that didn't pan out. I was. I was excited for ordinals, you know, that was more successful. Look, I think that ultimately the crypto builders are going to have to come to bitcoin. I think they're. They're going to have to. Whatever good ideas that they have, they're going to have to figure out how to migrate over. I think that's the natural law long tail of what we're seeing is that everybody will settle on that sort of bitcoin standard. But I do think it's a good lens to be skeptical. Right. As long as we want to be hopeful and optimistic, it's, it's good to start from a baseline of skepticism. Right. As a, as a, as a journalist, I think the bitcoin maximalist lens of like just starting from suspicion, starting from, okay, what's wrong with this? And then working to. To what's good. I think it has been a distrust but verify. That's a sticker.

Scott Melker (29:55)

It absolutely is. Guys, I know we're kind of running out of time, but I want to make sure that we once again shill the out of your podcast here, Rizzo. So here.

Pete Rizzo (30:06)

Yeah, we'll be, we'll be having bitcoin conversations and mixing it up with crypto stuff. I'll be at the Digital Asset Summit. Hope to see you guys there. You know, talking about bitcoin with, with crypto, folks, I think it's time to mingle again. Maybe that's where I'll agree with you with, with Eden. It's time to get rid of the old party lines, the bitcoin and crypto. Let's, let's get rid of the ands. You know, we got to welcome everybody back. If this is the Noah's Ark, you know, it's time to get, time to get everybody on that we can.

Edan Jago (30:31)

So you want to bring me on as a bitcoin coiner?

Pete Rizzo (30:35)

I will. We'll get you on. We'll get it on.

Scott Melker (30:37)

Yeah, we forgot, we forgot to tell Pete that this show, theoretically, the first day we named it Bitcoin. And because of the barbell of there's bitcoin and everything else that was popular in the market, specifically memes at the time was. So, you know, it's, it's in line with. It's in line.

Pete Rizzo (30:52)

We'll be getting back somewhere in the middle on that scale. But I appreciate it being here. And yeah, no more Bitcoin at 70,000. We're not going to see it. Well, you can put me on a prediction with, with Arthur Hayes.

Scott Melker (31:02)

I don't think so either. 10. So this is launching on X at 10am on your X account, is that correct?

Pete Rizzo (31:08)

I've got a great conversation coming up with Jameson Lopp. He's going to disprove that Jack Dorsey is Satoshi. There's this you know big story going around that that Jack is Satoshi. Seen the viral X threads? It's going to be debunked at 10am at Pete. Underscore Rizzo underscore on X. If you guys want to follow along, you know, if you still think Jack is Satoshi and this is you know going to shatter your dreams I guess stay tuned but you know there'll be some sleuthing to to share.

Scott Melker (31:38)

Awesome stuff. Well thank you very much guys. I can't wait to watch the watch the show and keep up with it. Iago as always. Bitcoin and bullshit. See you guys later. Thanks.

Edan Jago (31:48)

Thank you.

Scott Melker (31:50)

All right guys, we're about to move on to Dan from the chart guys of course. But first gotta tell you about L Bank obviously a sponsor that we have here on Thursdays. For those of you who don't know they are a no KYC exchange meaning where there's a will there's a way. 20 USDT sign up bonus with KYC. If you choose to deposit and you get a 50 trading bonus trade and earn up to 100 cash back on your net trading fees and a referral bonus of up to 250 USDT. Now as I would always recommend in any situation like this go there and trade and if you've learned anything from watching exchanges and Buybit and such go there and trade. But when you're done trading move your coins into self custody. I love exchanges. They're great vehicles for making money in trading but not to be the best any of them to be trusted as custodians. So I would say move your tokens off when you're done with those amazing trades. Going to bring on Dan now. What's up man? Sorry we kept you an extra couple minutes.

Dan (32:51)

No worries.

Scott Melker (32:53)

We got some pretty like this is pretty crazy. So like I was going to bring this up with these guys but I thought I'd bring it up with you. Obviously we have just to put charts in context. BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF sees record daily outflow as the basis trade starts unwind. So we saw basically a billion in a day on Tuesday. We saw a lot of coins obviously moving to exchanges today for them to sell. Yesterday's sell off and last week another billion. So these are record breaking days that we're seeing right now for outflows from the ETFs and I didn't even realize quite how bad this bitcoin selloff is because I'm immune to everything. But this is Actually the worst three day price slide since the FTX debacle, which is pretty meaningful considering we didn't have an FTX type catalyst this time. We do have the President out on a, like a roadshow of tariffs this morning, which is interesting. I don't know if you saw this, but I just opened this guy's feed. It's literally just all tariff news. So we've got a lot going on, right? I mean, we've got Trump tariffing everybody. We have bitcoin on this kind of historic slide here, which I didn't realize it was as bad as it was. I mean, what do you make of it when you take a look at the chart?

Dan (33:59)

Yeah, I mean, like, like everybody's saying. And it's interesting watching everybody say the same thing because it's, you know, technically sound, but. Yeah, I mean, once you break that support level that we broke, we don't have much until those low 70s that we're looking at. That said, I just yesterday made my first bitcoin trade that I made in, you know, six plus weeks because I wasn't trading that sideways range. But yesterday, you know, I love playing oversold bounces. It's one of my edges. And so yesterday was my first trade in a very long time. And I just want to give a little insight into the mindset of a trader. Do I think this is the bottom? I have no idea. But I've positioned myself to benefit if it is and not be hurt if it isn't. And the, the reason I looked to go long yesterday, which I did, I had a really good entry, you know. Right, right. When 82.5 broke on Bitcoin, I bought Ibit, which of course is the ETF. And the reason was because we were just at extremes across all time frames. It's what I call a super stack. You know, you could be beat up on the daily, you could be beat up on the four hour, but a super stack is when you're, you know, the RSI is extremely beat up on the daily, the 12 hour, the 4 hour, the hourly, the 30 minute, the 15 minute, the 5 minute everything. And so that tells me, okay, even if I'm not nailing a macro bottom, I'm likely going to be able to position at least a five minute bounce and sell a little bit into a five minute bounce. And so that's exactly what I did. And so now, you know, I, I get a good entry, I sell 2/3 on the way up, and now I break evens down around 80,000. So I just Stick a stop at break even and I either nailed it or I stop out break even. And that's the mindset that people don't really understand. You know, everybody wants to predict with trading and technical analysis. I predicted that we would see a short term bounce, but that's as far as my prediction goes. And now it's just let it play out you position and then let it play out. And so I'm looking for, you know, can the bulls confirm a four hour uptrend? That's what I care about next. From here, we've been in a clear four hour downtrend. This is a beautiful backtest. We had that $89,000 support. We break it, we try and get back over it and reject and then we see that another leg down. So can we confirm the 4 hour uptrend? If we do, we then zoom out to the daily and we'll scout a daily lower high with a whole lot of space for it to form. So it's one time frame at a time. The bears are confident and they do have control. It's just a question of how big of an oversold bounce can we get going here.

Scott Melker (36:22)

Yeah, I mean I took a look at the chart as well. I bought a little bitcoin, but the 200 ma here on the daily, which hasn't been even sniffed since October. So there's at least going to be a lot of algos on that. But as you said, I mean this is the first time that bitcoin's been oversold on the daily since last August. That was the dead bottom in the low 50s. So there's some confluence there. And then my favorite four hour has bullish divergence. Everything six hour, four hour, one hour. But those are good for bounces. This will be hidden, bearish divergence right here. Maybe another. But this, these are the signals I like for building a bottom. I should say, like I don't as you said, like if it's 82.5, if it goes to 80, whatever, you know, and that sort of air gap we're talking about, there is no support in here because of how fast we broke that all time high from 74 and zoomed right into the high 80s. So it makes a lot of sense. But if Everybody's looking for 74, I think you get 80 and go up or, or 65.

Dan (37:18)

Yeah, that's, that's exactly right. And it is, you know, it's, it's common to see everybody talking about the same direction when you're in for euphoria or whatever. But this is one of the first times where it's like a very technical, sound majority of opinion where it's just, I guess there's enough influencers who can see these levels that are clearly visible from space that they're all saying the same thing. And so now all the market's looking towards those levels and as we know, the more everybody's looking at the same thing, the less likely it is to actually happen. So that's one of the reasons why I made an attempt at this bounce play. But we'll see how it plays out. There's a lot of work to do for the Bulls to regain it. Again. We got to confirm a four hour uptrend, then we got to confirm a daily uptrend and then we're in a daily and a weekly downtrend. So it's going to take a bit for the Bulls to regain things. But bigger picture, the monthly chart, there's no major red flags at this point. And so, you know, I always position myself. Could this be a macro top? I don't think so. But I did sell 20 of my long term position at 105 because if a trump meme coin marks a long term top and I didn't act, I wouldn't be able to live with myself. So I, I did sell a little bit just in case and now it's, it's just let it play out from here.

Scott Melker (38:30)

Yeah. So what are you watching otherwise outside of bitcoin, which, man, that, that's an ugly candle.

Dan (38:36)

We talked about litecoin a couple weeks ago and granted it's only up, you know, 2% from two weeks ago, but compared to everything else, it's holding its own. It's still got. For what I was saying two weeks ago on the show was when LTC BTC sees this weekly EMA 12 and 24 cross or 12 and 26 every single time we get at least some follow through. And so LTC btc, I mean this is the strongest litecoin's been compared to Bitcoin in over 10 months. So again, just as a shorter term trade perspective, but it's just very interesting to see. Litecoin is like one of the standing strong survivors in the bloodshed over the last two weeks.

Scott Melker (39:15)

Yeah. It's pretty astounding that anything could be up in this environment.

Dan (39:19)

Yeah. So I'm just going to keep on, you know, litecoin. If we hold weekly EMA 12, it's going to remain a lead bull and let's see how long LTC BTC can See strength other than that, you know, Seoul, of course, watching that bloodshed on its dump, it actually got to some of its most beat up daily RSI ever, which was surprising to me because I would have thought it would be more extreme. But you know, we get down into the low 20s in its history and that's generally where it bounces. But again, so much negative sentiment. Just a clear long term downtrend here. Again, I know traders that are making some attempts here, low risk, obviously stopping out if you're wrong. But you know, when sentiments this crush and prices get this crushed, sometimes some contrarian traders like to at least make an attempt, but only, only for the experienced because again there's much stronger things out there than Seoul.

Scott Melker (40:10)

Yeah, it's been down only basically since Trump token.

Dan (40:15)

Yeah, I mean that's, you know, the fundamental reason. It's the same thing as the cannabis sector in Canada. Literally the top was the day or two before recreational legal sales started. It's sometimes you get these little fundamental markers that in hindsight can be a. Oh yeah, but Seoul definitely getting taken to the woodshed. MSTR was a good one. We had two months of inside bar that broke bear. Now we're going to scout a monthly higher low in mstr. And of course anytime bitcoin's down, everybody starts talking about when what level does Michael Saylor actually get liquidated. But again, the structure of this long term chart, still just fine, very similar to bitcoin. But monthly higher low will be the most likely scenario, just like bitcoin is. And the last thing I'm watching is.

Scott Melker (41:00)

Tesla crazy by the way. It's just crazy to look at that chart because it just looks like it's like kind of forming a big bull flag. And that's a 50% drop just because of how parabolic it went. Yeah, it doesn't look like a 50% drop when you eyeball it, you know, logarithmically, but it's. Yeah, it's crazy.

Dan (41:14)

Yeah, you get that climax top and you know, I made a prediction that I think the premium that MSTR has on its bitcoin has peaked for this cycle. And I don't see that shifting. So we'll see if that ends up shaping up. But again, it just got so euphoria that blow off top. You got to keep an eye out for it and, and you know, Google check, guys, blow off top. We got a video all about it. But it happens oftentimes in markets and it's a good thing to, to be aware of in terms of how those shape up.

Scott Melker (41:45)

Yeah.

Dan (41:45)

And the last thing I'm watching is Tesla. Tesla's getting really beat up. Daily oversold, very patiently scouting a bounce but still struggling there I'm going to be ideally when in stocks, when you get this is one thing that stocks have that crypto doesn't is when you get extreme. Whether it's to the upside or downside MSTR to the upside, a gap, a gap up or a gap down will very often mark the low or the high on an extreme move. And Tesla hasn't gapped down on this entire drop. And so that's one thing that I'm patiently watching for to potentially happen if I am going to be looking at a daily bounce on Tesla. Because it's the same thing, you know, weakness in the short term. Absolutely. But a monthly higher low is the most likely scenario. We're coming off all time highs. We made a, you know, extreme 100 plus move to the upside and so now just scouting that monthly higher low in Tesla, Bitcoin, mstr, a lot of things.

Scott Melker (42:37)

Yeah, I saw a tweet today, it was like Elon Musk's net worth is up 50% since Trump was elected. I looked at the Tesla chart, I was like, how?

Dan (42:46)

Yeah, I know the headline you're talking about and that was from like two, three weeks ago. It definitely has changed.

Scott Melker (42:52)

I was like, is he shorting Tesla in size? Because that doesn't seem to make sense. Just to give people some very quick perspective. By the way, I brought this up earlier, but we're at a 25% retrace on Bitcoin peak to trough right now. If you go back, posted this last March. Right. But in 2017 we had 41, 38, 29, 34, 41, 40, 27. So this 25% retrace would not have even registered as top seven in the 2017 bull market. And we go to 20, 21, we had 21, 17, 31, 26, 55. So it would be right in the middle there. But there's just nothing new under the sun here with this. If you're totally panicking.

Dan (43:36)

Yeah, yeah. And I expect those numbers to continue to shrink as market cap and liquidity grows. But Yeah, I mean, 25, definitely no big deal for those who've been around multiple cycles.

Scott Melker (43:47)

Awesome, guys. We'll give chart guys a follow, check out his courses and videos that he has. For some reason I'm losing my voice all of a sudden. That's all we have got for you today. We'll see you next week. Thanks. Man. Really appreciate it.

Dan (43:58)

Have a good one, Scott.

Edan Jago (44:00)

That's DOP.