BUCKLE UP: Why "Boring" Bitcoin Chopsolidation Leads to EXPLOSIVE Moves | James Check (Checkmate)

A lot of people going, "Oh man, this cycle sucks cuz it's like 2025 and we're at the same price." It's like, "Yeah, but chop guys, chop consolidation." When this thing goes, it's proven that we're now a $2 trillion asset. The next move is 3 trillion. And if we go through another 12 months of sideways, the next top is 4 trillion.

I think expectations, not earning enough Bitcoin cuz they're in [ __ ] coins, not earning enough Bitcoin cuz they're in treasury companies, they're the big three that I think have got people frustrated. If we go up to 150 and we chop solidate for another like 6 8 12 months, that thing just keeps drifting higher because 150 140 130 becomes the base. As we chop around in that zone, people buy, people sell, people transact. Suddenly people don't even think about 75. 75 is a long lost memory. The same way that $1,000 is a long lost memory. So over time these like smaller prices disappear and they just become irrelevant, right? We never think about that again.

We're going to find out within the next 30 to 90 days because every single previous cycle has topped like if if we're still going by like 2026 then we've probably busted the 4-year cycle because we've more or less followed it from both the cycle low and from the cycle higher perspective. When we talk about this time is different. I think it's important to recognize what that actually means. The human psychology is the same. Bubbles will always look very very similar. They're constructed in the same way. people behave the same way. Human behavior is ultimately the great constant in markets.

I've seen a lot of people actually saying like, I'm so disappointed in this cycle. It sucks that it's topped. It's like you're just basing that off the fact the four years is going to continue. What if it doesn't? You know what? What if we do in fact go to 150 from here and then we chop sideways for for a year and then we go up again? Has the cycle ended? And that's what chop consolidation so interesting for cuz it kind of acclimates everybody to the new altitude. 100k felt normal kind of quickly.

I wouldn't say that these things are shitcoins, but let's just strip away the fact that they're orangewashed companies. The idea is that you want to buy them for the three-month pump. They're full of Telegram groups that if you're not on the inside, you're going to get smoked. Like the the characteristics of how they operate is shitcoining. It it like it it literally has all the properties of shitcoin. So, it's like functionally the machine is what it does. What are they? They're shitcoins. So, just just sit tight. Let the market do its thing. Like, Bitcoin's kicking ass. It's going to continue to kick ass. Chop solidation has a beautiful way of getting people to sell their Bitcoin out of boredom and frustration. Don't be the dude that loses it because of boredom and frustration. Because if you miss those 10 days, you miss what this whole thing is about, which is just like being there for those exciting reperic events and lots and lots and lots of boredom where you get to go and live your life.

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Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin podcast. Bitcoin continues to create new blocks every 10 minutes. The value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin. And if you're listening to this right now, remember you are still early. If you're not already, go ahead and subscribe to this show wherever you're watching or listening and share it with your friends, family, and strangers on the internet. If you want to follow me and the show on Nostaster and X, just head to the show notes to grab the links. If you're enjoying the Bitcoin podcast and want to support it by becoming a paid subscriber, you can download the Fountain app. Search for the Bitcoin podcast and subscribe by paying with Bitcoin via lightning or fiat via card. You'll get access to ad free episodes and early releases of select content. Plus, you'll help support this show. Head to the show notes for product discount links. Go to walkeramea.substack.com to get episodes emailed to you and head to bitcoinpodcast.net for everything else. Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk.

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Hope you don't mind. I am I am partaking in a little bit of uh of wine right now because for me if you're living you're >> I'm I am I am drinking Ben Justman's PE Lane wine. It's a Bitcoin wine. So >> it is hard like it's hard to get here in Australia. I mean like I'd love to get a bottle but uh is it awesome? >> It it's fantastic. We're we'll have to find a way to smuggle you some if Ben is uh I think Ben may be joining this stream. So hopefully he he hears this. But it's it's fantastic. And like I love that he's doing things kind of like the right way. like it's it's fully organic. He's, you know, really like he's you put in his proof of work. Like he's not taking shortcuts with it. And of I think like a crazy I'm forgetting what the exact percentage is, but like a crazy big chunk of his revenue it comes in in Bitcoin now. Like he has been able to like I mean he's the bit he's the Bitcoin wine guy. Like it just goes to show like you can find your niche >> and it's, you know, yeah, you might have to like work your ass off or something, but if you love doing it and you produce a valuable product, like Bitcoiners will be happy to spend sats on it. Like they will part with their precious Bitcoin for a quality product sold by a Bitcoiner and like I think that's just like a beautiful thing. So yeah. Yeah, I know. It's I think he has difficulties shipping internationally, even to Canada. Uh pine lane wine has has difficulties getting there. So you're not alone uh being, you know, being down on >> Oh, don't worry. We've had the uh we call it the Australia tax or it used to be much bigger, but the Australia tax was if you wind back the clock maybe like a decade kind of pre-Amazon really kicking off. We didn't have any of that [ __ ] So like you actually couldn't import stuff to Australia. So everything cost, you know, 30 40 bucks to bring in and it was just impossible to get things. So like that was a real thing just, you know, maybe 10, 15 years ago. Yeah, you know, it's it is just kind of ridiculous. Like we're we're at this point. I feel like Americans, we often forget how like how easy it is for us to get basically everything through Amazon. And obviously it has gotten a lot easier in other parts of the world, but like still when I talk to like friends in Europe, it's like they they can't just get some like I can get stuff like I can order it right now and it'll be on my doorstep like tomorrow morning. Like that's like and ridiculous things too. Like I could order a tiny home and it would like be delivered tomorrow morning. Like it's just, you know, may maybe it's gone too far. I'm not sure.

>> I mean, every so often because I mean, I spent a lot of time like studying macro and all that and that's like everyone talks about America and it makes sense, right? >> The more I've gone down the rabbit hole of like learning how big America is dollar-wise in terms of capital, like your tax base, your tax base is like 50% of all profit in the world, like from one country. And like you just come to the realization of how big America is. And I was watching um you might have seen there's a Netflix documentary on the Dallas Cowboys. Uh, I watched that recently and like just the size of the numbers and then like I go back and look through the most expensive sports teams in the world. It's just America, America, America, America. It's all NFL, NBA. And you're like, my god, like just the sheer capital in the US. It leaves everyone else for dead like just by sheer numbers is quite remarkable. It really is. Well, and and it's like, you know, because sometimes people will will give you a grief of like like if you're talking just, you know, kind of exclusively through like an American lens from an economic perspective, and it's like, well, >> hear that, but but it's also that that is the lens and it is also the global reserve currency and in addition to being, you know, a a just massive massive pile of capital. So, it's like, yeah, it makes sense. It's like a lot of other stuff is is a rounding error. That's not to say there is an interesting and important things happening. It's just that like if you're you know if you need a heristic like that that is a pretty good one to to operate under some of it. Yeah. Totally.

>> And I guess that's what makes this period in history so interesting because you have really the first time that America's had a challenger in China. It's really it is literally the first time and that's what makes this on a macros lands so interesting. You're like these are also you know they're also a monster but they're on two sides. There's the producer and there's the consumer and you know they're trying to make each other do the opposite thing but like it's a fascinating time in history. It's a turning point, that's for sure.

>> It it's it's going to be interesting. I mean, there's there's been all this constant talk about, you know, these uh these bricks nations getting together and doing, you know, having their goldbacked uh goldbacked currency, which everyone is, you know, seems to be very certain is going to happen very soon. I'm I'm not I'm not sure how much you've like looked looked into all that, but I think it's very interesting when you look at that whole uh paradigm through the Bitcoin lens where it's like, huh, America is uniquely positioned in that both as a nation state and as a corporate base and as an individual citizen base, >> we have the most Bitcoin. like we we do uh and relative like our Bitcoin holdings relative to our gold holdings relative to other count's Bitcoin and gold holdings like Bitcoin is a much bigger strategic advantage for us if we wanted to monetize something rapidly uh and kind of change the global paradigm. It would make much more sense to do it in Bitcoin than to do it in gold because if you try to do it in gold it's like well China and Russia have quite a bit of gold. Um or so they say anyway. I know China probably has a lot of fake gold too but that's a different story. I don't know. It's going to it's going to be a very like these next 10 20 years I think are going to be kind of mind-blowing. Like I don't know what the future is going to look like when my you know son is like entering the workforce and what like I >> I don't know. It's it's wild to think about it.

>> It it is and and like I I actually like I'm I am increasingly becoming a gold bug. Like I know that if Bitcoin didn't exist I definitely would be. But like gold is still 10% of my holdings. I've talked about why I own it. It's actually because I just want something to preserve, not to grow. I know it's not going to be Bitcoin, but I in a year's time, I might just want that capital, right? Buy a house, whatever it is. I don't want to be selling Bitcoin at the wrong time in a down market or it's I I'm pretty sure it's about to explode higher and, you know, I need 10 grand, the gold goes, right? That's what it's for. But I'm increasing as I just look at this whole thing playing out. I mean, we're literally watching gold breaking alltime highs as we speak. It just is the shelling point. And it was funny actually because I called my dad because he's he's retired. He's trying to work out like what do I buy, right? He doesn't have the timelines to ride a Bitcoin wave. And you know, there's only so many products I can really say this is the right thing. And he's already got a Bitcoin position. But for gold, I was explaining to him, he's like, "Why gold?" And I said, "It's a selling point." I said, "Look, we're in Paris. I tell you, I'm going to meet you at midday. Where are you going to be?" And he goes, "Eiffel Tower." That's it. That's exactly right. We're all going to meet at the Eiffel Tower because it's the most obvious place. That's the shelling point. It's like everyone's going to look around the world and they're going to go, "Fuck, it's it's a mess. What do I do? I'm going to buy gold." Because it's just like hands off, step away. Uh currencies are getting smashed everywhere. Um you It's funny actually when I flick through all sorts of different stocks. I mean, Australia is basically banking and mining. That's all we do. And I've held various mining stocks over the years. I've never held a banking stock. various mining stocks and like I've had some success but like not really because suddenly there's a news headline and just it's down 50%. Or suddenly like they lost their land title or some you know there's some thing that just happens some regulatory [ __ ] that just like blows up. It's like a perfectly well functioning mine. They have a flood. You know these are the kind of things that happen. Equities in all forms have these problems and you just kind of look at that's why people just go into the index because they want to diversify but like gold is just hands off shelling point. I'm going to buy because I don't know what else to do. And then also you've got you know the let's call them the bricks. They talk about this gold gold back currency. It's just gold, right? They're just going to trade in gold. So they're just buying and when China decides I'm going to buy a lot of this thing it they just keep going, right? They don't care. They're price insensitive. They just buy bye bye bye bye. And it's I I find it very funny that all the the gold bugs are saying like, "Oh, look at Bitcoin getting captured by the government." Like, bro, central banks are your buyer. What are you talking about? Like, back off.

>> So, you know, it's one of these interesting dynamics, but like I'm increasingly coming around to the fact that like gold has a very important role. It's going to be put back into the financial system. Bitcoin is competing for it. But let's face it, like the most probable outcome is that gold becomes the bedrock and then Bitcoin becomes like this liquid layer on top and over time they'll become more used to it. Like it's going to have a whole lot uh a much better shot than it would have obviously if it didn't exist. But if Bitcoin launched today, I think it would have a hard time. The fact it's got that 16 year history where it's like it's kind of made it already. I think that's an interesting time. It was just at the right place at the right time in time for this whole sovereign debt shakeup. Uh it's fascinating.

>> 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 chop consolidating 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 O2 is just easy as hell to use. Whether you're brand new to Bitcoin, it's your first time setting up a hardware wallet, so you're a little bit nervous, it's understandable, or you are a well seasoned psychopath, you will have no problem with the Bitbox. And again, it's fully open source and Bitcoin only, but you don't have to trust me. You can go and verify that for yourself on their GitHub. When you go to bitbox.swiss/walker and use the promo code walker, not only do you get 5% off, but you also help support this podcast. So, thank you.

>> Yeah. I mean, I like it's it's it's always fun to make fun of gold bugs, but at the same time like gold has been extremely good at maintaining value over thousands of years. Like literally like it, you know, it's not not great for increasing your purchasing power relative to the actual goods, you know, hard goods that you were trying to buy. But it is really good at maintaining, you know, what is it like the the thousand or you know, $1,000 suit or the the ounce of gold suit. uh you know like like a a fine fine tailored suit basically was like an ounce of gold a 100 years ago and it's an ounce of gold today and you know that it's gotten much more expensive in fiat terms obviously but you still have the same purchasing power if you saved in gold so it's like yeah I like taking shots of Peter Schiff as much as the next guy maybe more than the next guy but you know it it has its place uh I I think that's interesting that you use it really just as like a that's your if I need to sell something I don't want to sell my Bitcoin. I think that's something you actually I I h I haven't actually heard somebody else who's like no gold is the thing that I'm like I just keep a little bit of it because I want to be able to have something that I you know don't have any qualms about parting ways with which is basically where you're at right >> yeah it's it's kind of my one to twoyear liquidity pool so it's it's it's cash that's not fiat right if I need something in the next 3 months cash obviously if I need something in the next six to two years 6 months two years then gold is the right asset for that cuz it's just going to preserve that purchasing power in this current environment. Uh and then Bitcoin is my long like longest duration. So, you know, um paying off not not starting the mortgage, paying off the mortgage. Gold is there to start the mortgage. Bitcoin's there to pay it off. Uh putting kids through school, right? That's a 12 plus year long liability that I don't have to deal with right now. Bitcoin, that's where it's going. So, that's how I like to think about it. And it is it's there to be sold. Uh because everything is a relative game. So, for me, I talk about this a lot. The house in Australia is a really I mean, it's a hard thing to catch. Um in Sydney particularly our median to median is like 13 median income to median house price. So it's it's like they have to create a new bucket cuz five is what's deemed highly unaffordable. 13 is called impossibly unaffordable. They've had to create a new tier for it. Right? We're up there with Hong Kong and uh most other Australian cities. So for us it's like a good luck chasing it. Bitcoin is the only thing that's allowed me to actually chase the housing market. But everything's a relative trade. I may the housing market may have a spasm at some point. This can happen. And I may not want to sell my Bitcoin because like, you know, like many people listening, I also think it's going to a million bucks. Probably not tomorrow, but I think it's going there. Do I really want to sell my milliondoll future Bitcoin now to do that? Do I mind selling like a couple of ounces of gold like get started? Couldn't care less. So, it job is there to be sold to take advantage of the gold to house ratio. uh the Bitcoin is there to clear the mortgage to Bitcoin ratio. That's really the long-term and it's just about time frame. Uh most of the time when people disagree on stuff in markets, it's they're not understanding each other's time frame. And this is just a great example.

>> I think that's a really good point. I think one thing a lot of people do seem to agree on right now, at least people who don't just completely hate Bitcoin, is that gold is that canary in the coal mine, right? It's letting >> when when gold is going up, it's kind of letting everybody know, hey, something is out of whack here. people are feeling something is wrong. There's big shifts coming. People are looking for something that is, you know, that is going to be okay. Uh, you know, at least for the foreseeable future, like if everything else, you know, uh, you know, just completely dies off like gold gold's going to have a little cold, but it, you know, it'll be okay and it'll probably just keep going up. Uh, do you view gold as kind of that marker for where you see, okay, if gold's making moves, you look for Bitcoin to follow because a lot I think Bitcoin is still in its gold denominated value. It's still like uh, has it broken all-time highs yet? it briefly broke to alltime highs but it's then pulled back. Um and this is another one of those things. So I think the gold for me gold is actually the benchmark. So we often compare everything in Bitcoin terms. The problem when you put any asset in Bitcoin terms it just looks like the inverse of the Bitcoin chart because of how powerful its old history is. It's kind of useless. It's honestly useless information. Uh what I do like to look at is everything priced in gold. You can look at the stock market. This is a really really popular chart. um look at the S&P 500 and it's rolling over and it tends to have gold outperformance for roughly 10 years and then you have like a 15 10 to 20 year type period where it's equities and it looks like we've just completed a 10year equity phase and we're moving into a 10year gold phase. Which is probably not a great sign for equities by and large because it's usually during these periods of loss of purchasing power uh you get higher inflation. it's harder for companies to continue to grow in those environments. So you get this kind of lost decade. Now whether it's a lost decade in fiat or only in gold terms remains to be seen. Uh certainly in gold terms is kind of my base case. But if you compare fiat versus uh gold and I actually like I got a couple of charts on my website where I reference it to February 2022 because there's always a question of like where do you anchor this stuff? And what I re like one thing that really it's kind of a bit of a pet peeve is when you see people going, "Oh, Bitcoin's performance sucks." Measuring from like the pico top to the pico top. It's like who cares about the pico top? If you're DCAing into any asset, like that only matters for the guy who bought the absolute top and then bought the absolute top and was like, "Why aren't I performing?" It's like because you're a [ __ ] investor, you know, like do better. So like working out what is a correct anchor point is always tricky. Now, if you look at Bitcoin's performance, if you anchor to the cycle bottom, of course, it's going to look tremendous against anything. It's kind of a bit disingenuous. If you go from the cycle top, sure, you can see how it's performed up until the next bull, and that's okay, but really only matters for the guy at the bottom. I've got a bunch of charts where I anchor to February 2022 because that's actually a major geopolitical event. That's when the US froze Russia's reserves. And if you look at all fiat currencies versus gold since then, they're down somewhere between 40 and 60%. The the US dollar is down 51%. So the US dollar has been cut in half in gold terms since they froze the reserves. That's like, okay, so that's starting to say maybe we've got a shift going. Uh if you look at toilet paper, which is TLT, long duration bonds, uh they're down 61%. So that's a I mean that's that's more than being cut in half. That's pretty nasty. Uh stocks are down 25%. So gold's kind of kicking ass. Now if you then introduce Bitcoin, what happened in February 2022? Well, we were on the precipice of going down to 15K. We didn't know it yet. We're trading at like 45 50K. So the nice thing about this comparison is you pick up the Bitcoin bear. You're not saying I'm going to cherrypick from the Bitcoin bottom and say, look how good it's done. No, I'm going to cherry pick from like early phase of the bear. Luna collapses, three arrows collapses, uh FTX collapses, and yet we've still recovered and we're up something like between 80 and 50% depending on where you want to measure it. So, Bitcoin is one of few assets that is beating the gold benchmark. So, it's actually a really genuine and fair comparison because you're saying, look, we get some downside, but your fiat's getting killed, your stocks are getting killed, pretty much everything is losing to gold except Bitcoin and one or two of the high-flying tech stocks. So you're really like talking about a very small pool of assets. Everything's correlated right now. So it's all one trade. You know, at some point you're like I look at Nvidia. Nvidia is actually the only asset that I can, you know, big picture asset. Not penny stocks and the like. Nvidia is really the only asset that is beating Bitcoin on any meaningful time frame. And I'm like, is it going to go from 4 trillion to 8 trillion? I can see Bitcoin going from 2 trillion to 8 trillion. I don't even have to like run any compute cycles. this is like going to happen. Nvidia's got a lot of work to like they got to keep growing at a kind of unsustainable rate for a long time to justify an $8 trillion market cap or the dollar's got to get cut in half. Uh both of those things could happen, but like I can see Bitcoin going to 8 trillion far easier. So for me just becomes this like I'm just going to put money in gold and Bitcoin and just wait because I know where they're going to go. I understand the thesis. It's really the same thesis just different timelines. sit tight, hands off, shelling point, let it do its thing.

>> You know, you mentioned that kind of the the shite investor who basically, you know, bought the very top and is now complaining about, you know, the the lack of gains. I mean, do you think that there's a lot of that in the current just vibes in the current sentiment out there? Because it's we're still, let's see, right now the time of recording, we're a little over 111,000 uh infinitely printable, you know, fiat cuck bucks per Bitcoin. It's pretty awesome, you know, in in my book. Like, it's pretty amazing.

>> We crashed to 110K.

>> Yeah. Like, it's amazing that this is boring or that this is a crash or that this is somehow unsatisfactory to some people. Why Why are we seeing such just like a kind of weird like just a weird vibe out there right now? What What is your take on this?

>> Sentiment has been one of the most interesting things this cycle by far. And there's there's a few running thesis. It's very hard to prove what it is. It's probably a bit of all of it. Um I'll try and run through a couple of things on my list. The first one I think uh which is worth noting and I remember back in 2023 would have been like mid-23 I think I heard many ane I was working at glass node at the time and I heard many anecdotes from hedge funds trading desks uh average investors. If you wind back the clock to that like late 2022 bare market early 23 ETH actually outperformed Bitcoin in that process. And I think a lot of people, and I've heard this a lot of trading firms go, "Ah, Bitcoin's actually not going to make it now. Let's rotate and go." And even if it does, then we may as well be on the fastest horse, which is, you know, number two. And then it got absolutely slammed. So, I think a lot of people got stuck in the shitcoin trade expecting the capital waterfall to happen. ETH obviously got absolutely rinsed versus Bitcoin, just a horrible three-year persistent decline. And then I I look, this is just how markets work. I can only imagine the disgust of people just going, I'm done. They rotate out and then it pumps, right? Suddenly it's an alltime high again. I can only I mean like I I don't know how the future's going to play out, but poetry and I don't even like poetry, but poetry would be Ethereum tagging its alltime high by like 50 bucks as it's done and that's it. It's over. It's done. But all those people who bought it at the bottom, watched it go lower, finally sold it, and then buy back into the top and are probably now going to ride the next wave down. That's one area. So, I think people just c got caught in the wrong shitcoins underallocated to Bitcoin. I think the other one is treasury companies. People saw the meteoric rise of MSTR. There's a bunch of guys out there and well done for being on that train very, very early and riding that wave up. I think there's two things that have really crushed people. I say three things that have really crushed people's sentiment. One, MSCR has not really gone anywhere in some time since November last year. Uh, and most of it's gone down. So, I think a lot of people got kind of crushed on MSTR. I think more people got crushed buying call options on MSTR and they're probably discovering that call options, if you just hold the stock, it might come back. Call options literally go to zero. if they don't end up in the money, they literally go to zero. And they go to zero quickly. So, I think that's been a capital destruction. And I think a lot of people saw Met Planet, missed it, and then jumped on every other shitcoin with a coal card, and they're now down 60 odd% plus and still going. So, I think the treasury companies have probably incinerated quite a lot of capital. Uh people didn't quite understand the premium compression angle to this whole thing. What is that? That's actually the same story as the previous point which is people just underallocated to Bitcoin. Not enough people actually just own spot corn. Now there's the other one of and I think this is actually very meaningful. I don't believe that uh I think this is generally people who are inexperienced in markets have this view but I see it a lot. People think it's been a [ __ ] cycle because it hasn't gone up enough hasn't gone up as much as they expected. That's got nothing to do with the market. That's because people's expectations were just very very wrong. Like Bitcoin is just much bigger now. Right now, now personally I I ran a a study. I think it would have been like January, February. And I tried to look at like capital flows and how much I think has to come in to justify moves to different levels. And anyway, when I ran that study, we're about 100K and I said, "What's it going to take to get to 150 from 2 trillion to 3 trillion? What's that move going to require?" And my estimation was that the ETFs probably had to double from where they are at the moment, from where they were back then. I think they've been up like 60 70% but if you add in MSTR's buying since then you've actually kind of got the amount of capital that I thought we needed to get to 150. Now that doesn't mean that I'm right but like I think we belong at 150 honestly and I I think we kind of belong there and we should stay there. I just think a lot of people don't understand that markets are a process not a result. Just because you get to a price doesn't mean that you've earned the right to stay there. MSR got to what 500 bucks, but it just didn't have, you know, it can't really sustain a 3x premium. It can't really grow its Bitcoin stack by 3x. It's probably not going to happen. So, if you like Bitcoin's really got to go on a serious run before that expands. So, I think people's expectations outrun reality. Uh, a lot of folks I think feel like the Bitcoin market because of the bears. Probably the bears suck. They're brutal. They doesn't mean the market owes you a retirement. You know what I mean? Like markets are not ATMs. You've got to give the mark. It's like the tide. The tide if you swim against it, it's just going to drag you out to see. You can wish all you want what your expectations should be, but like the market just is. It's just a force of nature and you just kind of have to go along with the ride. So, you know, if for example, we pull, you know, we pull back to, I don't know, 100K, 90K, and we bottom out there, is everyone going to go, "Hey, that was a bare market." Like, in my book, that's a bear. I think if we actually pull back to like 90, 80, 75, to me, that's starting to look like bare market floor type mater. That's my like uh my gut feel. If we were to bear out here, I think that's a bare market. So then is everyone going to like correct their charts and say, "Oh yeah, we actually bottomed in, you know, uh, November 2025 and that was it?" And then are people going to be like ready to adjust their cycle theory? And like if you just keep punching to new highs, does suddenly the cycle not suck anymore? So it's just about like understanding that things are a process. Markets take time. When it's going up, it's actually not because people are buying shitloads of coin right now. it's because they bought shitloads of coin for the last like five, six, seven, eight, nine months and then the sellers dry up. You still got the same amount of demand, but suddenly there's no one willing to sell. So, you know, if I go back to 2024, that move from 50k to 100k when Trump got uh got elected without that 8 months of sideways choppy, boring, frustrating sideways price action, without that chop solidation, you don't go from 50 to 100. And if you do, you probably come back down because that eight months of chop is the base from which that move comes from. And if we look at our current performance, a lot of people going, "Oh man, this cycle sucks cuz it's like 2025 and we're at the same price." It's like, "Yeah, but chop guys, chop consolidation. When this thing goes, it's proven that we're now a $2 trillion asset. The next move is 3 trillion. And if we go through another 12 months of sideways, the next stop is 4 trillion. and like and I don't believe this kind of stairstepping can go on indefinitely, but it's a process. So, I think expectations, not earning enough Bitcoin because they're in [ __ ] coins, not earning enough Bitcoin because they're in treasury companies, they're the big three that I think have got people frustrated. Maybe the fourth one I should just add, there's less volatility. People expect the high octane old school Bitcoin, which is probably the way they went into treasury companies. It hasn't given them that high octane. It's given my old man his, "Hey, I actually quite like Bitcoin anymore. It doesn't seem to go down." That's that. Think about that sentiment in Wall Street, in pension funds, in retirement accounts. If you've got the high octane, you can kind of lose those people. The fact that we don't have that is actually opening doors and taking away one of the biggest pieces of FUD that's ever been around for Bitcoin, which is it's too volatile. It's like, well, we got rid of that, too. You know, like, what FUD is left? There is no FUD left. Let's go. the honestly bitcoiners right now are coming up with the most FUD for Bitcoin like that's what I'm seeing right it's it's no longer you know the external that's that's the most amazing part but okay there's there's so much there I want to unpack one of the things maybe to start with is just cuz you mentioned kind of that like you know earning that uh you know or you feel that you know we should be at somewhere around 150 and I've got to say so the last time we talked it was February of this year you like I don't know if you remember this but you perfectly called that like you didn't get the you know say what the exact time would be but you were like I I think we probably go back down to to 75 or so. And if that happens, I'm backing up the truck. Lo and behold, like a month later, we, you know, blast down to 75. Everyone's like, "What's going on?" And I'm just sitting there like, "Well, checkmate did say this was probably going to happen." And then you're like, "But I think that the top is somewhere around 150 this cycle. Are you still like is that still like do you think that was like the bottom? Do you think we retouch that uh that March April low again or go below that? Is is 58k a magnet?" um or or have we you know are those days gone by us and then on the other side of that >> is your kind of top target for this cycle still looking at that 150 marker is that we're looking at or have there been things that have come to light and you know in the past uh you know half a year basically since we last talked that have changed that in terms of what you think we might be able to achieve this this cycle >> all really good questions so on the I'll talk through why I thought we were going to go to 75 and again it's not because I can predict the future I certainly can't there was what I call an air pocket. So, we did the 2024 chop solidation. Uh, and in fact, I should actually wind back the clock one more step. In 2021, we got to a trillion dollar market cap. It's about 50K, 50, 60K twice. The first time in March, April, and then we got slammed down to 29. Then we tried it again in November, October, and we got slammed down to 15K. The market said, "Sorry mate, you're not ready for a trillion dollars. Try again next time." So, we did. We tried again next time with the ETFs in tow, right? We've cleared out all the dead wood. We've had a complete like Bitcoin equivalent of a GFC. We've smoked all the three arrows. The block fires, they're gone. Suddenly, we're in, hey, we got these ETFs and they're taking in billion dollars a day on a consistent basis. Massive numbers. Oh, by the way, they're actually like the most successful ETFs ever. Suddenly, we're at 73. Now, the market ran a bit too hard, too fast. We chopped around for 8 months. Every time we went below, not above, below 50K, we got bid every single time. The yen carry trade happened, 49, straight back up again. We come down to 53, the German government sells 50,000 coins, straight back up again. The market said, "No, you met, you did it. You made it. You're a trillion dollar asset." Now, so the ceiling of that, what I call the top of the chop, 75K. Now, from 75 up to 86 in November, there was basically no coins that trans. We literally just zipped way too quickly. So the move higher was built off that base, that 2024 base. But yet very very often markets will come back and retest major all-time higher breakouts. But also those air pockets, I don't know why it is. It's the same as CE gaps. There's just like these things in markets I've seen enough times. I'm just like, look, be aware. We might go down and touch it. We might just go and find out. Hey, I know you've bought all these coins at 95 and 100. do you still like it at 75? And the market said yes. Now, the reason I like this like 75 to 80K region right now. No, I'm not. By the way, I actually think there's a much lower probability that we go there. Um I actually don't want us to go there because I think that would be just from a technical perspective quite damaging to the chart. So, I don't want us to go there. I don't think we go there. But if we do, Sailor's cost base is at 74K. the average uh there's a onchain model I use called the true market mean which is the average cost basis for people who are actually active in the cycle that's at 78. The ETFs are at 80. So you got 80 78 74. Imagine the headlines. Imagine the smell of the price going back down to 75. You got the top of the chop. Just imagine that happening. It would be absolute chaos and only the Bitcoin believers would be like I mean sale are about to be liquidated. ETF investors get wrecked. Like pick your headline bottom forming stuff, guys. Like that's that's nasty. We have earned our right as a trillion dollar asset. We don't belong at 50k. Now, if we go there because anything in this world can happen, that's deep value. Like I'm sorry, but that's just deep value. I'm I'm selling the couch, right? Whatever you got to do. Once you get down there, it doesn't make sense. It's too oversold. So, I'm just trying to like think through these scenarios in advance. And then once you well well for me at least once I satisfied myself that you know what anything below that level is deep value I go well how low could we actually go if like if you look at things from like a riskreward perspective we're at 100 if we go to 75 that's 25% correction from here from or from 100 okay it's like another day in Bitcoin you know what I mean like as long as I didn't put my whole net worth in at 124 like yeah that would suck but like okay 25% 30% whatever. What if we go up to 150 180? So now let's look at the upside. Um as chop consolidation occurs. Now if we spoke in February, there's been a lot of coins that have changed hands both on the sell off down of 75 on the rally back up again on the multiple consolidations we've had on the pullback we're currently having. We've gone nowhere. We've chop consolidated for another 9 months. Imagine all the coins that have changed hand. And actually it's a huge amount. Uh, I'll try. I'm pretty sure the numbers are if you price every UTXO based on when it last moved on chain, I think it's 50%. It's either 50 or 45, something like that, around half of every dollar that has ever been, if you price the UTXOs, is above 95K. Above 95, that's the floor. That's like where Bitcoin's home is now. So, that's the kind of magnitude that we're talking about. the people's mental like investment cost basis. Like if you think about all these Wall Street investors in the ETFs or these pension funds, they don't care that Bitcoin traded $100 or $10 or $15. Their cost basis is $55 I bit, $62 IBIT, and all they see when they log into the chart is an uptrend. They literally don't know that Bitcoin has bare markets unless they kind of recall from the from the news. So from that perspective, we've reset the entire Bitcoin psychology to like 75K plus. 75K is like old news now. Bare market territory. Everything above 95 normal normal normal normal behavior. So then you go, okay, well, where can we go before people start getting too profitable? When are they going to start selling? So that was 150 when we spoke last. as more capital changes hands. If you've got a bunch of people with a cost basis that used to be 50, but they sold it to some guy whose cost base is now 100, well, for him to hit his profit target, it's no longer 150, might be 180, might be 200, right? The market's got to go higher to create the incentive for people to sell. So, from memory, the 150 level we spoke about before, I think right now be floating around 180 or 185, something like that. And again, that's not a target. That's just where statistically speaking, there's a 5% chance we keep going. If you just look at mean reversion, there's only a 5% chance that we get there and then keep going past it. But if we go up to 150 and we chop solidate for another like 6 8 12 months, that thing just keeps drifting higher because 150 140 130 becomes the base. As we chop around in that zone, people buy, people sell, people transact, suddenly people don't even think about 75. 75 is a

long lost memory. The same way that $1,000 is a long lost memory. So over time, these like smaller prices disappear and they just become irrelevant, right? We never think about that again and we start always looking ahead because people are naturally optimistic. So that that's the way I like to think about things.

Chop consolidation is the most important like market structure dynamic. It's a function of lots of things, ETFs, derivatives, the whole lot. But this chop consolidation thing that we're experiencing is why Bitcoin keeps climbing higher and it's why the cycle kicks ass because we've never seen this before. It really is a whole different thing. Very healthy, very stable. Actually, much easier to read, honestly. Like, if I went brought myself back and tried to restudy the 2021 cycle, you had to know that Blockfire was playing silly games. You had to know that Three Arrows Capital was borrowing a billion dollars for zero collateral. You had to know all this like weird esoteric stuff. Now all we have to just look at is like, you know, where has the market proven? Where have we got the confidence that we belong at that level? And it's just, for me, it just seems to be much, much easier to read on those levels.

>> Well, okay. I mean, I love that, first of all, that it's just kind of uh the chop consolidation. You've really brought me around this from the last conversation. Obviously, you've talked about it a lot, you know, and you know, uh, Dr. Jeff Ross would, you know, his version of that is like the crab market, right? Or the bull crab market, right? It's just kind of crabing along and it's and it's boring and it bores you just long enough >> to where you're kind of like, okay, you know, screw it. And then that's when it melts your face off. >>

I I'm curious though, you know, could because you mentioned, okay, there's also this chance of we maybe we have this pullback. Maybe there is like a November 2025 uh bare market and then and then that's the bottom of the bear. Like do you, where are you at with the whole four-year cycles thing? You know, because we talked about this a little bit last time. One of the things you said was, "Yeah, conditions might change." I'm paraphrasing here. Conditions might change, but human nature doesn't change. And obviously, there's other, you know, factors that that play into this. There's global liquidity cycles as well, right? There's all these different things. So, where are you at with us or with this? Is this time different from that cycle perspective? Uh, or do we, you know, is it is it a little bit different, but it still follows the the general framework? You know, it doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. How do you look at this? How are you kind of planning for that as we go forward? What's your what's your model there?

>> It's a great question and uh there's a few angles to this. The first one, we're going to find out within the next 30 to 90 days because every single previous cycle has topped. Like if if we're still going by like 2026, then we've probably busted the four-year cycle because we've more or less followed it from both the cycle low and from the cycle higher perspective. Um, a lot of people like to share that chart. I think it's a good one that just kind of maps each cycle's performance since the bottom, since the top. Uh, I really dislike the one since the halving because I think the halving was completely and utterly irrelevant. Um, both from a market perspective, but also it's just it's kind of an arbitrary date. Cycle bottom, cycle higher makes a lot more sense. Uh, because that takes into account the duration that people go through like the the investor psychology of going through a bear, hammering out a bottom, finding the actual like conviction to buy it, going through the recovery, hitting the euphoria, and then just going, "Oh man, I'm getting rich." And then everyone makes decisions on those types of time frames.

Now, no matter which way you want to measure it, we're somewhere between 30 and 90 days away from like hitting where all previous cycles have topped out. Now, if we've already topped out, which is always a possibility. I don't, it's not my base case, but it's possible. If we've already topped out, it was kind of a normal cycle, honestly. Like, we got the diminishing returns. You know, we went for about the same duration. It's in between the duration of 2017 and 2021. So, like there's a lot of things that are kind of in line. So, it still has a lot of characteristics of the four-year cycle. However, it is also different structurally, measurably, observably, it's very, very different. It has a lot of the characteristics of the 2016-17 market. Spot driven, I think is a key part of that. Uh, then the ETFs are a big role. If you look at any mean reversion oscillators, whether technical or on-chain, it has the same pattern and flow as 16-17, different amplitude and it oscillates around means rather than kind of finding support on them. So, it's got a different character. 2018 to 22 was a very, very different period. Um, boom bust, straight up, straight down, like with leverage, very, very different creature. So, it it is different, but it also like when we talk about this time is different, I think it's important to recognize what that actually means. The human psychology is the same. Bubbles will always look very, very similar. They're constructed in the same way. People behave the same way. Human behavior is ultimately the great constant in markets. So, the the four-year cycle, there will be a lot of people who like behave, sell, act. Um, I've seen a lot of people actually saying like, "I'm so disappointed in this cycle. It sucks that it's topped." It's like, you're just basing that off the fact the four years is going to continue. What if it doesn't? You know, what what if we do in fact go to 150 from here and then we chop sideways for for a year and then we go up again? Has the cycle ended? And that's what chop consolidation so interesting for because it kind of acclimates everybody to the new altitude. 100k felt normal kind of quickly. Now, in 2017, you never had time to get used to 3K and 5K and 7K and 10K cuz by the time you've worked out what price you're at, you're 2x higher. So people didn't actually have time to acclimatize to new altitudes. Here we've acclimatized to 100k for 9 months. People are now used to 100k as being like a normal level. If we go to 95, in fact, even at 108, I was like, kind of feels like a discount, right? I'm a hodler who's been in this market for a long time. We always feel like we're late and it's expensive when we buy. I now feel comfortable buying at 108K, right? Tell that to my like 12-month-old self like 12 months ago. Insane. When you're trading at 50K, you're like, by the way, it's going to feel really normal to buy 108K pullback. And by the way, you'll have been there for a year. You're like, what? You know, when you put all this stuff in perspective, chop consolidation is doing a really, really good job of just helping people get used to the ascent, right? It's like going to base camp one. Spend some time there, get your oxygen right, go to base camp 2. Once you're comfortable at base camp 2, you can start seeing the summit. Still a long way up, but you can start thinking about the summit.

>> Yeah. I mean, it is interesting to think of like how quickly these things become the new normal. Like and it just feels like, you said, like it's, you know, it went down to 108k and I'm like, oh, well, great, you know, add a little bit, add a little bit extra, couple couple little smash buys here with the the fiat that, you know, that I that I've got lying around, you know, I've got my my DCA just keeps on cooking, but little little extra there, feeling frisky and it's like, wow, it feels like a, feels like I got a great deal on that on those sats there, like fantastic. But it's again, that like, if you would have told me that at at 50k, I would have been like, well, I'm backing up the truck even more now. There's nothing left. Like the the truck is gone. I've sold all the tires in the truck. There's nothing left for it. But here, but if I, you know, I'm going to somehow limp it along to back it up more. But so I think it's interesting. Does that does that necessarily mean then that like are you generally the theory I should say that like >> any bare quote bare market or any draw downs will be less severe and less uh they won't be as long. Is that fair to say that you're kind of in that camp or do you still can we have a protracted bare market still?

>> Yeah. Yeah. It it very much depends on the bull. So, it's very hard for me to construct a nasty 80% down bare market from here. It's very hard for me to construct that because I do believe and again, these are just beliefs, but I do believe we have proven that Bitcoin is a trillion-dollar asset. Bitcoin doesn't belong down below 50K. Like it it's just it's just not, it's out of bounds. So, once you go to that process, you're like, we literally haven't gone high enough to justify an 80%. Okay. What else have we got high enough? How high do we have to go before an 80% makes sense? You wake up tomorrow and you're at 500K or a million bucks. Yeah, we're coming down. It's going to be hard, right? That that descent's going to suck. So, that that's where like a lot of folks I see say, "Oh, but it didn't hit my 300K price target." Like, yeah, but you need to be sitting there on the sell button when it gets there because it's not going to be there for very long, right? Unless the whole world is just imploding and you know that's a whole different edge case. But the most likely scenario is that we just go through this market cycle and we hit peaks. There will be a bear at some point. Uh, I suspect it will be protracted. I think we'll still get a lengthy period, but it really depends on the pathway up, right? Um, for me as an analyst, it's much easier and I think most people would would agree with this. It's much easier to spot an insanely euphoric bull where funding rates are through the roof. Lots of profit taking happening. The narrative is there is no ceiling. You know, MSTR is just mooning, every treasury company and shitcoin's going through the roof. We've all been there. We've seen it. We know what it looks like. It's easy to spot euphoria. How high it goes is a whole different animal because a lot of people sell and then it goes keeps going higher and then they buy back in cuz like, oh no, I'm wrong. And then they end up buying the top again. So, that's a very common behavior. What actually concerns me as an analyst is that we just like roll over. It's like this just like sad little, it just doesn't have the euphoric boom that we would expect. That's much harder to spot because you're really looking at just like a softening out of demand.

Now, the truth is, right now as we're talking, the ETFs are pretty soft. We really, we've seen about three or four weeks where they just haven't seen significant inflows. It's not bearish, they're just not bullish either. Uh, you know, we get a little bit of an outflow, we get a little bit of an inflow. One thing that I find quite comforting with the ETFs is that we've seen very, very little like sustained week after week, billion-dollar out, billion-dollar out. We haven't seen that. We get the occasional patch, but it's an event. Everything's being quite event-based, which is, I think, is very good. We're not getting like a loss of confidence of of holders. That's a good thing. Treasury company bid has just evaporated completely. Uh, and that's because a lot of these companies don't have an MNAV anymore. They have no premium, so they have no capacity to buy. Uh, you've got Sailor who's meaningfully backed off the, he he can't sell as much of these preferreds anymore. You know, he was raising 2 billion, 1 billion, three billion. He did like 400 million. Now 400 million is still a lot of money, but it's not 2 billion, right? It's quite sizably less than 2 billion. So even Sailor doesn't have the the buy side. So the treasury company bids evaporated really. Um, so really all you're left with is just classic Bitcoiners buying in spot markets. When you look at the amount of sellside slide, like I also don't encourage people to whale watch. I certainly don't whale watch, but Sne um from Time Chain Index, he's done tremendous work and he's got all the labels to track this stuff. He can see all these like, oh, 24,000 Bitcoin comes back to life. 24,000 Bitcoin comes um Galaxy just cleared 80,000 Bitcoin. Like these are very, very big clips and there's a lot of them. We're not at 90K. We're not at 80. We're not at 70. We're at 110, 111. Like, Bitcoin's doing pretty all right considering the ETFs are soft and the treasury companies are doing absolutely nothing. That's quite remarkable. There's a lot of Bitcoiners out there just stacking actual SATs. Uh, it's not going to be all retail. There's going to be like institutions and funds and firms and all that. But there's demand out there that I think a lot of people aren't like it should be lower given how much sellside there is and how little the obvious demand vectors are contributing. It's quite remarkable actually.

It's interesting. It reminds me because one of the things we talked about last time again was, you know, the the kind of market manipulation narrative. This idea that, oh, clearly there's market manipulation and paper Bitcoin being sold and all these things because the price isn't doing what I want right now. And your response to that again at that time, which I think was pretty prescient given the very like large and public whale sales that we've seen of late, you just mentioned a couple of them, is that you were like, look, there's a lot of OG whales with massive stacks of Bitcoin. And for them, anything over 100K like looks pretty great because they've held it from a few bucks or from, you know, from whatever it is. Like they are massively, massively unbelievably in profit and they're they want to take some of that. Like who knows the this may not even be their their whole clips. They're, you know, all of their stacks. They they may have other ones like like and I I feel like people just still I mean, it's hard for me to fathom having, you know, like one person having billions of dollars of Bitcoin but like >> it's out there and and there's more of them than we realize that that, you know >> this guy who's going to sell 80,000 Bitcoin. They're like, why would you do that? We're about to go on like the monster of all bull runs. Like bro, he bought in 2011. He's had the monster of all bull runs. He's up $10 billion. Don't like he he needs to hire a legal team to sort out his estate. Like that's how much money this dude has. He can buy an island. Don't worry about him. He's going to be just fine. And who knows how many more of these clips he's got. Uh, he probably doesn't want to keep it on a [ __ ] cold wallet anymore. You know, that's a whole mission. So that's a, it is an interesting angle, but it's not only just the whale OG's. They're definitely an interesting component that we've seen in like the recent months. But the other thing that's like even more interesting, there's just there's just hodlers and people have held for 6 months, 12 months, 2 years, 3 years. People who've just been around for a cycle and a half or a cycle. A lot of these guys are selling as well. Um, and they always sell. These coins come back to life. And this is the thing. When we look at on-chain data, we don't know that a coin was sold. We can see that a lot of them go in and out of exchanges on an average daily basis. Approximately a billion dollars goes in and out of exchanges, which is pretty massive. Um, somewhere between like 60 and 80% when you actually look at like adjusting the transaction volume and you get rid of all like the exchange internals and all that stuff. Somewhere between like 60 and 80% of the real economic volume of Bitcoin are coins going in and out of exchanges for trade. Now, of course, someone may buy a coin, then not exactly withdraw it on that day. They may also send a coin and not sell it on that exact day. It really doesn't matter. They come back to life. Old coins with the most profit always come back to life when the market is going up harshly, right? When the market is really ripping, people sell. They bring coins back to life. Now, it could also be that they've all got a Telegram chat and they go, "Now's the day we're going to do UTXO consolidation. Let's all do our management today because the price is at 100K." No, they they're they're taking profit or they're doing something in the market. They could be taking a loan. They could be, doesn't matter. The pattern is lots of old coins come back to the market and then the market stops going up. It's just kind of the way things work. So, we don't need to be perfectly precise, but we can get a decent read that there are a lot of these coins coming in. But my favorite, one of my favorite insights, everything is Newton's third law, equal and opposite. Every sold Bitcoin is a bought Bitcoin. When you measure sellside, you're actually measuring demand. And this is the thing for me that's been, I I look at the sellside and you've got to like, you know, it's all about developing a bit of a a gut feel. I call it like your Bitcoiner instinct. And by the way, trust your Bitcoiner instinct because you'll be amazed. I wrote a piece on this literally yesterday on how much your Bitcoiner instinct lines up with what's going on in the on-chain world. If you can like, really, I just view on-chain data as a way to visualize all of us, all of us Bitcoiners, what are we doing? What are we feeling? How in profit are we? More often than not, your Bitcoiner instinct will align with what's going on. And my Bitcoiner instinct for this pretty much whole cycle. Look at all of that sellside and the price is doing this over months. Yeah, it swings up and down, but guys, we're at 110K and we're taking billion dollars a day of sellside. Right now, it's $2 billion a day of whales, of like OG whales and long-term holder sellside. Two billion a day and the market's down 10% from the highs. We have serious, serious demand in this market and I think a lot of people miss that. They miss Newton's third law. Every sold Bitcoin has a buyer and the buy side is absolutely tremendous. Shouldn't be discounted.

>> No, absolutely. And somebody just following up on that, somebody asked in the live stream chat on uh on Noster, is there a way of kind of that you project when sellers, these OG sellers will reach a point of exhaustion? Is there something you look at that kind of informs that? And you know, how do how do you know if we're we're getting towards the end of that? When is there something that can tell you that?

>> Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so there's a there's a metric that I use. It's called sellside risk ratio. Um, it's one of my favorites actually. Uh, we look at when we talk about uh realized profit and realized loss. Every coin or UT, when I say coin, just think UTXO for the nerds in the room, when we when I say coin, every coin has a cost basis, right? That's the price when it last, when the UTXO was created. When did that coin last move on chain? If that's your cost basis and your cost basis is 100k, for example, and the price is at 110k, technically speaking, that person's up 10%. When they spend that coin, we can measure the delta. We can also do it on the downside. So, realized profit, realized loss. Now, when people are taking profit, locking in coins that they bought at a thousand bucks and spending them at 110K, they are signaling to the market that they think we are no longer at equilibrium. Because if we're at equilibrium, they would hodl because they're like, "No, I think we have further to run." Now, if someone's capitulating a loss, it is also sending a signal, but they do not think we're at equilibrium because they think it's going lower. Right? At bare market bottoms, if you can believe it, we get top buyers naturally taking massive L's, long-term holder, top buyers. You get the people who bought last week thinking it was the bottom. They capitulate as well. But then you also get long-term holders who lock in profits at bottoms because they're terrified it's going to go lower. So add up all the profit and loss, the delta between those cost bases, how much has been locked in by the coins that are moving and compare it to how big the market is. Right? So it's a ratio of the disturbing force, which is the profit and loss, versus how big Bitcoin is, which we use the realized cap, which values every coin based on when it last moved. This metric looks identical to options implied volatility. So options implied volatility is measured purely from the options chain. It wouldn't know that Bitcoin is a blockchain, has no idea about on-chain data, and yet these two metrics are identical. So when we see that everyone who was going to take profit and everyone who was going to take loss has done so, risk goes down because you've got this um your disturbing force is now very small. Bitcoin is very big, but no one's taking profit or loss. All the coins that are transacting on chain, you know, if we're at 110K, they were last acquired at 109 or 10950 or 106. They're not acquired at 10K or 5K or 30K. The delta is small. So, whenever we get this like volatility compression, the options market usually goes to sleep and funding rates usually quieten down. So, you get this really nice confluence where everyone just thinks that this boring sideways nothingness is going to continue. And what usually happens for me that's like ding ding ding setting off all these bells going, guys, market's about to move. The market is ready to go. I don't know when it's going to go, but like we have coiled up this spring that there's no more profit and loss taking happening. The market has to go somewhere somewhere else to either make people panic and capitulate losses or rip to the upside so people start taking profit because we have now reached equilibrium. It's one of my favorite metrics because there's so much of this like it's a simple oscillator, but it's got so much lore and density to it in terms of the actual signal about what it's telling you. It's just telling you what are investors doing. It's ready to go. Let's move.

>> I love it. And honestly, I'm I'm cool either way. Would love a rip to the upside, but I would also love some cheaper sats. Uh, I think that's the beauty of, you know, the the mindset shift that shift that happens. It's like, yeah, yeah, I love seeing NGU, but I like seeing number go down as well because that means my my dirty fiat buys just a few more sats. I'm I'm curious on the uh just because you mentioned options here and it reminded me of something you mentioned before the show to talk about the IBIT options data that you started looking at. You want to get into that a little bit and kind of what that's telling you?

>> Yeah, so um I haven't written my piece on it yet, but uh it's actually very hard to get good trad. So, I've been digging around for ages to try and find a decent read on the IBIT options chain because my base case was I know that IBIT options must be big. They must be significant because we've seen a lot of like the cash and carry trade where people long the ETF, short the futures. Now, the IBIT options went live in November. If you look at the total flows into all of the ETFs excluding IBIT, they have been dead flat since January. None of the other ETFs have seen any inflows on net since January. And yet the ETF inflows are ripping to the upside. IBIT is now 58% of the AUM in all of the ETFs. It's it's just tearing away. So I'm looking at this chart being like, "Holy [ __ ] the options like that has to be the options. There's no other there's no other reason for it." And options tends to be a market that is winner take all. No one wants to trade the second biggest options chain. So I was like, "Okay, I got to go and find because like I'm obviously missing a big part of the leverage in the system." Uh, and for me, like yes, a lot of people know me for my on-chain work, but like really I I'm a Bitcoin analyst. On-chain is one meaningful but one part of my puzzle, futures, options, but now I've got options on the ETF. Like what I love about that in the on-chain world, we look at like short-term holders, long-term holders as a good cohort. People have been around for a long time and speculators, but we also now have like funding rates. That's like real institutions aren't trading funding rates. Degenerate gamblers are trading. So you've got like the speculators in the cryptonative world and then you can go to the CME. CME is like your buttoned-up Mr. Wall Street trading futures over there. We've got Derabit options and now we've got IBIT options. And both of these are telling us about these different subsets or cohorts within the market. So we get a bit of a view of what everyone's doing. Now, uh, I had to rerun the numbers and I I may have made calculation errors, but I'm pretty sure it's right. I've I've got AI to double check these things for me. There's like $30 billion in open interest. And for a bit of a bit of a sense of scale here, IBIT in the since November is now as big if not bigger than Darabit. So Derbit has been like 95% market dominance. IBIT has just exploded out. Um, by far the biggest in terms of volume, in terms of open interest. If you take the IBIT um AUM, so the amount of Bitcoin that's in there, the options are now 40%. So for every IBIT BTC, unit of Bitcoin in there, there is 40 cents worth of options open interest applied to these things. So the leverage ratio is getting very, very big very, very quickly. So this was actually a bit of a missing piece for me cuz I'm like leverage was already going higher, but I'm like I just feel like there's more. If you want to talk about paper Bitcoin, these options are, you know, you could argue that they're paper Bitcoin. They're also part of Bitcoin maturing. But here's the other thing, you know, these are the two-sided coins. We are going to see volatility capture strategies. people selling and buying call options and put options and whatever. This is going to extract volatility from the markets what they do. They can also backfire and create volatility spikes if the market wants to rip through them. So this can also happen. But also when you got this big of an options market in like what, what 8 months, 9 months when we're this far in and the options are this big, capital allocators, if you got $30 billion worth of total size, they can now hedge serious risk. It actually makes it much easier for big institutions to allocate when they can hedge out hundred billion dollars and not over concern um hundred million and not be concerned. The size of these options, yes, it's leverage in the system, but it's also insurance. It's a market for insurance. So, the big allocators can now buy Bitcoin knowing that they can spend a little bit of premium to insure the car just in case it crashes. So that actually is going to reduce the chance they're going to just like market sell their ETF because they can hedge the risk in the option space and speculators can take that risk. So really, really interesting dynamic. I still need to do a big deep dive on it. It's meaningful. It's a really, really big event and uh it kind of shows that Wall Street is absolutely here.

>> And I mean, is that that's kind of another piece in the puzzle of like decreased potential downside volatility? Like I mean, just decreased volatility in general as you said. It's not just downside volatility, it's the upside volatility as well, which is that, you know, we like the upside volatility, we don't like the downside volatility so much, but they they necessarily must go hand in hand, right?

>> Totally. Totally. And that's the thing, everything is a pull and pull and uh two and fro, right? Equal and opposite reaction. Um, you can take volatility out of markets for a while, but it can come right back again because all that leverage, this is what I was talking about sellside risk before. When implied volatility gets super low, everyone goes, "Ah, that's all right. I can take more risk because the market doesn't go anywhere. Bitcoin is just a boring old stable coin at 110K. I'm going to sell. Oh [ __ ] I sold too many call options." Bang. Away it can go. So things can really move. Yes, it may be less frequent and it may not be as high octane all the time, but it can also get people on the wrong side of the boat and things can really start to move because they got to cover their positions. And the thing with options, if you're an options writer and you're selling those those uh puts or calls, you have infinite risk. You have unlimited risk and a limited upside. So when you're selling options, you have unlimited risk, which means if you got unlimited risk, you got to cover. They don't have a choice. They got to get out of those positions if they're wrong. Um, that's on the the um directional side. There's obviously traders who just they don't care where the price goes. They're just extracting volatility. The market's going to get increasingly complex. And really, like for me as an analyst, this is amazing because you you're kind of watching the true monetization and a market's coming up out of nowhere. We didn't have IBIT options in November. Now we do. Now we're starting to see how Derit trades relative how does a cryptonative exchange trade relative to Tradfi and start speaking the same language.

>> You know, it's I mean, it's really fascinating. I guess, you know, Bitcoin's uh Bitcoin's gone mainstream. Your favorite band now uh now your neighbor likes it too. and uh you know it's not not cool and hipster anymore, but you just you got to deal with it, right?

>> It's a real thing.

>> Yeah. So, kind of on that Tradfi side of things, I want to talk a little bit more about the Bitcoin Treasury companies because I do think that you mentioned earlier and I completely agree with the analysis that essentially a lot of the weird sentiment we're seeing just recently, even though Bitcoin's at 100, you know, 110 $111,000 per coin, which is just wild, um and seems pretty great to me still. You see all this negativity and I do agree. I think you're exactly right. Is that people were either too I mean on the crypto side they've been way underallocated to Bitcoin for a long time. We we know that, right? That's been been very obvious and I think it's becoming obvious to them now finally. Um, but they'll probably still do the same thing over, you know, over and over again as they claim that, you know, whatever shitcoin they have is going to totally replace Bitcoin. It's going to the flipping is going to happen this time, guys. I promise. But on the Bitcoin Treasury company side, it seems that there's a lot of folks who again came in chasing those gains. I I think I think it was a uh American Huddle said this the other day on on Danny's show uh when he had Huddle and Lubka on. Is basically like people think that they can kind of like teleport or you know take a time machine to be an OG that you can if you yes if you you know lever up and you take these these risks and you kind of gamble on some of these more uh you know speculative proxies for Bitcoin that you can somehow go back in time and it'll be just like you bought Bitcoin you know in 2015 with you know sometime around there and it's just like that's just not the case like you're you're not going to be able to do it and you're probably going to get wrecked and I feel like like I'm not saying that uh I think strategy is going to just fine. I think uh MetaPlanet's going to do just fine just because of the size they have. A few others that'll that'll do just fine. The Bitcoin miners that have a lot of Bitcoin in their balance sheet, I think will be just fine. But it seems like there is a lot of these kind of smaller ones that are were great for the people that, you know, got in uh at the very, you know, at the ground floor. Not so great for the people the retail that bought it thinking it was going to, you know, 10x overnight and >> maybe it went up a little bit and then it dumped back down. So, how are how are you looking at this? Is this in any way? I mean, I think this sort of thing was inevitable. This was going to happen. Bitcoin's a success. Of course, companies want it. Of course, nation states want it. Everyone wants it. But how are you looking at this? Does this factor into your analysis at all in terms of how much money is flowing into Bitcoin via these proxies? Or are are you paying less attention to this?

>> Yeah. So, um I I've gone through the loops and the calculations to just like get a bit of a read on my my feel for these things. There's a number of levels. So the first one is I think we need to make a very clear distinction. When I talk about treasury companies, I'm talking about those trying to play the sale of strategy book, right? If we're looking at just a company that puts Bitcoin in their balance sheet as like a savings asset, they're just sweeping cash flow like our business. We do that. That that whole different thing. Totally fine. Perfect. Perfect solution. We're talking about the entities that want to go the all-in approach. Now, if they're going to go the all-in approach, strategy is obviously the most all-in, completely and utterly all-in. Their operating business is completely irrelevant. They are a Bitcoin entity to their core. MetaPlanet is going from a hotel business and they're transitioning away from the operating company towards a Bitcoin treasury company. Now, they also have the advantage of being in the Japanese market, right? Which is again, big capital industry. Like I don't think that we have like Australia, we just don't need a treasury company. There's nothing special about Australian capital markets that would necessitate us needing one down here. I just I can't, I can buy uh um strategy with no problem and I do, I I actually don't need an Australian one because when you go to a small scale, so I'm I'm certainly short the idea we need one in every jurisdiction. I'm short that idea. Don't think that we do because there is a leak and that leak is anybody who wants to buy a Bitcoin treasury company, they're not going to buy the 200th biggest one with 12 Bitcoin on the balance sheet. They're also not going to care if you got a thousand Bitcoin. It just doesn't matter because there's entities out there with several thousand. Now, there's another angle of like how much buy side of these treasury companies applied. Uh, I've played around with this honestly, delete strategy and that's sorry, if you take away strategy, there's no buy side. So many of these big entities and again, I won't call out names and and single them out. It's left pocket to right pocket, right? One company has a bunch of Bitcoin. They move it into a corporate entity. They didn't buy anything. They moved Bitcoin from one entity to another. There was a tax arbitrage or whatever it was. A lot of them haven't actually bought Bitcoin. And if they have, we're talking about small potatoes here. They're not they're not serious like tens of thousands of bitcoins a week. It's just not how this is playing out. So there's a lot of fugazi. There's a lot of like weird deals where it's like, you know, you're a whale, I'll take your Bitcoin, and if we hit certain levels, I'll give you shares. Again, left pocket to right pocket. If you get on the inside, uh, that's wonderful. Most people don't get in on the inside. These things are and like who is actually going to buy a 5, 10, 15, 20 million treasury company. Here's an exercise. Look at the market cap of your favorite treasury company and then go on CoinMarketCap and find how far down and the the shitcoin peers that you're living with. There is no institution that wants to do this. Like I did this for a couple of companies and they're next to companies like like tokens like Octopus token and like, you know, um shill me your coin token, like all this stupid [ __ ]. You're like, this is there's no institutions buying this. This company doesn't have access to debt. They don't have access to preferred markets. They only have access to selling shares hoping that they're at a premium. And we're watching those premiums just get crushed. Now, let's imagine you're treasury company number 55 and your premium has gone from 12x when you first announced to 1.1 or 0.9. Who's going to buy your stock? Like truly, who's actually going to buy your stock? Because most of your investors are trapped at 2, 3, 5, 6, 10 ms and going, I just want out of this thing. Give me my money back. Who's going to restart the engines? You can't issue debt. You can't issue preferreds. I'm really just like, I'm really short the idea that we need many of these things. It's going to be a winner take almost all market in my view. There will be a couple of patches like even MetaPlanet. It's in the maybe bucket for me. I think it's it probably is going to be okay, but I think it's in the maybe bucket. Can it get back to a 6x premium? Maybe. Maybe. That's a lot of coin they got to buy to justify that kind of move. So um now once you get to the other end of the spectrum, they start small with a huge premium because going from one Bitcoin to two Bitcoin is very possible. Going from 2 to 20 is also possible. Going from 620 to 1.2 million is a different animal. The bigger they get, the premiums will naturally compress. So uh bit uh sorry, MetaPlan MetaPlan is a small company with a relatively large premium. Uh, Strategy is a massive company with a small premium. That's the trajectory. So the MNAV gravity, and I've been saying this forever since I first studied um strategy was MicroStrategy at the time. MNAV gravity is towards one in all circumstances. It's where it wants to go. So therefore, timing these things is absolutely a function of what is the Bitcoin price doing because that's the beach ball that's inflating underneath the company. If that's increasing, then the chance that MNAV expands is also higher. If Bitcoin is contracting, and we're down 10% from the all-time high. Some of these tickers are down 70, 60, 80%. We've got our 80% correction, folks. It's just in stock tickers, not in the Bitcoin price. That's where I think the damage and the pain is being felt. So, I'm really kind of bearish on the whole thing. Um, I I've also been listening to Danny's podcast. I know he's trying to like work his way through it and every time he's like, I just I'm not quite there yet. Can you explain this bit? I'm like, yeah, mate, I'm not there either. It's all fugazi. It's [ __ ]. There's a handful of these companies that make a lot of sense. Um, I'm very short the idea we need thousands of these things, even hundreds.

No, I'm and you know, again, I think that you're you made the important distinction at the start, which is there's a huge difference between a business that is just stacking Bitcoin with, you know, excess uh cash flows that they want to be able to save to preserve and grow their purchasing power. That's great and prudent and and you know, any business it would behoove them to do that.

>> Some people who are Yeah. Fantastic. Like that is natural and you should do that versus these companies that are like it's it's a it's a marketing play for them. It's it's you know, they're they want to be able to pump their stocks and a lot of times it's either, you know, it's because they've got a failing or flailing company and they, you know, you need just just one last pump bro, you know, just just to to juice it a little bit, you know, and of course, I I know a lot of the people who are in some of these other companies too, as I'm sure you do as well, and like I know really great people in them and it's this is not a knock on them at all. It's just

>> I agree with you that I think this is a, you know, uh winner take all, winner take most type of situation. Strategy, I think is pretty uncatchable at this point. Like they, like I mean, maybe not, but boy, that would take a lot of fiat to catch them at this point and and he's still going right and he has other instruments on top of this, right? It's and he's kind of pioneering that side of things and

>> I think that honestly, what I keep beating the drum about for folks is like, I have no problem with these strategy companies. I own, you know, some small exposure to some of them with money I'm expecting to lose and have, you know, suffered losses from already, especially relative to Bitcoin because I'm a terrible trader and I know this, but I like to punish myself every now and again just to remind myself of it.

>> Oh, it's so important to remind yourself with a few letters. You got to do it.

>> Yeah, you got to do it. You Oh, you think you think you might be smart? Like, no, no, let's get punished by the market a little bit because you're not. And that's why the like you should just stack Bitcoin. You should just stack Bitcoin, get a decent sized UTXO, transfer it to cold storage, and and then you can just live your life and not worry about it because you're, if you're like me, you're you're probably not a great trader. You may have made a couple of decent trades uh over time, but most my decent trades have just been buying things and then holding them. It's not, you know, it's like timing the market is really, really hard. It's it is really, really hard and we're in uncharted territories here. And so I think it's like it's what again, I don't tell anyone what to do with their money, but like for me, my strategy has remained, you know, besides a little bit of play money that I'm very prepared to lose. It's like nope, I'm going to stack Bitcoin. I'm going to try to create value. I'm going to podcast really hard and, you know, fiat mine really hard and I'm going to I'm going to stack sats and and cold storage. Yep.

And Odell really gave the most sage advice with that because I think that that is legitimately the best strategy. Unless you are able to get in, unless you're a somebody who is throwing some serious coin at these companies in the, you know, fundraising rounds, you're going to have a really hard time outperforming Bitcoin on any time frame that is longer than uh, you know, let's I mean, I don't know, longer than a year, four years. Yeah. Like it's just going to be really hard for you to outperform Bitcoin. You're not up from Bitcoin right now and you probably almost certainly won't. Uh, maybe there's going to be a couple exceptions. Again, I think strategy may outperform over over four years. Like that's what you know, their goal is essentially and they've got a good chance at it. Couple others maybe. Most of them I think you're going to have a really hard time doing that. You may trade >> and the other game that people are playing >> it all depends where you buy on the MNAV. Let's imagine a world where strategy sees its MNAV go to

0.95. Yeah, it's probably going to outperform Bitcoin on the return, right? On the return higher. I don't know where if that happens, Bitcoin's probably in a bit of a dump as well, but the timing of that, you know, and and this is the thing.

Yes, I wouldn't say that these things are shitcoins, but let's just strip away the fact that they're orangewashed companies. The idea is that you want to buy them for the three-month pump. They're full of Telegram groups that if you're not on the inside, you're going to get smoked. Like the the characteristics of how they operate is shitcoining. It it like it it literally has all the properties of shitcoin. So it's like functionally the machine is what it does. What are they? They're shitcoins. It's just that's what they are.

And really the secret sauce of any of this stuff, go in eyes wide open. It is all about the MNAV that you are stacking at. This is literally what Sailor does too. He doesn't want to sell when the MNAV is 0.9 because it's not favorable to him. He does when it's at three or two. So therefore, you can start to say, well, there's only so high this thing can go. So if I'm buying it at MNAV of 0.9, then if it goes to 1.5, I'm very happy. If I buy at 1.5 and it goes to one, I'm wrecked. So you are actually trading the MNAV premium and you're trading the Bitcoin price. It's a double-edged sword.

Um, and as you can see, 10% down the Bitcoin price means a 60% down and an MNAV compression from six to one. It's tough, right? It's really, really tough. Yeah.

And I think again, it's like I get it because I would love to to get in a time machine and go back to being an OG. I would love to go back and buy Bitcoin the first time I ignored Bitcoin like an idiot in 2014, right? But I but I wasn't ready. I didn't deserve it yet. I wasn't even close to deserving it. I didn't deserve it in 2017 when I ignored it again. Like I didn't deserve it until I actually started doing the work and going down the rabbit hole in, you know, during the COVID times. Like that that's when I finally earned it, right? Up until then, it's like, no, no, like you're not going to, you don't deserve to teleport to be an OG. You don't deserve it anyway. It's okay. You we get Bitcoin at the price we deserve and you can live with that. And trying to play these games to, you know, reenact that OG moment, it it's just going to it's going to leave you in some pain.

And >> do you know what the secret sauce is? I mean, you you know the answer to this, but basically daily DCA, you know why? Because if you start daily DCAing and like we we've vibe coded and played around to try and like even a lot of the tools that I use, they're fantastic at picking tops and bottoms. Even if you like save your daily DCA and you only buy the absolute bottom of these things, you might only beat it by like 5-10%. That's like a good run. Daily DCA from the moment that you like work out, oh, Bitcoin, once you work that out, just being on like a daily DCA wagon, that is how you teleport because you're then getting the most average price from that point on and it destroys everything else.

And the reason why we actually tried to backtest and find out like why is it so just unbeatable, it's because when Bitcoin actually goes, when it rips, it spends most of its time doing absolutely nothing. It's dead boring. Drives you mad, but there's like five to six days, 10 days in the whole cycle where it just rips. And all these people who are trying to trade in and out, getting in and out, if you miss, I I ran this study a little while back. If you miss those 10 best days, you are down on the whole cycle. You make zero money. Like your your Bitcoin cycle chart is just straight to the floor. If you're there for those 10 days, you get the whole return profile. So once Bitcoin moves, it like literally reprices. It just goes to a new altitude. And that's what I think happened when we went up to 100. From 75 to 100, we repriced. We now belong up here, right? When we went from 40k and the ETFs went live to 73, that was a repricing event. New altitude, new level. See you later. Thank you very much. Daily DCA is how you teleport back in time because it gives you since you worked it out the most average price from that point onwards. It's the best way. Consistency is the secret. That's actually the uh the answer to this whole thing.

>> I mean, you know, it's the old cliché. It's it's time in the market, not timing the market, right? I mean, it's just like it's the reason these things are clichés. It's because it's they're they're true. Like they're, you know, that that's that's that's why they're there. You know, it's it's I think people have a I was just talking about this on the other show recently. People have difficulty realizing that it can just be that simple. Like that the answer isn't some some complex process. The answer isn't jumping through all these different hoops. It's just like set it and forget it and you know, sit on your hands, you know, like just literally do less, right? Do less because we've been taught to think that we have to do all these things and jump through all these hoops just to have a chance at beating the, you know, the rate of fiat debasement, right? And so I so I I get it why like it's hard for me to just sit on my hands and do nothing and that's why I give myself, you know, a little bit of money that I'm like, you're probably going to lose this, dude. And if you don't, you better get it into Bitcoin, you know, because otherwise if you don't put it into Bitcoin, you haven't taken, you know, uh any real profits. Like you're just you're still kind of in fiat land and pay your taxes and do all that.

>> And at the end of that, maybe you've what outperformed Bitcoin by how much? Maybe a couple percent if you did it really well, but like, you know, so again, it's a reminder, but like you can just you can just daily DCA and you'll you'll do great. But that's hard.

>> It's hard to do.

>> And the amount of um the amount of eats in my time that have been like, "Oh, but you can't do anything with your Bitcoin." You're like, "I know. I know. That's Yeah, it's great, isn't it? I love it. That's exactly the right thing. I don't want to do anything with it. Like why do I want to move my [ __ ] around all the time? It's like I just want a pine hole, man."

Um, what my favorite book if you are like interested in market psychology um, "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" is just a it's a great read just in general, but it's my favorite book on markets because you I've I've read plenty of like trading psychology textbooks or just like, you know, um people are pining on it. It's all just rehashing the stories told in that book and he's got this great line that I refer to all the time where he goes, I I'll paraphrase, like I never made money in the markets buying and selling and trading this thing. I made most of my money by sitting tight and doing nothing. You got that? Sitting tight and doing nothing.

It is. I mean, you talk to any great investor and they'll say, "Yeah, I didn't make any money from like trying to swing trade in and out." It's like, what does Warren Buffett do? And again, sure, he doesn't understand Bitcoin, but I mean, you he found high-value companies that he did the work on and he just buys a stack of them when they need capital and he just sits on it forever. What a great strategy, right? The the less you do, the better off you're going to do because once you know what you're betting on, right? And really for me, I'm betting on Bitcoin, a little bit of gold. That's my bet. And I just watch that basket really, really, really closely. I mean, I don't experience the volatility. It's it to me it's a puzzle. I'm just trying to work out like which way do I think it's going to go next. It's not actually about being like, oh, I want to give the right calls. It's like to me it's just like a fascinating puzzle that's always changing and I want to keep solving it. It's like it's a hobby for me. Just sit tight. Let the market do its thing. Like, Bitcoin's kicking ass. It's going to continue to kick ass. Chop consolidation has a beautiful way of getting people to sell their Bitcoin out of boredom and frustration. Don't be the dude that loses it because of boredom and frustration. Because if you miss those 10 days, you miss what this whole thing is about, which is just like being there for those exciting repricing events and lots and lots and lots of boredom where you get to go and live your life, which which is kind of the whole point, right, of of having better money. So, so you can actually don't have to have a second job being an investor, trader, gambler. You can just go and and live your life. Uh so, yeah, and touch a lot of grass and spend time with your family. That's like that is literally what it's all about. And get plenty of sunshine as well and walk.

Uh, so may maybe last thing and then I'll I'll I'll let you because this has been as usual extremely information dense and I appreciate this. Super stoked to have you back on the show. Is there is there anything else that you're like really watching that that is kind of like uh behaving in an unexpected way, maybe that something that that you're looking at any of these signals that you're looking at where you're saying this is something that's a little bit like I wasn't expecting this or I don't, you know, this is giving me signals that I'm not exactly sure to interpret. Anything that's kind of like really out of the ordinary or surprising in terms of this current time in the market and and these many, you know, these myriad signals that you look at?

>> Yeah. Um, the main one is actually the fees. There's just no one transacting on-chain. Like blocks are mostly empty. So generally speaking, and this like we can weigh into if you want, but a lot of people say that like high fees are a bad thing for adoption. Whenever I look at the chart and I look at fees versus the market cap, the market cap rips to the upside when fees are high because when people are using Bitcoin, it's a good thing. Highly congested blocks means people are using it. Now, in our current environment, fees have been dead since I'm going to say February, maybe March. Let's to be safe, I'll say April. Since that sell-off in April, fees have just been dead. Now, on-chain transaction volume is actually quite high. So, we've got very few transactions, but lots of like big Bitcoin moving around. Now, obviously, some of these are these like big whales, but they're also like you only move 24,000 Bitcoin like once or twice. Go to an OTC desk, go to an exchange, it'll get consolidated somewhere, and then it's it's done. It's part of the mix. So like we're just seeing consistently very, very high transaction volume trending higher, multiple billions of dollars a day, but very few transactions. So that this is a very interesting dynamic.

So if uh generally speaking, Bitcoin has a what's called a positive skew. Uh when you look at the statistics of how things work, median represents the majority. It's where the most number of people are. And the mean, the average can be skewed by very, very large things. That's why when we look at housing, you don't want it to be get skewed by the multi-million dollar mansions because there's not as many of them, but they're worth a shitload more than all the other ones. Now, in the Bitcoin world, it's always had this dynamic, and it's still true, but lots and lots of retail transactions, lots of $100 and thousands and $10,000, a handful of billion dollar, right? Transactions. What we're seeing at the moment is less of the median. There's much far fewer retail type behavior. There's a lot more, even though if the whales, I would say they're probably a little bit higher, but their dominance is much, much bigger because there's just less of the retail. So, I've been trying to puzzle over this. I don't spend too much time like worrying about it, but we definitely have fewer plebs moving coins around now. Some just like ideas of what could cause it. Maybe Lightning? Maybe. But I don't think so because it's going to be a small factor, but I don't think that's like 90% of the problem. I don't think plebs are moving around 90% of the value on on Lightning. Maybe some of it. Uh, maybe there's less people DCAing. I definitely think there are speculators. Probably fewer people are sending their coins in and out of Binance to trade shitcoin A and shitcoin B. And um, treasury companies. Maybe they're speculating over there instead. I think my my like biggest argument would be that there's just less speculation using on-chain Bitcoin, retail-size speculation. I think that's the case. Um, I also think that the altcoiners don't quite understand that and I'm I'm pretty sure this is still true. FTX really, really did a mess. Like I I don't think I don't think altcoiners really understand how I think forever the damage for that industry is. I just don't think people care anymore. This is why they can't get any of their tokens to actually get liftoff because no one actually cares anymore. So, I think the speculative side is the main reason and I see it from a few different lenses, but definitely just the dead quiet chain whilst we're at all-time highs. And honestly, aside from, you know, there's a few things I'm like, yeah, I'm cautiously watching and I am cautious at the moment, but I'm not bearish. Um, I'm I mean, the the bears haven't even taken out my first line of defense, which about 109K. They're not even below that. So, like it's hard for me to be too bearish, but like the chain's just quiet. So, that's the main thing. And I'm like, that's interesting. That's intriguing. And it's been that way for a while. So, I don't know if that's going to exert force at some point, but that's definitely one I'm watching.

Yeah. I mean, it's it's basically been been cheap as hell to transact on Bitcoin all all summer long. I mean, longer than that even. It's been it's pretty wild. Has been a, you know, great time to if you want to consolidate UTXOs or move things around. It's a been a heck of a time to do that, but apparently not a ton of people taking advantage of it.

>> But yeah, it's it's it's interesting. Um, well, I I want to thank you again. Uh, this was fantastic. Uh, always giving me new things to think about and I always appreciate the way that you break things down for folks. I think it's just in a really digestible manner and you always come back to hey, just, you know, like keep it simple, stupid, and and and stack Bitcoin, like which I think is the best of all.

>> Yeah. Embrace the chop consolidation. It's I love the smell of chop consolidation in the morning. Let's let's get some more of it.

>> U where where where do you want to where do you want to send folks? Uh, they should they should subscribe to your your newsletter, but yeah, send send them anywhere you want to or anything new you're working on that you want to uh pitch out there.

Yeah. So, head over to check onchain.com so you can subscribe to our newsletter, but also we've all the charts I talked about. I mean, granted, it it's a bit of a mess in terms of the site. It's it's a piece of handwritten HTML by yours truly, but literally every Bitcoin chart that I use in my newsletter and like my daily analysis, it's all free. It's all there. We've got ETFs, we've got strategy, we've got IBIT options now, we get all sorts of stuff. Like you can, it's a maze of things you can find. So, and that's all free. All those charts are free. So, uh, jump in there, play around. Um, I try to make the charts fairly self-explanatory. When something bad's happening, the chart lights up red. You know, I try to simplify these things, but uh, you know, it's a good way just to familiarize yourself with, again, even if you're not a trader. I think this is the one thing I want to leave people with. I don't talk to traders. I actually don't care that much about traders, right? I don't write for traders. I write for hodlers because there's a gap in the market of like we're all long this thing. We're like a max long this weird internet money. Just understanding why it moves the way it does when you see narratives on Twitter like, can you actually back that up with data or is it just people going, oh no, price should be higher because it's like, okay, Mr. Central Planner, what should the price actually be? You know, like you can kind of distill these narratives and say, is it actually happening or is this all just fugazi? Um, and that's really what I find so interesting. So, uh, it's about helping navigate the volatility and just understand why the market does what it does because it's a it's a fascinating puzzle.

>> Uh, yeah, a a amen to that. And it's a, you know, while you're sitting on your hands and not trying to trade this thing, you you got to do something. So, you may as well figure out uh, you know, why it's moving the way it's moving as much as you can.

>> You'll learn about.

>> Checkmate. Yeah, exactly. I I appreciate you, man. Appreciate the work that you do. And uh, yeah, uh, thanks for this time and thanks to everybody who joined on the live stream. This was kind of impromptu. You're already living in the future uh there down under. So, you're you're a day ahead me. I don't know if the price is different for you over there in the future, but I think we're we're still seeing the same price.

>> But >> we're at this part of the world. Well, boy, that that sounds that sounds nice when they denominated in your uh your your, you know, fiat uh fiat [ __ ] bucks.

>> Yeah, mate. We'll be over 200k Aussie dollars by the time we talk next.

>> There we go. I I look forward to it and we'll see where we're at uh on the US side, but it's going to be an interesting ride and yeah, appreciate you helping us break it down. Talk to you soon, man.

>> Thanks, Matt. [Music] And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of the Bitcoin Podcast. Remember to subscribe to this podcast wherever you're watching or listening and share it with your friends, family, and strangers on the internet. Find me on Nostr at primal.net/walker and this podcast at primal.net/titcoin. on X, YouTube, and Rumble. Just search Walker America and find this podcast on X and Instagram at titcoinodcast. Head to the show notes to grab sponsor links. Head to substack.com/walkeramea to get episodes emailed to you and head to bitcoinpodcast.net for everything else. Bitcoin is scarce, but podcasts are abundant. So, thank you for spending your scarce time listening to the Bitcoin podcast. Until next time, stay free. [Music]