BTC Sessions - $45k Bitcoin Can Happen… But the Data Says Don’t Panic | James Check & Joe Consorti

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

Mentor Sessions Ep. 084: James Check and Joe Consorti analyze the Bitcoin market bottom, on-chain data, the AI bubble, and Strategy's sale in this 2026 macro breakdown.The Bitcoin bottom isn't confirmed — but James Check and Joe Consorti lay out exactly why $45K would break every precedent in Bitcoin's history and why 90% of the time price only goes higher from here.In this deep-dive conversation you'll learn why the market has entered what James calls the "time pain" chapter, how the AI bubble rotation could hand Bitcoin its bottom, and why Strategy's massive sale quietly killed one of Bitcoin's biggest pieces of FUD. You'll see the on-chain data behind long-term holders now sitting on 84% of supply, the 8-model study James ran to estimate when the bottom ends, and a concrete framework for DCA during downturns instead of chasing wicks. Joe breaks down the macro backdrop — oil, the 10-year Treasury at 4.7%, a hawkish Fed, and why the AI trade unwinding sets up a renewed risk-on environment.⏱️ Timestamps:0:00 - Intro1:16 - James Argues Bitcoin Bottom Not In2:31 - 45K Drop Matching 2015 Bear Market3:39 - Why Bears Anchor to Round Numbers4:27 - Self-Reinforcing Bearishness at Lows5:34 - Joe on Bitcoin Resilience to News6:17 - 79 Percent Drawdown Breaks Precedent7:22 - Inflation Scare and Oil Price Swings8:32 - Bitcoin Holds Amid Hawkish Fed10:10 - February Capitulation and Loss Spike11:47 - Bottoms Form on Malaise Not Vibes13:06 - 200-Week Moving Average as Support13:55 - Eight-Model Study on Bear Market End15:59 - Joe on AI Trade Unwinding in Q417:32 - Bitcoin Led Market Lower This Cycle19:35 - Iran Conflict Oil and Commodity Thesis23:04 - Financial Nihilism and Rotating Capital26:00 - Treasury Yields Housing and Inflation30:31 - Boomers Mortgage Rates and Housing Shortage33:07 - Australia's Housing Bubble Breaking39:04 - On-Chain Data and Sentiment Washout43:34 - Joe on Fear Greed and Next Narrative47:43 - Blood in Streets Time to Accumulate48:53 - Mean Reversion Index and DCA Plan52:17 - Strategy Sale and Fading FUD58:56 - Manage Your Own Emotions1:01:38 - Where to Follow James and JoeJames Check publishes on Substack (Checkonchain) and Joe Consorti runs his own YouTube channel and research — links below.🔗 Links & Resources:→ James Check (Checkonchain): https://www.checkonchain.com/→ Joe Consorti: https://www.joeconsorti.com/→ Book a 1-on-1 with a Bitcoin educator: BTCMentor.io💡BOOK Private Sessions with Nathan, Benn and the BTC Mentor Team: Master self-custody, hardware, multisig, Lightning, privacy, and more. 👉 Visit btcmentor.io 📌 Previous Episodes: Bob Burnett → https://youtu.be/k4rtC3oQqlk⚡ POWERED by Abundant Mines: Fully managed Bitcoin mining. Learn more at https://qrco.de/bgYKPB#Bitcoin #BTC #BTCSessions #JamesCheck #JoeConsorti #BitcoinBottom #OnChainData #BitcoinMacro #DCA #MarketCycles #Checkonchain #BitcoinAnalysis #AIBubble #200WeekMovingAverage #Crypto #BitcoinNews #OnChain #HODL #BitcoinPrice #CryptoAnalysis #BearMarket #BitcoinCycle #LongTermHolders #BitcoinETF #Macro #AITrade #MichaelSaylor #Strategy #BitcoinInvesting #CryptoMarket #StackSats #SellerExhaustion #BitcoinSentiment

What evidence do you have to support the idea that the bottom in Bitcoin is not yet here? Do you have any evidence that we're actually going higher for? Anyone that tells you that the bottom is in is kidding themselves. Anyone that tells you that the bottom isn't in is also kidding themselves. Going down at 45K, this doesn't mean it can't happen. Financial damage that will be done is comparable only to 2015. 45K would be right around 79%. It would completely break all precedent.

When there's blood in the streets and by blood, we don't mean investors' blood. We mean Bitcoiners' blood from infighting so much. that's typically when it's a good time to accumulate even more. Right now at 60K, we're at Q10. That means at the bottom 10% of the distribution. That means that 90% of the time it's higher. But by the time the AI trade sells off, there's not going to be a single person holding Bitcoin

who knows what the red button looks like. This is going to be no one left. So you just end up with a pool of Hodlons. When negative news has an increasingly lower impact on Bitcoin's price over time, generally speaking, that's when you know the bottom is close to forming. As long as we remain underneath the true market mean, just stack your face off. All right, gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me today.

Very excited to have this conversation. Very excited actually to get you guys together, you guys together. I think there's going to be a ton of valuable insight here. Of course, we're going to talk about Bitcoin, both the on-chain and the market data. And I also want to get your view of the general economy at large, both the U.S. and global market. So to begin the conversation, though, I want to start with you, James. And to kind of give the devil as due, you can always find data to support any thesis that you ultimately want to have. So if I were to ask you right now, what evidence do you have?

to support the idea that the bottom in Bitcoin is not yet here. That is not yet here. It is not yet here. Well, first things first, that it's the random walk of markets. So I'm a huge advocate for anyone that tells you that the bottom is in is kidding themselves. Anyone that tells you that the bottom isn't in is also kidding themselves because we just don't know, right? Markets have got to walk their own walk. And I think it's all about a scale of magnitude.

So, for example, my working thesis has been that we probably bottom somewhere above the realized price. that's a 53K. There's a whole bunch of fundamental reasons why I think we don't belong below there. Now, the market doesn't give a rats what I think we belong, but from a fundamental standpoint, to my view, the low 50s is just,

it's oversawed. It's well and truly oversold. And I honestly wouldn't be surprised that we bottomed higher than that. So that's my current working base case. I've then pushed a bunch of my models to say, all right, let's go down to 45K. Let's see what the current supply structure would look like at 45K.

And shorter the story is, it's kind of looking like 2015. Now, just to give people a bit of a sense of scale there, going down at 45K, this doesn't mean it can't happen. But if it does go down there, the amount of supply, long-term holders, the amount of damage, financial damage that will be done is comparable only to 2015. And 2015, just for context, the market cap was $3 billion. dollars. Strategy has three billion dollars in their cash reserve now. So it's it's hard for me to say that we deserve, belong, that I expect. I can't construct my base. I don't like constructing my base case on a flyer. So from my perspective, from the fundamental side, from the way humans have behaved, from the capitulation signals that we've seen, there's a bunch of things saying like,

yeah, 45K could happen. It's just, I cannot in good faith as a professional. make it my base case. If it does happen, I'll learn a lot from it. But for now, it's not something that I can convince myself as being something that I'm be like, that is a likely scenario. It's certainly possible, but it's not my base case. Just quickly before I come to John, that, I've seen like the 45K thrown out there a lot recently.

Is there a particular reason that that number seems to stick out? Is it reflective of a previous cycle? Is it just a percentage from the all-time high? It's just lower. It's just lower. No, no, it's just lower. Like, bears will always, and this is the thing. everyone who's been through a Bitcoin bear market back in 2018 we hit 3k and the hyperwave model was the thing at the time and it was saying 1K is coming guaranteed this model is never wrong that was the bottom 22 the bottom was 15k and the number was 12k 10k they were the numbers that everyone was just talking about Michael Sullivan's done a bunch of work here looking like people just seem to anchor to these numbers and every time a price goes lower bear markets have

I mean, like all trends, they have a self-reinforcing feature. The lower it goes, the more people are sad. The sad of people are, the more they get bearish. The more bearish they are, the more they lower their price targets. And then eventually you just ran out of sellers and everyone's the most bearish. Right. So generally speaking, you get that final capitulation wicked. Everyone just goes, oh man, here it goes.

And they just go max short at the bottom. They didn't short at 126 or 100 or 80. They end up shorting at like 55, thinking, that this, all right, now I'm going to make all the money I lost in my long positions for the last six months. I'm going to make all that money back in one trade and that just wipes them out. So, you know, that's generally what happens. People just get this seal for reinforcing bearishness and bullishness at the other side. People get super bullish at the top. No one, and by the way, I'm not saying do this. No one borrows money at 30k or 20K in 2022 to buy Bitcoin. I got so many

messages, it was like 12 in like two weeks, when we got to 110K the second time in July. Bitcoin is saying, how do I lever up to buy more? I'm like, not a good question. The answer is don't do that. Oh, God. Joe, I want to get your thoughts on that as well as if there's any, what evidence do you see if there's anything else that maybe wasn't covered that would support the idea that we might actually be going lower?

Goodness gracious. Well, you know, first of I feel like a total imposter being up here with James instead of the other side of the microphone with you, Nathan. But, you know, I'll throw in my two cents here. Look, I think, you know, James had a really good job laying out sort of the macro, or not the macro, the on-chain, sort of the on-chain thesis and also the technical thesis, right? Like, if Bitcoin were to go to 45K, you'd basically be almost matching the depth of the prior bear market, which is not something Bitcoin has ever done. Generally speaking, the bear markets in terms of size regressed over time. They get slightly smaller.

So, you know, the last bear market was like 79%, I think, something like that. A decline to 49K would be right around 79%. 45K, it would be right around 79%. So it would completely break all precedent. And it would break precedent at a time where the Bitcoin ownership cohorts are more different than ever, right? Like, ETFs make up a much larger chunk of Bitcoin holdings, you know, obviously than prior cycle because they weren't around the prior cycle. You know, and so, and that's a very, very sticky cohort, right? We like to think of ourselves as the diamond-handed hoddlers, but it's mostly the boomers with their retirement accounts and their self-managed super funds who are the

real hodlers, right? You know, it's not actually us. They only just recently, like, capitulated. They only just recently began really selling in size beginning in June. And so, like, with that in mind, knowing that, like, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of Bitcoin are held by these ETS in the U.S. alone, it's kind of absurd to say that we're going to not only break the idea of smaller bare markets over time, but completely but match the prior bear market in terms of its depth.

It's kind of ridiculous. And then also, I mean, like, but to steal man the case for another, like, down, a couple of different things. Like, number one, the inflation scare, the inflation stuff. So, like, this has gone back and forth so many times. In June, we had such a Goldilocks inflation report because the Strait of Hormuz opened up during the entire month. So basically, the price of oil had declined.

And then by the time it hit June, the price of oil was below, like, $75. bucks and it stayed there for all of June because of the anticipation of opening the straight of Formuz than actually opening the straighter for moves. And then lo and behold, oils back above $100 now because just as June wrapped up, we started shooting at them again, right? So now it's back up above $100. It's within a hair's breath, probably with the next couple of days, are going back to 115, back to 120. And so like, yeah, we did see CPI inflation cool from 4.2% all the way down to, you know, 3. whatever percent. But chances are, right, because we're measuring the month of July now, it's no longer going to be either case, right, during next month's print,

which is going to make for more hawkish fed, which is going to put rate hikes back on the table, which, of course, would be a headwin for Bitcoin. That said, when Bitcoin bottoms are forming, like, you generally know when a Bitcoin bottom is in the process of forming, like, any number of ways, right? The technical levels, the on-chain levels, the amount of time it has spent there. But, you know, in my mind, one of the key things to look at is, like, how well Bitcoin holds up despite bad news. And just looking at the tape, looking at all the terrible news we're seeing right now. You know, oil is massively spiking. It looks like the Democrats are going to sweep the U.S. midterms. The Democrats hate Bitcoin apart from like five of them, right? That's not

ideal. All of these negative catalysts for Bitcoin, particularly the worsening macro backdrop and oil above 100, the fact that Bitcoin is like holding steady, I'm pretty sure it's still 65K right now. That's pretty good, right? It is down marginally on the day. It's down from like 66 where it was, But even still, like the fact that raid hikes coming back on the table isn't something that's more of a headwind for Bitcoin is quite telling, right? When negative news has an increasingly lower impact on Bitcoin's price over time, generally speaking, that's when you know the bottom is close to forming. You know, could we get some sort of final capitulatory event where we get one major leg down? Like, sure. But it's like good luck predicting that, right?

You know, good luck predicting that like October 11th, 2020 was the day FTX was going to explode. You know, it's like, you cannot predict those things. You can obviously say that there is a tail risk of those things occurring, but you can't predict them with any certainty. So in my mind, like, you know, barring any major correlations to one event where there's this massive dash for cash across markets, I think, you know, the probabilities are such that the probabilities are more weighted to the fact that Bitcoin has found its price bottom, but it's going to take quite a bit of time to actually begin ascending higher.

Over the last couple of weeks, that's sort of how my mental model is shaken out on this thing. I think I can probably add to that. I mean, if you really think about this, I mean, you're talking about momentum, right? At a technical level, weekly RSI, got to the most oversawled that I had in February. That February sell off, I think the bottom was 59K. I got so many messages that just like a straight fear from very experienced veterans in this market. That to me felt like what I call the price paying capitulation. It's also the largest loss spike that we've had in an on-chain sense. It was $2 billion in a day. People's going, I'm done. I'm done. Get me out of this thing.

So massive fear event, 59. What has happened since February? We've had the war start. We've had the war stop, start, stop, stop, start. We've had inflation scares. You know, we've had strategy and the ETFs, both become net sellers, which, by the way, I just love this idea. How many times have you heard the Tradfly dude be like strategy and ETFs are the only thing keeping the market propped up? Well, they've both been sellers and the price is higher than where that February bottom was.

So, like, in the grand scheme of things, the last five, six months, I believe is what I call the time pain chapter of this bear. Probably got some time left to go. And, you know, leaky price and all that kind of thing. But 59K, we sold off down to 58K. There's been a lot of turmoil. AI has bubbled and then starting to come off the boil. Like, there's a lot of things. Clarity that doesn't look like it's going to pass.

Democrats, as you said, likely to. Like, can someone point to the good thing, like somewhere, anywhere? here, why aren't we lower? You know what I mean? So like, I just think there's a lot of those components that when you put it all together, it's kind of impressive that we're, you know, some people are going to stick them to, oh, bro, it's a lower low. It's like, yeah, but it's kind of running out of momentum.

And I described it as like the weather in London. I've heard many folks in the UK, so I feel seen after this comment, but it's like April in London. It's still cold, dark, miserable and just kind of shit. But it was not February or January. So much worse in February or January. So it's just incrementally getting less bad. And that's kind of how bottoms tend to form, right?

They don't form on good vibes. They form on real negative sentiment that just tires people out. And eventually just hits seller exhaustion, right? At some point, the only people who are left in the market are folks like you and I who aren't selling no matter what the price is, right? We just don't care. So you end up at that point in time of seller. And just for some numbers here, long-term holders currently have like 84% of the supply.

that's coins that aren't moving are 84% all-time high. They hold 80 something percent of the wealth, the realized cap wealth in the system. That's basically the lowest level we've ever seen versus short-term holder, the disproportionate level. So there's a lot of things that saying, like, you know, I said on Marty's pod a couple of weeks back, he's like, what happens if the AI trade starts to sell? I'm like, bro, by the time the AI trade sells off, there's not going to be a single person holding Bitcoin who knows what the red button looks like.

There's just going to be no one left. So you just end up with a pool of, pool of hodlers. Interesting. I want to just double-click on something there quick. You talked about the time pain, and we've been doing this for like the five to six months. Do you have any inkling direction as to how long you would expect that phase to necessarily last? And then additionally, this is like really rudimentary stuff, but I'm just curious your thoughts, talking about the resilience of Bitcoin's price. For about the last three weeks or so, we've been just bouncing around that 200-week moving average.

But on the most recent negative news, we didn't dip down below it. Now, it's only like one data point, but it feels to me like we're going to be. get it might might be sitting a little bit more on top of that 200 week moving average now could be completely wrong but curious your thought james no no we closed below it for a week and then we've subsequently held four weeks going on a fifth week above it so that's just generally all good stuff um on the time pain chapter i ran a study so uh i like to take my own ideas but make sure i dilute them a little bit with other people's ideas right because i don't want to have too much of my own bias in there so i tried to run a study this was i think it would have been like

three or four days after the february sell off I wrote a piece called capitulation where I said I think that was the price paying capitulation where all the price sensitive buyers been flushed out. I think we've now got time pain and chop ahead of us. And I ran a study with eight different models. And the idea was we know when we finally bottomed in all the previous bears. And for example, we know when we broke below the power law trend. We know when we broke below the 50 week moving average.

We know when we broke below there's an on-chain model called the true market mean. So we know when the bottom ended in previous bears. and we also know the starting point based on whatever your metric is. Technical analysis, on-chain analysis, when it's applied, get to a certain level of oversaw, blah, blah, blah. So I ran this with eight different models and just took an average. How long is the typical duration? Because we know when we broke the 50-week moving average here, we know when we lost the

true market mean, we know when we hit all these things. So we know the starting gun for those eight methods. We don't know where the finished gun is. So my estimate when I ran that study was it's probably going to be somewhere in the middle of the year around July. And then we had the June sell-off with strategy. And I'm not saying I predicted that. I'm just saying like that's the general time frame that I was anticipating.

Somewhere in the middle of the year. Now, I mentioned I dilute my ideas with other folks. There are some folks who believe that we topped on, what was it, the 6th of October at 6pm UTC. So I said, okay, well, that's my eighth model, which is we're going to bottom at October, 26 at 6 p.m. That's the final bottom, right? It's got to be exactly a year later.

And that is the only model. All the other ones were pointing it somewhere June to August. That is the only one that's like, no, October. And like, maybe might happen in October. But can I form a base case on that? No, but I'm going to dilute my average with it just to be, you know, fair and reasonable, knowing that it's just a, it's a ballpark, right? It's a yardstick.

We're not going to get it perfectly right. But, yeah, it doesn't really surprise me in the middle of the year. We've got a bit of turmoil and a low, hello, and also, you know, divergent on weekly RSIs and all that sort of stuff. Beautiful. Joe, I'm curious to your thoughts on that. And if I was asking James to start the conversation with the case for how we're still going lower, do you have any evidence or what would you point to to maybe make the case that we're actually going higher from here

that this July time pain might actually be, we might be wrapping up right now as we speak. Yeah, I mean, it's a really good question. I think I would just point again to Bitcoin's resilience in the face of all of these negative events. I hadn't touched on Sailor selling. It's a really good point that you bring up, James. It's like, you know, for the longest time, like Peter Schiff, all of the other major Bitcoin detractors were saying the moment Michael Sailor sells, is you're going to create this reflexive feedback loop of selling and the tulip bubble, Ponzi, whatever, you know,

a word you have for it is going to burst. All of a sudden, like, we're holding steady. We, you know, we had a couple of days, a really bad sell-off, and we're doing fine. Like, we're doing just fine. You know, obviously, and by the time, and I tend to agree with James as well, you know, by the time the AI trade turns,

and I tend to think that it will turn, you know, I think these things have a ton of utility. I use them every day, but, you know, it's not as if something can trade 100x earnings forever, you know, and your free cash flow projections for next year are negative. And the following year, they're even more negative and somehow you're trading extremely well. You're IPOing out a trillion dollars. That trade's got to turn eventually, right?

And when it does, chances are Bitcoin will already be close to its bottom. Think about it this way. Like Bitcoin sort of led the way down, right? In 2020, we were all very happy with the fact that Bitcoin led the way up. It seems this time around it led the way down. was sort of the first asset to begin selling off majorly. I think had it not been for the hype around AI, equities would have followed last October. Like we have sort of been in this derisking impulse for a year, but the AI trade has sort of made

it to that equities or sort of there's this bit of a facade in front of equities where the S&P 500 is doing exceedingly well, the NASDAQ is doing exceedingly well, but it's purely because people want to remain allocated despite this risk off impulse, right? You have a hawkish Fed chair. You have a war going on. You have oil raging. You have all of these different things. Those are all risk off impulse is the reason the equity market.

has been fine is because of AI. So when that trade turns, I actually don't think it'll be turning as a result of a risk off impulse. I think it'll just turn at some point because it will just get too overweight. You know, like the boat will literally be sinking because of how much capital is allocated to those specific names. And people will just rotate in other names. Like what sort of evidence do I have for this? Well, we're already beginning to see the early innings of it. You're starting to see at the margin, some of the blue chip AI names, capital is beginning to rotate into chip names. We had two weeks ago, or excuse me, last week, late last week, we had one of the largest

one-day inflows into SOXX semiconductor ETF ever. And then what do you know, like two days later, or the day later Monday market open, the thing absolutely tanks. These are just the early innings of, in my mind, capital is rotated from the main AI names into chip names, and then at some stage, they're going to rotate from chips into something else. Where do they rotate? I have no idea.

But what I do know is that that capital eventually makes its way out of the AI trade. And then Bitcoin finally catches up to what I believe will be a renewed risk on environment as a result of ideally the Iran war wrapping up. That's still the major tail risk for me as far as Bitcoin really starting its next bull market. But in my mind, you know, you start to see these things level off and move into a renewed risk on environment in Q4 right around the time when you're seeing Anthropic IPO. I think that'll sort of mark the tail end of the AI trade. and it's just perfect timing for Bitcoin.

So we'll see. I love it, James. I'd love to get your thoughts on that. There was a lot to impact there. Yeah, I mean, it is interesting. And I think the Iran war is obviously just a real curveball, but I also think that there's a lot of nuance there. And again, I'm no geopolitical oil analyst,

but I try to do my best to at least get a bit of read on things. And like, I think a lot of people get anchored to the crude oil price, whereas, and at Duneberg had a great line the other day that I'm still pondering, which is they started. started bombing some of the refineries in Russia and areas like that. And he was basically saying, by the way, less refining capacity is actually bearish oil prices. And it makes sense because if you've got all this crude but you can't refine it, you've got a glut on the supply side, but you can't turn it into the things people want.

You don't put crude oil in your car. So I think a lot of people get stuck looking at the crude oil price, looking for that to blast to the moon. But in reality, a lot of the detail, like it's in the nuance, jet fuel, might be through the roof. Diesel might be through the roof because they can't refine enough of it that we use, but you may have an absolute glut of crude oil. And also, the card of closing the straight, this is one of those things that it only happens once. You don't get to play that card three, four, five times. The whole world is now saying, right, what do we have to do to not have this

dependency ever again? So the dominance of that region is going to decline, just has to decline moving forward. So none of this is a quick process, but I think there's all of those dynamics that play into it. You know, for the AI trade, I mean, SpaceX is a great example, two trillion dollar IPOs getting kind of crushed right now because it was just. It took the trip from two trillion back down to one trillion faster than Bitcoin did. There you go. There you go. It's almost like it didn't kind of deserve that extra trillion and maybe it might even get cut in half again. When I first got into Bitcoin, I was overwhelmed. The jargon, the security risks, the fear that one mistake could cost everything. I remember staring at my screen and wondering, are my keys

safe? Did I do this right? That experience is why I started BTC sessions. For over a decade, this channel has helped millions of people like you learn how to use and secure Bitcoin. But I realized something. For many people, videos aren't enough. Everyone learns differently. Some need to ask questions in real time as an expert walks through their setup, their goals, their threat model. And certain things like advanced cold storage, inheritance planning, privacy, and node or mining setups often can't be fully solved by watching another tutorial. So I built BTC mentor. I recruited the best Bitcoin educators on the planet to work with you one-on-one. Real experts, real answers, personalized hands-on guidance tailored to your exact situation.

Whether you're brand new or building a complex setup, we meet you. where you're at and walk with you step by step. By the end, you don't just hope your Bitcoin is safe. You know it is. If you're ready for that level confidence, then head to bTCmentor.io and book a call with us today. So, you know, a bunch of these things, I mean, with the AI trade,

very hard to get a read on this stuff, but my big observation, two things, there's no doubt that you can, you can almost feel, there were some days where I'd wake up and look at my trading view list, and you could feel the black hole of capital, just sucking everything into this trade.

And then the other observation is like, I think the world is part of like the financial nihilism component of the world. I think it used to be there was a big pool of like the investors and then there was a hotball of money that would just chase stuff around. Now it feels like those two roles have switched where the hot ball of money is most of everything and this hot ball of money is much bigger,

but it does rotate through. First, it's into the, the mag seven, then it goes into the semis, and then it goes into the memory stocks, and then they're buying random stuff in Korea, and then that's falling off a cliff. Like, there's this like hot ball of money that is just so willing to punt and speculate. And the pool of investors, like, you know, when you really take a step back, I'm generally speaking, when I look at the world, I'm like, it feels to me like we just don't have enough commodities.

Maybe this is because I'm an Australian and all we do is dig holes and pull stuff out of the ground and build houses. But the digging of the holes part is kind of important. You know, like, why isn't BHP one of the biggest companies in the world? They mine a ton of stuff that we need, but the world just doesn't care. These are boring blue chip businesses that are fantastic value, but no one wants to own them because they're chasing the latest hot thing. So it actually makes markets quite challenging because you've got to factor in just like the nihilistic component of people, quite frankly, kind of gambling. Certainly, there's multiples and stuff and the value in the AI supply chain.

But what do we think is going to happen? there's a shortage of memory. What do you think happens in five years time? Do you reckon there'll be a shortage of memory? No, mate, we're going to be swimming in it. There's going to be so much of it. You won't be able to get rid of it fast enough. So I think that adopting a bit like a commodity mindset, a lot of the AI trade is commoditizable, whether it's the open source models, whether it's CFOs saying, bro, you can't, I'm not hiring you for a $150,000 salary and you spend a million dollars on tokens. This is not how this works. Can't do it. There's a bunch of things happening that are just going to change the commoditization of the industry. And then it becomes

much harder to justify these crazy multiples. So yeah, I don't know how it all plays out, but certainly all the things that markets just take time. It takes time to find a new equilibrium. It's very interesting. Joe, I mean to hear to get your thoughts on that. I kind of want to tag in there just quickly for clarification, actually, James. We talk about the hot ball of money. Is that coming from like retail retirement savings, that sort of thing? Or you're talking specifically but like institutional investors? Who's behind the hot ball of money, if that makes sense? It's both. I mean, if you look at the career situation, I don't know the full details, but as far as I'm aware, they allowed a repatriation of capital. So if you owned US stocks,

you could basically sell them, bring that money back and buy the Korean stock market, capital gains tax-free. So there's a bunch of retail investors that have just, I mean, there's reports of like a million accounts getting liquidated overnight because they bought too much SK-Hinex went sold off. So, you know, there's like this, there is a retail component, but there's hedge funds, right? There's going to be institutions in there. their trading momentum and, you know, they got smarter quants than you and I. So, yeah, it's a bit of both. Interesting. Joe, I want to get your take on that. I'm curious your view currently and we'll say like the American investor, maybe the American consumer or retirees will do. The things that

kind of have my attention, but I don't necessarily know what to make of them would be things like we have Atlanta GDP now is down at like 1.7. Just kind of dropped off a cliff at one point there. I know it's an estimate, but it still seems interesting. And then the other one I'm still thinking about, I don't know how much it would impact retail investment is kind of the housing lockup that because of the people locked into the cheap 30-year rates when they refinanced, they don't want to sell. Like, how much does real estate moving less impact investment in other assets? And then the last one, just to throw a whole bunch on your plate to make you deal with it all, would be the 10-year treasury being up at 4.7, which is up highest of the year, I believe right now. They were continuing

to see the bonds sell off. And I don't 100% know what to make of that. Yeah, for sure. So the 10-year treasury reason is selling off is because of the massive spike in inflation expectations. It's the same reason that the NASDAQed way lower this morning on market open, Treasury spiked, NASDAQ sold off massively, oil spiked above $100. So sort of all the same trade going on there. Like, number one, expectations of a rate hike as a result of oil spiking above $100, sends the 10-year up, sends the NASDAQ down. Now, we've sort of seen this exact same thing happen.

Over the last several months, like the oil volatility has generated these small sell-offs and equities, and then they eventually recover, because again, the AI trade is sort of doesn't really care about that. But as far as the 10-year is concerned, that is something that is quite disconcerting, right? Particularly for Kevin Orch's Fed, you know, a guy who got the job specifically because, you know, by hook or by crook, he's going to find a way to bring rates down whether or not it's, you know, what the U.S. actually needs. It's why he was hired into the position in the first place.

And so seeing 10-year treasury yields where they are right now, it's got to definitely got to ringing alarm bells in his ears. I mean, I know if I was in his position, that would certainly be a little bit alarming for me. And so, like, the onus is, it's, it's never been more on the United States to wrap the war up and wrap it up soon. Because if the inflationary impact of the oil spike continues rippling through the global economy, then you're just going to continue to see inflation expectations, growth expectations, continue ramping up. I would, I would expect GDP, the GDP now has to actually recover to the upside. Economic data, all things considered. is like, okay.

Something best. We're starting to see some cracks in the labor market. That's like the most overuse phrase of all time. But what I mean is that you're sort of in the phase of the labor market where rates are high enough that people are not hiring, but they're not firing. So hires are going down a little bit, but you're not seeing like mass layoffs and mass unemployment as a result. So that's like point number one.

But to James's point, the impact, the supply response impact to price is very, very real, right? Like, every other commodity has a supply response impact to price. It's quite interesting. This is sort of the value prop of Bitcoin, why it works so well as a store of value. You know, when the price of silver spikes, more of it gets brought online, the price of silver declines, rinse and repeat. That's why it's been this, you know, this bubble that has popped and bubble that has popped and just a horrendous store of value. It's also why people don't hold oil as a store of value, right? Obviously, other than the fact that it's really difficult to store barrels of oil in your backyard. When the price of oil spikes, when the straight-of-form moves is closed,

the rest of the world figures out how to refine it better, more cheaply. New technologies get built, more investment gets put toward it. And then all of a sudden, over time, you know, whether it's over the course of several months or several years, price eventually normalizes as a result. And the world, as James said, becomes less dependent on that one constraint. And that's sort of the process that we're in now, right? So, you know, over time, the impact of the straight being closed is going to be smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller as far as the actual downstream price of oil is concerned. So that's basically where we're out right now. As far as GDP is concerned, I think we're going to remain in a pretty good economic environment. I think the path for rates

is lower. We're going to have, you know, really tough inflation, a little bit of inflation turbulence, if you will, over the remainder of the year. But I think we'll make our way out. We'll navigate out of it without recession. We're certainly very far off from recession right now. And then as far as housing is concerned, you know, it's very interesting because the mortgage rates are obviously going back up once again. And the silver tsunami, this dynamic of like boomers offloading their homes onto young people and then causing a massive impact on price. You're not seeing that at all, unfortunately. Like there are actually headlines coming out saying that boomers are not downsizing. They're actually getting bigger homes, which is remarkable.

Really? Yeah, just when you think they couldn't be any more boomerly new adjective. they figure out a way to do it, not ragging on boomers. I know some boomers. Lawrence Lepard, good front of the show, is a boomer. You know, but it's, so it's quite interesting. You have that dynamic at play. Look, you know, until we see lower rates,

or really don't think the housing market is going to move much. But ultimately, even with lower rates, home prices are still 40% higher than they were in 2020, 45% and 50% higher. And so, like, a lot of folks have written about this, and I won't claim to be a housing market expert, so I might be talking out of my ass here. Can I curse on this show, or is that just on Bitcoin?

Oh, you can do it as much as you fucking back. Okay, fantastic. I might be talking about out of my ass here, but I believe it's something like, you know, either rates would need to literally come all the way back down to like 1%, sub 1%, or you need to see rates get like a 300 basis point haircut and then a 25% reduction in homes just to restore pre-COVID housing affordability. None of those things are ever going to happen, right?

And just relative to incomes, not even on an absolute basis, relative to incomes, right? So I don't think those things are going to happen, unfortunately. I think the housing market is going to remain. as unaffordable as it is now. It's going to continue to become even more unaffordable over time. The ways to fix that, obviously, number one, stop printing a ton of money at a thin air. But number two, we're trying to solve the immigration thing now.

We're trying to do mass deportations. It's not really working out all that well. We can't do as many as the administration was hoping for. But the other thing is like, you can just build homes, right? And we're not building homes. There's so much, I mean, we are building homes, but not nearly enough homes. And so the housing shortage is sort of one side of it. The other side of it is printing a ton of money out of thin air.

The other side of it, and then I promise I'll shut up. I'm looking for a home now, so housing is something I'm quite passionate about, is like stop doing things like what they're doing in Florida, which is like removing property taxes for seniors. Like, are you kidding me? It's the most ridiculous thing ever. It's one of the only forcing functions to actually get people who own homes that are too big for them to downsize, right?

And so all of a sudden we're going to remove that forcing function to make it so that Steve and Nancy can remain in their 4,000 square foot home despite all of their kids flying the nest. It's kind of ridiculous. But yeah, that's sort of, I don't even know where we got off on that. But yeah, that's sort of where we're at. I love the passion. So, James, I want to get your response to that.

And just as a quick aside, too, Australia like Canada, has had a turbulent and shitty housing market, for lack of a better term. I'm just curious if the situation in Australia is still that bad as well, too. And also your overall view currently on the, we'll see, the American consumer and the American economy. So on the American side, I have absolutely zero. edge whatsoever. So I'm going to leave that entirely to Joe. I couldn't tell you what an American GDP number looks like. But for the housing on the Australian side, I mean, we've gone through, you guys talk about housing affordability in America. No, you come down to Australia, get a job

here and you try and buy a home. The starting price for a home is if you're not showing up with in Aussie terms, two, three million, which is, I don't know, one point age, 1.6 American. If you don't show, if you want a house, get out of here. Not interested. The median home, and that's apartments and houses, is a million dollars in Sydney, Aussie. So that's 700,000 US. That's the median. So, and, you know, in terms of income to housing, right, median to median, they had to invent

a new bucket for us in Hong Kong, which is called impossibly unaffordable, where it's like 15. So you need 15 median salaries to afford the median home. So we've got a bubble of all bubbles. Now, in all their infinite wisdom, our government recently did, I wrote a whole piece on this, they're releasing new capital gains, tax, they're trying to make it affordable for young people. Now, as they typically do, they want to make it affordable for young people by basically saying to all the boomers, all your tax concessions and all the wonderful things you've enjoyed for your whole life that young people call unfair, you get to keep all that.

But for new people who, young people who want to buy a home, you don't get any of it, that's all gone. the way, we've also doubled the capital gains tax on all your savings. So it's like, okay, great. You're bringing in the housing market down, giving boomers a generational exit with all their tax incentives at the end of the day, and you've devalued my savings by increasing my capital gains tax, because if you're saving in cash, it'll let you 40 years to get your deposit, not the house, the deposit. So, you know, you stop kind of partying and having fun at 25. You start saving at 25. At 65, you've got your deposit. 30-year mortgage, fine, clear it at 95. well done, job done, right? This is the kind of, so anyway, for us, I'm pretty sure, I mean,

the Australian housing bubble has been the unkillable beasts for a long, long time. I think they've finally done it. I think they've finally nuked any confidence that anyone can possibly have in investing in properties. They've removed the capacity. I don't know if you guys have the same thing. It's called negative gearing. You buy a property, you get a 2% rental yield, but your mortgage is 6%. You can basically claim that 4% or 4% or. off your tax. I think in America you can even claim your owner-occupier mortgage off your tax. We can't. Only if it's an investment property. You can't do it off owner-occupier. So that means that all investors, like the rental yield is like 2% most parts of Sydney because the prices are

so damn high. Rent's also through the roof. But you now can't have as an investor, houses are a physical bond. If your yield is 2%, the price has got to come down until it matches your mortgage. Otherwise, it doesn't make sense. So the investors have absolutely disappeared, completely out of the picture because they have no certainty of what's going to be. So I think they've finally managed to kill the Australian housing bubble. It's been going for 40-odd years. I suspect it's probably at least a decade of maybe not crashing. It's certainly going to go down, but I don't think it's going to be like a 50%,

but 30, 40%, depending on where you are. It could certainly happen. But at least sideways. So now where the wages keep up, that's a whole different thing. I mean, you know, they want to do for capital gains. a beautiful example of government in motion. They want to make capital gains indexed. So that means that whatever your cost basis is,

you can increment it by the bullshit CPI number. We used to have a thing where it was just 50% capital gains discount after 12 months. Now you get your 3% per year. Oh, thank you very much. Right. So you get you 3% per year. Do they want to index the income tax brackets? Oh, can't do that.

Couldn't do that. We can only index it to take away your 50%. So there's all these things. So I think in Australia, if anyone wants to actually look at the Australian economy in a single oscillator, take the stock price of ComBank, Commonwealth Bank, CBA, divided by BHP, housing, mining. It's a beautiful oscillator that is it mining season?

Is it house building season? Is it a mining season or housing season? And it looks to me like BHP, biggest miner is now kicking CBA's ass. So to me it feels like digging shit out of the ground season. So that kind of builds on the commodity thesis that I think is underlying all of this. It's amazing. Isn't it crazy how we have these massive land masses and somehow some way, with all these natural resources, all three countries of ours, we're very well endowed with plenty of natural

resources to build homes, plenty of land, and somehow home prices are in Boston, where I am, it's like 60 years. It's like the third most unaffordable city in the country. 60 years to afford the median home. Remarkable. It's just crazy. It's good stuff. I mean, we're one of the biggest.

LNG exporters in the world, and we have some of the highest gas prices, winning. Incredible. And by the way, anytime the biggest gas producer, Woodside here makes money, the government's like, oh, that looks like a windfall tax for us. You're just like, you can't even invest in these companies. Like, they're great businesses, but the government's just like, yeah, put your hand out, and then what do they do with it? They just piss it against the wall.

Drives you mad. Dude, our hydrocarbons are completely locked up in Alberta, and there's nothing that we can do about it because people have hurt feelings about the environment, so we can't get it to either ocean. We can't get it to a coast. We can't export it. And even just quickly want to say on the housing front there, the new condo builds in Canada were finally coming down because there's no investors here, right?

So the government is bailing out the new condo builders to turn them into affordable housing instead of just letting the price come down until they were affordable housing. It's just fucking ridiculous. But I want to jump back first. I'm going back into Bitcoin for a moment. And James, I want to start with you on this one. We mentioned earlier talking about how at the, you know, at the tippy top, everyone thinks we're going higher at the bottom

everyone thinks we're going lower do you have any i think we mentioned michael sullivan earlier in the conversation as well too do you have any insight or read currently on sentiment do we have any thoughts on sentiment and then also what is the on chain data telling you yeah i mean it's bearish as hell in terms of the sentiment and the people are just sad and depressed and cranky

and you know we're arguing over stupid soft forks and all this kind of stuff like that it's amazing right the amount of i mean sailor became the main character and i wrote about this well, like I think before the bearer even kicked off, saying like, what do you expect to see? Late stage bear? And one of the things was, I can't predict with the exact headline, but strategy, close to liquidation, sailors' bungest bet on Bitcoin goes belly up, right?

Something like that. And you just saw this, right? So it's old 32 Bitcoin. Everyone's got the picks and shovels out and the torches are flaring. Yeah, I mean, sentiments, grim. But another thing that Michael's done a good job of is actually, and we do this all the time in the on-chain world, It's just peeling apart cohorts because not every Bitcoiner is the same. There are some of us who've been through a couple of these cycles before and are a bit more tenured.

And generally, our moods are a bit less volatile, right? And quite often when people are getting super pessimistic about the current thing, the OGs and folks have been around for a while like, I know this feeling. Oh, yeah, this is my time to actually step in and accumulate. So there's just like this, the breaking apart of the two cohorts. And again, as I said before, 80% of the wealth and the, system is now a long-term holder. And we have the so basically the all-time high and relative value for long-term versus short-term. So we've got a very, very strong base of coins that just aren't

moving, people who kind of know what they're here for, they know why Bitcoin is valuable. And the difference with those folks is they're not worried about the day-to-day. I think folks, very often your mood and emotions, I use the example of the Mount Gox folks back in 2024. They got their coins back. Lord knows what they paid for them. Not much, right? We're talking about boomers buying houses for raspberries. These guys are buying bitcoins for 150 bucks, you know, $1,000, whatever.

We'd all love to be there. Mount Cox fails. They finally get their coins back at $68K. Then the price goes down to $49. How do you reckon they felt? They're not like, oh, damn, I'm only down like 6,000. It's like, no, they've like, damn, I could have got $60k. So you anchor to your most recent structure.

most recent buy, most recent whatever. So folks get caught up in the day-to-day chop. That's why I call it chop consolidation. It chops your emotions to pieces. There is a skill and an experience to be able to back out and say, like, let's look at the really big picture here. You know, and I've said this before. If you go back to the 2022 bear,

the first what I call the price paying capitulation we happened in June, we sold off to 176. This is as three-harrows capital turned out to be a fraud. 17-6. We bottomed at 15-6, eight months later. later, what's the difference between 156 and 176? In terms of price, it's relevant. No one who is, no one who is a long-term buyer of Bitcoin gives a rats about that delta.

The difference is the eight months it took to get there. It's the time chapter of it. And then there was another phase after FTX. It was over Christmas, which is always a quiet period, but I wrote about this at the time. It was like two and a half weeks where the Bitcoin price traded within a $250 range. Like a horizontal line, just nothing. Dead flat. nothing. And we've seen a couple of patches recently where it's just like nothing. There's no volume,

there's no trade, there's no nothing. It's just sideways. So it's, again, there's just a lot of things that to me point to, we have a, we have a very, very large dominance of hodlers. We've seen the ETF capitulation. We've seen from an on-cham perspective to the two capitulations I wanted to see, price and time pain. And we've seen both of those momentum, in my view, across a number of metrics. Again, it's like April in London. It's still cold, wet, dreary and miserable, but it's not February. So the momentum is improving slowly. And you know spring is coming.

So more and more people realize that spring is coming and they start going, well, do I really care if the market goes a bit lower from here? If I turn on a DCA campaign and just start actually accumulating, do I really care that much? No, right? Once you get to this point in time, the speculators is gone, the tourists are gone. It's just people who know why we're here. So, yeah, no, look, I mean, generally speaking, I'm in the 60s,

Give it to me all day. One company I like pointing people to when they ask about Bitcoin mining is abundant mines. They were founded by Beau and Christine Turner after losing over half a million dollars to broken promises in the mining industry. And they built their hosting model to remove the usual headaches. With abundant mines, you own your machines and keep 100% of the Bitcoin you mine. There's no revenue share, no hidden skims. Pricing is simple. One flat monthly fee covers power, parts, labor, and revenue.

pairs. They also guarantee uptime. The machine goes down, their hash rate redirect system routes hash power from their fleet so earnings don't just stop. And every machine is insured at full replacement value. Everything is hosted in the U.S., powered by hydro, and mining equipment may qualify for 100% year-one bonus depreciation. Learn more at abundant minds.com slash sessions. Beautiful. Joe, I'm curious your thoughts on sentiment right now and even just as like rough indicators too. I think I was looking at fear and greed was sitting at like 28. And then I watched things like Google trends too and Google trends on all the little topics that I follow. They're all down in Bitcoin terms Bitcoin, hardware, Bitcoin self-custody, Bitcoin itself.

I like watching the YouTube metrics because it's the one thing I have access to. So I can see views and how they're responding. And I'll follow different channels. I follow your channel too, by the way, Joe, and track it for information. I can see that views and interest are down across the board as well. So Joe, even just continuing the idea of sentiment, what's your view on sentiment right now? I'm curious how the comment section has been to you lately. And I'm also wondering if you have any, it's just kind of speculation, any thoughts on how it might turn around. Like I'm almost wondering what the next narrative might be.

It's a really good question. Well, you know, if I could pull up my YouTube studio without revealing too much information, that's all the sentiment you need. Look at the comments section. People are calling me stupid. Adam Back told me to eat my shoe a couple of weeks ago. I didn't say that. That was a good one. All the most fun stuff in the world.

Get it framed. I was going to say, I feel like that's a bit of an accolade. Like, that's a good way. Yeah. No, I've got a signed. letter from J.D. Vance right there. And I have a signed letter from Trump in a drawer here. And then right underneath that, Adam back telling me to actually, right next to his name on the white paper. Yes.

Anyway, no, it's like you've got that. You've got the Fear and Greed Index. And also, like, here's the deal. And I think James, you'll agree. It's like Bitcoin's interesting when it's crashing. Bitcoin's interesting when it's rocketing. Right. And this is also corroborated by like my YouTube channel, Nathan, your YouTube channel, James and Shaw, YouTube channel, your newsletter, are all of it. Like, growth is good when Bitcoin is crashing. Growth is good when Bitcoin is rocketing. Growth is terrible when Bitcoin is doing nothing. And right now, we're sort of in that phase where Bitcoin is doing nothing. We've had like one too many fake rallies where even on this rally, like nobody seems to care, right? It's like Bitcoin's breaking above 65, 66.

Oh, it's like we've been there before. We went from 59K to 84K and then all the way back down, right? So people just aren't buying that anymore. We're at the point where it's like extreme Malays, tons of infighting, you know, you could say that like, you know, you own Bitcoin, you use like river.com in light mode instead of dark mode. People will kill you for it. And they'll say you're the reason Bitcoin's down. It's like, when you're at that point in the cycle, that's typically when it's like, all right, guys, you know, it's, it's, we're closing in on the bottom, right? The final question is like, when will we ascend higher? And I think that's just, you know, it's a question that'll be answered in time. But it's just as you said, James,

and you echoed Nathan, it's like being here for several cycles, understanding this feeling, it's like, oh, my goodness, this is fantastic. The moment we hit the 200 week again, I quadrupled my DCA, and I'm not touching it until we're back above the 200 day at like 73 or 74. Like, I'm all in now, you know, because I know that four years from now, maybe we get another week down. Maybe we get some capitulatory bottom correlation to one event, but I'm never going to be able to time it perfectly.

I'm never going to be able to predict it in advance. And like buying right here in this accumulation zone is going to pay off in dividends four or five years from now. If quantum doesn't kill Bitcoin, I'm fairly certain it'll be, you know, around half a million dollars several years from now, if not higher. And so buying around 60K is an absolute deal, you know? So when there's blood in the streets and by blood, we don't mean investors' blood. We mean Bitcoiners' blood from infighting so much.

That's typically when it's a good time to accumulate even more. And just add to that, markets are mean reverting, right? And Bitcoin, especially so. There's a series of anchors, like 200-week moving average. We slingshot away from it for a number of years, then we come back to it. Slingshot away, come back to it. There's a bunch of these things, on-chain, technical, power law, whatever you want. I've modeled a bunch of these things to try and look at, like, what's the distribution? What's the bottom 10% of the distribution? What's the bottom 5%. And I ran a study because I got a fantastic question from one of my subs, because obviously people are in different ways of life. Some folks have an income and they're like, okay, well,

I DCA because I get paid. There's other folks who maybe they're retired or they've just, you know, sold a business. They've got a chunk of money and they're like, okay, I want to buy, but when and for how long. I love the idea of DCA. I mean, for me, I'm a huge advocate of DCA, but not every day, because if you're DCAing the top may not be the best idea, right? And from my perspective, I just DCA less in the bull because then I have more capital to allocate to something else or, you know, too many people I think buy all the time. But if you restructure and rethink about it. Well, Bitcoin does go through pullbacks.

Maybe you should actually anchor your DCAs to when it's in the best possible spot. And I was trying to answer this question of let's assume I've got a big pool of capital. when do I start dollar cost averaging and how long should I do it for? How long is the campaign? And it should be of no surprise here, right? This is all very logical, but I'm using this mean reversion index to just try and understand. Right now at 60K, we're at Q10. That means to the bottom 10% of the distribution of where Bitcoin gets pulled back in terms of the slingshot. That means that 90% of the time it's higher. 90% of all days is higher. So you walk into a casino, someone says you've got 90% chance of rolling the dice. What do you do? Roll the damn dice.

The question is, how long do you do this for? So previous bears, this bottom 10%, even the bottom 20%, because generally they happen like one big sell-off, and then you're in that bottom, bottom fifth, bottom 10%. That process is three, four months, right? Now, we've been down in this zone kind of tagging around that 60K level. There's been about a month worth of time down there. If you go down to the lowest level, which is like a Q5 or a Q6,

something like the bottom 5%, that's the 50K level. like low 50Ks. Getting down to that level, it's generally down there on a quantile perspective, down there for like seven days at most. So, you know, in terms of how aggressive you want to be, the problem is a lot of people like, well, I'm going to wait for the final week. And then it happens. They're like, I'm not buying that.

It's going way low. It's scary as hell. So this is what's so good about dollar cost averaging. Bottoms are really hard because what happens is people think it's going to go lower. They keep their cash on the side. The market rallies. and they buy because like, oh shit, I missed it, and then it sells off. And then they go, oh, shit, I missed it.

I got a sell there. And then they end up chopping themselves up. But if you just set yourself up like a three-month DCA campaign and just let it run, you just take away all the emotional problems of trying to pick the bottom. And you also, it's very humbling. Just accept that none of us know. None of us know. And we can pretend to know, we can do all sorts of models and that kind of stuff.

at the end of the day, no one knows. The best thing to do is to be like, are we in a discounted spot? Are we seeing the behavior of people that looks like a bottom? From my perspective, if I had to write a checklist, like, you know, at the start of the bear, what do you want to see? There's very few boxes I haven't checked. I've checked pretty much everything in terms of like the behavior of people that I would want to see, the price levels, weekly RSI, like technical on-chain, mood sentiment, the whole lot.

We've got a very long laundry list of things that's like, even if it's not the bottom wick. It looks like the bottom zone. It looks like a bottom formation process. Don't ever think it. Just, just dollar cost average the bottom, right? And the bottom is the whole thing. It don't get caught up in the wicks. It's not good for your health. Just DCA, the bottom is a process. It's just so much better for you. Beautiful. I love it. By the way, the one thing that you are missing, the best indicator that I possibly have is that when I'm afraid to tell my wife that I'm buying more, best opportunity to buy more. That is always the best time for me to buy more. One other thing that I want to make sure that we touched on as well, too, and I'm curious

to your guys' thoughts on it, and Joe, we'll start with you, is kind of the, we talked about, is interesting that Sailor couldn't really actually push the price up. It seemed like the buys didn't particularly matter. And hey, funny enough, after the initial 32 or whatever it was, the cells don't really seem to matter that much either, that I don't think he can necessarily move around the price. I kind of have the sense that the strategy story is rounding. It's coming maybe a little bit more to an end. He won't necessarily be a main focus moving forward, but I could be completely wrong. I think that my basically the base case is we kind of saw something similar play out with orange juice coming from Lin Alden right now. Now, without the underlying business

having basically a ton of cash coming into the convert into Bitcoin, I find things to be harder for them to continue to accumulate. I don't think the company is necessarily going anywhere. I just don't know if it's necessarily the darling that it was or the big behemoth in terms of continued accumulation that it was. So Joe, I'll start with you. I'm curious your sense, your thoughts and your sentiment on strategy moving forward. And you can go ahead and tell me why I'm stupid and dead wrong. No, I don't think. you're stupid and dead wrong. I think, you know, if anything, if they do have a difficult time raising capital to buy Bitcoin, you know, over the next couple of months as Bitcoin sort of chops

around, I will say it's remarkable that they've been able to raise capital until this point in the bear, right? In previous cycles, they've only been able to raise during the bowl and then sort of the early months of the bear. And then they've, they haven't been able to otherwise. But they've been able to, in relatively consistent fashion, just continue accumulating, which is quite cool, right, in size as well, right? You know, maybe they had a couple of performative buys during bear markets previously, but capital markets naturally open up

when you're in the business of buying Bitcoin and Bitcoin's in a bit full market, right? It's just the way that it works. And so the fact that they've been able to be large net buyers at this point is quite remarkable. You know, I think it just speaks to a fundamental change in the business strategy, right? Like, for a very long time,

the main argument against strategy was that they were Ponzi-like, they were Ponzi-adjacent, they were just perpetually selling STD, In order to buy Bitcoin, they were just rinsing and repeating that. And then instead of selling Bitcoin to pay the dividend, they would sell more STRC. And now they've pivoted away from that to saying, look, we're going to try to be net buyers of Bitcoin over time, as long as long enough time horizons or cost of capital is lower than Bitcoin's cagger will be good.

And so I think it's a much more interesting experiment now. Now that number one, they've shifted into more of a like actively managed fund type of entity and they're selling different financial instruments in order to raise funds to purchase their Bitcoin. They'll be selling their Bitcoin. I think that's a much more interesting entity. But number two, and more importantly for Bitcoin itself, one of the major pieces of FUD has now been removed, right? We've now seen that strategy can sell and they can sell in size without moving the Bitcoin price material. Like James knows, Nathan knows, I know, like Bitcoin's volume on an intraday basis is so massive. Strategy could be unloading clips of 10,000 Bitcoin

a day and they'd be done in a couple of months and it wouldn't matter all that much. Like Bitcoin may go down a little bit, but chances are to be able to absorb it. But regardless, one of the major pieces of fud against Bitcoin was because there was this massive structural buyer the moment they sold, Bitcoin would die. It didn't die. So regardless of people's thoughts on the longevity of the business model, I think it's undoubtedly a net positive for Bitcoin that that piece of fud is now off the table. Yeah.

And even if you take this to the extreme, I think they obviously found themselves in a bit of hot water a couple of weeks back, where the market was just like how much of your 840,000 coins you're going to have to sell, right? They was trying to work out how much of it, because they had six months worth of cash runway. MSGR was at a one next MNAV, which limited their dilution. And what did they do? They basically went, all right, we're going to do a couple of big slugs of MSTR, get a bunch of cash in the account. Sorry shareholders, stiff. We've got a bunch of cash, and we're going to sell the Bitcoin because, and that was actually quite important, a derisking event because they're now saying, first of all, we've got so much cash that

whatever, 17 months or 20 months or something worth of runway, we're fine. And the other one is that they, by selling the Bitcoin, they slayed the sacred cow, right, which, to be perfectly fair, reared himself, but they've slayed the sacred cow, they're not going to sell. What they really did is they said to all their preferred holders, you are now the product. You are now, like these are now the products. That 30 years of dividends that we keep saying is in the Treasury, here's proof that it's actually in the Treasury.

So honestly, if you take this to the extreme, and I'm actually not mad at this as a setup, Imagine Strategy just sold their dividend amount. They never bought another coin. And they just leaked out and slowly unwound the Treasury. They've got a hundred and something years worth of dividends in there. Once by the time Bitcoin does its thing, this company could become like a miniature miner where they just offload a couple of hundred, a thousand coins here or there, once a month, whatever it is, raise a couple of million dollars and just pay the dividends.

That would actually be, like, I have, not that I think this is the correct interpretation, but I've certainly gone through this mental loop. I'm just thinking, is strategy actually like, you know, Hunt Brothers cornering the market, does it keep people away? Is it actually a bit of a problem now because of their size? And I think there is a case. I think there's certainly capital on the side that I said, no. Now, I don't think that's the core reason, but I do think that that is,

is a reason for some people. If strategy was to become purely a seller just to service the dividends, it's actually fantastic. Honestly, I think it's a great setup for the market. I think Bitcoin's will be just fine. So if you take it to the extreme, the risk of how many coins are they going have to sell has been solved in this bear market. And then the real question is, like, how do they just run their business moving forward? And like, I don't think Treasury companies necessarily caused this bear. I think they were a part of it, just the euphoria and the hype. And like, we didn't get the blow off in Bitcoin, but we sure got it in all those stocks. So I definitely think we had a blow off top over there.

It certainly destroyed sentiment to an extent from November onwards, but I don't think they necessarily caused it. But if you imagine that strategy goes a little bit too ham in the next bull and sells far too much STRC, there is a possibility that they do become the reason that Bitcoin gets crushed. So honestly, I don't think this is what's going to play out, but if, you know, on the far extreme that they became a purely net seller, just to fund the dividends.

That is a beautiful way to unwind what could be argued to be a trade that went a little bit too far. That's actually a great setup. Again, I'm not saying that's the base case, but in the extreme where they become a net seller, I actually think it's really, really positive. So if your most bearish case is actually really positive,

happy days. Beautiful. James, is there anything else that you wanted to share with us that we maybe missed here today? No, man, I think we've gone over a lot. I think, yeah, honestly, There's going to be 1,001 people drawing lines on charts, calling for markets to go lower and lower and lower. And by the way, it may, totally may.

But it is also really important to just recognize, I mean, from my perspective, unless you think Bitcoin is going to die, from my view, we're in high value territory. The hardest thing about markets is not the price, it's not the sentiment, it's how you manage your own emotions. One of the best tools to manage those emotions is to zoom out, look at things from a bigger picture perspective. How has Bitcoin performed since getting to the 200 week moving average? Unless Bitcoin dies, that's a different track of thought. If you don't believe that Bitcoin's going to die, then go the other direction and say, is there a future where they're going to print less money, where people are going to be less

digital, where UTXOs are not a great tool for halt storing wealth? I mean, I just can't, as much as I like gold, I can't. cannot convince myself that my son's going to need a bunch of Roman coins. It's just not how the future is going to play out. Bitcoin is better in every way, in just every single way. So from the verification side, from the transportability, from Easeg. I mean, multi-seg is just awesome. It's just a superpower technology. I love it. I think it's such a fascinating piece of tech that gold could only wish to have. How much gold's in Fort Knox? No idea. How much how much Bitcoin's in the ETFs? We can check on chain. Let's how we go and look. You can see these

numbers. So from my perspective, unless Bitcoin dies, the thing you really have to manage is your own emotions. Every man in his dog's going to want to sell you a story of moon boy, doom boy, try and just like find your level and just DCA at the whole bottom. Don't get too caught up in the noise because it'll just drive you mad. Beautiful. Joe, is there anything that we miss or anything else we should mention before we wrap? You know nothing we miss, but I do appreciate chatting with you both. This was awesome. And, yeah, what I'll say is like as long as we remain underneath the true market mean, just stack your face off.

Not financial advice. Stack your face off. It's like you, I guarantee, whether the bear market is over already and we're in the early phases of the bull. And we're just waiting for these macro headwinds to get out of the way before letting loose. Or we've got a couple more months of chopper, maybe even one more leg down. I guarantee regardless, whichever three of those doors we step through, if you don't stack in this range, you're going to regret it a couple of years from now. Unless you think Bitcoin's going to zero, which it isn't,

that's all I'll say. That's sort of what I'll leave people with, I suppose. Spring follows winter. 100%. 100% James. Joe, where can everybody go to follow you and your work? What are all the good, wonderful links there, sir? Absolutely.

Well, yeah, again, thanks for having me. Thanks for watching the show, guys. This is a collab. You can just click right down there. Click Joe Consorti. Check out some of the videos. And subscribe if you like it. Beautiful.

Love it. James, where everybody, where can everybody go to follow you and your wonderful work? amazing substack. Was it number one in, unfortunately, crypto and number one in Australia. Yeah,

yeah, number one in Australia, number one in the crypto. We've finally got the top spot in the crypto category, which will work hard to try and rename to Bitcoin, but if not,

we'll just, you know, we might pivot somewhere else. But yeah, no, you'll find us over at checkonchain.com. So, yeah, we do two posts a week.

Just trying to help people think this stuff through, right? We write for hodlers, not for traders. Certainly traders will get value out of it. But yeah, I'll just try to take it, just try to visualize what's going on.

What I love about the on-chain side of things, it's just us making decisions collectively. And you get to see people buying tops, selling bottoms, all the emotions you feel. You get to see it in the data. And I just find it so calming in many ways to be able to visualize what we feel in the data and in the charts and just help people navigate through the chaos. If you enjoy this episode with James Jack and Joe Consorti, and I know that you did. Hit that like button. It really does help us out and check out the previous episode with Bob Burnett or the recent live stream.