BTC Sessions - Everyone Waiting For A Bitcoin Dip Is About To Get Left Behind | James Check

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

Mentor Sessions Episode 100: James Check breaks down Bitcoin market cycles, on-chain data, the bull market transition, and his end-of-year $100K price target for 2026Bitcoin just flipped from bear to bull and the on-chain data proves it: more than half of all invested wealth is now in profit, up from just 8% at the $58K lows. James Check returns to break down exactly what changed and where the cycle goes next.You'll learn why James called the bottom back in July and what the run from the low $60s to $86K revealed on-chain. You'll see his four-phase market cycle model, how short-term and long-term holder cost basis acts as resistance, and why 90% of ETF buyers were underwater before $8 billion in outflows hit the bottom. You'll also hear his honest end-of-year outlook, his left/mid/right curve scenarios, and why he believes dips will most likely be bought from here.This is a measured, data-first conversation for anyone navigating the transition out of a bear market without getting chopped up.⏱️ Timestamps:0:00 - Intro0:42 - Confirming the Bull Market1:24 - On-Chain Data Reveals Human Emotion1:36 - Price Pain Versus Time Pain Capitulation2:13 - Macro Trends Begin on One-Second Charts3:13 - Two Legs Up and Short Squeezes4:27 - Wealth in Profit Jumps From 8% to 55%5:27 - Bear Market PTSD and Transition6:25 - Will Old Buyers Sell at Break-Even?7:22 - Who Bought Bitcoin at $64K?8:04 - Four Seasons of Holder Behavior9:39 - Volume Rising Across Exchanges10:24 - Anything Missed in the Bear Market?11:42 - ETFs Bought Tops and Sold Bottoms13:07 - How 20% of Coins Drive 55% Drawdowns15:11 - What a True Catastrophic Event Looks Like15:48 - $100K Resistance and Silent IPO18:09 - Why the Next All-Time High Feels Special19:46 - Low-Fee ETF Flows Gaining Traction21:19 - Why Companies Avoid Bitcoin on Balance Sheets23:01 - Housing Markets Push Rotation Into Bitcoin24:00 - Bitcoin Is Not Set and Forget28:18 - Personal Signals Confirming the Bottom30:40 - Testing Fear Versus Greed Titles31:04 - Why Brains Are Wired to Lose Money32:57 - Is the DCA Strategy Still Active?33:46 - Maxing Purchases at $60K40:40 - Bull Market Lines of Defense44:34 - Tracking the Hot Ball of Money53:47 - AI CapEx Compared to Bitcoin Mining59:48 - End-of-Year Price Targets Left Mid Right1:02:47 - Disbelief Rally Remains Alive and Well🔗 Links & Resources:→ James Check's newsletter & Checkonchain charts: https://checkonchain.com→ James X.com: https://x.com/_Checkmatey_🔔 Subscribe for weekly Bitcoin Podcasts🐦 Follow on X: https://x.com/BTCSessions🐦 Follow on X: https://x.com/theBTCmentor⚡Case MultiSig & Inheritance: https://casa.io/sessions10% Off First Year Promo Code SESSIONS⚡ Sponsored by Trezor - Get Your Safe 7 Today: https://affil.trezor.io/aff_c?offer_id=352&aff_id=1088⚡ POWERED by Abundant Mines: Fully managed Bitcoin mining. Learn more at https://qrco.de/bgYKPB⚡ Sponsored by BITCOIN WELL: Best Place to BUY & SELL BITCOINhttps://qrco.de/bfiDC6💡BOOK Private Sessions with Nathan, Ben and the BTC Mentor Team: Master self-custody, hardware, multisig, Lightning, privacy, and more. 👉 Visit btcmentor.io #Bitcoin #BTC #Bitcoin100K #BTCSessions #JamesCheck #Checkonchain #OnChainData #BitcoinMarketCycle #BitcoinBullMarket #BullMarket #BearMarket #BitcoinAnalysis #BitcoinPrice #BitcoinETF #CostBasis #SelfCustody #Glassnode

Hold Mr. Check, you were right. It turns out people really want to own the orange coin. Gold got smoked. Oils up. Yields are rocketing. Bitcoin's hanging in there. Last run didn't really feel like a great run. It felt very muted. Once we get about 100K, it's now rock and roll. You're taught from an early age to avoid risk.

And what ends up happening is people wait and they wait and they wait. So we've now got more than half of the wealth is in profit, where it used to be 8%. Are they going to be looking to get out? Or is this kind of maybe the opposite where they're now along for the ride and feeling good about themselves? Who are the recent buyers at 64K? Those recent buyers are actually pretty serious. Was there something that's kind of left unchecked that maybe gives you a bit of pause or consideration? There was a lot going.

All right, good morning, James. Thank you so much for joining me today. Very excited to have this conversation because in the interest of accuracy, I actually went back and checked out our last interview in July. And lo and behold, Mr. Check, you were right. You said, bottom above the realized price, low 50s was truly oversold, capitulation window mid-year, strategy-turning seller wouldn't break the market. and you even had a throwaway line that the Clarity Act wasn't going to pass.

So now I believe you're saying that we're into a bull market. What are you seeing that confirms that? And in particular, this run from the low 60s up to 81 and then from 81 to 86. Was there anything unique there, either on chain or in the price structure? What should we be aware of right now? You've given me a hard bench to follow. Now I'm going to get everything wrong, right? You're never going to get it all right in every string.

It was so hard point. I know. Yeah. Well, look, to be honest, a lot of these things, I mean, this is one of the lenses why I love on chain data because it's a story of, us people doing what people do, which is acting with their emotions, not with their brains. So what happens is you see prices fall, your capitulation events, people go, oh my God, it's going so much lower.

And they all have the same epiphany that it's going lower on the exact same day. And they all sell the exact same time under the exact same stimulus. So I'm looking for those events. And the real big one was in February. And then we have what I call the time paying capitulation, which is like the boring grind. and then that was the July sell-off motivated by strategy and ETFs were selling and all the rest of it. Now, the current rally, now again, when we talk about bull bear, you know, these are very, they're very like finger in the air terms, right?

But obviously a bear market is a macro down trend, a bull market is a macro up trend. Macro events, like multi-year events, they start on the one second chart but you don't notice them. Then they propagate to the hourly and then the daily and then the week. in the monthly. And the way that I look at a lot of this stuff, like people don't have confidence that it's a bull market. By the time it gets all time high, everybody will believe it. Three months after it, which is kind of where we are now, it's like, it might be like bottoms in. People are starting to come around to the idea, but there's still a lot of bare market PTSD. Six months in, you'll look back and go, oh, okay, right, yes, the bottom was in. So what we're trying to do, the way I try and

frame it up, we're building confidence from a point where like it's really hard to know to a point where everybody's going to know, right? So that journey, how do we model or map that? Now, the rally we had, we went from, you know, 64K, let's say, rallied up to, I think it was like 82 or 80 or something. I can't remember the exact number. And then we had another pop that got us up to 87. So we've kind of had two legs. Now, the recovery from that bare market low, the way that I look at it. How much of the supply, dollars invested, capital flows, how much of the bottom buying, because if you think of what a top is, the top is when too many people bought too many coins are too high for price. Price falls below their level. They panic. They start to sell. So you get like a really

large pool of trapped buyers at the top. Invert that idea. Not trapped buyers at the bottom, but you've had this massive capitulation. People have sold. The smart money have stepped in, accumulated at low prices, and then suddenly the price rewards them. And we saw two big short squeezes on both of those rallies, because there's a ton of people who really, really, really, really believe that the market has to bottom in Q4, right? Four year cycle stuff. Now, we're only just getting to Q4. So let's not, you know, count too many chickens yet, because we're still going to get through Q4 before we can say that they were incorrect, you know, give them that much. But there was a lot of people who just don't believe the market could have gone lower. We saw a

very, very large. Like, you know, on that first rally, like 4 million BTC return to a profit. In terms of the capital base, if you look at every coin when it moved on chain, at 58K, only 8%, only 8% of the dollars invested in Bitcoin, there's a crazy stat, we're in profit. 92% of all the dollars invested in Bitcoin were underwater. Now, that's not a perfect metric, but this is approximately like the 10% being in profit metric for there is very common across all, air cycles. That's now shot up to 55%. So we've now got more than half of the wealth is in profit where it used to be 8%. All of these things are just like a tailwind. And the way I've been describing it to my subscribers is we all can feel that like it's just less shit than it was

three, four, five, six weeks ago. You know, it's still low. It's not at all time high. We're not above 100K. But we all know that it feels a lot better. It feels like there's just a bit of a tailwind a bunch of people who bought low are now feeling good about it. A bunch of people who are sidelined are going, hey, did I make a mistake? Should I buy more? What do I do? They're rushing in and buying a little bit late. Then the market pulls back and they say, oh, it is actually a bull market top. So we're in this kind of transitional period where there's still a lot of bearish PTSD. There's a bunch of people who bought low, but they're also like, they would really like one more green candle to be like, ah, okay, good, now I'm calm. They're all like, I think I bought the bottom. I think I

did, like, and they're waiting for it. So everyone just needs that extra level of confirmation. So early bull markets tend to start powerfully. We own 50% rally off the bottom, kind of wakes everybody up. Then there's a period of reaccumulation, bit of chop, bit of sideways, bit of down. And that's just like people trying to work out which side is this thing going to go on. 2023, 2016, they were long periods of just like 2019. It was like as long sideways grind as people just kind of work at, maybe it is a ball, maybe it's not, is there a reason? What's the narrative? Trying to work it all out. So I think we're in that, you know, transitional period. Very interesting. I'm curious with regards to kind of the direction of the motion and the sentiment

with people kind of having this post-bear PTSD. I'm wondering if in your view we're going to hit levels of basically resistance as people that were underwater, like we're up to 55% you're saying now, but as people that were underwater come back to kind of their cost basis, is that going to give them, like they held it for this long? Do you generally think if the markets, moving upwards, are they going to be looking to get out, like get back at their, just get back to zero and we're going to have a hard time kind of grinding through? Or is this kind of maybe been the opposite where sediment starts to change and they're now along for the ride and feeling good about themselves? Yeah, so you're very correct in that idea, except that is what

characterizes bear markets. So one of the metrics that we use in the on chain world that's just, it's fantastic, short-term holder cost bases. The cost base for people who bought in the last five months, recent buyers, right? Now, that recent biometric is interesting because most of the time, talk about short-term holders. We generally refer to them as like the speculators, the fast money, the traders, that's that kind of cohort. However, if you just reframe and say it's the cost basis of recent buyers, who are the recent buyers at 64K when we're down 55%? Quantum and Jane Street are killing Bitcoin. It's all over. Thanks for playing. Gold's going to win. Like all these negative narratives, those recent buyers are actually pretty serious holders, right? They're people who really want

to be here. Now, as the market rallies back into the bull, they get diluted out of the system. It starts to move back towards that speculator fast money. So we're in that process as well. Now, in a bear, short-term holders consistently sell near their cost basis. They are doing exactly what you said. They're trying to get their money back, back to break even. It's a sell-the-rip mentality. And then by the time we get to the end of a bear, we see what we call long-term holders, the other side. People have held for at least five months, six months. Now, these people, they generally characterize the time-paying capitulation. They sell the most in loss at that point in time. Now, those folks, they're the ones who bought the top, huddled the whole bear. They did it.

They made it to the end. And then they collapsed right. They just go, oh my God, it's not happening and they sell everything. So there's these regimes that we can see, these pivot points. We've gone through the phase of long-term holders who bought the top selling the bottom. We've gone through the phase of short-term holders just trying to get their money back. we've actually transitioned into a new phase, which we typically see in early bulls, which is where short-term holders dominate profit-taking. The folks who bought low, they're happy to take a quick 50% off the table, right? We rally again, they take it.

So we're back into that kind of trading-type system. And then once we approach all-time highs, we move into the fourth kind of, let's call it a season of this whole thing, move into the fourth season, which is where long-term holders come back into the mix, but they are now people who bought low. And they have waited for however long it takes us to get back to all-time high. and price discovery, and then they start selling later on. So it's kind of these long-term holders are active at extremes, price discovery above all-time high and at the absolute bottom,

and then short-term holders kind of dominate the trend in between in either a sell the rip in a bear or more so a buy-the-dip in a bull. I love it. Would that mean that if we have a little more trading activity going on, does that mean we're seeing more volume now on chain as well too, or at least volume on trading? Yeah, volumes picking up across the border. Again, we're relative to a bear market. the early phase of a bull, we're coming off like, it's not as if Bitcoin's plasters on every Bloomberg terminal in the world right now on every billboard, right? So it's still kind of the

people who are attuned with markets, paying attention to price all the time. Some momentum guys will start seeing it now that's above the 50 week moving average, above the 200 day. You'll start seeing some momentum start coming back in. But really, if you imagine one more leg of green candles, get anywhere close to 100K, suddenly it's going to be in the news, papers again. People will start rushing in. So we're still in that early phase where like volumes are up relative to the bear, but they're still low relative to the bull. And these things will ramp up over time. Awesome. Just to make sure I put a, you know, a couple, you know, double tap on the bear market here. And literally, like, make sure we take it out back and kill it. The, was there anything

off your general? Because I know you've talked a lot about bear markets being a process. And I imagine bull markets are kind of in the same vein. Was there anything from the bear market process that you expected to see that ever actually came to fruition? Was there something that's kind of left unchecked that maybe gives you a bit of pause or consideration? Not really, actually. So my overall setup or the way I thought about the bear, to be honest, I was, you know, again, I'm no, I'm no sage here. I was surprised at how well my overall framework kind of played out. Price pain, time pain, just like looking at these dynamics. So, you know, even I was quite impressed at how well. And like, these are all ideas you have to simplify the world.

And the way I think about, I mean, I've been through enough cycles that I know what my emotions have done, the roller coaster of ups and downs. And I look at what I did back when I first got into the bear market, right? I thought I was super smart, looking for the best indicator that tells me exactly when things happen. And I would sell low and buy high consistently because I just didn't know what I was doing. And I didn't have a plan or a system. And I've kind of learned from that. And all assets are the same. at the end of a bear, like no one believes in it.

So you're just looking for those like points of capitulation. We even got what I think, because, you know, the ETFs are fairly young. 2024, they went live. We haven't really seen them in a bear market yet. And we got to the point where if you price all the inflows, assume that it's not a perfect metric, but imagine inflows are like coins or dollars invested. Of those inflows, how many of them were underwater or at a higher price? And it was like 90 or 87% or something.

a massive number. So a huge number of ETF inflows were underwater. The average ETF holder, like just pricing the average inflows, was like down 30%. And then we got $8 billion worth of outflows. Really big sell side. When did that happen? Exact bottom. Right on July, we had the maximum amount of ETF sell side. They've now come back to life. We've seen $2.2 billion of inflows.

They finally back alive again. Yeah, 2.2 in a week is on par not quite as high as, but on par with some of the big weeks in the bull market. So there's been enough people who've just kind of woken up and seen, oh, okay, maybe Bitcoin's not dead. So we've seen the ETFs do exactly what on-chain people do, which is buy too much at the top, hoddle the whole way down and then sell it all at the bottom.

And we're only talking about marginal amounts here, right? Of all the capital that flowed into the ETFs, 80% of it stayed invested. Pretty cool, right? But that 20%, it's obviously big enough to drive, you know, and, you know, if you kind of think about that as a ratio, 20% of the coins can create a bear market that goes down 55%, right? Of all supply. That's not a perfect model, but that's the kind of the amount of sell side that we typically see. Most people hold the marginal 20% as a seller. Eventually, you exhaust them, start moving in the other direction. So, yeah, there weren't too many things that, like, I needed to see ticked off. There was a lot of metrics, especially in the onset. chain world, realize price and various other tools that I had already assumed we're going to break and not get hit and, you know, MVV didn't go below one. And it took me a bit of convincing various folks to be like, MVRV, I don't think it's going to go below one. It might do,

but I think there's a good reason why it won't. It really helped me like frame up that idea. And to be very fair, I had the exact same idea in 2022. So I was wrong in 2022, but the, you know, if I then think about what did I get wrong? Well, I didn't know that FTX was the world's largest fraud. I didn't know that Genesis had borrowed money from every man at his dog, and that was a whole thing. GBT was a complete mess. Choose your weapon of how many, like, fraudulent enterprises were completely eviscerated. So, and by the way, fastest rate hiking cycle in history, everything's selling off.

You know, TLT loses 50% of its value. There was a lot going on. And I don't think many people could have, like, understood the allot part. So when I look back and say, well, okay, what did I get wrong back then? Do we have those conditions here? If strategy fully implodes, maybe we saw a bit of like a scare, but like, again, like Sailor's not going to blow up. You know, he's got enough tools and capital.

And even so, even if he dig in in in a hot water, you sell 50,000 Bitcoin and bang, problem solved. Yeah, market goes down a bit, but like bang, there's a strategy thing solved. And only took him, what, 5,000? So, you know, I wasn't too concerned about an FTX show. up. So therefore, I was like, well, maybe that thesis I had, in principle, it should make sense, make sense for it to play out now. And there it did. That's beautiful. And I agree. I try to think of what sort of major catastrophic event could actually just rip everything down for the time being.

And the only place I can kind of come to, which is similar vein to strategy, is you see idea of a custodian being compromised. Like if Coinbase custody somehow got hit, like that basically it's game over for a bit. That's going to be unbelievably painful. But a Aside from that, there's, I didn't really feel like anybody else was really too out on their skis or there was two major risks kind of hanging out there, too much leverage. But I think it set us up for a good position right now. The other thing that I did want to tap on in that same vein was the idea of 100K and was going to kind of be like getting back there.

So the last run didn't really feel like a great run. It felt very muted and it wasn't necessarily all the euphoria and things that maybe we were used to in previous cycles and kind of looking for again. And the model that I'm working with, and I can't remember if it suddenly touched on before, but this idea of $100,000 of Bitcoin at 100,000 U.S. being this huge psychological sentiment just indicator. For anyone who was here so early, you dream of it one day being 100K. It was the stretch of all stretch targets, right? It couldn't happen. Exactly. It couldn't happen. It's never going to happen. And then to get there, because I believe I've heard you,

and I remember from talking last time, that there was a ton of whales and OGs selling at that price point, which makes sense. It's a major lifestyle change. And so the question I have now is, Those giant bear whales, do they have any ammo left? Do they exhaust the clip the last time around? Or do we anticipate that same sort of 100,000 resistance again as we make our way back up? Yeah, so there's no way to answer that question with any degree of honesty. All I can do is kind of prophesize and say, well, if I was in X shoes, how would I think about it? I have a feeling.

My instinct is that we saw the general, I called it the great rotation. Jordan Vista called it the silent IPO. I think both of these are fairly reasonable analogies. It feels to me like that was the like handing over of the baton of like if you have been around long enough where it's time to buy the house, the boat, the holiday, the just like, thank you very much Bitcoin. You finance the rest of my life. It feels to me like that was the period where it was going to happen. You had strategy, ETF, institutions, you know, treasury companies, investors in general. There was just a huge amount of demand at that level.

It's in the headlines. Like, it made perfect sense. Now, that does not mean we will not have sell side in this bull. We absolutely will. We always do because higher prices will always unlock supply because someone who buys low will always want to sell high. However, I have a feeling. My instinct is that we have now financed the lifestyle of the OGs.

And it's easy to kind of blame like the OGs. Now, there's certainly some, right? There was a due to sold 80,000 Bitcoin and people. people made fun of him at 110K, like, dude took out $9.6 billion. And they're like, what an idiot. Like, seems pretty smart to me. But anyway, you know, state planning all that stuff. But like, I do think, and I've been talking with, where people ask me out, like,

what's the next cycle look like? My instinct is the next all-time high is a special one. Because you can't really blame that all-time high on 2017, Bitcoin became a household name. First time I heard about it. A lot of people I know first time I heard about it. You can't really blame it on stimulus because of COVID, right? You can't really blame it on the ETS going live. You can't really blame it on Trump.

You can't really blame it on anything. It's just, it turns out people really want to own the orange coin. So the next all-time high to me feels like it might be a bit special in that regard and that it's just demand. It is just straight demand. And if you're a critic, you just have to accept that you're wrong. Now, we're not an all-time high yet. I do believe we'll get there.

And when that happens, right, I think there's a bit of a narrative reckoning. for those who have just been anti-Bitcoin for such a long time, because what else do you blame it on? It just turns out that people want to own this thing because it kind of makes sense in the setup that we're in. No, I completely agree. Like you can't say it's rate cutting or rate hiking anymore. It has to be just, it just comes back to the pure demand for the asset itself. And I wonder if even just rotation from older generation inheritance going down to younger generation, rotating from real estate and gold and into Bitcoin, it's probably going to be like Bitcoin is going to be millennials and younger's kind of gold. It's going to be their safe haven. It's going to be

the one that they're going to look to. So it's a very interesting framework that you can't argue that point anymore. You don't have any sort of excuse to justify, well, this thing's still ripping and you were pitching about it at 10K and 3K and 300. You're just dead wrong at this point. And one of those is not a perfect data point, but one that this kind of sits into this. I wrote a piece yesterday about the ETFs. They're very small, small but growing, but the two low cost ETFs, which is gray scales BTC, and the new one, which is Morgan Stanley's MSBT, those are like 3.5% dominance. They're very small, but they are the only ETFs that are really gaining ground on IBIT, which is like 62% or something dominance. So small

but growing, but those low fee ETFs, you don't really buy a low fee. If you're a trader, you really don't care what the fee is, because you're not holding it long enough for it to matter. You're a hedge fund. You actually care about buying IB because it's high liquidity. Who is buying these little ETFs? This is small, low, low, fee, but people who want to buy and hold. They literally want the lowest fee because they want to hold it for 10 years. So that fee starts to matter over the course of a long period of time. So I think we're going to see that like passive flows, Bitcoin becoming a normal part of the portfolio. You know, a lot of folks are like, oh, but we've gone through retail and corporates and now it has to be

sovereigns. Otherwise, we can't go up. I'm like, no, mate. You just need corporates. First of all, to get off zero, which is just an ungodly sum of money, you know, any kind of invest pensions retirement funds, just saying it, you know, 1% model portfolio allocation, just the numbers that come out of those kind of calculations are just astronomical. So, yeah, no, I don't think you need sovereigns to get involved. I just think you need, like, the incremental winding up from 0.001% to 0.01%. That's just a tremendous amount of capital. No, I completely agree. And it's funny, but even looking back, the idea that we had, like, the corporate rotation into Bitcoin, wine. It's like, no, not really. Like, even with Sailor, it was a very specific and unique case.

Right. It was a unique case. He was head of the country with the majority share. He could kind of head of the company, sorry, and he could kind of dictate which way he wanted to go and gave the investors out if they didn't want to do it. And the rest were kind of like metaplanet, struggling hotel chain, you know, last ditch effort. But whenever you see, like, it just being part of a regular company that has to deal with a regular board and regular shareholders, adding it as part of their reserves, where they got treasuries and USD, whatever else they're kind of sitting on. It really hasn't made its way as a normalized corporate asset yet. No, that's cool. And also, how many companies hold gold on their balance sheet? Not that many. Even gold miners

just like sell. You know what I mean? So like we don't really have that many. I think people have kind of over indexed on their own personal journey. It's like, I've got a stock portfolio and I got Bitcoin, I got this. And they expect like companies to have the same kind of balance sheet that they do as an individual. Like most of them just hold treasury bonds and cash. You know, they literally, it's, post how much cash they got on their balance sheet. Sale was in that interesting field where it goes, it's a melting ice cube and I've got to do something with this excess cash. So yeah, look, having Bitcoin on the balance sheet, it's going to be something that'll occur, but like it'll happen small. I don't think we're going to be seeing the apples of the world

doing it anytime soon, but that's okay. That's fine. You don't need it. You just need it to become part of a very small allocation to a normal person's portfolio, even just high net worth individuals. Retirees, anyone who's in this kind of bucket where they've got wealth and they've got to look after it and certain assets and trades aren't working anymore. I think about here and you'd probably know this as well. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, we've had these housing markets that have just been like, you know, you pray at the altar of the real estate agent. And I mean, you guys have already gone through a bit of a correction there. We've just started our correction. It's a generational drop there. And that's early days.

And you just start doing the math being like, okay, I'm going to take out a, you know, I'm in my mid-30s. by the time I'm ready to buy a house, I'll probably be closer to 40. I'm going to take a 30-year mortgage, I'm going to pay this thing off when I'm 70. And like, you look at some of the numbers and you're just like, you're telling me that government's going to take 5% just in tax straight off the bat. You just look at this. I'm sorry, prices have to come down because it just doesn't make sense.

I'm going to buy corn because it just makes a whole lot more sense. And there's going to be people who just go, oh, okay, this trade that has worked for my whole life, my adult's life, my grandparents' life, isn't working. So I've got to look somewhere else. And just that forcing function alone, I think it's going to turn a lot of people and say, well, what is out there that is working and growing and makes sense?

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key. You invite them with an email and their key lies dormant while you're still alive and should that day ever come. You don't have to worry about them having to figure it out when you're not around to ask. You've already taken care of it. So head to cossa.io slash sessions promo code sessions to receive 10% off your first year. That's cossa.io slash sessions code sessions. Click the link in the description down below or scan the QR code on the screen. And easy too, right? You can buy as little as much as you want. Conveniently in 10 minutes you can get set up depending on where you're in the world and kind of the onboarding requirements. Even just a quick side note, I was seeing today,

now I can't remember if it was looking at the broader market. It was just anecdotal, but it was Brampton, Ontario, and it was a 41% correction, I think, since 2022. Wow. The house went from, like, 1.5 mil to 900 and something. Like, absolutely insane, but that's where we're at, right? These things got incredibly overvalued, and we're seeing interest rates continue to rise.

In the U.S., I saw today, we had, I think, the 30-year hit 5.57 or 5.5-something. like it's going to six, which means mortgages are going to be at 8%, which means your monthly cost is just going to be completely untenable. If the man of the money, the money printer's got a 6% rate, you missed a job and might lose your job and a, you know, a dependence and all that, you're not getting a 6% rate, you know?

No. It's eight, and it's just, it's too much. And so I hope that because in, if I look back on like the 2021 cycle, it was very, I knew friends and family and everyone kind of jumping in in small amounts and getting into it. It was very like the crypto gambling.

It was what sports betting is in friends groups that I see today is what it was in 2021, right? But I wonder as things just continue to grind and get harder, if we might actually see them return, like they might actually venture back. Because I don't feel like they came back the last time around for the actual like, I don't really have a lot of other investment savings opportunities. Like I really just have to use this not as the get rich quick, but as the long term savings that it's intentionally and supposed to be.

That's it. Yeah, 100%. It moves back towards its utility value. Some of the monetary premium washes out of it. And yeah, I mean, look, we'll see. But, you know, I think we're seeing it early signs across, you know, similar places in the Commonwealth. And it just feels like Australia is the next shooter drop. No, 100%. All right. So speaking of early signs, I want to know we talked a little bit about the bear process. I want to know about the bull process and what you're kind of going to be watching for and looking for going forward. But before we get to the technicals, the hard answers, the stuff we can really back with our engineering and our science. Do you have any, like, how do I phrase this? Like, little checks that you would never put in the newsletter. I'll give you, like, an example. I got a text message from my brother-in-law, who I absolutely love.

But that was a bull market signal to me. He texted me, and was like, oh, what's going on with the Bitcoin right now? Looks like you had a good week there. And as soon as I saw that, I'm like, okay, bottoms in. I just felt good about it. Again, it's a terrible indicator to actually use. But do you have any of these? Is there anything outside of this that's just a little bit of a tell,

just for you. Yeah, I mean, certainly I've got a, there's a handful of folks that I know that like when I get the message, like, you know, how's your Bitcoin doing? That's usually a pretty good sign. But for me, honestly, the thing that really worked in my favor, I've got a client list. And, you know, I get emails and stuff from folks all through my subscriber base. And there was points in time that, like in February, specifically in February, I've spoken to this before.

My inbox was just slammed with people who are long-term bitcoins, like, have been. been around for a long time, concerned. Like, something's wrong. We're down 50%. We're at 60K for the first time since the peak. And I was like, oh, this feels like palpable fear, right? People saying, hey, my clients are scared. Can you jump on a webinar? Can you do this call? Can you have a conversation with this dude? You know, someone in my circle wants to sell everything. What do I tell them? And I'm just like, this is palpable fear. So for me, that was a really, really good insight. Yeah, I just kind of use the tools that's around me.

This is what I love the on-chain side for because I don't even need to have these checks because I've got them. I can see everyone's coins. And I can see when everyone is selling, when everyone is holding. So it's like, I can see when everybody's capitulating. And I saw tons of people saying, I don't think we've had the capitulation yet. And I'm looking at like one and a half billion dollars of losses on a single day on par with 2022 at the low.

And I'm like, oh, man, it kind of looks like capitulation. to me. This looks like people who held from the very top are selling all on the same day. You love to see it. That's beautiful. Wonderful. I will give you one that actually hasn't turned bullish for me yet that for anyone that's made this far in the interview, you'll have a list a little bit of an insight to whether or not we've switched into a better market is just my packaging on videos. For the last couple months, so usually I'm going to try and find something along the lines of fear, greed, or curiosity to try and drive people to come and enjoy the conversation. over the last couple months,

if I tried to do anything on the greed-related, like a little bit of optimism towards the future, no one clicked, no one gives shit, no one was coming to, completely not interested. If I go max on the fear side, everyone's piling in the door. It was just the sentiment is what the,

it was probably confirmation bias. So I'll be curious with this one because I will throw up the positive, optimistic title and we'll see if people want to click. Yep. No, that's a great test, right? Because people naturally, And this is part of how I analyzed markets too. From a very early age, we are wired, right? Don't touch that thing. Don't put your finger in that PowerPoint. Don't jump off that ledge.

Be careful over there. Like you're taught from an early age to avoid risk. And the great irony of markets, they're one of the few things which everything you are trained to do in life is perfectly counterproductive to your success in markets. For whatever reason, our brain wants us to lose money. We want to do the exact wrong thing at the exact wrong time. And what ends up happening is, people wait and they wait and they wait for confirmation after confirmation after confirmation. And when it feels safe to jump in the pool, it's nice and warm now, there's 50,000 people in there, the water must be nice. I guess I can get in now. Oh, you know what? I kind of missed the first, like, year of the bull. I'll lever up because then I'll catch up. And that's what happens,

right? People wait to feel safe and they buy too much late in the trend because it feels like the bull market will never end. It really sucks and is very difficult to accumulate in a bear market because it is probably going to go lower, right? And you are going to buy it. It is going to go down. It's part of the reasons why I think it doesn't matter who you are, DCA is just such a powerful tool, not because it's going to give you the perfect pico bottom entry, but because it's going to help you manage your emotions. And that is the hardest thing. The hardest thing is make sure that you can actually handle your emotions. Buy when it doesn't feel good, but also be impartial to it. If I buy and it goes down, this is the beauty of DCA. If you buy and it goes down,

great, you get to buy more later at a lower price. If you're buying it goes up, fantastic, you just bought the bottom, right? Well done. You're winning in both scenarios. And this is like complete shift of mindset. It's a simple technique, but it's actually very hard for people to do. So, yeah, it's all about managing your emotions more than anything else. No, I completely agree. I'm curious then, there's a few things on Drom, but just quickly on that note as well, too. Are you still executing on your DCA strategy? Last time we talked about how you were, let's say, choosing and sizing how much the DCA kind of was by where we are in the market. And I remember we were down at like the 10th percentile or something last time we talked.

Are you still on that same DCA regiment or have you started to adjust it with recent moves? Yeah. So my general framework was basically to buy the whole bottom. Don't worry about the PICO bottom. People fantasize they were buying like the bottom wick. It's just not useful. I've always got a DCA running, right, most of the time. I've also been in the market long enough now where I don't need to be buying all the time.

There's also other stuff I've talked about this, you know, various times. I'm at an age, I've a dependent, I've got other things I need to just like have in my portfolio for various reasons. So for me, like I'm buying Bitcoin when it's cheap. So when we got down a 60K, basically I maxed out what I, you know, for me and for the business, because the business has a treasury as well. And we were just maxing out whatever we could handle, right, without busting. up our cash flow, whatever spare capital we had, we were just buying as hard as we could, same amount every day, irrespective. The moment we hit 60K, I was like, let it run, let it rock.

Now, as we got to 64 in August, and then we rallied to 80, I think on that rally higher, I had like 10% of our capital left ready to go, and we got to like 69, I think it was 69, and I was like, nah, this is it. And I just, all in, just totally, totally allocated. Now, once we got to 80, obviously cash flow is a thing that comes in, right? So you need to wait for that to occur. There was a point where we're like, you know what? I feel like this is the right time to take a very soft amount of leverage. So we pulled forward some of our demand at about 80K, 82.

And that's basically us as a business. We're kind of set for the foreseeable future. So we pulled forward a bunch of our demand. Nothing too extreme. But to me, I'm very happy to buy at 80K because I have a feeling once it goes to 100, probably not going to be on the buying train. We've got other stuff that we need to buy for business and personal assets. So that's just how I've been thinking about it.

So really, I think anything under 100K is great value. 80s is fantastic value. 60s is just bargain basement. So everything between here or there, you know, and I've got tons of messages recently from folks who are, hey, they're the opposite. Like, I bought like 10% of what I wanted to buy. And I'm like sitting on the side with 90%, what do I do?

And I mean, I can't tell people what to do. Everything is personal, but I can share what I'm doing. And like, I'm kind of fully invested at this point in time because I think 80s are great. Everything below 80s is just more great. Everything above that, you know, people like, do you get more bullish when it goes up? I'm like, more bearish when it goes up. It's the opposite, right? You can flip around.

No, uh, beautiful. Good to note. Now, I do want to ask you about the recent weekly close above 84. If there's any significance to that. And the other sort of things that we're going to be looking for to identify where we are in the bull market as it progresses. But speaking of the business, I actually just kind of want to pause for a second, because you and I never really get a chance to talk about this, and maybe you don't want to, and that's totally fine as well. But how are you doing on a personal

level? We never really get to explore what's going on in your life. We've got the family, the business. It's been a hard year for any bit coiner. You're a Bitcoiner just as much, if not more than the rest of us. So how are you, sir? Yeah, I'm good, mate. So through, I'm actually quite proud of how we've handled, I mean, first of all, I'm proud of how we handle the bear market from an analysis standpoint. I think we, you know, a lot of folks think that, and I see this on Twitter all the time, like, why the hell would you pay for a premium newsletter and, you know, blah, blah, every man who dogs on newsletters. It's like, well, yes, and every elite athlete also has a personal trainer. You know, that's why? Because they're humble enough to realize that another perspective or

another view, you know, if you need a lawyer, you have to pay a lawyer. If you need a doctor, you have to pay a, and the way that I think about it, Bitcoin for a lot of us is our life savings. It's a huge portion of our net worth, having someone who literally spends every day thinking, looking, designing charts, building metrics, trying to like study and analyze this thing, it's the exact same way that I would outsource any professional skill to somebody else. So, you know, obviously having a good call on things is right, but really a lot of people who subscribe to us aren't paying me to call how the market trades. They're actually looking for someone to just help explain why stuff happens because when you understand the why you take away the uncertainty and the confusion

from what is otherwise a very market to complex and dynamic places. So it's actually more about like managing a mental state. You know, if it is your life savings, having someone that's just kind of tracking and understanding where the market's at is a useful toolbox. So I'm quite proud of how we've handled it both from the analysis standpoint, but also our revenue has more or less been chopping plus and minus 10% from our all-time high. So I mean, a lot of content creators were just being crushed in the bear. I think we've done very well at our retention. We've held on to a lot of people.

And, you know, plus and minus 10% after a 50% drawdown, there's no question. I wasn't expecting growth. I'm really happy with us just holding ground. So that's been fantastic for us. You know, we've grown the team by one, which is a 50% increase, right? We're at three now. You know, but this is the beauty of a small business. I get to work with my two best friends.

You know, the kids just turned one. Life's good. Oh, that's beautiful. That's good to hear. Yeah, because I was thinking about it, even as we were going through. It's like, it couldn't have been easy for you at times, but like, you're also experiencing the time pain that we're all going through. You're just the one mapping it out for us. I'm sure.

And there are moments. Let me share that by the end, right before the cold card incident, as horrific as that event was, I was saying, I was saying, I'd go into the office and I'd be like, I'm just, I'm out of ideas. I've written about this thing from the same lens so many times like I'm running out of ideas here guys like I can only massage the same topic so many ways and like I've gone I've I've modeled like what would the ball market look like and done all these different frameworks and like time pain the whole thing so like coming up with fresh ideas when the market's just doing this for like a month and a half you know like there are points in time where you're like please do something and then we started to get some expectations. activity, right? Whether it was cold car, whether it was ETFs was selling, suddenly things started to move and then we popped and right, okay, bang, there we go. There's the momentum. You know, it puts a spring back in your step. I'm glad to hear it. I'm glad to hear it. I imagine we're feeling a little bit better now, a lot more to write about. I think it's

hopefully going to be very exciting. Just a little bit better. And this is what all the on-chain data shows. It's just, and I was describing it through that late stage, like June, July, August. I was describing it as like the London weather. where it's like it's in April, it's still wet, it's still cold, it's still dark, it's still miserable. But yesterday was shitter. And you know that tomorrow is going to be that little bit better, just a little bit, like it's just not getting worse anymore.

I'm like, that's what this bear market is currently doing. It's losing momentum to the downside. It's still cold, dark, dreary and wet, but it's a little bit better than yesterday. Good. I love it. You also come back and let me know when you get above the all-time high for subscribers. So I think that'll be another interesting metric to know kind of where we are in the market. So with that, the idea of looking forward, what we're going to be

kind of looking to check off as we go through this bull market process and the 84K close, if it has any significance. Tell me, what are we seeing? What are we thinking? How is this going to play out as you see it right now? Yeah, so I think the recent rally is an interesting one because I try to frame it up as like, again, going back to my previous analogy, you want to have confidence, very hard to be very confident that the bottom is in on the day the bottom is forming. Very, very few people. And by the way, you shouldn't try to. Very, very difficult, impossible to be like, ah, that exact one second candle, that's it. That's it. Bears over. Good luck with that. But as time goes on, price proves it out. Eventually, like, okay, now I've got a bit

more confidence. So first thing, I mean, I frame it up as like lines of defense for the bears. Same on the downside when you start coming off the top. You've got certain levels that when they break, you're like, okay, warning one, warning two, warning three. By the time you're on the time you're on warning four, it's like you've got to be asking yourself something's going wrong here. So, and they're almost the same levels on the way down and the way up. First one that breaks is the short-term holder cost basis. We lost that 114K somewhere in mid-October of the, after the bull market top. We crossed that on the rally when the short squeeze went off from 64 to 80.

Likewise with the 200-day moving average. Now, the short-term cost basis provided resistance like three or four times in the way down, just couldn't get above it. The 200 day stalled us out in May at about 83K, that was the local high. We slice through both of those. There's another model called the True Market Mean. This is the center of gravity. This is the middle.

It's the cost basis for active investors, which is like just the, it's basically where the ETF cost basis is, is where Sailor's cost basis is, in that like 7580 zone. So we got above that. Then there's the 50 week moving average. Now, why am I choosing these random levels? Well, the on-chain models is psychological. Breaking above the short-term cost basis means all those brave souls who bought low have been rewarded for it. They're more likely to go, I know that.

That feels like that's different. Now I'm probably going to be buying dips. Now I'm looking for opportunities. I'm more willing to allocate now that the base is in. 200-day moving average, people just start to notice like it shows up on Bloomberg terminals. It's like, hey, show me all the assets trading above their 200-day. Bang. Right, it starts to show up on screeners.

Above the 50-week moving average is much, much slower. but you're now above the one yearly average. Again, breaking below it, it was like 95 or something. We lost it in the bull. Breaking above it just puts it on more people's radar. We put a new higher high versus the 83K or 82 and a half, I think, technically from May. Technically speaking, now technical analysts are like, now it looks like an uptrend. Now it's a weekly uptrend.

Now I have to pay a bit more attention to it. The probabilities are, now that we have a weekly uptrend, a did. dip will more likely form a higher low than a lower low. Now, that may not be the case. The market may well roll over and we go to zero. Could happen. But the odds favor that a higher low dip will be bought. So therefore, people are going to step in,

and we're now looking to see on this current correction, when do they step in, right? You can do a Fibonacci retracement, late stepping into the 20%, 30%, 50%, 601, people are going to work out where this thing finally gets arrested on the downside. And if we break up again, now all the folks who are on the sidelines are going to go ah it actually is a bull market i guess i should probably be buying in they'll buy high it will sell off they'll sell the bottom again they'll

do all the dumb stuff that i did when i first got into markets thinking i could outsmart it and they just get chopped up on the way higher right eventually we get to all-time high and they go i guess i should lever up to catch up and they get blown up beauty i love it in terms of the capital that might be coming into one i am going to ask you for like your you're your left curve, your right curve, and you're kind of mid, maybe for end of year, just because it's fun. And I know it's all just probabilities, but I do want to get it out of curiosity. But in terms of, I know previously we talked about this hot ball of money that was just kind

of looking for something, just running around trying to find somewhere to park itself. One, I'm curious what you're seeing with the hot ball of money if you can identify where it currently is. And in terms of capital that you anticipate coming into Bitcoin, do you have any thoughts, thesis on what's going to be driving the prices higher? I don't really know where the hotball of money is, actually. It's a good question. I think if you wind back the clock, you know, a couple of months,

pretty obvious that it was in the AI trade. Before that, it was in gold and silver at the start of the year. And before that, it was in Bitcoin and, you know, various other things. I don't actually know where it is right now because AI has been like coming off the boil and maybe it's floating around just, you know, just NASDAQ. You know, Bitcoin's up, but I don't think because of hotball or money type money, precious metals aren't doing that well. You know, commodities are doing okay.

I'm sure there's a bunch of people trying to trade oil, but like, I don't know. I actually don't know where that hotball of money is. Maybe they're all shorting bonds. Could explain why the yields are going higher. Now, your second question was about, like, where's the incremental demand and stuff come from, right? Yeah. It's a good question.

I mean, I'm just of the view that this is kind of Bitcoin's normalization era. It's not weird to own it now. I hear it just on like your tip. I listen to tons of macro podcasts. It's kind of my usual information diet. And it just like shows up as like a normal thing now. It's not like, oh, wait, let's talk about that weird thing, Bitcoin. It's like, no, now it's actually just like part of the conversation.

So I just think that it's becoming like a normal part of people's portfolio. It's just passive flows. Again, people love to buy stuff that's not going down. And if Bitcoin's one of the few things that's starting to go up and, you know, it's kind of got its own cycle at the moment. I'm trying to get a bit of a read on. I mean, the market is in a weird place right now. And I can honestly play that line on repeat for probably the next five years.

but like, you know, oil's high, bond yields are screaming higher, gold got slapped yesterday, you know, there's just a lot of things happening. Equities are at all time high, and you're looking at the stock and like, the world is just in a weird spot. Like, AI is pulling off the boil, you've got Anthropic coming. I haven't read into it, but I saw a headline. The IPO? They've got an IPO and they've got like some tremendous loss on their balance sheet, and you're like,

I mean, first of all, I'm not surprised in any way, shape or form. do I use Claude? Yeah, it's great. Fantastic. But it's clearly costing them a lot of money to subsidize my usage. Thank you very much. So look, there's a lot of dynamics there and like where does Bitcoin fit in? I would reason.

Like if you really just asked me three months ago, bond yields are blasting through 5%. Oil is going to be back up towards the high. We've got another diesel shortage here in Australia. You've got diesel shooting through the roof in terms of prices. Like should the world be? falling, the dollar's getting strong, should the world be in a real pickle? And it's like, yes. And what's Bitcoin doing? Oh, it's pulled back by, you know, a few percentage points from its

recent rally. Okay. Really? Sure. Like, seems to be holding up pretty well, given how wrong things are in the world. So very tricky to read. Honestly, the macro picture is just challenging. I try to have a decent read on it. I'm never going to be, you know, as good as you James lavishes in the world of the world. Like, they understand this stuff a whole lot better than I do. But also, like, as a macro tourist, it feels like things should be a whole lot worse. Maybe they're about to get a whole lot worse. But as you said before, people are just anchored to this doom porn. I scroll through someone like every so often I go through that, you know, various podcasts I listen to.

And I just like objectively look at what is the doom versus greed headline population. The world is so dead and over and finish when you read these headlines. You're like every episode's telling me to sell everything and just be super cautious. I'm like, people love this stuff. They love doom porn. So it just seems to me like the market's kind of still there. It's still hanging in there. I don't know.

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Everything is just like trucking along. We all anticipated that oil was going to go a lot higher when the street of Hormuz closed, but it didn't. And so that tells me that like any assumptions you had about the street of Hormuz and energy flows were just wrong. Like either China had access to more reserves or they were able to route around it or they could refine it in ways to get different products that they needed. Like, everything, the have, again, I remember when we first, the bond market, at 5% on the 10 year, 5% of the tenure, there's no way, big intervention, it's not going to happen. We're like 525 right now.

And I think Dundberg, you've had on your show a few times, those shows with James are also fantastic. I listen to all of them. They're great. Oh, thank you, sir. Yeah, yeah, no, really, I mean, they're a great combo, but Dundberg's just such a good thinker, and one of the things he's been talking about recently, I think is just so clever. The crude market is the input.

the refined products are the output and what happens if you blow up all the refiners you've got a glut of the input even if you can't get a single ship out of Hormuz you've got all this crude you can't do anything with it. It's toxic sludge and like that's such a fascinating insight that I'm just like I'm anchored to

and I agree I mean a few people conversing and saying like there's a ton more oil coming out of Hormuz than what the official numbers and the ship trackers and all this stuff You know, something like 70% of the oil is actually getting out or the ships are getting out. I mean, I'm going to be the first one in the world to admit, I couldn't tell you a single thing about the logistics of Hormuz. Everyone seems to be an oil analyst.

All I know is oil prices are high. They're not as high as they probably should be. The refined products are high, and that's what really matters. Probably should be causing some cracks somewhere. So should bond yield. So should the dollar. And yet here we are. Just kind of trucking along, as you said.

It's very odd. 2020s. It's very, very weird. And you wonder, like, global instability and political instability and like midterms going up. There almost feels like this, like I almost have a bit of like a doom or fatigue where everything's been so, especially like post-COVID. COVID was like grotesque.

It's like, ah, like we'll be fine. Like anything that comes up, it's like, it's not going to be that bad. It's not going to be necessarily the end of the world. It's a little bit like, I think Luke Groman had this analogy that humans can feel acceleration but not speed. So when you're speeding up, you know, when you're building up momentum, people can feel the rate of change, but once you're at altitude, you don't feel it. And like the 2020s, we accelerated into the weirdness so hard in the early 2020s,

but now that we just kind of sit in there and cruise control, everything's batshit crazy around us, but like it's kind of normal now. So like we're kind of waiting for the next acceleration of the weird, which is no doubt coming, but I don't know, maybe we just get more acclimatize. I mean, humans are very good at adapting. That's one thing. Now, that's not to belittle some of the true challenges that lie ahead, right? And again, Duneberg was talking about, I would apply everything he said about the energy crisis in Europe.

And I'd look at my own backyard and say, we've probably got many of the same problems, if not worse, just with longer shipping times to fix it. So, you know, there's a lot of the same problems. I'm like, I know there's pain to be felt. But you know what I also am pretty confident of? The governments do not have the skin to deal with it. it so they will debase the money to do whatever they have to do. That is their tertiary concern. By the time that the shit really hits the fan, they're not too worried about the purchasing

power of their currency. They just need to get through the next six weeks without their opinion polling falling through the floor. Yes, I completely agree. There is another thing that you kind of reminded me of that actually brings back to a prior conversation we had about a bare market in the mining industry and what we're seeing even in the AI space right now because that was one of the things that kind of struck me and I wanted to get your take on it if you've been looking at,

the AI KAPX and everything that's having there, this idea that I almost feel like they might be about to learn the lessons that Bitcoin miners have known for a long time. Okay, right. Yeah. So just to even quickly lay it. You don't just take it. I know you know exactly where I'm going. Run with it.

Yeah. No, I think the analogy between AI KappX and mining Kappex is very, very similar industries. Now, I will say that I would say my, let's call them AI miners for simplicity. the AI data center set up, the miners of AI compute, their business model is far better than Bitcoin miners. Bitcoin miners is like, I've run studies way back in my day,

my team and I at GlassNode, we spend tons of work trying to just study how the mining economics are. And basically we ran a bunch of models, and we basically come up with 50% of all days, 50% of all miners are going to be out of a job, and then 50% are in a job. The difficulty adjustment is just the most brutal,

ruthless capitalist thing that has ever existed. Miners should be expected to go bankrupt, left right and center, all the time forever, with no exceptions. It's just what I think is going to come out of this whole, like obviously miners are moved into the AI space and so they should, honestly. I think that mining is going to, it's always been best positioned with a dude, with a bunch of money and container ship that they fill with A6 and move around landfills and like, real dung beetle of energy type stuff.

And I think that's actually a good thing. Once these PubCo's got so big, you know, the moment they hired a HR team, the difficult adjustment was like, sorry, too big, we're cutting you off, right? That's the end of your revenue. And they just shut it all down. So my view is that mining will always disperse. It kind of wants to get pushed out to the edges. In a way, the system was kind of designed that way.

You get too big, the system kills it. So it's a fascinating concept. Now, with the AI setup, I mean, it's a. I think the demand for computer is just infinite. You know, I'm using AI more and more and more, as most of us are, super powerful, super useful. What I do think loses the most is the Anthropics and the AIs and the Open AIs. The models, this like thing around the frontier, are you going to pay premium prices for

the frontier model? Just as an example. I know that Anthropi, they've brought out Opus 5.5. Now, 5.5 is great. Opus was already pretty good for most of the stuff that I'm. I'm doing, I'm not doing, you know, deep science and solving millennium problems here. For a lot of the stuff that I'm doing, Opus is just fine. 5.5 is better and it's 40% cheaper. Why? Because they know that if they do not make it 40% cheaper,

I'm going to go and use Kimmy K3 or one of these other models that's cheap as. Now there's trade-off there, obviously, with data and Chinese models and whatever else, but I do think that the economics of the models, it just doesn't favor this like pay per token type thing. Nvidia is going to start rolling out personal boxes where companies can just have their own little data centers that float around their basement. You know, they're building up those kind of, you know, self-hosted compute systems. You don't want to be sharing your data because you might be solving a Millennium Prize and then Open AI solves it for you off the back of your work.

There's a whole lot of these data privacy things. I don't have like, I've got zero edge in the industry. I just find it fascinating to kind of watch. I think there's a lot of parallels with Bitcoin miners. But yeah, I think the demand for compute and energy. and all this stuff. I mean, I do believe it's a forcing function for us to fix a lot of these problems and neglect over the last several decades.

Energy security, just like infrastructure being up to scratch. I think all of these things are going to be promising. Again, I look at my own backyard here in Australia. I'm like, are we going to be building data centers? No, we're 100% going to be reliant on somebody else for that. I hope that changes. I don't think it will, but, you know, I hope that countries start to realize we actually need. petroleum stalls. We actually need

strategic reserves of X, Y, and Z. Maybe we should cut all the red tape. Maybe nuclear power shouldn't be illegal in Australia. Maybe we should line some of the uranium we have. It's illegal to produce power out of uranium out of nuclear heat. My God, it's absolutely ridiculous. No.

One of the probably the biggest fumbles that will not necessarily happen is like, I'm here in Alberta. There's a lot of land in northern Alberta that's not being used. It's cold. Great for cool and stuff. We have a shit ton of natural gas. If you want to set up a nuclear power plant, it's a great remote area to do so. We're not going to capitalize it, unfortunately, just because I think that's the way the

anti-AI and data center kind of sentiment, but it's incredibly unfortunate. And the other thing that I was thinking about there, too, that brings me back to the relationship to mining is that not saying it for sure will, but the idea of taking out loans to buy GPUs, just like taking out loans to buy A6, yeah, and then also collateralizing them. It's like, dude, you're going to burn those things out in like eight months. I think they depreciated them in like three to ten years. But it's like I've seen how fast those things can get chopped up and burnt out there pretty quick, especially if they're not well maintained.

And you're growing so fast. I have a suspicion you might be moving a little bit quick there. I could be wrong, but I feel like it's going to come back and bite them in the ass, just like it did the Bitcoin miners every time we get into a bull run. There's so many lessons that the Bitcoin and the crypto industry. I mean, like, I've been an observer of the crypto industry for many years, as many of us have. And like my favorite thing about it is that I got to watch the playbook,

bug for bug, error for error, mistake for mistake for how the regulations that we have today came to be, right? To literally stop everything that happened in the world of crypto because they just, if there's a law that it doesn't exist, it will get broken. You know what I mean? Like people just want to be greedy. They want to do dumb shit. They want to steal money from other people.

This is why Wall Street looks the way it does. It's why banking is so highly regular. because otherwise it would look just like that industry, which is a total mess. So I think there's a lot of lessons that can be learned. It's about humanity. How we operate in a quote-unquote free market. You know, sometimes you need the guard rails because otherwise it just becomes, it's a bit too ridiculous. I love it.

All right, James, one more important, very important, very fun conversation. Left of the bell curve, middle, right of the bell curve for the end of the year. Where do you see Bit going going? And I'm going to throw in there because I think it'll be a fun experiment that relates to the whole conversation. whatever you give me for the right of the bell curve, I'm going to test that on the thumbnail and we'll see where sentiment is right now if everyone's getting a little more bullish

or if they could actually pull back. Look, I would be very impressed and very happy for us to reclaim 100K by the end of the year. I think that's certainly possible. I don't necessarily think it necessarily has to happen. I generally would expect a bit of chop. I think that, and chop in a big range. If you look at how 2019 traded as an example,

2019 we had a really powerful run to start the year and then it kind of was a miniature bear market. I don't think we'll go into a miniature bear. A lot of this will depend on macro. I mean, honestly, it really depends whether we start just getting the whiff of they have to step in. They have to start fixing things. So look, really hard to tell. I think by just natural forces, if we don't get some kind of macro meltdown, which are probably like a down-then-up type scenario.

Without one of those, I think that we just slow grind up towards 100K. I would hazard a guess we've got what a quarter left in the year I would hazard a guess it probably takes us a quarter to get through 100K that would be my kind of gut instinct you know I try to be fairly measured with this stuff left curve

so that's my mid curve right trying to actually think about it and left curve is look left curve is a down then up I don't know down to 70k and then you know next thing you know we're above 100k that's that's kind of my my V shape recovery

And honestly, it's probably my right brain as well. So the Jedi and the Grug both probably think that we get some kind of like a decent correction. 70. Everyone panics, thinks, oh, no, bare market. Look, Q4, low incoming. See, told you so. And then blast them all out. Beauty. So you're putting 100K on the right curve there? Is that the thumbnail title I'm going with? Yeah, look, I don't, I don't want to send us, you know, I don't want to claim that we're going to go to all-time high. I think it's possible, but I'd put a lower probability on it. 100K, I believe, is an achievable target. And also saying that, once we get about 100K, it's now like rock and roll, right?

There's going to be no bears left. So by that point in time, you want to be on the train, would be my base case. I love it. I will say just from my personal viewpoint, it's purely just, it's just vibes. I got nothing else to go off of. I'm not measuring the on-chain data. I'm not looking at the charts. I just have a sneaking suspicion just with all the craziness in the world that for some reason

where we're above 100K at the end of the year and make it away back towards that all-time high. I don't know why, but I feel like that would be the thing that nobody believes, that they just, they won't believe it. And so that's what's going to end up happening. No, I believe that that is the case. This belief rally is absolutely alive and well. The amount of people who do not believe or really want it to go lower and just think about why that is. they wanted to go lower because they sold somewhere in the mix, and they're probably now looking at going,

I sold the bottom, didn't I? Or they didn't buy as much as they wanted to, and they want that dip to get back on board. This is why my base case is dips will most likely be bought. That doesn't mean that we necessarily don't roll over and go to zero, but I do believe that the most probable outcome is that dips will end up being bought. From whatever the catalyst or the reason or the logic, I think dips end up getting bought. I'm quite encouraged by the fact that gold got smoked. Bitcoin's hanging in there. Yields are rocketing. Bitcoin's hanging in there.

Oil's up. Bitcoin's hanging in there. It's kind of surprising because you would think that it should be lower, but I'm just looking at all these evidence data points and saying, what just came? Seller exhaustion in a bear market. We've got all the pieces of the puzzle. We'll start rallying.

Maybe people don't want to sell here. People want people to sell, but that's because they want to buy. So what happens if they're going to chase it a little bit harder? It's rock and roll. I love it. I absolutely love it. James, the only thing I'm more confident about than all-time high at the end of the year, be all-time high in your newsletter before the end of the year. So I get the emails.

They're delightful. Where can people go to sign up for you and all your work? Yes, you'll find us over at checkunchan.com. So you get the newsletter in our charting sweep. So, yeah, check it out. And ping me if you have any questions. If you enjoyed this episode with James Check, and I know that you did hit that like button and don't forget to subscribe.

And check out the previous episode with Professor Dave Collin. Thank you.