BTC Sessions - ‘Sellers Exhausted’ What Bitcoin On-Chain Data Reveals | James Check

Episode Date: April 14, 2026

Mentor Sessions Ep. 063: “Sellers Exhausted” – Bitcoin On-Chain Proof The Bottom Is Forming, and James Check’s Bold Shot at 100K | James CheckThe charts are sending a signal — but is anyone reading them correctly?James Check (Checkmatey), one of Bitcoin's most respected on-chain analysts, sits down with BTC Sessions to cut through the noise on where Bitcoin actually stands right now. From sentiment extremes and on-chain bottom indicators to the silver market FOMO spilling into crypto, macro headwinds, and the long-term future of Bitcoin mining under quantum computing pressure — this is the data-driven Bitcoin conversation you have been waiting for. After watching, you will know exactly which on-chain metrics to watch, why macro conditions are shaping this cycle differently, and what serious Bitcoiners are doing with this information right now.⏱️ Timestamps:0:00 - Intro & Teaser: Seller Exhaustion in Bitcoin0:54 - James Check Joins the Show1:18 - The Silver FOMO Story: James Check’s Real-World Sentiment Experiment6:24 - Current Bitcoin Sentiment: Geopolitical Chaos vs Seller Exhaustion9:13 - James Check’s Thesis: Why 2025 Was Actually a Bear Market11:16 - 60K Capitulation: Bottom 10% of All Days & “Deep Value”16:55 - Key On-Chain Metrics: Realized Price, True Market Mean & Cycle Position20:06 - On-Chain Volume Collapse & Long-Term Holder Behavior24:02 - Sponsor: BTC Mentor (Personalized Bitcoin Guidance)25:26 - ETFs, Institutions & Retail Demand – What the Data Actually Shows28:40 - Time Pain Ahead? Relief Rally or More Chop?33:58 - Bitcoin Miner Capitulation, AI Pivot & Power Strategy42:33 - Corporate Bitcoin Treasury Strategy – Is the Play Over?44:44 - Quantum Computing Threat to Bitcoin: James Check’s Balanced View57:08 - Final Prediction: Bottom Before Year-End + Shot at 100K?58:01 - Outro & Where to Find James Check 🔗 Links & Resources:James Check: https://x.com/_Checkmatey_https://www.checkonchain.com/Bitcoin Survival Workshop: https://btcmentor.io/bitcoin-survival-workshop-2026/📌 Previous Episode: Simon Dixon & Larry Lepard → https://youtu.be/YbdduZNB0so⚡ POWERED by Abundant Mines: Fully managed Bitcoin mining. Learn more at https://qrco.de/bgYKPB🔒 Lockdown your Bitcoin with the BEST gear on the market from Coinkite. Get the 5% Off the COLDCARD visit: https://qrco.de/bfiDBV💡BOOK Private Sessions with Nathan, Gary, or Ben at Bitcoin Mentor: Master self-custody, hardware, multisig, Lightning, privacy, and more. 👉 Visit btcmentor.io Follow Us on X:• BTC Sessions: @BTCsessions• Nathan: @theBTCmentor• Gary: @GaryLeeNYC#Bitcoin #BTC #BTCSessions #JamesCheck #OnChainAnalysis #BitcoinMarket #BitcoinMining #QuantumComputing#BitcoinCycle #MacroEconomics #BitcoinAnalysis #Glassnode #BitcoinEducation #CryptoAnalysis #bitcoinprice #bitcoinpodcast

2025, it was a bare market for Bitcoin, right? Not in terms of the fact that we were down like 6 and 8%, but it was down a lot more in everything else. 60K were in the bottom 10% of all days. Bottom 10%. There's a 90% chance we're going higher eventually. On-chain volume is falling off a cliff, and that is very normal.

Bitcoin just from a seller exhaustion perspective, we're damn close. We should be bottoming before the end of the year. Meet James Check, by far one of the most respected on-chain analysts in Bitcoin. In this episode, we discussed where we are in this bear market. There's a decent chance that we take shot at 100, Okay. Just how he nailed the exact top of the crazy silver fomo.

Gold, silver ratio got to a point where, like, in my lifetime, it's never been lower. And minor capitulation. Mining is an industry that is designed to send miners bankrupt. Plus, he shares his thoughts on the quantum threat to Bitcoin. Doing nothing is the wrong thing, but doing everything is the wrong thing. I'm Nathan with the BTC mentor. Let's get into it. Beautiful James, my favorite Australian analyst. Thank you so much for joining me again today. Very excited to have this conversation. To kind of kick things off, though.

I want to go back a little bit because I have. found myself reflecting on you and the silver market of all things that just a couple months back, it seems here, you absolutely like nailed the top or like we're right at it in terms of getting a really good read on investor, retail investor particular sentiment. And so I kind of want to start the conversation there. One, for someone who might not be familiar, give us that tale again quick of what happened during the silver fomo there. And then additionally, what is your sense of retail investors right now? What is sentiment at? Where are they paying attention to? What's going on? Yeah. And so the the high level story.

I'm not talking about a serious amount here. It's a couple of silver bars. But I do have a, you know, basically I bought silver and platinum physical. Because first of all, people ask me like, why did you buy a physical if you plan to sell? It's like,

because I kind of expected to wait Peter Schiff's years. You know, I was going to grow silver hair waiting for this thing to go up. It went up in like 18, 12 months. So I kind of made the money that I wanted to make. My cost basis in Ozzie dollars like 50, 52 bucks. anyway, the parabola, right?

I was just looking at this thing just going through the moon. And I talk about this all the time in my own world. And I actually have been thinking about this event myself. Why did I sell the silver? And it was because I wanted to test my own read of sentiment. It was actually like I want to put my money where my mouth is and actually sell something that I bought specifically to sell. The gold silver ratio got to a point where like in my lifetime, it's never been lower. And if it has been lower, it's been lower for like three days.

I'm like, okay, it's like 45. I'm like, probably not a good time to be in silver relative to gold. When I went to the dealer, it was the day after Australia Day. So Australia Day, everything's closed, obviously. It was a Monday. The silver market went ballistic under the Friday, and I was like, I made the decision over the weekend to sell. And then I got a message from an I made who's quite versed in markets.

And he goes, by the way, uranium was kicking ass at this time as well. And he goes, my uranium insider's channel is just, Silver Bugs Central and I was like, okay. I was going to sell one or two bars and I'll grab another one because it just tells me that there's just too much froth. Anyway, the long story is I went to the bullying deal. There's been stories of lines out the door and they were certainly there. I was first one in line.

I was there at 8.30 with my coffee. They opened nine. I was kind of surprised. I was expecting there to be a line before me. But anyway, built up very soon after I got there. People in the line are chattering about the coins they bought last week. I'm already up five grand here. I'm up six grand here.

And oh, I've been trying to tell my friends to get in the silver forever. I'm like, oh, God, these, you know what this sounds like? This sounds like Bitcoin is raving about a bull market. I'm like this sounds like topping stuff. And again, it was a social experiment for me. And when I was in there to sell the people who were selling next to me. So sorry, I was a seller. There was another bloke of selling the people who were buying.

Some of them didn't know what a Troy ounce was. There was another lady who was looking like, no, they're not shiny enough. Can I have new ones? And the guy's going, we have no new coins. Like we're sold out. And they're like, no, but I want, and she points to my coins. She goes, but he's buying him. I said, no, man, I'm selling.

And they can't sell off. They have to hold for like a two-week period because of porn-broken licenses and in case they're stolen and all that shit. From the Bitcoin side of the equation, by the way, me selling all of that, a couple bars and some coins took like half an hour because they've got to like assay every single one, put it through the machine, ding them against each other. I'm like, God, I could also just run a Bitcoin node, right, and verify this stuff. But anyway, the only other dude who was in there selling,

comes in, puts down a big, how can I help you, sir? And he's like, I'm selling my man, puts down a big bag, and you need to hear it, hit the table, thump, and he's just silver bars. This dude's been stacking for a long time.

So I'm looking at this whole thing, and by the way, the premium that the lady next to me was buying her silver coins out was 50 bucks above the spot. So I was selling like 247, Ozzie. She was paying 200, some of them are 220.

Like, she was paying the amount that I paid for mine above the spot. And I'm like, I just, it's just the whole thing. Anyway, I bring it back to a lot of the work I do. I mean,

the world of on-chain data, in my opinion, is just a perfect, immutable record of people doing good and bad things, good and bad decisions, buying tops, selling bottoms, buying bottom,

selling tops. And I wish I had on-chain data for this because I saw it, I saw the short-term holders buying my long-term holder bags. I saw all, all the things that I study and analyze for Bitcoin, but I can't visualize it as well. I can tell the story, obviously, but it was one of those things where, like, I know this data exists. Gold has this,

invidia has this, the stock market has this, all these metrics in this data. It exists. We just can't see it. The NASDAQ can see it. New York Stock Exchange can see it, but it's not public information. Wall Street tries to see it with expensive data and all that stuff, but to me, it was a great read-on sentiment. It just told me like this. looks frothy as anything. I put my money where my mouth was, basically sold the top. And honestly, again, we're not talking about material money here, but it was enough for it to be like, okay, I'm testing my own read. How good can I actually read the signals on the ground without a data footprint to back an opportunity? Beautiful. So taking that sentiment spidey sense,

what are we feeling right now in Bitcoin, in the broader markets in general? So the last month, I was going to talk about the last month, which is basically, much, right, coming to early April, but it's been war. It's been quantum computing. It's been end of the world. It's been like straight of Hormuz. It's been energy shortages. It's been no fertilizer.

It's been like end of world stuff. So the headlines have been real bad. Corn's up. Like up. So a lot of assets didn't perform the way people expected. Precious metal sold off. A lot of people like, but why are there a geopolitical hedge? I'm like, I know why.

It might be. It might be that gold and silver hit a monthly RSI of 97, where the only time that's ever happened ever is the 1979 top. And it took 20 years, 20 years to work that one off. So, you know, like it might have just been sold because it went up a lot. And there's another element, which is like, there's probably some countries out there who just need to buy oil and they have gold savings. Maybe they sold some. So, you know, gold just went up a lot. Of course it has to come down.

Like if we have one, two, five years of gold going not up, chop consolidation sideways, like that should surprise absolutely nobody because that's like par for the course. So oil, 100 bucks, right, 100 something. This is a much bigger oil shock than certainly Russia, Ukraine. Why isn't the oil price of 200 bucks? I don't have a good answer for that. All I know is that the market didn't go.

If you're not going to get above, Duneberg talks about this, if you're not going to get above one, 50 on Strait of Hormuz being closed, when will you? And why? The US dollar. You would expect the US dollar to go just like vertical because like, why would join any other currency?

And truthfully, the Aussie dollar, like the Aussies are pretty exposed. Not that that's in the DXY, but the Japanese, the Japanese are highly exposed to the Australia and Europe, highly exposed to the gas. UK, highly exposed to literally everything because they've done nothing to secure their economy. Like kind of the dollar went up. Not a lot, but some, simply because every other currency was just way worse. So it's very much like the least dirty shirt in the hamper.

But like it didn't kick ass. Like it wasn't a full risk off. Equities down eight, nine percent. Okay. Where's the 20 percent? So I don't think anything, Bitcoin up. Why did no assets perform the way people expected? Why did gold go down?

Because it had gone up a lot. Why did Bitcoin not go down? maybe because we've kind of knocked out a lot of the sellers. I've got this working thesis, which I'm writing about at the moment, where 2025 it was a bear market for Bitcoin, right? Not in terms of the fact that we were down like 6 and 8%, but it was down a lot more in everything else. What was Bitcoin in Video down significantly?

What was Bitcoin gold down significantly? The bare market in Bitcoin in real terms, in I should have bought something else terms, was well and truly in effect through 25. So all that parabola envy combined with the sideways chop in the price, generally speaking in a bare market, we have a euphoric peak. Then we have a period of going from it's a ball market to, oh shit, it's a bear market. And that journey is a process and price generally comes down. Then it's got to chop around for ages, chop consolidation at the end, time pain.

So I've got this thesis that I think we might have served a lot of time. pain up front. We built up all this pent up frustration, this like, I hate this ass. It was, I mean, let's face it, at the end of 25, Bitcoin was not a popular trade. There was a lot of other stuff that was way more popular. So once you got to November, we got to 80K, a lot of people puked out their coins. And also all the people who were taking profit, I've talked about this before. There's tons of profit taking through the back half of 25. That stopped, like just completely off a cliff. That November still off at 80K, long term holders go, all right, we're done. And it only continues to go down from there. I actually wrote about it

today. It's like the most remarkable chart because I was looking at it in 25 being like, guys, this is remarkable how much selling there is in the market's not down. And now that we're down, I'm like, it's remarkable how little they are selling. What does that tell you? And then that moved to 60K was, in my opinion, what I call the price capitulation, the equivalent to June 2022, kind of the equivalent to the December 2018, that 50% sell-off. This was the event where like, if you are price sensitive, you're gone, you're done, it's over. Tourists are out, speculators are out, fast money's out.

They puked hard. My phone lit up like a Christmas tree, my DM. I literally that day, I logged into Twitter. I checked my DMs. I had the full page of requests for podcast. I closed the app immediately. I was like, I do not. I'm sorry.

I got too much shit to do today. I cannot look at that. I closed it. I came back to it over the coming week. My DMs, everything, emails. And I was like, fear. This is, this is fear. People are terrified at 60K. And I released a piece at 60K. That was called Welcome to Deep Value. And my thesis was, when I had already built the thesis up to that point, at 60K, and the numbers really haven't changed much since then, at 60K, if you look at every mean reversion model, markets are mean reverting, which means the price oscillates around things. cost basis levels, technical moving averages, whatever it is, power laws.

If you take a basket of those and you put them all together or you look at them individually, 60K were in the bottom 10% of all days, bottom 10%. So every previous bear market has bottomed at what I call Q5, the fifth quantile. So 5% of all days are further? Where are those 5% of days, by the way, when Bitcoin was $2 in 2011? That's like, that's the time when it was stretched further than a Q5. So 55K is a Q5, 60K is a Q10. I'm like, look, guys, I don't write for traders. I write for Hodleys.

We're in the bottom 10% of this market cycle. Bottom 10%. Do I really care if it goes from 60 to 58? I couldn't care less. If it goes to 55, do I care? Because I'm in the bod, like there's a 90% chance we're going higher eventually. So I think there's a very good case that 60K is the bottom. I would actually love to see an undercut of it because that generates extra

a fear and I still believe we've got some time pain to pay. We've still got a bunch of milestones. So I don't necessarily think we've finished this bear market process. But I also think the folks who are looking at this bear market and saying it's got to be the 70% down and it's going to go to 40K. 40K is a $2 Bitcoin. Like in terms of equivalent value, it's a $2 Bitcoin. It's actually lower than that. 45 is a $2 billion Bitcoin. I don't even know what 40 is. It's lower than that. It's a Q0.5 or something. So it's like, I don't even know where that is on the chart. It's very small. So my big picture view is we've seen the price paying capitulation. All the price sensitive people are gone. Bitcoin is not a heavily owned asset. It kind of looks like

the bottom of a bear to me. Like honestly, it just looks like the bottom of a bear to me. I would love to see us go a little bit lower because that will just get the bears so excited. And this is a great irony of markets. You kind of need the price to go down to get the bears just go, ah, and sorry, the bulls just throw everything in. It's over. I'm done. I'm finished. I hate this thing.

It's going down. Zero. The bears were right. And then the bears go, yeah, the bears were right. And they go max short. And then what happens is there's no sellers left. And the shorts have just painted a giant target on their back. The smart money goes, thank you very much.

And then it's over. And then no one believes it for the next six months. Everyone's got this ghost of a lower, the all time high. So I suspect that we're not too far away from that journey. Beautiful. I want to jump back for just one second because this idea of a bear market in 2025 is really interesting to me. And I'm curious if you have like a rough timeline of where that like bear market measured

in other things began because even conversations I was having during 2020, and looking back on it, it never felt like a bull run. I never felt like there were new entrants coming to the market. I never really felt like we got any sense of euphoria. It felt very weird. Yes. So when I model it out, the whole bull market, the January 2025 top. So just after the election, that was when Bitcoin stopped.

outperforming and it started equally performing. Everything else was kind of grinding along. So if you, if you do relative Bitcoin gold, Bitcoin S&P, Bitcoin, whatever, up until January, it was Bitcoin season. From January through to October, it was just long the market. Everything's kind of getting tariff tantrum and up and chop consolidation period. And in October, it was, everything is ripping and Bitcoin is actually going down. So we started accelerating, splitting those two apart. So really you could almost say I would say the tariff tantrum right somewhere in like Q1 25

is probably where things really started to break down but yeah I think in a relative value perspective a lot of people have parabola envy and we saw by the way tons of people and this is why in the on chain world we use long term short term holders and the threshold is five months

folks love to throw eggs and stuff and say that that's not long term holder enough it's like the statistics don't care about your opinions but the fact is if you've held something for five months. If you held Bitcoin for five months, you didn't hold gold. What did gold do in five months? It doubled.

What did InVitya do? It went up a lot. I don't know what the stats are, but that five months is enough for you to be like, oh, there's like a decision when you spend it and sell it and give it up. There's a ton of those guys who sold, momentum traders. They're telling you, like, they didn't buy it yesterday and sell tomorrow. That doesn't matter. But if they buy five months ago and they're finally going, no, I'm done.

This sucks. That's great. that's there is enough opportunity costs baked into that time. That is why the time factor is so important. There's enough in there to be like, okay, there's a signal there. Someone is now selling that did own it for long enough to have felt the price. Yeah, that makes sense. I'm curious then, if we take a look at the on-chain metrics right now,

where are we in terms of, what is it, average realized price? Do you think we're going to end up testing the 200-week moving average? And I'm curious in the on-chain data, because at least I look at the fees for just because I'm always, I'm just pulling up Memple just to see what the fees are. They're dead low. They're like stupid cheap all the time. Is activity in the market just basically, activity on chain that you're seeing dead, quiet, volumes down?

So there's two points there. The first one on the price levels. Yes. So the model that I think is misunderstood or not widely understood, it's called the true market means. I mean, that Dave Puell and I invented for coin time economics, so I go into the full nitty-gritty details. But the realized price is fixed. 54K today.

True market mean in November was 80K, it was the current bottom. It's currently at 78. And then the 200 week is 959-5. Anyway, so in terms of where we're currently trading, we're at 72 right now. So we're in between the true market mean and the realized price, or the 200 week. At the bottom, we've got the 200 week and the realized price. The realized price is the all-time cost basis for every coin in the supply. Now, there's a bit of a problem with that, and this is what the true market means solves.

The problem with the realized price, in the actual calculation of it, you've got the realized cap, which is the total, it's the on-chain market cap. Rather than valuing every coin at the current spot price, you value every coin at the price when it last moved. When did Satoshi's coins last move at a price of zero? So they've contributed nothing to the numerator, zero dollars. But then we divide it by the circulating supply to get the average cost basis per Bitcoin. So they're diluting the denominator, but they're not adding to the numerator.

numerator. Same for lost coins. Same for like coins that were bought it 100 bucks. They contributed nothing to the top, but they're diluting fully in the bottom. So what we did in coin time economics, we actually, from first principles, we developed a model that was trying to discount old coins. Think about every coin in the supplies having a health bar. There's two components to that health bar. Coin days created and coin days destroyed. Of every coin that's existed, when it's spent, it is demonstrating to the network that it's alive, that isn't lost. You could literally buy a coin tomorrow, lose a private key, and everyone would assume it's a normal short-term holder, long-term holder coin. But in 15 years time, the odds of it being lost goes up and up and up and up and up. So that health bar is how

much of its life is destroyed versus still held in the system. And you do that system-wide. So we use that as to basically back out and say, well, let's get rid of long-lost coins. was there 100% coin deads created. Satoshi has never destroyed a coin day, except for he's transaction with power. But if you put all those things together, can we actually get like an active investor cost basis? And that's where the 78K, 80K level comes in.

That is, statistically speaking, the middle of the Bitcoin cycle. That is like if you model how Bitcoin oscillates around it, it's dead center. So that makes a particularly interesting model because we developed them from first principles. It corrects what the realized price should, in theory we should drift away from it over time,

and then the statistics are it's in the middle. So from that perspective, we're below the middle, we're in the bottom half, minimum of the cycle. And then from a mean reversion perspective, when you start looking at how it oscillates around a whole bunch of different things, we're in that bottom below 70K, the bottom 20%, the bottom fifth, below 60K, we're in the bottom 10th.

All of this stuff just puts us in a really, really favorable position. Now, on your second question on on-chain activity, There's a couple of elements here. On-chain volume is falling off a cliff, and that is very normal. If you go back and look at 2022, July, we also saw this, July, August, September, volume was falling off a cliff. What was also falling off a cliff was long-term holder selling, which I mentioned earlier. That metric is just falling off a cliff, and that is where most volume comes from. If you think about you as a DCA hodler, if you're a trader, you create two-way volume,

buy-sell, buy-sell, by-sell. If you're a DCA hodler in deep accumulation mode, you're in buy. Buy, it's one directional. There's less. By definition, there's going to be half as much volume. And combined with that, you've got less people selling, right? More people sitting on their hands. So the default position has gone from, I'm a seller, right?

I'm selling my silver. I can't wait to buy my silver. That's a bull market. In a bare market, you've got, I'm going to sit on my silver. No transaction. And the other one is, I'm going to buy only. I'm not going to sell any of it. So you actually reduce your amount of volume significantly in late stage bears.

On fees, that's an even more complicated topic because the fee model actually peaked in October 25, October November, which is kind of aligning with that January period I said before around the election. Fees always go down during bear markets, actually quite a good signal. However, over time, they're becoming increasingly difficult to analyze. And the reason why for, I mean, when inscriptive, and ordinals and all that shit went live, we kind of couldn't use transaction counts and active addresses anymore because they're just two different systems, the way that they work in blocks and miners and all the rest of it, fees and volume with the last two on-chain

activity metrics that held kind of a network effect signal. I now actually think fees are kind of dropping off them out because miners have also started mining sub one-sat transaction costs. So that completely changes. You're in a whole new regime now. So the fee market has changed forever, post, I think of December 25. So you've got the bare market where it's always low. And then they've also changed the mechanics. Like, I know folks are saying like, you know, you can go on mine inscriptions and whatever.

That's what people were, that's what the miners are going after. It's like, yeah, sure, but I now send my monetary transactions at sub one sat. So they kind of shot themselves on the foot. So fees is its own beast. So that's kind of dropped off the map as a useful tool. And now it's volume. Volume's kind of the main one. But I ran a study the other day looking at spot.

spot trade volumes and not on chain. On chain volumes off a cliff, but that's because people will stop selling. If you go and look at just trade volumes, spot futures and options, ETFs, all very healthy, actually, very healthy, not collapsing like you see in every other bare market. So volume is really important because if coins and shares aren't changing hands, you don't build a bottom. You actually need the ownership structure of Bitcoin in a bare market it's a change. Otherwise, you've got the same clowns who bought the top, also trying to buy the bottom. And that rotation of capital is super important. Last thing I'll add here, you mentioned that we didn't have like a euphoric bull. I don't necessarily think, I don't believe that because we didn't

have a euphoric bill, we can't have a disastrous bear. But what I do believe is that we didn't have a euphoric bull, which means we didn't suck in Mr. I'm talking about silver behind me and how much money I'm making. Those people who don't know what a three ounce is aren't in Bitcoin at the top, which means they're not in Bitcoin to the bear either. So you have fewer unsophisticated speculators to amplify the downside. So the reason why there's a fundamental case for a no blow off top, no euphoria, probably not going to have as much of a disastrous bear is most of the people who bought the top are you and I. What are we doing? I'm not selling. I get coins that are under what. I don't care. You just don't care, right? So there's a bunch more of us in the market. And I think

we're going to reef that saturation, that southern exhaustion point, much faster than we have in previous cycles. 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, and 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 of confidence, then head to btcmentor.io and book a call with us today. Beautiful. I love the sound of that. Quick question. and I'm not sure if you actually have this information as well, too. You said that the volume for ETFs and derivatives is still quite good.

And even recently we had, I think it was Morgan Stanley launched their own ETF product as well, which is another interesting add to the pile. Do you have any read on who those buyers are? Is there any way of discerning, is it, are they, like, is it large institutions, or do we know if there's any information regarding retail buying the ETS? Does that kind of make sense? Yeah, it does. Much harder to ascertain.

So this is a story of all market data, by the way. if you think about it from the on-chain perspective, in order to make an on-chain data print, you need to be a holder or a spender. Both of those are existing holders. It's a sell side metric. It's a story of people who are holding and selling. The buy side, who do they sell to?

Finance knows that. Coinbase knows that. Very hard for us to know that. There's no share registry. And people like to look at like, oh, whale data. Stop. Wallet data is nonsense. And the reason why wallet data is in terms of sizes is nonsense for small entities like shrimp,

people with less than one Bitcoin, you and I, there's only so many ways you can DCA. I buy every month. I accumulate every couple of weeks and then I withdraw every so often. I buy and withdraw to lightning. Like there's only so many ways you can do that. And we as like shrimp is the correct name. We behave as a big amorphous blob. And you can kind of just like look at.

at the big center target and go, what's the average doing? That's probably right. Once you go into the world of whales, is it a whale or is an exchange? Because the whale might also have lots of 10 Bitcoin wallets. You know, they probably don't have all their coins in a 10,000 Bitcoin wallet that they reuse over and over again. Like they're not that dumb. It's probably in exchange. And if you don't know if it's an exchange or a whale, you don't really know. So, and if it's an exchange and it's getting inflows, that's sell side. But if it's a whale, that's by side. So which one is it? It's like literally 180 degrees wrong, so you just don't know. So the actual buyer profile, much harder to ascertain.

You can look at things like the 13F filings in the ETFs. I haven't done this for some time, but last time I checked it was like 25% institutions. And of those institutions, the vast, vast majority had 0.000% like nothing. So there's a lot of retail in there. I know I've got some of the ETFs in my retirement account. That's retail. There's going to be a ton of retail interest in there. I don't think we've hit like the

the institutions are coming is a process that will take decades. They have started showing up, but we're not, they haven't come completely, and that's the end of it. You know what I mean? Like they are in the process

as Morgan Stanley is showing, right, putting their own name on this thing, launching two years after the other ETFs, they know, they've done the math, they know that this is a product that their customers want

and they're shipping it accordingly. Beautiful. I'm curious because you mentioned time pain as well too. So I agree. Again, I have nothing to base this off of just the pure instinct tells me. It's like, we're going to hang out here for a little bit, probably going to be a boring summer. We got a little bit further to go. In terms of the time pain before, perhaps if we can actually form that bottom and make our way back up,

is it just macro driven at this point in time? Like, are we really just kind of in this holding pattern into there's some sort of broader catalyst for us to start to move back up? Or is it just a matter of chewing through that supply? Like, even if we just no major kickoff. we just hang out here for a bit, we'll exhaust the sellers and we'll keep moving. Yeah, there's a few elements to it. So the first one is time pain is very frustrating.

So as price goes up, and I'm just going to construct a case here, we're at 72 right now. If we get to 80K, there's a ton of people, tons, who bought that bare flag in November, December, January, right before we went to 60K. And they're waiting to get their money back. They're going to, the higher the price goes, the more sellers we're going to create. So it would not surprise me in the least for us to get a nice relief rally. And everyone goes, whoa, the bull's back. A bunch of sell side comes in. Price goes up, generates supply price cascades.

Trump tweets, market goes down again, right? There's a thousand one reasons why that would happen. I ran a study, it's not a perfect model, but what else can you do? I ran a study looking at not like, I tried to look at different market mechanics. from the time we broke below the 50-week moving average, and by the way, hindsight's 20-20 here. We can look at 2015, 2018. I use 2019 as well, because I think it's also equivalent as a miniature bear, and 22. There are four bear market samples and our current one, because we're currently hammering out a bear market.

And I looked at from the time between the 50-week moving average and the bottom week. So I fixed, we know when these bears were over. And this wasn't the time-paying capitulation. the FTX. This was in 2015. We had the first sell-off and then 2015 was 12 months of sideways and then we had a final sell-off. So I anchor those final cells. COVID was 2019, February was 2018, final event. And then I go back and say, well, when did we break the 50 week? When do we fail a retest of the 200-day moving average? When do we top? When did we X, Y, and Z. Market mechanics, I did eight of these. And I tried to look at how long since the thing happened

did we hit the final bottom? And then when did the thing happen this cycle? Where would that project us to be? Now, there's a chorus of people out there who might be right, who want the four-year cycle to occur 365 days after the top, right? So the 6th of October, 2026 will be the bottom. They're standing there ready with their big bags of cash that they're going to buy on that scary week because that's just how markets go.

They'll gift you money. So the only model that says October, was the one that said it topped in October, therefore it must bottom in October. Now, whilst I waited everything equally, personally, I wait that one the lowest because, okay, the calendar defines the Bitcoin price. Fair enough. Then, you know, why aren't we all billionaires, right? You should have bought in October 2015 then.

So it's one of those things where, from the market mechanic perspective, most of them suggest mid-year for that capitulation event. And then I also just look at the world around us and go, like, what needs to happen? to get Bitcoin to get, like, the world is in a real pickle, and yet we didn't go down lower. There's no shortage of headlines or Trump tweets that should have sent the market's tailspinning. Now, that doesn't mean it can't happen. But I'm also just being very aware that we've taken a lot of bearish headlines.

Bitcoin's going to get broken by quantum computers, by the way. Have you heard this story? And Epstein created it? So, like, there's just a thousand and one, like, please, please, send us. lower bears you have this is your chance so look you know getting to 80k i can see as getting slammed back down i kind of want to see that extra flush out just to get everybody on the wrong side of the boat markets tend to do that but um overall i'm very constructive i think i think the formation of what would be a typical bottom in every previous bear well and truly under effect i think we are

watching it getting constructed i think a lot of people don't believe it um again can we go low of course I can't predict the future, but the odds, the probability of us going down to 40s. It's, it can happen, yes, but it's a Q1 event. It's a Q2 event. It's a $2 Bitcoin event. It's just not my base case. No, that makes sense. Even in my own rough mental model, I can very easily see that we have some sort of

escalation with the conflict in Iran in the coming weeks here, but that ultimately leads to the end of it. So we get this almost like, whick down because we saw some sort of event kick off. But that was the end of it. and now markets are back up and racing on the excitement that it's done. Like that mid-year summerfall, that totally makes sense to me. I'm curious to see how it plays out. You did mention quantum, and I do want to go there in a bit,

but I actually want to touch on something else that, again, I don't know if you have any information up. I find it very interesting. And for some reason, my instincts tell me that, like, maybe this, I don't think this is going to end up being a good move, but maybe I'm wrong. There's been a ton of what seems like minor capitulation over the last year. We had, I think, Bit Deer sold off their treasury.

I think Mara and Iron and Core Scientific and Terrible, Arrowwolf and I think there's some more, are all pivoting to AI, which, again, I have nothing to base this off with it. Like, that feels bubbly to me in the sense that you guys are all going in the same direction and maybe it's a smart play. I have no idea. I'm curious your thoughts currently on Bitcoin mining and the pivot to AI. Yeah, so I think first things first, is it 2022 or 2026?

Because I'm pretty sure all those companies also got wrecked in 2020. Oh, actually, it might be 2018. I can't remember which one was. All I know is that minor capitulation is. bread and butter, normal Bitcoin cycle. Welcome to a, if you haven't been through a Bitcoin bear before and this minor capitulation is coming as a surprise to you, this has happened since Bitcoin was $2. It has always, miners capitulate every single cycle.

It always happens. In terms of the pivot to, so first things first, mining is an industry that is designed to send miners bankrupt. The difficulty adjustment, I've actually run this study where to my best estimate, I've got a model where I do like a, it's a difficulty in market cap, regression. My reasoning is that difficulty is the price to mine. And that price to mine doesn't care whether you use a hydro dam or natural gas or if you're in America, if you're in China, if you're in Nigeria, it doesn't matter. Everyone has to mine on the same difficulty. So it is the all in sustaining

price to mine Bitcoin. So if you do a regression between that and the market cap, gives you basically a cost of production. What's the average cost to produce? 82K. True market mean 80K. The average miner, where the average actor investor is. Where's the average ETF investor? 82K. 82K. 82K to the middle. So we're trading below 82K.

Miners have already spent the CAPEX. They've already got a failing business model because mining is brutal. Every time more competition comes online, the difficulty gets higher. The expected result is that miners go bankrupt. Now, the pivot to AI is a function of that because they have to innovate. They have to find other ways to have revenue because all their business is going to get smoked. So they're not really pivoting. They buy power and they consume it.

That's their business model. They turn electricity into something. Now, that compute could be for AI. It could be for Bitcoin miners. You can't pivot a Bitcoin mining ASIC to run opus. It doesn't work that way. They're too, like you have to, all new racks, all new rigs, all new everything. what do miners have that other people don't have?

Power agreements, racking, electrical infrastructure, a bunch of engineers on hand to plug these things in. They are a business designed to consume electricity via compute and sell it. So I would not say the word is pivoting. I would say the word is expanding. They're literally looking at multiple sources of revenue to remain profitable across the market cycle because they don't control their input price, right?

nor do they out control the output price of the asset they mine. It's a brutal business. So minor capitulation is very normal, very expected, minor turnover is the expected result. What a lot of folks don't appreciate is that when a miner goes bankrupt, they sell their rigs to someone, and that someone comes in and buys those rigs. If you bought the latest generation Bitcoin miner at $10, your capex is so low, you could run it here in Australia and you'd make money. If you buy it at full retail price, there's no chance. So mining is always profitable for someone.

It just may not be the person currently with the reeds. I'm curious because I've had it in my mind that I think that mining, like a public minor, like a public company devoted to just Bitcoin mining will be a thing of the past. And I'm wondering if we're approaching that kind of moment right now as well too, that it seems to me the long-term viable strategy for mining is it's a cost reduction for energy providers, right? It's a way for them to recoup some of their costs. They're not doing it at a profit, but they had the excess. They had the stranded.

they had stuff that they couldn't, that they were getting set up in the meantime. It's that buyer of last resort for things that they already had on hand, just to reduce costs. Totally. And there's a whole case to be made that for demand response and load balancing, if you're, and if you bring in the engineering side of things,

if you're building a nuclear power plant, for example, it's hard to spin nuclear up and down. It's hard to spin coal up and down. It can be done, but it's like base load power, generally speaking, this is why they have pika plants and things with natural gas because natural gas is easier to wind up and down much harder to do that with your big baseload things so and also if you get a weather event or population growth you don't design your power plant for like okay what was the

highest energy demand of the last five years let's build it for that no you need excess capacity to facilitate growth and flexibility what happens if you design a power plant at 130% of your design capacity. You've got that extra spare space. Run it at 125. And the miners say, hey, we'll come in and buy all the excess. So they can actually be a consistent buyer for that extra power. And then suddenly a weather event comes, the miners can turn down, sell that power back to the grid.

So there's a ton of stuff that can happen there in terms of load balancing. That helps them. I mean, grids have a heartbeat. And you need to keep that heartbeat moving. More solar, wind, intermittent stuff comes online. That creates all sorts of impulses. And these miners can live. Literally, sitting behind or on the grid, just ratcheting up and down is actually very favorable for grid stability.

So there's a world here where grids would actually rather have Bitcoin miners there than not because of the flexibility they bring. You may not even need a big one. You just need a component of energy demand that is a stabilizing force. So it actually is something that we could see just literally as a lost leader coming as a part of grid infrastructure. And people like, oh, but isn't that centralized? I'm like, have you seen how many places in the world have a person? power grid? Can you find something more decentralized and electricity? It's kind of hard. Maybe water. It's a pretty decentralized system. Yeah, they're centrally operated, but like how many times

we've seen the Australians cooperate with the Libyan government? Very rarely. Or with the, you know, in Costa Rica, these different places have different governments, but they can't agree. The best of time. So it's actually a very decentralized system. And if it's a viable solution that ends up working well and becomes like a running model for building out new areas, then it just becomes global, right? You get that actual decentralization of hash all over the world because this is the best engineering solution we have. You have a bunch of these A6, you plug them in while you have access. As the population grows, demand grows, you unplug them, you move them over to the next site,

you start building again. Like I just don't see, I never see miners staying in one location. I think even with companies right now, the way they're rotating makes perfect sense, and we'll see it in locations as well. It's a purely free market thing. Like Bitcoin miners, I mean, find an industry that's received subsidies from the government, it ain't Bitcoin mining. They're like, it's just not.

They have found these solutions because they have to. you know once they start buying bitcoin for the balance sheet and then taking on debt yeah yeah it's not a good idea because your business model is already challenging enough the last thing you to do is have more volatility in your balance sheet and debt like my view is that mining wants to decentralize because the bigger you get the more you start making dumb centralized decisions like that and the market takes you to town and that's you know there's benefits to economies of scale but There's also a ruthless, ruthless system that will tear you down if you make errors. Coin kite has been in the game for years, creating hands down the best and most secure hardware

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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 1 bonus depreciation. Learn more. at abundant minds.com slash sessions. Speaking of like debt and leverage as well, too, do you think that the treasury play is done as well as maybe,

I don't think we've never even saw shit coins come back around this time. I mean, look, when you say the treasury play, like I think strategy is still going to be a big, big player, there'll be a handful, the long tail of sailor-esque clones. I mean, you know, let's face it. If you put 5,000 Bitcoin on your balance sheet and the Bitcoin goes to a million dollars,

Okay, you're a $5 billion company. Does that even show up on the 10th, 20th page of company's market cap? Like, what are you going to do, change the bond market, change the insurance market as a five bill? Like, it's just not big. So there'll be a couple of plays here, but I think the concentration will be much, much, much, much stronger. I, yeah, look, I've always been a skeptic of that whole thing.

And I, let me be very clear. I differentiate my business is a treasury company. We buy Bitcoin. That's out one of our treasury assets. But we're not playing a saleable. I'm not selling shares. I'm not making preferred. I'm just writing analysis and just saving money.

The whole different thing. So, you know, you're a kebab shop who saves in Bitcoin, 10 thumbs up. You're a company that wants to be the second coming of sailor. Good luck. Very, very small playing field. And yeah, I mean, you've got to get real creative.

And I just think that there's a forest fire that's going to keep. I mean, some of these companies are now selling their Bitcoin. Why would you, trust management of a firm who is entirely a Bitcoin business and then levered themselves so much they had to sell their Bitcoin when their motto was to not sell their Bitcoin. You're done. It's over. Like move on, cut your losses, put your money into something more productive.

100%. You've got to actually have some sort of service or good output that you're selling. And then, yes, saving Bitcoin. I think it's kind of the beauty of it that for all that it does, it just simplifies things. It's just savings technology. And for most companies, most people's, most businesses, it will just be savings technology. So we're trying to get too cute with it. I completely agree.

So taking a bit of a bit of a weird tangent here as well, too. We mentioned quantum earlier as well, too. Check, do we have any thoughts? Is quantum coming to destroy us? Is it taking us out? What's your position right now? Yes. So I try to take a bit of a middle ground.

Dangerous. Yeah, no. So first things first, I personally, instinctually, I think quantum is Fugazi. I think like, I think the gap between what, what is real and what is not. First of all, it's very hard to ascertain. The best that I can do personally, take these research papers.

I've tried to read them, right? And I use try, is doing a lot of lifting in that sentence. I try to read them. I spend half an hour, 45 an hour, just playing with different LLMs to challenge it. I've got a bunch of papers that have skeptics have written. And I put those in and I just try to bounce these ideas around

to get a bit of a view. Now, my current understanding of the situation, somewhere around the end of 2025, some say December, I can't know what paper, but there was a major breakthrough in terms of error correction. I think Google. I think Google was the one that did it. The way I've been envisioning it, there's two curves.

There's the curve of people writing algorithms and writing complex papers of what we could do. Shaw wrote an algorithm a long time ago, right? This is the thing that breaks keys. Shaw wrote an algorithm. We don't know how to use it yet. We don't know how to run it. We can't run it. So Shaw wrote an algorithm.

A bunch of people have made it more feasible to run, fewer cubits, less time, more complexity, blah, blah, blah, new architectures, new grids, new circuits. Google just released a paper circuit so dangerous. We had to zero knowledge proof it. All I take it very serious. I cannot handicap and say it isn't coming because how could I? I mean, honestly, I think anybody who's tried to understand this question, quantum thing. If you come out of it saying, I understand this, I believe you're lying, because I just don't think anyone understands this. It's just, I'm sorry, like quantum physics

itself, where everything is everywhere all the time at the same time, like, it's weird, right? Even quantum physicists are like, yeah, it's weird. So it's a weird thing to understand in the first place. I don't, so the first curve is how easily can we do this, in theory, on paper? The other one is what is the current state of the art of the physical computing systems? And there are many architectures, right? Six, eight architectures. What can they all do? And the answer right now, to the best of my understanding, is absolutely nothing.

So we've got these two curves of how good are the computers, which may have had an error correction point in late 2025, enough for me to take it seriously as a skeptic. and we're seeing the curve of what we could do coming down in exponential scale, log scale. So in theory, they might intersect where quantum computing might suddenly go through a physical upgrade or they may just get it down just like, oh, you only need five qubits, right?

They may just keep inventing stuff to bring it down to our level. Maybe they'll intersect. So from that perspective, no, I do not believe that quantum is coming tomorrow. I also don't think, I mean, I couldn't even tell you how long it's going to be, but I think, If Bitcoin is dead in a decade because of quantum, I'd be very surprised. So I don't think it's coming anytime soon. Now, that does not mean that we need, we should do nothing.

Because NVK recently released a piece, which I think is very much agree with. Even if, even if you do not believe quantum is coming, which internally I don't, but I also know my own limitations that I could be very wrong. And I'm not willing to trust myself that that is true. There is enough evidence, including. this recent Google paper to say, they're getting serious about this. And if they're getting serious about it, it would be wrong. It was the wrong decision to not take them seriously. So my view is, whether it's quantum or whether it's, we want Bitcoin to be a $10 trillion, $100 trillion asset,

having one security assumption in the ECDSA and elliptic curve, it's probably not the right idea. Wouldn't it be good if we actually had like an extra layer, the two factor, right? There's two different cryptographic systems or those options or whatever it is. It would, it would make a ton of sense for Bitcoin to just have resilience because cryptography isn't forever. If you run the human experiment long enough, eventually we will have classical computers that might be able to do this, right? So just simply future-proofing, having a plan, there will be investors out there, big money, who will not allocate because they can't hedge this risk. They don't understand it. So it makes a ton of sense to me. First things first,

we're not changing Bitcoin anytime soon. Making a change tomorrow and rushing it is the wrong decision. Not making a change at all and making no progress to even have a plan is the wrong decision. My opinion, the correct decision is to take it seriously. Understand that none of us can handicap it, including the people who think it's coming tomorrow. Have a plan for it.

Don't rush it. Look at the rest of the crypto field. By the way, this is one of the great things about being Bitcoin. You can just watch the rest of these systems. throw these things together and they'll jump off the cliff first and we'll find out which ones bounce, right? Because most of them won't. And some of them are going to implode because they're going to rush, they're going to put something into complex.

They're going to realize that their system is kind of stuffed. And they're going to go down these rabbit holes that just is going to be fruitless engineering and could potentially be fatal. Bitcoin's just going to be sit there and observe and watch and learn and do our own thinking. I've seen in the last couple of weeks enough smart people saying, hey, here's an idea, here's an idea, here's an idea. One day, it's going to be a dev who just goes, hey, That's interesting. Bang, new idea. Oh, here of you. Great. Oh, cool. Hey, look, we've got a solution. Bitcoin appropriate.

So doing nothing is the wrong thing. Doing something is the right thing, but doing everything is the wrong thing. Somewhere in the middle. That's a good way to cover it. I think I share a lot of that sentiment as well, too. Like even right now, we're only have public keys exposed in legacy addresses as well as tapu addresses. I like BIP 360 because it takes out the script key path, which is the only vulnerable spot there.

It seems like a very elegant and simple solution. It's a straight solution that just improves taproot. Do it. Yeah. It's just easy to move forward. And it's funny too. I talked to some of the guys working on BIP 360 and I asked them out directly. He's like, are you worried?

They went honestly no. And there's one guy on the team that doesn't think it's even feasible at some point. I'm not concerned at this moment. But I think the one thing that you hit on that I do share is that one, we should be considering this for even just classical computers. But two, the narrative is really important. Like how many people got shaken out because of the quantum narrative, the quantum threat, right? Realistically, and I'd be curious, actually, because what's currently in the state of Australia is, But like, I'm much more concerned about, like, an unrealized capital gains tax.

I'm worried about, like, geographical issues with the governing mob above me than I am about quantum. But if that's where the normy attention currently is, it'd be at least nice to have an answer to point to, to say that we are working that that's not an issue anymore that we are moving beyond that. For sure. And, you know, the folks who are highly convicted that quantum is coming, you'll never convince them that it's not. And the folks who don't believe the quantum is a complete fugazi, you'll never convince them that it isn't. I mean, I just sit in the camera. It's like, you know, there's this idea that we will not see quantum computers developing.

And like, it'll just come out of nowhere. And I'm like, yeah, but guys, the only application for quantum is not breaking Bitcoin. Like, there's a ton of applications like chemistry and biology and physics. Like, can you just show the quantum computer like doing those at all? Like, can you just, like, show us some answers to anything? like literally anything. Once the physical computers are doing something ever, now we can be like, okay,

there's scaling going on in this tiny little left of field thing that's not Bitcoin, but like it's showing progress. And, you know, so I think that the doomerism is a bit much. But also having a plan, it does. Narrative-wise, it will help a lot.

It will help a lot simply by just having smart people thinking about. And you know what? I have a feeling that we're going to discover, there's a couple of things I'm interested to see. I think we'll just discover interesting things for Bitcoin. It's almost like this, I mean, if you're a, if you're a cryptographer or like a Bitcoin dev, this is a kind of interesting problem. Like, this is like a complex thing and like the engineering mind and a lot of people is going to go, I kind of want to solve this. Like,

it's big. It's a big thing. And maybe it just gets the fires going in the Bitcoin again. Like, I'd love to see some more work on Covenants. Maybe Bitcoin actually breaks out of this funk of like us actually not putting in sensible changes for Bitcoin. Actually just looking at stuff and You know, like, hey, we could actually improve things. And I know sailors are going to hate stuff like that. Or don't fix stuff that's not broken. It's like, yeah, but dude, multi-sig and vaults and all that kind of stuff is awesome. It is awesome.

And by the way, gold can't do it. Right? And by the way, gold does also have a quantum risk. Again, I can't handicap it. Aliens, right? Aliens. Asteroid mining. Guys, if there are aliens out there, there's an infinite world of gold.

Like, there's infinite gold out there. They've got aliens coming to Earth and all that kind of stuff, always start asteroid money. Like that's going to happen eventually, maybe not in our lifetime, but it's going to happen. Quantum may never happen. May never happen.

So like gold's kind of a zero. No, like long term, it's kind of a zero. Multi-sig is awesome. Being able to secure an asset across geographies, using vaults, insurance companies like, guys, awesome. There's a ton of stuff like CTV and Covener. and I hope that this whole quantum thing just gets engineers on Bitcoin excited to ship stuff

again. And the community gets used to like, hey, maybe that isn't a bad idea. You know what I mean? Like, that actually could be a good thing for us to add to make Bitcoin increasingly resilient on the self-custody side. That's great. All that kind of stuff, I think, is I hope it lights a fire from that perspective. It'd be nice.

There's even some like code cleanup that we could do. There's still one bug I'm blinking on at the moment that we've got to deal with. It would be nice to see some movement towards consensus again. That's the one way of the overflow bug, I think, where it's, yeah, we've got to do that. It's the date overflow, I think, yeah. But before the final block reward. We'll get in there. We'll get it cleaned up at some point in time.

It's funny mentioning gold can't do that. I want to get your thoughts then quickly on it. We recently saw that gold wasn't the shining star for taking a toll at the Strait of Hormuz. And I thought that was a very, very, very important kind of inflection point for showing Bitcoin as the censorship-resistant non-com. confiscatable money. I'm just, I'm just curious your thoughts because for me, like, my instinct was that that, like, it could be overblowing it. I don't think that I am. But that felt to me bigger than El Salvador making it legal tender, which did end up getting pulled by the IMF. Like having a major country heavily involved in oil demanding Bitcoin for the toll, it's not

quite oil for Bitcoin, but it's pretty damn close. Well, I've always thought that the oil and the Bitcoin market have a very close relationship. There was a long time ago where I'll listen to podcast about a dude who trades oil. And he was explaining how the world, actually, the oil world works. It's, it's wild. It's literally ships like cruising around, getting a call saying, hey, we've got X amount of barrels here on the west coast of Africa. Can you come pick it up and then ship it over here and there's someone else is calling it to buy it? And like, then you've got to deal with local currencies and your trade has got to deal with their people of Bitcoin transaction. You know, when I sold my silver, it took me half an hour for them to just stick it into a machine

and work out whether it was actually gold or not. It doesn't matter the fact that it was, a government minted coin, like they literally had to assay this thing over and over again. That's a pain in the ass. Bitcoin transaction, it's done. Ten minutes. The ships hasn't even passed the toll point by the time the confirmation's in. So it's kind of, kind of neat. You know, like the verification side of things,

Bitcoin's. Honestly, the more, what I love about bare markets is, you know, go through the process, you play with multi-sig, you play with custody, you think about how Bitcoin works, holding precious metals versus Bitcoin. Like, God, this thing is actually awesome. And then you say stuff like this and you're like, yeah, it's small and it probably is irrelevant the end of the day, but like kind of the right tool for that. And you just say it comes to fruition, like, we'll get there, we'll get there, slow a bit

surely. Big things will eventually happen. And I feel like they're kind of underway right now. Okay, before I let you go, before all that fun stuff as well too, best case probabilities, what do you think in end of year? Just whatever the slight bell curve advantage you think one direction or the other. No, I think we're higher. I think there's a decent chance that we take a shot at 100K.

I do think the market probably has, I think we're in bottom formation. I would love to see another lower low. I'm not banking on us seeing another lower low. I don't think that lower low is in the 40s. I think it's in the mid-50s. Look, I mean, when we bought, look, I think we should be bottoming before the end of the year, is my base case. Now, macro could come through any kind of spanner in that works, but I do think that Bitcoin just from a seller exhaustion perspective with Dan Quartz.

Beautiful. James, tell everybody where they can check out your stuff where they can come and find you. Thank you, mate. You'll find us over at checkonchand.com. We've got a charting website and we do two newsletters every week, written and video. Hey, guys, thanks for watching the video.

Just wanted to quickly let you know we're going to be doing our annual Bitcoin survival workshop covering how to privately use and acquire Bitcoin, June 28th in Banff. You can scan the QR code or check the link in the description to learn more. We'd love to have you there.

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