TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #756: Why Anger Is A Buy Signal with Michael Sullivan

Episode Date: June 10, 2026

Marty sits down with Michael Sullivan to discuss using AI-driven language analysis to map Bitcoin sentiment across cohorts, why 2026 price action mirrors 2015 despair, and how collapsing pleb conviction alongside steady OG optimism signals a generational bottom. Michael on X: https://x.com/SullyMichaelvan Michael’s Substack: https://substack.com/@sentimentsully STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/yHGkvYxdqT Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bitkey.world/ Aven https://www.aven.com/bitcoin CrowdHealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/tftc Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Salt of the Earth: https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Michael Sullivan, welcome to the show, sir.

Thanks so much for having me, man. Really grateful to be here. I'm pumped to talk to you. I think it's been interesting observing your coverage and your particular analytical niche, which is sentiment analysis within Bitcoin. And I think a lot of what you've been putting out there has been confirming my natural pattern recognition indicators have been going off in my mind, having been around Bitcoin for 13 years now. And I've been saying pretty frequently over the last few months that this market reminds me more of 2015 than any other bear market that I've experienced. For those who are unaware, 2015 was terrible sentiment-wise. Bitcoin Twitter didn't even really exist yet, but the small pocket that did exist basically went away. People thought Bitcoin was legitimately going to die.

For some reason or another, this time around in 2026, the sentiment's very similar. And I find it fascinating because I've never been more bullish, But people are really butthurt about where Bitcoin is right now. It's so true. And this happened like really naturally for me. I was really into language and just kind of had been noticing relatively recently how kind of the vibes were out there changing and whatnot. And I'm so excited to talk to you about it because like some of the people that have been here longer have been more in tune with this.

At least from my experience, like they've really been like optimistic in different ways than the newer folks are. And there's a bunch of potential reasons for that. I have my own theories as to why this might be, I'm sure you do too, like between like gold ripping, the AI trade going crazy, and then like Bitcoin treasury companies burning a ton of the newer cohort of Bitcoiners. Like there's a lot of different reasons out there, but for whatever of them, like sentiment is really bad right now, despite so many things being so optimistic broadly. And that's just a really interesting dynamic.

So yeah, I've been really, really, really having a ton of fun getting into this stuff. Yeah. We could dive deep into the details, but just a couple of comments based off of that is thinking back to like FTX when we went down to 15, 15K, 15.5K, wherever we settled at the capitulation wick there. There wasn't like an AI trade like sucking or a gold or silver trade that people could point at in parallel and be like, oh, look how great they're doing compared to how poor we're doing. And I think this time around, the AI trade, gold and silver, even though they're off their highs, they're still relatively elevated. I think people are looking like, oh, God, am I holding the wrong bag? And beginning to basically do the meme of the stick figure poking Bitcoin and saying, do something. Yeah, I think part of it, too, is like Bitcoiners in general are relatively technologically savvy and optimistic folks.

And like, we've really gotten deep into AI, myself very much included in that. But so to watch something that we're, it's just like to watch that narrative and that technological thing get really taken over and be so enthusiastic and euphoric, I think just hits a little bit differently since we're also generally so much aligned with the AI thing in general. Yeah. I mean, we're talking about before we have record, but the AI energy is real within Bitcoin too. I mean, I've been leaning into it very heavily here at TFTC and other aspects. and I think it's actually helped us to get good information as it pertains to Bitcoin out there. So it's been in that positive. There are many people saying, what are you doing focused on AI? You've got to focus on Bitcoin.

It's like, yeah, you can do both and hopefully leverage one to accelerate what you're doing with the other, which is leverage AI tools to accelerate Bitcoin education for our purposes here at TFTC. But again, it's fascinating and I think now's a good time just like how did you get into i mean you mentioned a lot of language and all that how did you get into sentiment analysis within bitcoin specifically and what what set you down this particular rabbit hole yeah so a little bit of background myself i've been an engineer for like 13 years a writer for something like nine or ten now uh came into bitcoin around 2021

for a lot of the same reasons that people did around that time with like um money printing going crazy and that sort of thing. And just a minute went immediately crazy deep down the rabbit hole. I was a big writer at the time and was so just like profoundly inspired by Bitcoin that I had this creative energy around it, got deep into writing. And a lot of people in the Bitcoin space know me as the guy who was writing a Bitcoin novel. I did that, went really well, it was a ton of fun. But like upon wrapping that up, I was so like energized for wanting to build more stuff in the Bitcoin community. And at the time, like people were at each other's throats. i think it was like when i really started doing a lot of thinking about this was like late january

early february when uh price was down there and once again saw this pattern that i've been seeing repeatedly of people like just butting heads when price was down for really no other reason other than price being down i was like i always wanted to explore this more deeply because i've been obsessed with language for a long time i think it's fascinating how narratives kind of flow through systems like you'll hear somebody go on a podcast state an idea and then it just proliferate across the entire ecosystem think that was fascinating and i think minor language choices that people make hold a lot more information than most people realize right there's these subtle kind of things that you can say to one another that actually give high degrees of indication

like what the underlying emotions are in people and like it's a really weird thing like analyzing human emotion for this like analytically about data but i'd always like had these collection different ideas and i want no one to pursue it farther so i kind of started with just myself i used like my engineering skill set to digest tons of my twitter data then throw every single tweet i'd ever done through these ai models to help like delineate what kind of language cues existed inside of them and what i found was really interesting i've said a lot of dumb stuff on twitter over the years i both posted tops like yeah like just like people do you know like come to this thing and have different opinions emotions and are inspired by whatever narratives out there

but looking at it in that way was like really eye-opening for me of how interesting of a tool this was just immediately for my own person and i did it for other people did it for michael say where i started looking at this stuff and then i just kept going and going and going like hundreds of hours spent on this now like cohorting different people seeing what things different folks are talking about what moods are being different felt in different subsets of the bitcoin ecosystem and it's just been amazingly interesting to explore like kind of all over place but that's sort of like the initial like uh evolution here for me and i've just never been more excited about it because even right presently right now with the most recent sell-offs there's

been some really fascinating stuff happening that i'm pretty pumped to share about yeah i guess let's jump into it i mean talking about like cohorts and um different cohorts and the sentiment that may exist in one or across many in diving into the language like discerning sentiment you said the word choice is very important and the particular particular words you use says a lot more than than the short sentence you may include those words in uh what is the the sort of minutia of deriving specific sentiment from word choice so fortunately people way smarter than myself solve these problems in pretty clear ways. The quickest way to maybe conceptualize it, like every single different emotion has different words that are more or less likely to be used

around it. And for example, one of my favorite ones is like conviction, to look at conviction over time, how confident people are and those kind of things. And this one's easier to conceptualize because you can basically just search for words like would or maybe or these kind of things that just are indicative of slightly more hedging. The inverse of that would be really confident things like going to 100k tomorrow, just like a lot of exclamation marks, other things. And basically, people have trained these models through Twitter data, which is why it's particularly interesting to look at that stuff, to recognize how much optimism or anger or different moods exist comparatively over time. And then what I do is I take that initial measurement and then compare it

every single tweet a user has ever said or every single post and look at how that deviates over time because that's what's really interesting it's not just like seeing okay people are really mad about this all at once it's most interesting to see like how their language evolves when they get angrier what events they get angry around what kind of narratives they're talking about while they're getting angry and then how these moods collide so like conviction is interesting on its own but it's also really fascinating when it's like people are really convicted and really optimistic which typically happens around blow off tops and that kind of thing so looking at all that and then doing it for different cohorts has been crazy um we can take it wherever you

want on the which one you want to do but like since we were just speaking about ai that might be a decent first one to just like look at how this narrative is taking over the entire bitcoin ecosystem yeah let's do that because it is uh objectively true like i said earlier i think it's actually like a breath of fresh air um personally while you pull this up i'll just ramble here but breath of fresh air for me it's like oh something interesting to to learn more about to apply to stay on the cutting edge of things and hopefully apply it to what we're doing here yeah so i i very much share that sentiment with you too i'm using these tools like absolute crazy at a crazy rate and i'm using it to build this stuff for bitcoiners too like to your point

earlier where i to build this suite of things like i i would have had to have a full team of people and tons and tons of time, money. To be able to do this using my own compute, basically, it's just been really freeing how much crazy stuff you can build with these tools. It's a profound game changer for how we work, in my opinion. What we're looking at here is the amount that AI, just the phrase AI, is mentioned over time. Specifically, though, it's among Bitcoiners,

which I think is the interesting dynamic. We all kind of recognize that AI is this frequent narrative talked about in the world It's like kind of defining 2026 in a lot of ways. I mean, even this longer period. But what was so cool to me was watching the Bitcoin community talk about it. And you can kind of see it like gyrate over time. Like there's new headlines all released. People talk about it at a higher rate and it'll lose interest a little bit.

But it's pretty obvious to see here. Like this is a very consistent, powerful trend, despite there being small, little euphoric peaks among the Bitcoin community. Like this is just a growing mindshare happening out there. and i think this really confirms a lot of the stuff that we were talking about where it's like drawing a lot of mindshare away from bitcoin and that's clearly even happening within the bitcoin community yeah and i'd actually be interested to see uh this bitcoin cohort overlaid with others because i was having conversations about this um with some bitcoiners and i feel like i mean could be wrong but i feel like we hopped on the ai trend earlier than most because and i think what

does that say about bitcoiners tech forward early adopters willing to take risks like my assumption um is that the bitcoin cohort would um i think on a per capita basis for lack of a better term would be like much higher involvement engagement with ai compared to others outside of obviously the ai cohort itself in silicon valley i'm i'm really curious to hear your thoughts about this But when I was in Vegas for Bitcoin 2026, one of the main things I was talking about was AI. That was the panel that I was on. And for me, it feels as though Bitcoin kind of prepped me in some ways to adopt AI more quickly. For me, Bitcoin was kind of this ego-dissolutionary thing where I was wrong about it repeatedly before getting into it.

I'd had exposure to it multiple years before taking it much more seriously in 2021. want. For me, like the repeatedly being wrong about a technology than like kind of spending more time in Bitcoin and growing more optimistic about technology broadly. I did. I do think primed me in a lot of ways where with AI, I felt a similar thing where like when it was just coming out, I was a very early adopter of the tools the entire time. But during that time, I remember saying things like, oh, AI is not going to totally take over this domain or like I'll still have to be involved in that part of the process or like, no, I need to review this area of the code. That's something I need to understand deeply as a human.

And I've continually had to walk every single one of those statements back over and over and over again and just accept that, like, this is a new paradigm that's kind of happening. And, like, I don't know where it's all going to go. But I think going through that in the Bitcoin space around that new evolving technology kind of primed me to adopt the AI tools more quickly. And it's part of the reason that so many of us are so interested in this thing. Yeah. No, I think that's definitely it. I mean, I think for Bitcoin, for me, when I found it, I was very receptive to a Bitcoin like solution at the time that I found Bitcoin.

So I personally had like very little doubt when I found it. I was also very young. I was 21 and probably a bit naive, which worked out to my benefit. But I found Bitcoin. I was like, oh, this is it. This is like I was a child of the 2008 financial crisis going into college right as that was going on and studying economics basically like, all right, how do I get this bad? Like, I need to I need to figure this out. And having a sort of innate feeling that the incumbent financial system and banking system and monetary system was was corrupt.

And so I found Bitcoin, which at the time, you had Andreas Antonopoulos and others, a few others educating about it. that whole digital native currency for the internet that can't be controlled by governments or central banks clicked with me and then dove in and tried to learn as much as possible about the the the tech side of it the protocol side of it and how it works how to receive how to send how mining works and became obsessed with it and obviously um i'm here now basically made a career out of continuing to follow the space and help develop it and uh i don't know for me personally it was like oh i found it and i dope right in i imagine there were similar feelings for for many others obviously there's many who found it dismissed it

came back and then ultimately said all right i was wrong so i think you have two archetypes there like the tech forward hyper crazy experimenters like oh no yeah this this makes sense then you of the other archetype which is um maybe initially skeptical but uh a small enough ego to to get over any apprehensions or skepticism that existed before and to to hold your hand up and say hey i was wrong um i should learn more about this and dive in so when it comes to ai i think i was very similar i mean we've been using ai here at tftc for over two years which i think is um which i think is probably like 2024 is when we started using um ai like to help the operations and to run the business and it's only got like the tools have only gotten exponentially better

throughout those two years and um i feel very fortunate that we started experimenting with this two years ago because now it feels like it's new stuff drops it's like okay we've had enough swings at the plate to understand what uh what to adopt what to ignore and how to implement things once they come to market and uh yeah i feel like it was a no-brainer for us in terms of ai too it's like hey this new thing is pretty powerful yeah it may not be perfect but um it's probably going to be a large part of the digital economy moving forward so it makes sense to adopt it early and figure it out uh so you have a head start there um and it's fun too that's the other thing very much so it's i also don't think it's the entire story either like there is other reasons

potentially the bitcoin um sentiment feels low it's just like one of the many variables it's like it's so multi-faceted and one of the things exploring this is like bitcoin is fragmented in a lot of ways too, where it's not just single groups. The longer the network has been around, the more isolated different groups have been, which have different narratives they watch onto about why things are doing things. And that's been kind of interesting. I've also seen... One of the things I'll pull up here momentarily is the engagement on social media from some of the BitCleaner accounts that have been around a while. So yeah, newer retail folks and pubs have been tweeting about certain things and angry and we can get to that

but like even these older uh bitcoin accounts that have been around for quite a long time like we're still seeing similar rates of this so i'll just share this here um this is uh the specifically like the bitcoin price on top the middle is the optimism in the language of the ogs over time the ones that i track in my system and the bottom one is the one that i want to draw attention to that's really interesting to me uh it's the likes per post so like it's adjusted so like how much engagement are you getting on x comparatively to back in previous periods and like the main thing that sticks out to me personally is that like end of 2022 beginning of 2023 bottom where like the moods were relatively good still like there's like up and

down with anger or whatever but the engagement rate was super high there was way more activity happening even back then comparatively to now during some more vibes right like there's we're down quite a lot uh price wise but like back then there was just a distinctively different mood comparatively where things are at right now yeah i agree and like while you're saying that so i'm wondering if the quick and iterative algorithm changes at x affect us at all like our because i think nikita bear came out um at some point within the last year or two and explicitly said we're gonna deprioritize anybody talking about crypto okay and so i'm just trying to think of ways that uh the data could be uh not skewed but missing that that context have you looked into

that at all oh it's so at the core of the one of the ways i've done this is like very individualized so the way that a lot of social sentiment has been done previously uh things like the fear and greed the way those tools work is they'll like have a couple different things that they pull in but one of the main social sentiment things they pull in is like reddit posts recently or like the top posts on twitter at the time and they'll just pull that into the system and they'll say like all right well there's an increased amount of posts around this thing that indicates like higher levels of sentiment and that's interesting um but i if i always like felt that there was a little bit unexplored there so i took like a different approach than that a lot of those ways to measure

sentiment just like take the main posts out there which get all these like massive engagement baiting accounts these people that just like say dumb stuff to get engagement there's tons of bots everywhere now that's never been more of a problem so you kind of get like a really polluted data set with those things. So I took the exact opposite. I went and individually found people that I know are real. Anonymous or whatever, it doesn't really matter as much. It's like they're a person who can post consistently over time. And I've done some validation that they're a real person tweeting consistently over a long duration. So you can kind of watch their actions over time. So you lose a little bit of that algorithmic sway where we all kind

of are filtered through the lens of what our algorithm is showing us. I guarantee you my algorithm is wildly different than yours compared to other people too. We're all seeing different things based on our interest. But the way we're interacting with those things can still hold a lot of data. We'll get into the anger thing here relatively soon, I'm sure. But if you are frequently having angry tweets out there, regardless of what the algorithm is showing you like that's still a very uh interesting lens into the eyes of like those people that have been here for a while so like you can really see there's increased levels of anger right now like it's because the algorithm's showing them more of that negative things or whatever like

the algorithms are designed to give you more of what you're searching for more of what you desire like and sometimes people like are disproportionately likely to click on rage bait if they're in specific moods that kind of thing and by looking at this through an individualized lens you can kind of like see that stuff rather than just get this like broad uh data aggregation thing that existed in previous versions of the funerary index so freaks this work was brought to you by good friends at bitkey as things happen things get lost you need to replace your phone life happens and bitkey has been designed with this in mind so if you're looking for the easiest way to secure your bitcoin off the exchange go get a bitkey doesn't come with any seed phrases there's

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list? How many, uh, how do you determine whether somebody is an OG or a pleb and what are some of the more interesting, I don't know if you've feel comfortable picking out a particular account or particular group of accounts and describing how their sentiment has changed or stay consistent over a period of time but really nailing into the uh the different cohort construction how you do it and what what you're seeing um this year particularly so the cohort construction ends up being by far the most important thing here um the the like delineation there between like ogs is basically 10 years or more in bitcoin and consistently posting but there's some problems where you can't just always pick a person

and then use their data. There's a lot of things behind the scenes in figuring out which data is most pertinent, which one's most useful, these kind of things. Some people don't post for years at a time. And that kind of stuff is kind of tricky where I thought about this in a lot of ways, really similar to the way James checked

as on-chain data. But there's a huge difference here in that social sentiment tweets are wildly different than on-chain stuff where people can ghost for months at a time. So if you look at very specific individuals and if you go through like my own tweets, like there might be periods for a month or two where you're not tweeting as much there. The way to solve this problem in the like from the data perspective is you cohort people together. Like there's always going to be specific bits of noise.

Like I had a child, so I'm like really excited about stuff. And like you can actually see when I'm having positive life events in my data. but if you get a big group of Bitcoiners together and look at the things they're talking about in aggregate you actually get way more interesting stuff like as you can see when they're as a collective talking more about negative things more about positive things so I've used this much less to be like creepy on specific individuals and just like look through specific stuff and way more to see like what different groups are doing so a lot of my efforts have been like defining different groups seeing which groups are more interesting and a couple that I've logged into as being

really fascinating are the older Bitcoiners versus the newer Bitcoiners, the Puebs versus the OGs, retail or whatever you want to call them, like newer accounts versus older ones. And it's much, a lot of my time spent on this is figuring out who those folks are, seeing how long they've been in Bitcoin for, and then kind of comparing them to one another. So one of the ones that has been more interesting is the Puebs anger levels, which is what we're looking at here um and i think again people kind of feel these things right like it's not like it's a revolutionary new thing to say like oh yeah the plebs are really angry right now but it's so interesting to me because sometimes you feel these things but to

be able to visualize how bad it actually is has been eye-opening to me to get by the pulse on where stuff actually is and as we're looking at here there's like one of the longest most persistent periods of negative emotion here, essentially a persistent anger, since, like the end of 2025. Yeah, that's an insane chart. Who are they? Who are they most mad at? So that's, that's an interesting thing, too. So like, I did, like, again, fear and greed is always been this like one thing

you just get like, fear, right? But there is a lot more complexity to humans than just like, Oh, I'm in a bad mood. I'm a good mood like different emotions have wildly different things like if you are fearful it's very different than if you're angry right like the like people are angry they're much more likely to make different kinds of mistakes i wrote a long piece recently about this like analogizing like if you are in a in a car and somebody cuts you off you're immediately like sort of building stories in your mind when you're under the influence of anger about like how stupid this person has they have like different like pains or like you build up a whole thing compare like

but this holds true through the ones of markets and bitcoin too like when people are prices down people are like pissed off about that they're disproportionately likely to try to find villains out there to blame and i think we're seeing that right now with uh sailor getting yelled at for selling 32 bitcoins like what people desperately desperately wanted somebody to blame for negative price action so it's kind of just like this uh environment that breeds toxicity and then it's just looking for somebody to latch onto and yell at and it's kind of comical but when you the thing that's been valuable for me is like recognizing that people are just kind of on edge and kind of angry and then as soon as somebody gets yelled at like say or it kind

of has been a useful lens for me to be like all right people are really overreacting to this silly news right now you know yeah it makes you wonder too the um it is funny the uh what can you tell or what have you tried to derive between the difference of sentiment from plebs to ogs i think you said ogs are relatively more optimistic than plebs are now we've got some thoughts about that which is i think if you've been around bitcoin for long enough you realize like hey uh there's really nothing you know i wouldn't say nothing but uh it's basically bitcoin's a beast that beats to its own drum and you have to internalize that you have to stop externalizing what's happening uh via the day-to-day price movements on people like michael saylor or other actors

institutions core devs whoever it may be uh and i think it's fascinating that the plebs as you've defined them in this cohort have been angrier for longer than they ever have been in recent memory at least going back to 2023 this is maybe the thing I'm most excited to talk to you about

because you locked onto it there already this is arguably my angriest cohort it's also across other metrics too, they're much more pessimistic in general, the OGs are not as overly angry right now.

Moods are still not amazing, but there is for sure a huge deviation happening. In order to get all this data, I need to run these tweets and things through a bunch of AI compute. It's not a super quick process. I don't get all this stuff and immediately have all the information.

There's a whole giant pipeline that I've built to get all this stuff right. After the most recent sell-off, I was really excited to see what is happening here to the sentiment because i collaborated with james check on a piece called peak apathy like a couple weeks back talking about how like moods were so persistently just like no one cares right now right uh i think many of us have felt that but after this recent sell-off um perhaps the

time pain capitulation which he calls it but i was so fascinated to see like how moods had changed so i immediately just began my pipeline through everything through i just like looked at it in detail. And what stuck out to me was like, there is the divergence that was beginning has continued to grow, um, both across anger levels and optimism between the OGs and the plebs and conviction, which is maybe the most interesting deviation happening where the plebs conviction was pretty high, which, uh, conviction is a kind of a tricky thing to reason about. I can share my chart here. So we have something else to think through. But conviction in general, it's kind of like a non-directional metric where you can be convicted for different reasons, right?

Well, you can be convicted because things are bad or that bad things are going to happen, or you can be convicted that good things are going to happen. It's sort of all over the place. It's really this, it's in combination with other moods and things that are happening where it gets really interesting. What we're looking at here is the average conviction level in Pweb's language over time comparatively to Bitcoin. price and you'll see that they were very convicted here since the top right like with growing conviction this is a right side here with the higher amount of gold compared to blue but they were also angry at the time lots of negative emotions they've been like highly convicted that bad things were going to happen um but recently their conviction has

totally fallen off um the ogs on the other hand relatively similar moods in a lot of ways but the convictions than the opposite thing. They've grown much more convicted around this bottom compared to all the plebs. And to me, it just speaks volumes to how much a little bit of experience matters where like, and this is where I'm so curious to hear your thoughts about. Cause like you've been here before, you've seen this before. Like, do you not disproportionately think like that experience has given you a different lens to think about this compared to all these new folks who are so scared right now? Yeah, I think it's definitely, I mean, like I said the pattern recognition I think so I got into Bitcoin like late 2013 and my first buy

was like top ticking that that bull market right before Mt. Gox completely collapsed and then I wrote it down all the way to uh 2015 where the capitulation wick was topped out at like 1400 dollars in late 2013 early 2014 then over the course of 18 months felt like 200 dollars went down to like 180 at one point i believe in like july 2015 like i said earlier the sentiment then was terrible then we began to climb back and late 2016 then rolling into 2017 2017 was one of those um surreal years in bitcoin probably the most real um even outside of 21 and and last year i would say 17 was probably the most euphoric i've experienced and then but i do think i mean i was writing about it and talking about it a lot on the podcast in the very early days right

when it started but like the ico bubble was like obvious that was a bubble and there was some animal spirits pushing the markets up in that era and then you had the fork wars as well i think that's why particularly for hardcore bitcoiners that was a an era of relative euphoria because you have this massive sort of block size war culminate with um like a legitimate like sort of confrontation at the social distributed consensus layer and depending on who you talk to i like to think that the good guys won and that's very validating for um for many people around back then i was like oh wow this thing is truly distributed it's truly run by individuals who decide to run code so yeah 2017 was very euphoric

and obviously 2018 2019 um it wasn't the it was a bear market but it wasn't uh it was just more boring from from my recollection there's a lot of building going on there's a lightning network was getting more robust and i think uh block uh formerly square coming in really validating it around that time as well i mean i think they launched bitcoin buys right uh right after like the blow off top of 2017 like having jack dorsey and square sort of validate and spin up spiral and um everything else that they did uh was like a nice sort of strong anchor indicator like hey we're not crazy one of the um the most prolific tech founders in the world is validating this and then obviously at microsoft or then you had 2020 covid and you had that march 12th to

march 15th or a 50 drop overnight and everyone's like oh that's crazy but um i think rather quickly people were able to read the tea leaves of what was going to go on with covid which was massive money printing then we had the run-up over over the next two years and then the fed started raising rates and that sucked a lot of liquidity out um and then ftx happened shortly after the fed started banking rates and you had that and that was more that sentiment was more like hey there's more bad actors like ico bubble part two with a bunch of um sort of easy to call out grifters if you have anything that that resembles a bullshit meter so i think a lot of people the anger there was like hey there's um a bunch of grifters shitting in the punch bowl

and ruining it for the rest of us and then you have uh that roll into 23 and 24 with the etfs and the government for validating trump running as the the bitcoin president the crypto president and i think a lot of people rightly so like all right the u.s government here is here that that sort of tail risk of government shutdown of bitcoin may be off the table um run it up to wherever it did 126 and then um and yeah i think that is where a lot of the the divergence i think stems from particularly if you come in at like 2017 or not in 2017 if you came in like 2020 and onward um i can imagine a lot of people being like five or six years in like wait a second we were supposed to go out forever the government's on our side the etfs

are here gold's ripping silver ripping ai is ripping like why are we why are we selling off and then you mentioned james check earlier i think he's done a good job of reading the the on-chain data and i think there was a ton of people who helped bitcoin for 10 to 15 years and we're saying hey i'm gonna take some chips off the table sold into six-figure bitcoin and then obviously on top of that you have uh just the natural liquidity flows going out of bitcoin after it's hit a new all-time high into these higher growth opportunities in nai and temporarily in precious metals but i think more so nai and now we're sitting here 50 down people are wondering when's our time coming i thought i thought we were going the hyper bitcoinization hand up i

was one of those guys who was saying on the podcast i was like i could squint and see like super super cycle coming and uh as soon as the tides turn i mean i know i've been around long enough to know like all right like you're not gonna like bitcoin's gonna do what it does it beats to its own drum and uh it's like hand up i was wrong seems like we got a typical four-year cycle here and uh now sentiments in the shitter i actually think literally within the last two weeks it's beginning to turn because i think some ogs are like recognizing that sentiment is is down bad and sort of trying to inject more optimism in the form of like hey remember why we're here in the first place like we have this peer-to-peer distributed uh cash system with

hard cap supply can't be censored by governments look around do you think government censorship's rising or falling it's rising look around do you think the government's gonna need to print more money uh looking at debt levels and interest expense on debt like yeah it looks like you're need to print more money and so it's like okay if a b plus a number of other factors are true then it wins reason for existing and it's fundamental value prop um or stronger than ever yeah i think there's something beautiful about sell-offs too that make people renew their theses around it and like remember the actual reason they're here i feel like as though there were so many tourists that have been fleshed out this entire time and kind of remembering the roots to which like like

what is truly profound about this technology it's kind of a beautiful process despite it being a little bit painful um this chart here echoes the current divergence that you were just talking about where this is same exact kind of chart measuring conviction and language over time but this is for the ogs compared to the plebs and you can see here like there's been a lot of volatility in the past but like ogs are disproportionately optimistic right now compared to the pubs we were just or not sorry disproportionately convicted right now comparatively to where the pubs were at which was much less conviction and this was like one of the more large convergences that I found I just found this really interesting um to your point earlier about like the different narratives

like there's all these different things that people latch on to like the four-year cycle being dead being a really big and super interesting one um all these different price levels that people latch on to and it basically stories that people are telling themselves all the time like I mentioned been really into language like humans are kind of like story driven creatures we we use stories as ways to like perceive the world to think through things stories make their way around the bitcoin ecosystem too like not always based on how truthful they are but kind of like whatever the market's feeling at the time if people are more optimistic angry or whatever and different stories get latched on to like one of the reasons i think this conviction thing is so fascinating

is because one of the reasons conviction drops is because your story disintegrates like you felt as though this thing was a truth or like a certainty about how the world was going to function and then you were wrong and when that happens like you you start to like have to double like check on the things you're saying you're not as confident comparatively to like when your story is proven right not necessarily that's bullish or bearish but just like you had a story that you thought defined the way the world worked. If you're proven more right about that story, you grow increasingly convicted. And that's why I think this is so interesting because we had a bunch of different stories die here. And some stories we didn't want to have function like the four-year

cycle that has continued. And I just think that kind of the different stories of different cohorts that people have told about Bitcoin have been really fascinating to watch through this whole time. So freaks, when you take Bitcoin seriously, you start with custody. You want to control your keys, avoid single points of failure, and make sure your savings cannot disappear because you or someone else screwed up. That is what Unchained has been focused on since 2016. Unchained is the leader in collaborative multi-sig custody and Bitcoin financial services that keep you in control. They secure over $12 billion in Bitcoin for more than 12,000 clients. That means about one out of every 200 Bitcoin sits inside an Unchained vault. Their model is simple. You

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CrowdHealth. It's an alternative way to pay for your healthcare. It's not health insurance. It's crowdfunded healthcare. As you can tell, they negotiate prices for you. You pay in cash. It's much cheaper. Overall, we're much happier. They have incredible perks. Go to joincrowdhealth.com slash TFTC to sign up. Five years on CrowdHealth, not looking back. Joincrowdhealth.com slash TFTC use the promo code tftc once you set up your account you're going to get 99 a month for your subscription for the first three months do you have the data on what exactly bitcoiners are convicted on obviously it's bitcoin but what sort of framing they're putting out there that is backing this conviction well different groups talk about different things um so like right now

a lot of the conviction I hear is similar things that you just said, where it's like the money printing aspect, just like these fundamental long-term theses about Bitcoin that are like, we're so persuasive to me too, where it's like this thing, we're about to cross $40 trillion of debt. Like there's just all these long-term money printing issues that desperately need to be solved. And Bitcoin is just this brilliant solution to those things very much come out more at least like i've seen more of them happening currently um the thing i mentioned different groups too like there's things like say or just wrote this long piece about like different ideologies in bitcoin i've already started looking at the different people that

he was talking about them one of them he defined as bitcoin capitalists that group as a whole is convicted about totally different things than the other bitcoiners are talking about like they're like preferred products they're putting out there and all these other things like those narratives are disproportionately talked about by that group of people like strc and sata etc whereas like the more technological bitcoiners people actually building stuff are talking way more about different things it's like e-cash and like building new things and like quantum is talked about more there the ai thing is talked about much more frequently in that group of people too which is kind of interesting um but those are the sorts of things that are different and that that's

sort of what i meant earlier about like a divergence of bitcoiners like these different groups that are almost more siloed and because of the x algorithms kind of breaking us into different chunks they're not even interacting with each other as much as they may have been in the past which kind of farther exacerbates this like different little echo chambers that are all sort of segmented and that's just a crazy different dynamic that is happens way more now that probably hasn't quite as much previously yeah i mean i remember back in the day on bitcoin twitter back in like 2015 2016 when it really like towards the end of 2015 2016 when it really started picking up when the fork wars like started rumbling and there there was no algo back

then it was all chronological tweet deck was like the thing so i i would just build list of people like i would personally create my own algos of list of people and i have a bitcoin list you can Go to my ex-profile and find it. I've been building it since, I think, 2013, maybe 2014. But for the longest time, it was just like chronological order of the conversations happening on that list were how I consumed content about Bitcoin. And when they took my baby, that is TweetDeck, behind the shed and shot its brains out, it really disrupted my uh my information flow for for many years there i felt like i was plugged

into the matrix and to your point yeah the algos i mean it's very obvious that they're siloing i mean not just bitcoin or anybody like i know now how to manipulate the algo in my favor like if i notice that it's making me angry it's like all right let me go find somebody talking about ai or somebody talking about something positive or somebody doing like golf um golf demos like you know golf coaches showing swing demos and like go like some of those suites so i get more optimism and um signal injected into my into my feed but i think it's obvious once you notice how the algorithm works and reacts to what you're interacting with is it like you get siloed immediately into what you're interacting with you just showed more and more and more of it

and uh like i've noticed especially after negative news events like if there's some really bad news item that comes out there and I engage with it at all just because I wanted to keep up with the world. I am just given more and more and more and more of that negative content. And you literally have to be conscious about it and try to have it not shoved down your throat by the algorithms. And it's a complex subject because I'm very grateful for the algorithms in other ways. So much of the Bitcoin community that I know, I came to have some really fantastic friends. And in some ways, those have been algorithmically driven friendships in the sense where I had some hobby i was into and we connected with it and i know because of the algorithm right

but at the same time it's so toxic when you're sent down this like negative rabbit hole and somebody's spiraling on a topic and the thing they probably need is to have no more of that fed to them automatically but it's just like shoved down their throat so it's it's a weird world we live in i feel that the old just regular social feed days you just scroll and get the the entire history was so amazing in some ways um and i definitely have some nostalgia for that time for sure yeah one thing i forgot to mention earlier that i think could contribute to uh the conviction and the sentiment the diverging sentiment even though g's are still relatively angry compared historically but compared to plebs less angry and obviously

as we can see on this chart more convicted than plebs are who seem to be losing conviction right now i think a lot of that has to do with um like how long you've been in bitcoin and what that means for like the value of the bitcoin they hear hold so like anybody who's gotten in at 2021 um particularly if you got in like later that year i'm just trying to pull up a chart to make sure i'm accurate on these um on these numbers but yeah if you got it in like 2021 the price of bitcoin ran up to 60 and you've been in it for five years and you look up and we're at 63 000 i can see why a lot of people are like oh um this is not what i thought it was but right where i was five years ago and

obviously that runs with the assumption that you top bought the top and never bought again i mean you dca'd every two weeks during that period i think you're still up um pretty dramatically uh considering the bear market of 22 and 23. um but i i think there is this sort of people put the mental flag down of like i got into bitcoin in april 2021 it was trading at 60 000 and now it's like oh it's june of 2026 and it's trading at 63 000 and people like what what did i get is it really happening is this thing actually valuable it just goes to prove like the value of dca and consistency rather than like just yoloing all your money at the top what's like tricky though is like when you look at some of these uh like measures of sentiment optimism and

things you know people are so convicted at tops they're so optimistic at top so they disproportionately make terrible decisions when that happens and i'm not saying this through the lens of like somebody who's an expert at it either like i looking through some of my own data with this like i'm guilty of both of these things and i think that's extremely common especially when people come into bitcoin because price is basically the biggest advertisement right like that's that's the thing that gets most people initially like no matter how you want to feel about it like human greed is a really powerful emotion that draws people towards seeing these things and it's usually after that price advertisement that you begin to learn go down the rabbit hole so to speak and just like

the whole thing and learn how profoundly impactful this technology can be but very few people at least hear about bitcoin at first because of those things it's almost always the price that draws people in which is happening typically when people are optimistic and euphoric and highly convicted yeah how do we use this sentiment data when uh what is your what is your hope by surfacing this data and synthesizing it and making people aware of it like is there anything actionable from all all this do you think so i for sure think so but i'm glad you asked this because i have a lot of people that see it they're like all right man how can i trade on this i'm like that's that's not really my interest around it like the way i think about it is just to have a more accurate lens of

where things are at where literally just seeing some of these things for me personally has been valuable where if i i i feel as though i've been more optimistic the more i've looked at it because i see that people are angry and like to just be in your own little algorithmic silo like we were talking about and feeling angry is very different than if you see like okay the broader bitcoin community is pretty pissed off right now even if you don't know what they're pissed off at even if like they're having talking about different things then you're just like seeing that like all right everybody is angry right now that means that people are disproportionately likely to believe stupid shit and they're more likely to like make bad decisions or want people to blame for stuff

so whenever you see people blaming sailor for a price sell-off because they sold 32 bitcoin like maybe fade that narrative a little bit like don't feel quite as fearful because you can see that other people feel that way that that's sort of the lens that i'm looking through things on or the other side of that being like if people are optimistic and really highly convicted like maybe be a little bit cautious or not think that we're going to have like a new paradigm thing like this is a it's just a useful lens to be a little bit more uh like practical perhaps it's not going to like predict to the perfect t like some future price but i think it's a really good way to like make sure you have a good knowledge of where things are at and don't

get too wrapped up in whatever dumb story is getting thrown around twitter at the time and just being able to have a little bit more accurate a lens of where things are going yeah but i'm thinking like your comments about storytelling earlier like is there something because i'm conscious about this obviously just the nature of what i do here on the podcast and newsletter and on x to a certain extent too is uh effect like that's something i've been fascinated with to affecting narratives and it's something i became extremely fascinated with about eight years ago when i was working great american mining and we were dealing with like the esg narrative headwinds and basically positioning bitcoin mining as

sort of good for energy systems good for humanity good for human flourishing actually counterintuitive to to the broader public who thinks that we're wasting energy It's like, well, no, actually, we're being extremely energy efficient by utilizing energy assets that are otherwise stranded or just completely wasted. And we're actually helping bolster the economics of utilities and grid systems so they can reinvest. And then on top of that, like highlighting how objectively absurd the concept of ESG is. uh and i think you know whether people want to admit it or not bitcoin miners or people commenting on the bitcoin mining industry in that period of time did have a positive effect in terms of helping people come to realize that esg was completely asinine um and so on that note like

using and recognizing um where sentiment and conviction may be at any given point in time and using that as a trigger not maybe as a buy but as a as like a reframing and a reinvigoration of the the fundamentals which is i think in the last month specifically is really what i've been focusing on it's like okay what's going on outside of bitcoin that is going to drive people to bitcoin look at the straighter news the weaponization of the incumbent financial and monetary system like it's like hey they're preventing people from accessing their assets and it's even happening on stablecoin rails now too like if you think um if you approach it unemotionally yes you may not agree with anybody or everybody that's using bitcoin or any one

entity that's using bitcoin but you have to admit that bitcoin due to its design can be used by anybody and if it can be and they're being shut out from other means of payment or value storage like they're going to find bitcoin useful and that is that is bullish um but again going back to storytelling narrative and using the sentiment and conviction data that you've aggregated to sort of trigger um it's like an alarm that says like hey get the good why we're here content out or something like that uh yeah there's a lot of different stuff here is a fun one but like Like, there's all sorts of different stories that get told out there. And I think what can be really interesting about this is, like, how the story is told under the context of some of these other things, right?

Like, one of the more interesting ones to me was looking at, like, the strategic Bitcoin reserve as a story and how it aligned with other emotions and price, too, right? Like, when price was ripping at the end of 2024, people were talking about the strategic Bitcoin reserve. And there was actually forward movement on it, too, with the government, right? Like, it was a thing. but the narrative out there was it was going to be this persistent nation state buyer and it was just gonna be like yeah crazy euphoric bull run because of it right and it's kind of funny that like it was specifically when people were the most optimistic that that narrative took off right and presently there is movement on the strategic bitcoin reserve like there's stuff

happening out there there is continued action but what's crazy is the mention rate is just zero like it is very infrequently talked about there's like scott bestin was just out there talking about it as well that thing that tweet about it the videos about it that got almost no traction if that same thing happened back at the end of 2024 that would have been like way up there everybody would have watched on say this thing is happening and i think it's really interesting looking at the same story under the context of like really optimistic regimes versus more fearful angry ones where people just don't take these stories as seriously where they're like underweighting the probability of this it's still all kind of like probably ballistic anything could happen we could have

massive sell-offs because something crazy happens over um in the middle east or we got some positive news that breaks it's just like impossible to really you know future stuff in that manner right but it is i think useful to think like what kind of stories are people underweighting or overweighting um and that sbr in my opinion is like one of them where people just don't care about it right now for whatever reason and probably because of a lot of the boredom and the anger and the poor moods right yeah like yeah like the sweet i mean it's definitely not it's not a great performer for us i mean got 184 000 views but 478 like 61 retweets but yeah scott besom is basically asked by tim scott like what's going on with all of our initiatives in the realm

of bitcoin and crypto and scott percent explicitly said we're working on the strategic bitcoin reserve it's going to take time but we want to do it right like it's important it's like signaling like no we haven't forgotten about this um we're going to try and get a bill passed which is incredibly bullish and to your point not many people covering it and even when we covered it yeah 184 000 impressions is is um it's pretty good but the engagement on the tweet itself is not as high as as one might expect and so if you post that same thing man in the middle of like a euphoric bull market that thing's doing 10 000 likes or if not more whatever the number is but it's just really interesting because again like the anger out there you get the dumbest possible

post people talking about say or blowing up and that does crazy numbers because people are desperately looking for villains like and not even just the broader public but like bitcoiners are looking for villains too because they're angry about something there's just this like residual emotional environment that's out there and when stuff happens like certain kind of stories are more likely to latch on under those environments and i think that lens is really interesting to me where there's all these other positive movements too. A clarity act is happening too. There's a lot of stuff I'm not always the biggest fan of in it,

but like regardless, it's definitely this narrative that's really positive, right? And people are not caring about it quite as much because where we're at presently with moods. It's always like the variance between them, right? That's the most interesting. It's not just like one single metric that's going to be useful, but like really looking at these and looking at them

in the context of everything else is to me is the most fascinating stuff. and so what do you think could be the catalyst for a sentiment shift here or what is needed for a sentiment shift so again plebs are not very convicted right now they're basically another way to frame that is they're like looking for a story to latch on to um because a new story that they can latch on to would allow them to have new conviction basically people are humans are always looking for new stories to tell we're always looking for thing to latch on to to understand the world better so stuff will come up what that'll be i

have no idea yet i'll for sure be watching it because one of the interesting things is like seeing what early trends are starting to be talked about disproportionately a really big trend was like the strc thing as like this perpetual buyer bitcoin monetizing the bond market that was a really big thing i don't think that is done yet as a narrative that one was very consistently growing over time that's something but sometimes narratives like the relationship between price narrative is interesting too like um narratives pop up because of price oftentimes like don't necessarily lead it you know like it we're kind of looking for stories not necessarily like finding them ahead of time so it's always like a interesting thing there something else

i will mention that's like kind of interesting to me here in this specific market dynamic is the four-year cycle um so like we've talked about like when stories are proven incorrect it's really volatile right because like it's a thing that we all locked onto as a truth that we were setting is like this is this is our new barometer for how the world works so to me one of the interesting things right now is the four-year cycle where like everybody's super highly convicted the four-year cycle is just not going to break it's this reality a lot of people are very convicted so i haven't done this crazy deeply because i'm not quite as interested in the crypto space but i did want to look at them a little bit to like see where

crypto folks were doing they're doing terribly spoil i get just really bad it's hilarious um but a lot of those folks now are so convicted the four-year cycle just mathematically guaranteed that we're going to bottom in like october and then have another four-year bull run so to me like this narrative is absolutely fascinating presently where people are like pretty locked in that that's going to be the thing right so if anything happens where that narrative is like challenged at all even if it's like i'm not saying like we're gonna like see a run-up like who knows it's still like just this crazy like there's so many things that can happen all i'm saying is that if something does change here if we do see any positive price action or

even months from now like before the four-year cycle bottom should happen if those things do start happen this narrative unravels very very very very quickly because normally when narratives are destroyed there's volatility around them because people realize they were totally wrong offside their view of the world was just incorrect that is going to be so interesting to me like watching the four-year cycle narrative like how it gets talked about more when it gets talked about more and the conviction around it specifically yeah yeah the four-year cycle i'm trying to think of like what um because i mean i was like i said hand up i was like super cycle i think the strategic reserve was like governments are

to be buying like we're done now it's like all right four-year cycle safe and dino miss was right he's been talking about this publicly on on x he i think he was one of the more level-headed bitcoiners um reacting last year he was like nope i'm convinced the four-year cycle still think we're gonna we're gonna drift lower for the next year and up to this point that's uh proven to be true and that a like who like you said like some catalysts will emerge will latch onto it it will um what i'm looking for it will confirm our priors and um the conviction will rise i'm like yeah we were right we were right but i'm trying to think of like the again going back to what i've been trying to do the last few weeks like is there any sort of consistent

persistent narrative catalysts that or could there emerge a more persistent um inconsistent a narrative that that sort of does take us to oh bitcoin's here it's not going away everybody needs to get some adoption it's just going to experience an iphone moment where um it goes from this niche asset that a bunch of us crazy people are into um and some institutions and now nation states are as well too it becomes a oh you don't you don't have bitcoin like you know you have bad money like you to get better money it sometimes i think it takes pain too like uh the trucker protest being an example that where you like literally see people like use bitcoin in a way that like nothing else could have solved kind of thing like sometimes it takes these negative events to prove out the

underlying thesis and why that's so important um like we like sometimes it's not even necessarily a positive narrative it's like a bad thing about money printing or like the way the government our financial systems work. That's the thing that'll set people over the line because like I don't have any charts of it, but one of the things I did look at was the phrase cold storage and that being so much less of a primarily talked about thing than it was even back like a few years ago. And but these properties of Bitcoin are made on change. And I'm certain that during specific regimes of like monetary action by our governments, like these things will come back again like these properties are profoundly useful but we kind of forget that at

times right especially like in a first world country like the u.s like it's just not as needed for a lot of people in the bitcoin space and it's they don't see that but like there will be events that happen inevitably that prove out the value of this thesis once more you know yeah it's like proof of keys day proof of keys day used to be a big thing uh until trace mayor left like every january 3rd people would would uh go to their exchange and sweep the the bitcoin they had in the exchange to cold storage and that that narrative's completely died i do think it's beginning to re-emerge but just from a different angle because i think one of the anger uh one of the points that's driving people towards anger is they believe a paper bitcoin summer and obviously

the um the assumptions of of paper bitcoin or that there's re-hypothecation going on it's the largest buyers over the last two three years are black black rock on behalf of their customers and these treasury companies that are custodying at coin maze people are just running wild like are they actually buying the bitcoin is it there um and i think you're beginning to see a re-emergence At least from my anecdotal observations that people are coming back to, oh, you may need to put this in cold storage. And it's not because it's the safest way. It's because you need to sort of incite the bank run to unearth every hypothecation that makes this. Paper Bitcoin was a phrase I was super curious about, right?

It's definitely been a narrative popping up. um uh the whole like paper bitcoin really really like took off in summer of 2025 like paper bitcoin summer was a whole thing um but what i found interesting here was like it's really risen up more recently but in a negative context i have it labeled here like it really peaked as a narrative alongside higher levels of anger because people were looking for somebody to blame for stuff this is not to say there is not some blame there like they're very well could be not well like there's for sure price manipulation happening out there, right? Especially because like in the paper Bitcoin markets, you're able to do these kinds of things. But it's kind of interesting to me that

like the narratives come and go with the emotion, right? Like it's not necessarily like, it's not always based on truth that stories arise. It's often based on like what people want to hear what they're like looking for out there, right? Yeah. Now you can see this resolving in many different way it's like right now stretch i think it traded at like 91 over the weekend or late last week i don't know where it is now but it looks like it's drifting back to par but you have this temporary two-day uh sort of blow up on twitter over the weekend we're like oh stretch is gonna lose its peg it's the next terra luna um it's gonna blow up it's gonna be massive yeah it's back at like almost 97 so like stretch just reclaims the peg it's like oh well maybe the mechanisms are working

and this is a perpetual bitcoin mining machine so this one's maybe been maybe the most interesting narrative i've looked at this is yeah stretch talked about over time across the bitcoin community and you can see like when it came into existence in july or end of july i think it was like literally the last day like the 31st or something and then you can see it grow over time but what's so interesting about it in my opinion is the variation the volatility of the narrative which is kind of a cool concept like narratives are not always linear up into the right like there's a lot of up and down based on how news comes out right um but uh stretch in general has been this like persistent and growing narrative over time the first time i looked at this it was just like so

obviously up in the right it's been kind of falling off here more recently but even still it's like lower lows higher highs generally when thinking about it and it's it's kind of non-directional in a way right like it's not just that people are really euphoric about it like but sometimes people are talking about it in a negative context but still like uh all marketing is or all pr is good pr even if it's negative sometimes like this is becoming a thing that people are talking about and it's growing consistently so like this is definitely um in my opinion a narrative that's it's not going anywhere it was to parent anywhere right now and this has been much more durable of a narrative uh compared to some other ones what are some other narratives that you're following

that people may not be obvious to some people um so it may not be obvious like a lot of the ones are relatively obvious because it's like the ones that are talked about the most frequently are the uh interesting ones to look at um quantum was one that i've looked at pretty closely because that also like so many of these actually have really similar chart dynamics where it's like if it's in fearful negative fearful narrative they are up into the right recently really high mentioned rates if it's a positive narrative they are low currently uh clarity act was another one that i looked at pretty closely that's getting talked about more now but like people are kind of underweighting uh generally um stuff like recession that as a word was interesting uh

there was like a couple spikes to talk about that things like mnav over time where people like you can really see the rate at which mnav was talked about in these treasury companies like was blowing off right as well as all the euphoric mnav valuations where that was kind of a fun one and sort of all over the place with it because it's interesting to look at and it's interesting look how different groups talk about different things too. I don't have any charts with it to share today, but like MSTR as a narrative is talked about like 10x more in the like Bitcoin capitalist community that Saylor has coined compared to like the technologists or the fundamentalists. Just like different groups care about different things, latch on to different

narratives. And especially because like we are all kind of siloed by our algorithms again. and despite trying to stay up to date with things like you probably have a better pulse on this than the vast majority of people but like a lot of bitcoiners are kind of in their own siloed algorithmic world and don't always have insight to what other groups are talking about so it's really interesting now like seeing what other people are thinking about and when it's different from you and the capitalist group in general are actually very highly convicted right now which is kind of another interesting thing yeah do you think there's value uh so i think i would fall um into like the hardcore bitcoin like technologist bucket i think because i talk

about a lot that's what i care about that's actually what interests me the most um but do you think and i to that point though like i do follow what's going on with stretch what's going on with mstr the mnav cover like i feel like just due to the nature of what i do i have to have a sort of well-rounded understanding of what's happening across the spectrum but to your point it's the silos do exist and do you think it would be beneficial for people in certain silos to really understand what's happening in the other silos uh and if so how do you how do you do that that's already been one of the benefits to this for me is like seeing what people are talking about and seeing how moods are different between them um like the seeing the mood differences too

between like the technologists and the fundamentalists and the capitalists has been like really interesting you can really see like the moods are pretty poor generally among the more fundamentalist group of people at least those in my system i literally just did this this weekend so it's kind of new to me i haven't explored it quite as deeply as some of the other ones but like seeing how those things differ is fascinating another one is like bip 110 i specifically have cohorted the bip 110 users and how they're doing right now and their moods are even worse than the plebs that we've looked at um they're like across the board like anger fear us optimism and like and lower conviction to just like the whole host of kind of like

negative and then not convicted about stuff those sorts of things are interesting because like i and maybe i was plugged into some of these communities but like seeing where they're at and where their specific sentiment is that has been interesting to me to get a pulse for things too because like you can take what you want away from that i know it's a pretty like um charged topic but that does give you a pretty good lens into how confident different groups are that their thing is a winning thing like the capitalists on the other hand are extremely confident and uh not necessarily always positively happy right now but they're very high conviction that they are right and that that that alone is like a very interesting takeaway in my opinion yeah no the

bit 110 i can just tell uh tell from experience they like to reply guy me and the tftc account a lot because we're uh not as supportive as they would like us to be and it's always very very vulgar very negative i'm an enemy of bitcoin now yeah there's a lot of that going on and again like people are looking for villains right like it doesn't take much to become a villain when everybody's kind of pissed off yeah i'm just some guy just doesn't agree with bit 110 i'm i'm a villain now um this is fascinating what um what else can we can we pull from this what else uh what action should people take uh after listening to this this episode well i i think having continued conviction in bitcoin right now would be maybe the one thing i'd like to

leave people with like it's so easy to get wrapped up in the more human side of stuff and like fall into whatever narratives out there and fall into the fear that prices are down but in my opinion it's just like never been a better time to revisit the reasons you're here and double down on your conviction again it's in times like these that like that really do separate people right like now is the precise time you should be stacking in the same way that like a james check has the quartiles like people are super pissed off right now and like rather than that be a reason for you to like get wrapped up in the anger and check out and get bored like double down like now is a great time to buy bitcoin i am buying bitcoin hard right now like

i don't want to tell people what to do but like to me like kind of fading that and like when you see anger and fear i know it's like it's like talking so much about negative emotions and that i was this positive thing but in my opinion the takeaway is like you should be freaking optimistic right now like this is exactly the things you would expect to see during bottoms like who knows what the price will do in the short term i have no freaking clue but this is your signal right here I think one thing we do have a clue of, we can say with a high degree of certainty, is that there's blood in the streets right now. That's typically when the best buying opportunities

arise. And again, we don't get financial advice on this show at all, but I think I concur with you that using my personal pattern recognition of sentiment over the years without the help of AI tools, but my own AI brain, my my meat ai tool that is my brain it's just it's one of those periods where it's like yeah everybody's pissed nobody's paying attention to bitcoin because ai is taking the wind out of the sails and those historically have been the best times to double down to your point where um where should i send people to find out more about your analysis yeah so the best way i'm

I'm pretty active on X. My handle is Sully Michael then, like my name, but just inverted. And then I have a full archive of this work that I've been really pumping a lot more effort into on Substack. Or you can just search my name, Michael Sullivan, and I do all sorts of stuff there

and have a full way in-depth versions of some of these charts, writings about them, videos about them, et cetera, et cetera. I'll be sharing a lot more of my stuff over there too. Well, thank you for doing the work, sir. It's fascinating. It's a fascinating sociological dive

into what's going on in the bitcoin markets and uh i've i've been loving uh watching you put out the charts and following it as you've been um iterating on on the analysis and diving deeper into certain cohorts and um basically surfacing what what people are actually thinking right now i think it's highly valuable data and to your point earlier it's like it's not going to tell you when to buy or when we're going to bottom tick or top tick but it'll it'll help you out directionally which i think is extremely valuable yeah exactly that's how i'm thinking about it too awesome well michael this has been an absolute pleasure we'll have to do this again at some point catch up uh if sentiment gets worse if it gets better i'm sure we'll have something to talk

about we'll we'll be able to pick out narratives that arise and drive sentiments or ways that that'll be a fun ongoing conversation yeah these things are a certainty i guarantee you another story all evolve and become the thing it always happens ever all right that's all we got today for peace and love thank you for listening to this episode of tftc if you've made it this far i imagine you got some value out of the episode if so please share it far and wide with your friends and family we're looking to get the word out there also wherever you're listening where that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want

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