The Wolf Of All Streets - Big Threat To Bitcoin, But BitVM Can Change Everything

Episode Date: October 11, 2023

I am joined by Alex Miller, CEO at Hiro Systems, and Chris Inks, a Trader and Market Psychology Coach. We are going to talk about the threats to Bitcoin given the ongoing attack on Israel and geopolitical risks it brings and also uncover BitVM and why it can become a game changer.  Alex Miller: https://twitter.com/alexlmiller Chris Inks: https://twitter.com/TXWestCapital ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/   ►►OKX Sign up for an OKX Trading Account then deposit & trade to unlock mystery box rewards of up to $60,000!  👉 https://www.okx.com/join/SCOTTMELKER  ►►THE DAILY CLOSE BRAND NEW NEWSLETTER! INSTITUTIONAL GRADE INDICATORS AND DATA DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX, EVERY DAY AT THE DAILY CLOSE. TRADE LIKE THE BIG BOYS. 👉 https://www.thedailyclose.io/   ►►NORD VPN  GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets   ►►COINROUTES TRADE SPOT & DERIVATIVES ACROSS CEFI AND DEFI USING YOUR OWN ACCOUNTS WITH THIS ADVANCED ALGORITHMIC PLATFORM. SAVE TONS OF MONEY ON TRADING FEES LIKE THE PROS! 👉 http://bit.ly/3ZXeYKd  Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io   Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #Trading The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

The escalating war between Hamas and Israel could be a big threat to Bitcoin, according to a bunch of traders not named me because I tend to disagree with that sentiment, but it makes for a great title to a YouTube stream. But BitVM can change everything. If you guys haven't seen this, we're getting yet another proposal to make Bitcoin more programmable and be able to do all the things that shit coins can do, which I know is very exciting to Bitcoiners. But I've got someone who's actually building on Bitcoin to join today. That is Alex Miller, one of my favorite guests, both on YouTube and Spaces. We're going to talk about BitVM, whether it's a good idea,

whether it's better to be building on layer twos, and when we'll see layer sevens in Bitcoin. We're not really going to talk about that, but maybe we'll get there one day. Guys, we got another great stream for you today. Of course, Texas West Capital, Christopher Inks on the back end telling us what he thinks of the market looking at charts. Let's go. what's up everybody i'm scott malker also known as the wolf of all streets before we get started please subscribe to the channel and hit that like button i'm getting faster and faster and faster with that as the days go i'm going to just go ahead and bring on Alex right now. And we're going to talk about everything that's happening in this market right now. It's hard, honestly, man, not to just pack it in while the war is happening. And I think that that's been a lot of people's gut instinct. I know we do Twitter spaces and Mario hosts a whole bunch

of spaces in the finance space, just haven't done it this week. Right. And we've been sort of pushing through with the crypto town hall because we feel it is important at least to review these things and to show up and answer people's questions. But I don't know if you're finding it the same way, but a bit hard to focus on work with everything that's happening right now in the world. Yeah, it's not awesome. I mean, the I'm really conflicted about the amount of conversation, everyone that we all have going on, because, like, on one hand, both the dopamine hit. And I think just the grounding of trying to gather information is just really core to the human experience in a time like this. But we just don't know anything right now. It's so I mean, it's literally called the fog of war for a reason. And I wish I could say I was better about getting offline and just, you know, decompressing myself and touching grass. But no, I'm doing the same thing and constantly refreshing like everyone else is. Yeah, I think that's the natural reaction. I remember the, you know, the first Gulf War when I was a young teenager and you just went to the few news stations once or twice a day.

You got your update from Tom Brokaw or Peter Jennings or Dan Rather, actual reliable news sources, and you moved on with your life. Now it really is just a constant flood. I find it pretty hard to consume all of it. And I think that's been pretty clear. But obviously, a big part of that is the takes on what could happen with Bitcoin, right? And we have this article here from Coindesk, Bitcoin could fall. It's so direct. Could, it's possible. Could fall as market braces for spread of Israeli Hamas war. And then it goes on to say there's three traders who had different opinions.

Of course, we found three guys and they all disagree on what might happen to the price of a nascent asset in the future. I don't really think that the war is going to directly affect Bitcoin, but I would love your thoughts. About the same. Whenever someone asks me for price predictions on Bitcoin or any crypto, I'm like, sometime in the next three months, it will go up 10 percent. It will go down 10 percent and it will then do something else. It's solid. No one really knows. And I mean, so I run actually, my wife and I run a small like venture capital side fund called Chaotic Capital. capital. And literally the entire idea behind this fund is that humans are terrible, terrible

at predicting the second, let alone third order effects of anything that happens. Right. And the thing that's crazy to me about people being like, oh, this is going to happen to Bitcoin because what's going on? Like, first off, you don't know what's going to happen in the Middle East right now. Like apparently the U.S. right now is going around hardcore to Lebanon and a bunch of other countries and being like, don't fucking escalate this. Right. Like there's a lot of people working very hard to make sure it doesn't escalate. There are lots of people working hard to make sure it does. So like no, A, nobody knows what's going to happen there. You don't know what the other effects are going to be. And then so you certainly don't know the third order effects of how that's going to impact Bitcoin, because

it's as you pointed out, it's still too new an asset. And I know it's 15 years old, but it's still too new an asset for people to have any idea how it reacts to major world events in something like this. So, yeah. Yeah, I agree. And we were sort of talking offline before we started. And you made, I think, the best point, which is, yeah, maybe it has a major effect on the global economy if it escalates and pushes the world into recession or something. And then we can talk about the effects of Bitcoin. But then again, that's a third or fourth order effect, not a direct effect of a war. Yeah, I think, you know, there was I've listened to some smart folks over the last uh you know week or so on

different stuff actually there's a really send them my way because i've just seen morons well look if you can get if you can get the president of the chicago fed to come on the show i'd be super impressed um but you know he made a really good point that like look he thinks the fed can actually like thread the needle on the inflation soft landing. The one danger is, and this is a giant one, is what's the exogenic shock that might hit it, right? Like if we don't get any insane shocks, we can actually probably thread the needle without a recession because normally recessions at the end of the day, like there's preceding events and factors, but like something usually tips it over, right? Something makes it so you can no longer adapt.

Whatever they finally break. Right. So what's that event going to be? Will it be a war in the Middle East? Maybe. Will it just be an auto strike? Maybe. You know, we don't know.

And again, that's why even if, say, this war causes some kind of global economic change and that causes change, you don't know when it's going to happen. You don't know which aspect of it's going to be. But honestly, I always laugh, though, when it's like a Fed governor who tells you they're going to thread the needle. It's like slight vested interest and tell you how amazing of a job they're doing. Well, sure. But but the funny thing about it is that I think especially when you're talking about economic and monetary policy, it is very much a case of how much people believe you is the greatest determinant of if you're able to do the job or not. Right? The old self-fulfilling prophecy. Kind of. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that makes sense. And I just laugh.

You talked about chaotic capital and the very idea that people are horrible at understanding even the first order, but certainly the second and third order effects of things. And the Fed is literally like using lagging data from 12 and 18 months ago. And predictive markets have been horribly wrong about everything that was going to happen with recession, rate hikes, and rate cuts, even when it was like 99% certainty that we see three rate cuts by the end of 2023. Now it's like, 2029, bro. We might recess a little bit. Yeah. And I think as humans, the only thing we ever really try and do is pattern match, right. And you had someone on we're on a space earlier this week and I forget who it was, but they made a really good point, which is like, you know, if you're if you're talking about like Middle East and oil, like you kind of have to throw all of history out the window because we've never been in a conflict like this at the same time that the U.S. is the biggest oil exporter in the world.

So all of this stuff of like, well, what if they shut down pipelines? Like, well, it doesn't really matter. We're in that exporter right now. Yeah. This isn't like, yeah, we're not raiding Iraq and running straight over to Kuwait and Iraq to get their oil rigs like in the last one, which we did a terrible job of securing, by the way. But, you know, we all know that those were oil wars, right? And so a war in the Middle East that's not about oil is really something different, I think. And that is an important nuance. By the way, there are people who think that Bitcoin is a tremendously good bet in a time of geopolitical strife. This guy, billionaire Paul Tudor Jones backs Bitcoin and gold as geopolitical risks rise. Now, not a big surprise because Paul Tudor Jones has been a Bitcoin bull for quite a long time.

But it is nice when you have an article on Coindesk where you have three random traders you've never heard of telling you what might could possibly potentially maybe happen with Bitcoin to have this guy come in and be like, shut up. This is great in a time of geopolitical strife. Yep. I mean, look, I love Bitcoin. I think it's a good long-term bet on things. I think it's really interesting both for the technical applications and stuff, but someone talking right now is just pumping their own bags.

I mean, he literally said, I can't love stocks, but I love Bitcoin and gold. Exactly. So what I'd say is- As stocks go up. If you were going to buy Bitcoin yesterday because you think Bitcoin's good in 10 years, buy Bitcoin. If you weren't, don't buy it because you think it's a good bet tomorrow.

I said the same thing on the spaces yesterday. There was this guy who's like, I'm a Bitcoin maxi, and I want to know if I should be buying Bitcoin now because the war is ahead. I was like, if you're calling yourself a Bitcoin maxi, you've been buying Bitcoin anyways. Yeah. Like nothing changed today in the world that should shake your conviction as a Bitcoin maximalist. And certainly nothing happened that's going to make you say, man, I hated this yesterday, but I really love it today.

Yeah. Also, there's no one time you should be buying stuff. Just dollar cost average. Always dollar cost average. Not financial advice. But I agree with his financial advice. And then, you know, right after you get a legend billionaire like Paul Tudor Jones telling you there's a great time to buy gold and Bitcoin. On the flip side, you get Jim Cramer. Mr. Bitcoin is about to go down. All right. So we're about to rip then. Sweet. It is on.

It is crazy that the guy seems like he's always wrong, but I think he does have a history actually of being right. Maybe in Jim's defense, if you have to make calls all day, every day, you're going to be wrong. So, you know, as I recall, he was not a terrible fund manager back when he was doing it. But yeah, look, being a TV personality, A, it's entertainment. It's not news or financial analysis.

It's entertainment. And he's got to spend all day constantly making calls. And it's really easy to go back and find all of the ones he was wrong on, which there's some good ones. But yeah, I mean, it's confirmation bias for those of us who love the old meme of this. But I am looking forward to seeing everyone posting about this on Twitter and how Bitcoin's about to do it. I mean, at least we'll have something to laugh about for a day. But OK, now we've talked about the market. I think that we all concur that right

now is really not the time to talk about the market because it's going to do what it's going to do. But what you actually specialize in, obviously, is building on Bitcoin, right? Obviously, Hero and your involvement there then with Stacks, building on layer twos to make Bitcoin more scalable. Well, right now we have, of course, Bitcoin transactions seeing sharp decline following Ordinal's peak hype. So maybe, listen, we have people who don't follow it so closely. You could give us the two-minute TLDR on the huge ordinal spike, how ordinals actually function on the layer one, and then maybe why you believe the layer two is better, which will transition us into the next conversation. Yeah. So ordinals are a really cool innovation that came out in like February of this year.

And basically what it does is we've always assumed that every single Satoshi, right, the 100 millionth of a Bitcoin is completely fungible. You can't uniquely identify them. And it turns out that's actually not true. You totally can. And using the witness data in Bitcoin blocks, four megabytes per block, you can store data on the Bitcoin chain, uniquely link it to a unique Satoshi and then trade that Satoshi. Right. So basically make a non fungible token, except, you know, NFTs and things on all other networks. They're just a pointer to like an IPFS file, whereas here you can actually embed the data on the Bitcoin chain.

Like you and it can be it can be an image. It can be a text file. Whereas here you can actually embed the data on the Bitcoin chain. And it can be an image, it can be a text file. Scott, if you got some cool secret national security information in a PDF file and wanted to embed it onto the Bitcoin chain forever, you could do that using Orginals. So it's really powerful when it comes to storing data on the chain, people poured into it right away, both kind of OG Bitcoiners, but also, you know, a lot of folks from other ecosystems who wanted to see it, like Yuga Labs, the, you know, creators of Bored Ape and things immediately started playing with it and released a collection there and things. So it then about two months in, really broke the Bitcoin chain, as it said, because someone came up with this BRC20 standard. What's that sound like? ERC20, right?

So, basically, how can we make meme coins and fungible tokens on Bitcoin? The only issue is, it's a super open standard, but incredibly technically inefficient because it's basically just JSON files written into an ordinal's inscription. And so everyone like land goes to land, grab these tokens and, you know, drove the cost of Bitcoin transactions to like 500 sats per byte. And you couldn't even get a transaction through no extreme premium so the mempool is completely full here's the really important thing it did when it comes to the long-term future of bitcoin is it actually for several days had you had inversions in miners making more money from transaction fees and from mining rewards. Yeah. And especially with, you know, the next halving coming up in, you know, at the end of April of 2024, it's highlighting the fact that like, look, if Bitcoin is going to be long term viable,

it is going to have to have greater and greater transaction fees over time. Well, either you have to have constant increase in the price, which sure maybe happens, but ultimately long-term there will ultimately be no Bitcoin being given away as a block reward in like 40 years from now. And so it, the network has to be useful enough to people that they are willing to pay a lot of very high transaction fees to use it. And this also comes around to why we, you know, at Hero and a lot of other folks are such big believers on layer twos, is that what layer twos allow you to do, similar to the way layer twos on Ethereum work, is both A, add new functionality, like fully programmable smart contracts, like we have on the Stacks network. But also, by rolling up huge numbers of transactions, you can get a lot more functionality,

run them a lot cheaper. But those transactions themselves, kind of settling everything back to the Bitcoin chain, are now insanely, insanely valuable. And so people will pay hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to write one of these transactions to the Bitcoin chain in a way that you're not to Venmo your friend 50 bucks. You're not going to pay $100 to send someone $50. Although there was a time with ERC-20 that seemed like that's what you had to do if you wanted to send somebody $50. The last bull market Ethereum transactions were so incredibly high. People couldn't even that's why nfts died because someone couldn't sell a ten dollar nft without you paying two hundred dollars to mint it yep

i paid a lot of money to get my uh um ens domain i think i paid 75 to register at five dollars yeah yeah i mean then but we were all willing to do it because we knew that ethereum would actually get it done which was not necessarily the case in a lot of other places. It's funny that there was such a controversy about ordinals when effectively the Genesis block had a transcription. It's not like Satoshi didn't do this. Chancellor on the brink of a second. My favorite thing was all the maxis. And look, I have some dear friends who are Maxis. I have one who referred to ordinals as a programming bug, despite it being like literally the most exciting innovation in Bitcoin in years.

But, you know, the funny thing I like is, you know, they're complaining about, you know, you're putting monkey JPEGs in my perfect decentralized money and you're breaking it for, you know, the legitimate uses of bitcoin right people need this to transact with and you're breaking it and keeping them from i'm like i'm sorry you have a chain that you are saying is going to like replace the global finance system for eight billion people and yet like a couple thousand dgen traders swapping monkey pictures and meme. There's wizards, an existential threat. How do you reconcile those two? How do you say that it's going to do all this if it can't handle this? So I love breaking the Bitcoin chain now because it's stress testing. It lets us figure out, hey, how do we scale it for the future? So it's usable for everyone.

Okay. Well, then that leads us to the next topic, which we thought was actually big enough to put in the title, right? We've got BitVM, compute anything on Bitcoin from Robin Linus here. If you guys haven't seen it, here's the actual PDF. I think it's worth a read. Actually, I think it's very interesting, but I think that maybe you are a skeptic of this to some degree, right? Not a skeptic of it in theory, but for all the reasons you just talked about that this would be incredibly inefficient to do it. Exactly. So I think BitVM's awesome. Again, I love anytime someone tries to do innovation on the layer one,

I'm pretty darn happy, right? I love seeing, and we've seen a lot of this happening again, especially since Ordinals came out. It's really led to a revival of the innovation we saw. If you go back to especially pre-Ethereum, things like color coins and whatnot, you saw a lot of people trying to innovate and make Bitcoin programmable and do stuff there. And the whole reason that Ethereum even got created in the first place is that Vitalik got really fed up with the Bitcoin community opposing doing some of these innovations. And so where things have moved in the last few years is people like, OK, we're never going to get a soft fork of Bitcoin. You're never going to introduce more like functionality for this stuff. So we're just going to find crazy hacks and workarounds to make it work using the existing structure. There are proposals for stuff like drive chains, but again, there's a lot of opposition to them from people.

And so, you know, like Ordinals was, BitVM is basically saying, OK, how can we take what Bitcoin can already do and add the programmability there? The downside to that is that it's really convoluted. It's basically you play, you know, two players and only two players can play sort of a logic game using like 128 NAND gates. You have to do a bunch of computation off chain, but you can verify the logic on chain. You can store it in a transaction and it can be on and off chain. And it's limited and complicated enough that it's probably not going to take off, would be my guess. I read this and my brain hurts so bad. Nothing makes me feel stupider than reading white papers. It's interesting white paper because it's both written in plain English.

It is. But you also definitely have to have at least some basis in a lot of this stuff to fully grasp it unlike you know i think the bitcoin white if you go back and read the original bitcoin white paper it's awesome because man it is just it is true plain english like almost yeah you actually understand it i mean listen this is understandable but i got down to like number three on this you know we got this and you know, my ADHD kicked in hard and I was like, oh, look, a squirrel, you know, and then I, and then I moved on with my life. But conceptually, it does seem really interesting, but it doesn't seem necessary when you have things like stacks and hero, obviously, and what you guys are building on your side. Maybe talk about exactly what you guys are focusing on right now and why that's actually better than this. Yeah. So we adhere, we're a dev tools company for building on Bitcoin, right? So we build stuff for

ordinals. We build stuff for stacks. There's other things we've got coming out soon. But the idea behind stacks is there's multiple layer twos in the Bitcoin ecosystem, right? The best of which known is lightning, which is for payments, Right. Super fast, super cheap payments. Stacks is about fully expressive smart contracts on top of Bitcoin. So you basically all of that functionality that's inherent to the chain that you see on like Ethereum and Solana and stuff, we were building it or the community is built, built it and is continuing to build it as a layer two on top of Bitcoin. So you get all of that inherent programmability and super cheap transactions, but it still settles back to and is secured by Bitcoin. And you also get really angry maxis, which is a great... Oh my God. Well, and again, this goes to really interesting stuff about when you're building in

Bitcoin and the technical decisions you make. There's an argument that Lightning, as cool as it is in certain respects, is a little overly complicated and hard to work with. And the reason is because they went to the ends of the earth to avoid using a token. And there is a reason that tokens exist. I'm not talking about meme coins and shit coins, but I'm talking about the tokens that underpin actual networks that can be used for programmability. The reason that Bitcoin created a token is you need an economic incentive for people to mine. You need an economic incentive and a way for people to transact. And if you engineer your entire system around not having a token, you're going to have to make certain trade-offs. And so that's the reason that the

Stacks community, when doing it, were like, no, we we got to have a token. But yes, there's a lot of Bitcoin maxis who hate anything that is not pure, unadulterated Bitcoin, and they don't love us for that. How dare you use my censorship-resistant, decentralized network for something that I, as the president of Bitcoin, do not directly approve of, Alex? I apologize. I should have never even considered it. Craig Wright didn't even tell you you could do it. Oh, my God. You know, the man's a genius. I just I don't understand how he came up with so many good ideas and did everything on his own.

Somebody's going to literally edit out that clip of us and just post it online with no context. And we're going to all of a sudden we're going to get like hate from the Maxis, but we're going to be. But at least we won't get sued by Craig Wright for saying that he's not Satoshi. That's true. We will not get sued. You did not just say that, by the way. You said we won't get sued for saying that. Yeah. If he had heard you saying that we literally airmail paper airplane lawsuit into the face. Right. I'm just saying that Craig Wright is not Satoshi is something that people have said and gotten sued for, even though...

Factually correct. He's not Satoshi. But factually correct. Okay. We got a couple minutes, like three minutes left. Here's the final question. Why should all this stuff be built on Bitcoin and not everywhere else that it's already being built? Sure. Or has been built. Yeah. I mean, look, Bitcoin is the it's the OG chain. It's the OG currency. It's the thing people trust and it's the place people want to build. Like that's what I come back to again with something like Ordinals is it's not just that it's a cool technology. It's that it showed how desperate people are to come back and build this on top

of Bitcoin. But ultimately, chains have network effects. You know, there's only going to be a few 10 years from now that survive. And I'm not saying that the ones that do are even all created now. But I think Bitcoin has shown it has the lasting power. It has the staying power. It is what's trusted by people. And so, you know, if you want to build something that's going to last for decades, why not? You know, you got to do it on a stable surface. And I think that's the thing that Bitcoin provides for a lot of people. And do you think that it can be done with the same, we'll call it robust, even though we know Ethereum is also like 80s technology at this point, but like with the same, you know, sort of robust functionality as can exist on other

chains that are potentially less secure. Yeah, I mean, like I said, I think it's going to happen on L2s, both from a functionality and a scalability perspective, right? Bitcoin's never going to be able to sustain on the L1 the level of transaction volume, nor the speed. You know, it's 10 minute blocks. And when we say 10 minute blocks, it's actually four minutes to 60 minutes, right? With the next upgrade on the Stacks Network that the community is working on now and is releasing probably about a month before the next halving, it's going to be 5-second blocks. That's exciting. An hour to 5 seconds. That's a meaningful improvement.

But 5 seconds and under a penny to run a transaction is what you need to be usable to people, especially as we move to cell phones more for crypto and things. So, yeah, I think this will all get built in the Bitcoin ecosystem. That's what I mean on the L1. You have a cell phone? I'm jealous. That's awesome. Yeah, I got two cell phones, actually. Didn't know that you have to have two phones if you're a real OG crypto guy. I have one functional cell phone. The fact that we're calling them cell phones, by the way,

shows like we're showing our asses a little bit. But my other one is just for Google Authenticator. I don't comment on what security protocols or software programs I use or not. Don't blame you because you actually know what's happening here. All right, man. Well, thank you. Always a pleasure. Thanks for waking up early because i can see it's still dark where you're at yes it's the sun is starting to rise in the background here oh well we'll look forward to that seems to happen every day no matter what we what we do to try to stop it all

right man thank you so much alex everybody follow him he's in the uh down there in the comments is his twitter account uh alex always a pleasure, man. I love talking to you. Thanks, man. Always a great time with you. All right, man. Have a good one. What is up? We're back.

And now it's time to see what Chris thinks about the big threat to Bitcoin. What's the title, man? I don't know. I didn't write it. I'm the worst YouTuber. I'm so bad. It's horrible. I was like, I'm sorry.

I was talking to my producer. I'm like, it's horrible I was like I'm sorry I was talking to my producer I'm like I can't I could be doing this and I could be telling you about like how everything's gonna explode and this is gonna happen and whatever but I just don't give a shit man the world is a really brutal place right now and I don't like

I can't anyways Chris does war does war change your opinion of the charts or the asset? Do you think that this war will fundamentally change Bitcoin in any way, shape, or form? Or is it just pure clickbait media hyperbole that I've now, I guess, technically participated in? Yeah, what's going on, man? You know, again, the way I look at the charts and what's going on is, you know, pretty much the opposite of the way most people do. I think wars are the result of a society's social mood. So the more depressive and pessimistic and whatnot that they get, the less they're going to put their money in the markets, the more they're going to pull their

money out of the markets, market comes down. So it's showing you, the market itself is showing you how society feels at that time. And it's usually, if you look back, I mean, you can look at, for instance, Russia's invasion of Crimea and Ukraine, you can see that those are right around the bottoms of its stock market, just to bring up some more recent kind of events. So, you know, I know people want to say, oh, yeah, you know, war is going to cause all this and do all that. But I think you kind of look at the charts for it. And the charts, you know, for us, especially, you know, are pretty high, right? You know, if we're looking at stock market, for instance, you know, we're coming up there toward that all time high again. It's not the

conditions that we look for in the market to kind of tell us that the society is feeling a certain way. So the market doesn't care about good news or bad news right now. I can tell you that. It's just doing its thing. Is that the dollar you got pulled up there? Yeah, yeah. The dollar, yeah, man. I think it looks really interesting. We were talking about, you know, for I guess a month or two now, we've been talking about some levels we were looking at. This gets us right up here around that 50% retracement.

So, you know, a solid, you know, wave two. You said 107 to 108. Yeah, yeah. Over and over again. 107.33. So, um you know it works well we followed through the as you can see here the ascending support here um we're looking for an impulsive breakdown through the daily pivot that's right around uh 105.43 or so if we can get that we're probably headed down to new lows but uh you know along the way 102.936 and then um the swing low down here at 99.578 are our targets uh to head on down there so i'm you know again

overall i mean everybody freaking oh my god it's been going up and i mean this this is all it did you know we got to bounce around 100 which you should expect it's you know it's a tens number it's a zeros number it's a round number um so yeah i mean nothing doing basically what we're kind of looking for it to do so now we just look for it to fall through lower yeah i mean i have the weekly here and uh i talked about this yesterday but this candle structure that's forming right here that's about as potentially bearish as it gets you already had a little upwick here but now getting this gravestone here or whatever you want to call it there everyone has a different name but long wick up small to small red body bad right and then we'll see i guess how the how the week closes here but follow through with another upwick i mean this is

you know if you were trading this as an alt coin or something you would be getting uh pretty short or certainly exiting a position on something like this, right? This shows that bulls are completely exhausted and that the bears are really kicking in here. And this makes sense. I mean, by the way, if it was wartime, if this was an actual world war escalating, you would expect that bonds would go up, meaning yields would go down initially, right? People start buying bonds. So this is exactly what we would expect for people who don't understand. We talk about it all the time. But when people say that, people often hear the term like it's been the worst bond market of all time, which it has, and then they see yields going up and they don't understand. What do you mean it's a bad bond

market? Yields have absolutely ripped. That's bad because that means that any previous bond with a lower yield is going down in value. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, and, and people, you know, again, people tend to be very emotional. They have their, their opinions on, on what they think is happening and what's, what that's supposed to mean. And then what that meaning is going to lead to in terms of markets, you know, and most of the time people are wrong, you know, again, like you said, if it was a shit coin, you, you know, you'd, you'd be selling the hell out of that. Right. But people are like, Oh no, but the dollar is going to keep going. I'm going to keep going up. Well, I mean, you know, is it one or is it the other?

I mean, you know, the problem is a lot of times people get in there, they get sides, sidetracked by their, um, by their emotion. And it's, it's tough, you know, it's tough. It's tough. That's the toughest thing as a trader. I always say, trading is simple. It's not easy. Anybody that tells you trading is easy is lying to you. Don't listen to them. Run the other way. Because the difficult part is not understanding how to trade it. You can learn risk management. These are just rules. They're simple. Follow the rules, right? But it's that dealing with the emotional and the psychological side of yourself that is really, really difficult. It's what makes us human. I often look at TLT as sort of just a proxy for the bond market, obviously, being the

iShares 20-year ETF. Listen, we're far from the monthly candle closing, but this insane volume down here on the sell-off, maybe if we get this WIC and close a little bit higher, that to me would look like a serious capitulation bottom for bonds, right? And if bonds are bottoming, that probably means the dollar is going to continue down and yields are going to flip and start heading down as well, right? So, and that means stocks reach, frankly. Yeah, yeah. I mean, exactly.

You know, I covered TLT every week, a couple of times a week with what we do. And, you know, we were watching this sideways for forever, kind of expecting it to continue to break down. But, you know, you kind of have to wait for it. It took its little sweet time here. But, I mean, for me, this seems like it's done from the weekly here. From that high up there, it seems like it's done. We're right here around the target area, 83.37. We've got this bullish divergence and oversold here on the weekly, this large one for about a year here.

It's from October of last year. And on the monthly. The monthly is about to print one if it goes up any higher on what I just showed you, by the way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so, again, we see this, right? And again, if we jump here to the weekly, especially, it's easy to see. You've got this big volume spikes down here right at the weekly, especially it's easy to see you've got this, uh, big volume, you know, spikes down here, right at the bottom. And then we're getting this reversal here. Um, you know, I mean, I think, I think it's probably bottomed. Um, it looks pretty close. We've got a count that'll get us there. Uh, locally, I mean, I'd look for a breakout above the daily pivot here, a nice impulsive breakout above 90 and a half. Um, but that should get us on the other direction. And, you know, um, know, and everything else is kind of

extremes, right? It's at the extremes of markets that everybody swears to you that it's just going to get so much worse, right? Or so much better. Again, we can think of laser eyes on Bitcoin, you know, around April before it had that first, you know, it hit the first top in the last cycle, you know, and, you know, there was a time I said, listen, guys, it doesn't have to be the top, but it's definitely a top and, you know, it hit our target on the pullback. But, you know, it's the same thing. So bonds and everything, like you just said, everybody's, you know, extremes, oh, it's the worst market bubble and all this is happening. And so they just shift into this extreme, extreme mode. And usually it's about that time that you should be

looking, you know, other ways with it so uh yeah tlt man uh to me i think uh we're probably bottom there finally or if not we've got to be pretty dang close to it um and so really just kind of looking for some upside to that now which means of course the bond market uh does its thing you know it does its little change there but yeah yeah yeah i totally agree do you have a Bitcoin chart we can take a look at? Yeah, I mean, I've got the same one I keep pulling up here. Last time, you know, I've been talking about it was this blue square here being this bearish market structure coming down off that high. And I was talking about we were looking for a breakout above that swing high right here.

That's at 28142 area because that's the last lower high on this bearish market structure. So let me kind of move this out of the way here. And so of course, you know, we hit it, we hit it, we hit it, then boom, big volume, big candle spread coming out of there. That's what we want to see. So we got the breakout then rallied up into the R1 pivot here on the daily. We're pulling back. You know, usually when we're looking at pivots, if we move in sideways like this between the pivot and the R1, and we don't test the pivot and we rally up to the R1 first, usually what happens is we'll come back down toward the pivot area.

It doesn't have to hit the pivot, but just there's usually a support area just above it that it'll pull down to, and then it'll rally up higher. So right now we're just, again, just working in line with, uh, with the expectations of, of what we normally do here. Um, so yeah, I mean, I could see it, you know, potentially drop a little bit lower or around this area being the, the, um, the low here, but I mean, right now this is, you know, this is three waves up, so this could still be an abc so we definitely want to see a breakout above that swing high on this uh bit stamp chart that's 28 592 we definitely want to see a break above there to give us at least a leading diagonal if not a one two one two and then heading up so but you know we broke through the uh the downward channel here we broke above the last lower high um you know, things working out all right. We rallied up off this bullish divergence that we talked about previously on the show.

And it's just kind of continued going up there. So, I mean, again, nothing really going on there that has me worried about anything. But then again, I'm not trading the five-minute chart either. Why not? I did it there. Five-second chart or you're not a trader, Chris. Too much effort, man. Too much effort. Yeah. If you ain't on the five second charter, you even, uh, working hard. You got to work hard, man. You're not working hard enough. Well, you know,

it depends. You work smart, right? That's what I prefer to do. I prefer to work smart. I got too much to do to work hard all the time on everything. Yeah. Some hilarious comments. Des is asking if I'm wearing a McLaren top. Yes. In case you didn't see, it's a sweatshirt. Yeah, it's just a sweatshirt. And don't you have to buy a car to get that hat? I mean, it's Tiger Woods hat. I guess maybe you have to have your wife beat your car to get this hat, like Tiger Woods did. Oh, that was bad. Anyways, Chris, what other charts do you potentially have for us today? Let's jump on over to some stock charts here, man. So lately I've been looking at these stock charts that had like the largest 52 week declines and a lot of them on the weekly and the monthly, I mean, are looking pristine, like it's bottomed or right around it. So I

figure we'll take a look at these because often people don't catch uh reversals right uh this right here is uh dg it's dollar general uh we've got this you know this kind of 65 pullback basically just hitting this previous area of resistance and support right here in the low volume node i mean i can't say enough of the buzzwords um it's just a good setup. Big capitulation coming in here. This here is the monthly, of course, oversold Stoke RSI and RSI here. We can jump into the weekly, well oversold the weekly. Look at all the volume picking up down here. So again, it was all kind of, as we were through here, we're there. First capitulation, a little bit of volume comes down. Second capitulation, even more volume here. Looking to try and get a reversal somewhere around here.

Even if we zoom into the daily, the daily suggests we could potentially jump down to the S1 pivot here on the daily, which is right around $94 or so. But man, if we go from here, we break out above that daily pivot right there at about, what is it, about 115 and a half or so. But man, you know, if we go from here, we break out above that daily pivot right there at about, what is it, about 115 and a half or so. If we can do that from here, or if we get down to the S1 pivot, I'd be looking for a reason to buy that, buy a reversal there. Impulsive breakout above the pivot. We should at least, at the very least, kind of fill in this gap here right around 155 or so. So massive, you know, potential upside just on that first bit there. But again, with my chart, it looks like it's a pullback, wave two is complete, and we'd be breaking out to a new

all-time high. But minimally, we've potentially got a 50% run on that alone. So you're not concerned that retail is dead, it's all over, and the dollar general is going to go out of business across the world? Well, it's always got to be the worst, right? Because that's what you hear about Target and Walmart these days when people are taking a look at their stocks. But yeah, I mean, that's a pretty incredible looking chart. I'm looking now, I'm looking at the monthly, but I don't even think it has a... It doesn't even have a monthly 200MA yet. But if you even revert to the 200 MA, it's a 2X. It's up here at like 200.

Yep. I mean, yeah. And now you've got, of course, the late death cross, which is. Yeah, but look at how far it's already dropped, right? I mean, it's already had a significant decline. So, you know, you know me. I'm not a big fan of the death cross and the golden cross because usually they come in so late. But like on this one, again, huge, huge decline before you finally get the death cross there. So it's just late uh but like on this one again huge huge

decline before you finally get the death cross there so it's just kind of telling you hey listen it's happened weekly rsi at 15 is not something you often see on a decent company exactly exactly so minimally we should get i'm gonna buy that all right uh note to self, buy dollar general. What else do we got? I've got AES right here. And as you can see, this is, again, starting out the monthly chart here. Absolutely perfect tap down here at this demand structure EQ right here. It's right there at this high volume node, just beyond the 70.5% pullback. Again, it's an ABC.

I mean, there's not a whole lot more I can't say about it. The monthly didn't quite hit oversold here. Um, but we do have, if we look here, we've got a higher lows and we do have, um, on your, uh, right here, we have lower lows. So we've got hidden bullish divergence potentially printing here. And this has been a great rally off that monthly. Again, dropping into the weekly, again, capitulation down here, large candle, large volume, getting that bounce on that. If we can clear that S2 pivot right there on the weekly here, if we're looking at this bigger picture, right around 14.5. I see little reason to think that we shouldn't at least get 20, um, at least. So again, another, uh, initial first pop. And then, uh, you know, we

should, I would think breakout higher than that. Uh, daily has got a great hammer candle there off that, um, that pin bar there off that, uh, that support we're rallying up, uh, you know, again, it's not going to go up over, you know, straight up, but if we can get a, you know, again, a little bit bigger picture here, if we can get an impulsive breakout here above that daily pivot around $16, 1610 around there. I think, you know, we should rally it up through here through the R5 pivot, get us up above $23 easily. So yeah, you know, I mean, again, another potentially great setup, not looking terrible at all. Got a lot of volume pickup down here in this, into this low area. So another setup there. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I, I, I'm actually, this is the first time where like, I'm like, wow, dollar general, man. It makes so much sense. Even if there's a downturn, you would think that dollar general perform well just based on the cheap prices. Well, I believe it was a dollar general during the great financial crisis. I think it was the dollar general was the one that like outperformed. I mean, it was like huge.

It did like huge during that. The entire time it went up when everything else went down. Yeah, yeah. All right, well, now we got six charts. Chris has taken us into the matrix. Well, I got a few of them here. You know, just again, just looking All right, well, now we got six charts. Chris is taking us into the matrix. Well, I got a few of them here, you know. Again, just looking at these 52-week, you know, big drops.

This is Chewy here. My dog loves the commercials. We were kind of doing this here. Could potentially be bottomed here, but if it drops down lower, I'd be looking down here at the S1 pivot again, $15.35 or so to get that reversal. Ultimately, I'm looking for an impulsive breakout here above the daily pivot, which is around 20, almost 20 and a half. If we can do that, we should minimally fill in the gap here up to around 27, was it about 27.30 or so. But if we're doing that, then we should run the pivots here,

probably all the way up here to around 37, $38. Uh, and to me, that would just be the start. We started on the daily here, but we can look at the weekly, uh, down here. You can see we're right around that S one pivot, uh, volume pickup again, as we kind of with the spike on the drop up here to break us down through this support and then volume picking up on all that follow through their monthly again jumping out through there we could you know i would love to see this monthly kind of pick up here we got huge fair value gap here up through around 23 and then again here up through 32 and some change so if you're looking at that bigger monthly picture you know again i think we got those fair value gaps to fill in.

Once again, we do have bullish divergence here. We've got lower lows on price. We've got higher lows here on the monthly RSI. Monthly stoke RSI has dipped down and oversold. It's reset. So, again, looking for that move back up there to kind of you know continue up but i think locally we got a lot of good targets on that as well yeah i mean whether the bottom is totally in or it comes down for new lows eventually you should at least see a humongous bounce

yeah we even it makes the lower high just all the lower high oh it's just b says chewy sent us a hand-painted eight by eight canvas of our dog because my wife posted his picture in a product review that's awesome see the dogs love it wives love it guys this is really playing to the uh heartstrings of the men of the world uh let me see here i've got fmc here as well. Let's start off with the monthly here. Again, look at that. Let me see. Did we actually reset? Yeah, we're pushing in right into oversold right down the monthly. May or may not get it. Again, trying to find the EQ of this demand structure here. It's just basically this previous kind of support resistance area. I could see this

potentially continue on lower toward this S3 pivot on the monthly. It's right around $59 or so. We've got that low volume node there. So if we did ultimately get some further down, I would see that. But I mean, for the monthly alone, uh, you know, you've got a rally filling this fair value gap up here at around 80, was it almost $86 on that monthly. We jumped to the weekly, uh, here we go again well oversold you know again these rsis down here one more time 14 again down here 13 and some change um stoke rsi of course reset and oversold once again volume pickup right down here into this low so looking to get some

follow-through here uh and then moving it into the daily uh you know once again we're kind of at that area we're kind of halfway here between a little bit between the pivot and the S one. So we could potentially see a drop down to the S one here at about $59, $59 and 10 cents right around there. But if we got that, I would be looking on the daily for, uh, some reason to long on that. I would be looking to see some sort of reversal, ultimately looking for an impulsive breakout above the pivot. That's about $73.20 or so. So whether we rally from here or hit the S1 and then rally, first targets that pivot area I just mentioned. If we can get impulsive breakout above that. We've got this

R1 pivot. It's a quick, easy target at 81. But I see filling in this gap up here at around 101 and three quarters gets us to another fair value gap, or I'm sorry, another low volume node there. And if we're there, odds are likely we're going to break out through the R5 here and fill in this gap way up over here from, was that May 1st, May 1st into May 2nd, that gap there. And that probably gets you up there around 123 and some change. So again, a series of targets that look to set up. And each one of those that you hit adds more confidence to the idea that the bottom's in, which means, you know, much, much higher overall kind of going on that.

And I realize a lot of what I'm talking about here is anti what everybody else talks about, because everybody's saying, oh, my God, it has to be the end of the world. It has to be, everything has to die here. But, you know, we've been saying that for a couple of years now, right? And so the timing's off, you know, it's going to come, but you know, what, what do you do if you're a trader who thinks it actually has to come for the last two years, you're worn out now, you're stressed out, you're tired, right? Because you'd be constantly fighting for two years for it to happen. What if it doesn't happen until, you know, 2030? What if this is the roaring 20s all over again, which is crazy to think about? You know me, a couple of years back, I was thinking, you know, the top was going to be in there.

And then we got the top and the stocks and it wasn't any kind of blow off or anything. And so I said, it doesn't look right. We got three waves down. I said, man, looks are going to new all time high. I mean, what if what if it doesn't happen for another few years? So I think as a trader investor, you've really got to kind of come to terms with it, that possibility, because otherwise you're going to be you're going to be living a miserable life.

And I'm not saying this to be me. I'm saying this because psychologically, emotionally, it's very, very stressful to feel like the end of everything is coming and it not to come. And because you're fighting what's actually happening day in and day out. And it can be a lot on a human being, on our whole psyche to deal with that all the time. So, you know. Yeah, we're always wrong. Bottom line, humans. Yeah, yeah, you're going to be. Not a good history of being good,

right about prediction. So, yeah, that's right. That's right. Anything else? I guess it's where we're getting towards time here anyways. You got any more? Let me see here.

We don't want to pull up here. Maybe Chris came prepared today. Much more than me. You know what? Let's look here at Wolf. Why not? Right. Um, semiconductor, um, company. Yes, I am. Yes. Um, I'm looking if, if we're, if we don't rally from where we're at here coming down a little bit further, I think we've got maybe like a $29 and 30 cent kind of target area um this is the monthly of course you know not oversold here but you see how that volume's really kind of starting to pick up here down in these lows let's kind of zoom in a bit here uh weekly again looking at the idea that we've got this bullish

divergence picking off here on the rsi And we've got it down here. So, you know, a rally from here. The first thing I want to look up is this S1 pivot area, which is around $42, $43. If we can kind of break out above this swing high right here at 49, I think there's a good chance we get up here to around 80. And again, you know, impulsive breakout. This is the weekly here, impulsive breakout above that, the swing high just above it here at 87.93 should lead us to

new highs here above 142. You know, and those would be new all-time highs there heading up. Real quick, let's see what we got on the daily. Yeah, daily, we're right there around, you know, we're getting this reversal off, uh, just below the S1 pivot here. So again, you know, on the daily and pulse a breakout above about $41, that pivot there should get us a gap fill here up to around 53. If we're doing that, we're at the R2 pivot. Likely we're going to run the pivots here through R5, uh, minimally get up here around 69 69 and a half and again that kind of just sets the stage for further upside so once again another

great setup you're looking for the monthly on down uh large term you know bullish divergence nothing's guaranteed of course but uh these are the kind of things i'm looking at you know when i'm looking okay where do i get in where do i, uh, major bottoms where I don't have to do a lot of work, get in here, you know, and let it, let it run for a bit. Um, because if I'm wrong, the bottoms right there, right? My stop loss is real close. So I know that I'm wrong. I don't have to, you know, wait for a 50% up, you know, between the high and the low before I figure it out. Um, and if I'm right, guess what? I've got a huge, huge upside. It's the same reason we went in long there. Bitcoin down November lows, stock market, October, November, December, those wherever you were in there, the indexes. Same idea, same idea, right? And it's no reason

to fight it. If it looks like it's low, jump on it, proper risk management and go about your day, right? Love it. No money back guarantees, guys. That's right. Not financial advice, right? Chris, I love that you came prepared. I love that we can finish with Wolf. Someone said Wolf is at Scott's business. Definitely not.

I wish, probably. I would feel we wouldn't be here together if it was. But anyways, all right, guys. Follow Texas West, TX West Capital on Twitter. Follow Chris. Also, as I always say, check out his courses and Discord and all the amazing content that he has for you guys. Really, always worth it. I was a big part of it back in the day.

Yeah, you were. Really, really the best content out there if you actually want to learn how to do this and not be a completely spastic moron who moves their stop losses and loses all their money even when they're right. Chris is your guy. That's all I got for you today, man. Thank you so much, Chris. Take care, man.

All right, guys. We'll see you all back here, same place tomorrow. See you later. Bye. Let's go.