The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoiners Prepare: 2024 Will Be Crypto’s MOST BULLISH Year | How 2023 Set The Stage

Episode Date: December 29, 2023

This is the last show of 2023, probably one of the most interesting years for crypto. After a very bad start of the year we are ending it with a bull run and I am expecting 2024 to be a very big year for crypto. But first let's take a look at 2023 and recall the biggest and most important events.  ►► 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  ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. USE CODE ‘2MONTHSOFF’ WHEN VISITING MY LINK.  👉 https://tradingalpha.io/?via=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/   ►►NGRAVE This is the coldest hardware wallet in the world and the only one that I personally use. 👉https://www.ngrave.io/?sca_ref=4531319.pgXuTYJlYd ►►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 #FridayFive 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.

2024 will undoubtedly be the biggest year in history for crypto, and that should mean prices are much higher. But it didn't seem like that was going to be the way when we started 2023. Certainly in the middle of 2023, when we had crypto banks collapsing, Operation Chokepoint 2.0, the SEC coming after seemingly every platform that we came to know and love, but we ended on a massive bull run with tremendous tailwinds heading into 2024. Since this is the last stream of the year and I'm alone, I'm going to review the biggest stories of 2023 and tell you why 2024 is going to be so massive. Also going to take some questions and answer them at the end

because YOLO, man Man 2023 is out of here. Let's go. I did the face, opened the mouth as wide as possible. That was a joke picture from long ago when I was making fun of people who did those thumbnails, but we did it. But if we get like more than, I don't know, 30,000 views or something, we will do those kinds of thumbnails every single day sarcastically

just to drive you guys nuts, mock ourselves and everyone else. You can Photoshop all kinds of implements going into my wide open mouth. Nobody cares. We got the Bitcoin pump. Listen, guys, let's start. Let's end 2023 the right way and start 2024. Let's just get the pump music right now. You guys hear it? I can't even tell. I think it is. You know, pump it up. You've got to pump it up. Don't you know, pump it up.

You've got to pump it up. Don't you know, pump it up. Don't you know, pump it up. You've got to pump it up. Don't you know, pump it up. You've got to pump it up. All right, guys. But getting serious, 2023, hell of a year. As I mentioned at the beginning, 2023 started with a whimper. And about six months, seven months into the year, it seemed like the crypto industry was doomed, dead, over, finished.

Talk about the Friday Five. We usually do this with NLW. This is the Friday Five for the whole year. And the lead story has to obviously be, first, all of the banking collapses and Operation Chokepoint 2.0, right? Crypto cries foul as banks close ranks. Yes, we saw all of these banks start to collapse. And we know that it was because of treasury risk and the fact that they were massively invested in long-term treasuries and in an environment where there were zero interest rates and then interest rates went up and then they didn't have liquidity and then there were bank runs and then they failed and it was the fault of the Fed, even though the Fed didn't say that it was their fault. We all know exactly how

this went down, but it was curious that the banks that failed, the biggest bank failures, were effectively the only three banks that banked the crypto industry in the United States. Now, interestingly, we know that that was Silvergate, Silicon Valley Bank, and Signature Bank. But actually, if you go to FDIC and you look at all the bank failures of the year, they don't even include Silvergate actually, because it wound down in an orderly manner right before the actual collapses of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature. I viewed Silvergate as one of the collapses, but officially not there. And interestingly, if you take a look at just how meaningful this was at the time, largest bank failures in the United States as of 2023 by total assets,

First Republic 2023 was second. That came later, of course. Silicon Valley Bank was third. Signature Bank was fourth. I didn't even do the right numbers when I was doing that. Right? And so these were massive bank failures. And there was this moment when the banks were failing that you'll all recall, especially Silicon Valley Bank over that weekend when everyone was going, shit, is it over? Is every bank going to fail? And then the United States government came in with the absolutely bull Zucca and bailed everyone out and said, no matter what happens in the future, we'll bail them out too. We're just going to bail out everybody. It's like, Oprah, you get a bailout and you get a bailout and you get a bailout. Right? And so the bank collapses that were coincidentally all of the crypto banks didn't

end up having a contagion for the economy that many people expected, but it certainly felt like the crypto industry was screwed. If you remember at the time, like Coinbase every week had a new bank that you had never heard of. It was like Customers Bank and something Circle River Bank, River, nobody knows. Nobody knows. But it was very hard. And a lot of these exchanges that were operating in the United States still have not found a banking partner and only allow withdrawals and deposits using stable coins. But you may have forgotten, and I was going to bring up an article about it, but I don't think I did. But the first bank really that showed us what was likely to happen, it wasn't Silicon Valley Bank, which happened in March. It was actually the rejection of the Fed master license for Custodia Bank. I've had Caitlin Long on here many times. Over two years ago, I sat with her at Bitcoin Miami and she said,

the SEC, CFTC, that's all misdirection. The regulators that the crypto industry needs to be worried about are the banking regulators like the Fed and the FDIC, etc. She said it a year before it happened. And then in January, the quiet news was that Custodia got rejected. And this was a bank that was going to have 100% backing of customer assets and basically got rejected just for being crypto adjacent, calling themselves a crypto bank. And they're now still suing the United States government and these regulators to get that license. But that was the first opening salvo in this war of banking against the United States. Now, Silicon Valley Bank was a boring collapse. I don't think

you would call it boring if you had deposits there. But Silicon Valley Bank was the first, and they were very, very famous for being a quote unquote crypto bank, right? Because they even settled things on chain. They had 24-7 settlement on chain. That got taken out. And then all of the companies that were banking with Silvergate, all of a sudden did not have banking relationships. But the big boy that kind of came in next, obviously, was Silicon Valley Bank. Now we know that Silicon Valley Bank, when it failed, had $175 billion in customer deposits, all that ended up being backstopped by the United States government. And the story here was that this was basically the bank on the planet for half the

country's venture capital-backed technology and life science companies. So all of these companies that were risky and taking in huge investments, They were all banking with Silicon Valley Bank. And as the economy got weaker, and as these companies had more trouble raising money, they had to tap their bank accounts. And guess what? Only a few percent of the actual bank's assets were in cash because the rest were sitting in long-term treasuries that were becoming upside down. And oh no, that is bad. But Silicon Valley Bank was also massively, massively banking the crypto industry and no one bigger, of course, than USDC, which de-pegged that very weekend. And we could talk about this, but people forget Circle had over $3 billion in Silicon Valley Bank.

And during that same weekend, when we didn't know if there would be a bailout, there was a DPEG. Now, that DPEG was only on exchanges, right? We talk about the DPEG of stable coins, but a real DPEG is if somebody goes to Circle and is not able to actually get their money out in a redemption directly with Circle. That never happened. So it was always one for one for customers of Circle who went for redemptions. But on exchanges, you could see it traded down to like mid 80 cents and Tether actually went up to over a dollar. And that was because people didn't know, didn't know if this was going to end up being a huge problem and they weren't going to be a fully backed stable corn. The irony of that is astounding

because everybody always claimed that USDT tether was not fully backed. They were taking all these risks, but it ended up that because of regulated banking risk in the United States of America, Circle became the one USDC that you had to fear would not be fully backed. And when the FDIC insured came in to save all of the depositors of Silicon Valley Bank, people seem to forget Circle was the biggest with $3.34 billion. Think about that. Silicon Valley Bank, the biggest bailout, went to the crypto industry in the form of USDC. But I don't think people have forgotten about it because in that time, we've obviously seen the market share of USDT rise tremendously and the market share of USDC go down massively. Sorry, I'm trying to block ridiculous comments on Facebook where we started

streaming and that's happening over here, but got distracted there. Okay. So Circle got the massive bailout. The coin obviously went back to parity one for one and yeah, whatever. Then came the real curious one. And this is where we all got our tinfoil hats on because Signature Valley Bank didn't technically collapse. The regulators closed it down on a weekend, right? There was no evidence that Signature Bank had actually had a sizable bank run. There was no evidence that anyone was unable to withdraw money that they wanted. There was legitimate evidence that anyone was unable to withdraw money that they wanted. There was legitimate fear that because it was similar to the Silvergate and Silicon Valley Bank, that it could collapse because, listen, I mean, a lot of crypto people were losing money,

taking money out. That means a closed account, right? I mean, it makes a lot of sense. Even if it's not a bank run, a hell of a lot of people were taking their money out of the bank at this time. But yeah, I don't know. Why is that huge comment just go on the screen? Jeez. Okay. No idea what just happened there. So Signature Bank was shut down on March 10th. Silicon Valley was March 12th. Silicon Valley was March 10th and Silvergate wound down on March 8th. All this happened in one week. But this closed down the final rail, really, that crypto companies had for settling. And so all of a sudden, basically, the entire crypto industry in the United States was unbanked just because these three banks went out of business. Now, think about that.

There's thousands of banks. They all had the same treasury risk. They all had the same problems, but the only three that collapsed in March were the ones that were servicing the crypto industry. The three largest that were servicing the crypto industry. Call me crazy. call me a conspiracy theorist, but it feels like that was very crypto related. Barney Frank obviously came out and said, hey man, he was on the board of signature to be fair, but he said, this is an attack on crypto. The government said not an attack on crypto. We know it was an attack on crypto. It was very clear for a very long time that the United States government led by Joe Biden, kind of, because he's asleep right time that the United States government led by Joe Biden, kind of because he's asleep right now all the time, but led by whoever's behind that,

Elizabeth Warren and her stooges that they wanted to shut down crypto in the United States. This was the way they were going to do it. And they failed massively at doing the job. Luckily, other banks stepped up. But this was the beginning of the rhetoric of the Elizabeth Warren anti-crypto army of Joe Biden posting tweets that said, hey, man, would you rather give crypto people tax breaks or feed homeless children in middle America? Those two things were somehow related. But this is when it became very clear behind the scenes that there was a war against crypto. And then they actually said all the quiet parts out

loud and said, hey, we're forming an anti-crypto army and we are coming for you. So that's the first story. It's a big one. The bank collapses. That seemingly is in the tail, tail, tail, you know, back in hindsight, in the rear view mirror, the words I'm looking for. So we got past that. But if you guys remember the sentiment in March, man, it was supposed to be all over. Now, the good news was that at that moment, because I was afraid of what was happening with USDC, I moved all my USDC into Bitcoin, thinking that Bitcoin was probably going to dump and Bitcoin rocketed from like mid 19,000 to 25,000. So for me, it was a 25% gain on my stable coin because I ran to the safety of Bitcoin. I know a lot of other people did. Now you can't talk about

2023 because listen, we're going to talk about why it's all good for 2024, but without talking about cleaning out all the contagion, bad actors, everything that happened. We don't have Doquan here. He gets an honorable mention. We know that now he's being extradited to the United States. He's getting in a lot of trouble, but obviously the big three, I would say are Mashinsky, SBF, and CZ. Now, CZ, I find to be in a very different camp than the other two. To be clear, these two are frauds. Celsius founder Alex Mashinsky arrested and charged with fraud. Now, there was some good news yesterday, I believe, for Celsius creditors that the mining plan was approved. So Celsius creditors now own a Bitcoin mining company and could actually get their money back. Seems that the Voyager creditors like myself ended up being the big losers because

Voyager liquidated all of our assets at the dead bottom. Even if you're an FTX creditor now, Solana is up so much and they had a couple of decent investments that you might actually get all your money back. We ended up getting about 24%, which now is about 18%, with the price having gone up. But Mashinsky, yeah, was charged with seven criminal counts, including securities, commodities, and wire fraud, according to the US Attorney's Office in Manhattan. He's also accused of misleading Celsius customers about the company's business, including how it would use their money, while depicting the lender as a bank when, in fact, it operated as a risky investment fund, according to the indictment. We also know that there's accusations there of pumping the sell token and basically it being a massive monster Ponzi scheme.

This one is unresolved, but this one is not. Sam Bankman freed guilty on all seven counts in FTX fraud trial. Now, for all the bad things we can say about the United States government and how they've handled crypto, FTX collapsed in November and this dude was arrested by December, right? They went after Sam Bankman, freed hard. They took care of business. He was guilty on everything. He looks like a complete asshole and clown, and he will end up being charged in the not so distant future,

which is good news. March 28th, I believe, is his court sentencing, although there are other accounts that he could still be brought to trial for in a completely second trial. And we know that his life behind bars has become a meme. He had that stupid haircut that apparently he traded some fish for. But yeah, he's behind bars giving crypto tips and paying with fish. I think that I read that first as playing with fish. Oh, I don't really know what that means. Very strange. But yeah, I mean, Sam Bankman Freed is going to go to jail for a very, very long time. He's awaiting that second trial in March, as I said, but it looks like March 28th, he'll be sentenced. And you have to imagine that he's going to jail for a very,

very, very long time. Maximum sentence for his crimes back to back would be roughly 110 years. And then, of course, if we're talking about what comes next, it was obviously getting a bow wrapped around the Binance situation, which I consider very bullish. And I think that most people are still fans of CZ in light of everything that happened here. Now, we know that Binance had to pay a $4.3 billion fine. He had to pay $50 million himself. You might have seen in an article just the other day that he made $25 billion on Binance just this year. So not such a big deal to even have to pay these fines. He's going to retain his majority ownership and hopefully we'll just get a slap on the wrist, spend a few months in jail, a couple of years outside of Binance, then he'd come back and do whatever he wants.

But basically, I've always been of the opinion that in the case of Binance specifically, and a lot of crypto companies, they were operating in an environment with no regulation. And it was either wait 10 years until we get clarity, which we still don't have, or go ahead and do things and then try to get compliant later. And I think that they were just really operating in the wild, wild west when there were no rules and they broke rules that ended up being rules down the road. And Binance, he was willing, CZ here, to fall on his sword, take the hit, came to the United States. They won't let him leave, voluntarily turned himself in, is taking the deal. And the best thing that could have ever happened for the crypto industry was for Binance to become a

smaller entity, which it did relative to the rest of the market, and for it to continue going on. I think the biggest fear, go back to July when they charged, SEC charged Binance and Coinbase back to back on a Monday and Tuesday. I think the biggest fear at that time was that Binance would get completely shut down. Guys, you have to remember back then we had no wins. It was all losses. You have to put yourself back in the mindset of this summer. We had Operation Chokepoint 2.0, the SEC coming out like blazing, blazing hot and seeming like they could

just go after whoever they wanted and do whatever they wanted. So that obviously wraps up the second story. I think CZ will come back. I think that the actual bad actors have largely been punished in this space. And that's part of my case for 2024 is that, you know, really we've taken care of all the bad actors and bad news from 2023. But here you go. Look at this guy. Everybody loves this guy, right? I can't open that article. But what that article would say to you, if you could open it, which is weird because whatever, is that the big battles loom in SEC's war on crypto. So we obviously saw the charges, Coinbase, Binance,

Kraken, which people just didn't even seem to notice. And that one has commingling funds in it. Nobody noticed that because Binance was doing the whole DOJ dance at the exact same time. But the SEC has filed about 55 enforcement lawsuits over cryptocurrency since Gensler came in. A lot of them are clearly PR stunts like Kim Kardashian, as we've seen. But they have come after pretty much every big actor. And at the time, we thought that it was absolutely over for all of us, that they would win. We hadn't seen any pushback from the courts.

It seemed like the SEC and Gensler had a mandate to do whatever they wanted to the industry. So SEC sues crypto exchange Binance and CEO Changping Zhao alleging multiple securities violations. There is the actual SEC charges. We saw this, right? You guys then remember SEC sues Coinbase on unregistered securities exchange allegations.

The suit comes a day after the SEC sued Binance. So basically saying that everything Coinbase was offering outside of maybe Bitcoin was a security, an unregistered securities offering. They were operating as an illegal broker dealer, exchange, custodian, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We've heard it all. And here was that actual press release by the SEC. And then the SEC says that they don't need any more crypto rules. They've made this point clear over and over again that they have all the laws necessary from the 1930s that totally obviously should apply to a new technology 100 years later, of course. But yeah, we've had a lot of lawmakers, the Patrick McHenry's and Warren Davidson's and Tom Emmer's coming after the SEC and making the very clear point that, dude, we need some new rules. You can't just regulate by enforcement. Congress has to make these rules, but that we absolutely need special regulation for

the crypto industry because it is not the same as all of those industries before it. So the SEC is saying, ah, we don't need no rules. It's fine. And then, of course, here was the Kraken suit, which just happened. And Jesse Powell right there as a Chad was like, yeah, we don't care. We don't care. Not a big deal. But see, in the midst of all of this, we had Gary Gensler approaching the industry as if

he had carte blanche to do whatever he wants, say whatever he wants. And if he said it, it was gospel, right? Gary says it's an unregistered security. It's an unregistered security. And you may remember in each of these cases, they would just passively list like 10, 12, 15 altcoins as unregistered securities without ever actually going after that altcoin, talking to those projects. They would just passively list the name and those coins would drop like 30 to 50% in a week. Absolutely destroying the price of these assets that United States citizens were holding under the guise of protecting United States citizens and investors, apparently, from

ourselves. Gary Gensler has done more harm to your average crypto investor in the United States than almost any of these bad actors have because he operates in bad faith with zero clarity. But then guys, we had all of this bad news all the time and then it went to court. Ripple ruling deals a blow to SEC's effort to regulate crypto. You may remember secondary sales of Ripple deemed not to be securities offerings and everyone went, well, if that's the case, then all my altcoins being sold on six exchanges, which are secondary offerings, are not securities. Party, YOLO, let's go. It's time to have altcoin season. It's kind of been sort of a low-key altcoin season ever since then. Now, we've had legal interpretation on this show and everywhere

else. Some people saying this was great news. Some people saying it'll be questioned. The SEC did not end up appealing this, right? Because they're screwed. But yeah, we got this big win. And then you guys might remember in the Voyager bankruptcy, the judge actually pushed back against the SEC on the same count saying, what you're saying makes no sense. This is ridiculous. No. So we had major pushback from the courts against the SEC,

and Gary Gensler has not really won much since then. We obviously saw Grayscale. Here they are. Look at that. Invest in your share of the future. But yeah, guys, Grayscale court victory over SEC and spot Bitcoin ETF case made final. You will remember that there was major pushback from the judge here, arbitrary and capricious, the two words that we used all the time. SEC lost again. Grayscale then obviously majorly moving forward in the process to convert to an ETF. So we had the Ripple, Voyager, Grayscale,

the United States court system, which by the way, clearly not corrupt, doing the right thing. They took care of SBF, did the right thing in Ripple, did the right thing with Grayscale, did the right thing-ish with Voyager-ish, the judges at least. And this sort of was part of the spark for ETF Palooza, which we've obviously had. And just this week, if we're talking about Grayscale, Barry Silbert resigned as Grayscale chairman to be replaced by Mark Schiffke. Now, obviously, Barry Silbert still runs DCG, but he's been under fire, obviously, with the Genesis bankruptcy. A lot of people thinking that he could be the next person to

be charged with something. I have no idea. I don't know if anything he did was criminal, but clearly he's getting out of the way so that we can get this ETF approval. But remember guys, for the half of this year, it was operation truck 0.2.0, SEC coming after us. There's more CFTC enforcement actions, even than SEC, DOJ coming after people. And we've had actually a nice bow wrapped around most of these things that have been resolved without really crushing the industry in any meaningful way, right? So that's kind of number three right there is all the enforcement actions and then the court's response to all of those actions. Number four, if we're trying to put

five things in order, has to be the ETF, right? Because in the midst of all of this sadness and depression, the least likely hero came in to save us, and his name, his name, whether we love him, hate him, believe in him, think that he's corrupt, think that he is one of the government agencies, maybe he's actually president of the United States, we don't know it. St. Larry Fink. Larry Fink, the guy who literally created ESG and environmental investing, embraced an asset that people were saying boiled the oceans, will liquidate your entire swimming pool for one transaction, and will probably scare away the aliens with its major energetic force field that's surrounding earth. Bitcoin was supposed to be the worst thing in the

world for the environment. That was the narrative that was killing us. And single-handedly, one man, the king of ESG comes in, files for a Bitcoin spot ETF, and you don't hear much environmental FUD anymore. But also, this gave instant, massive credibility to the industry and to Bitcoin in the midst of all of this FUD coming from Gary. He just absolutely... Do you remember when we were kids, when you used to prank people, you could do a big wedgie, or you put their head in the toilet and flush and you called a swirly. He did all of those 1980s horrible bully pranks to Gary Gensler just by filing for a spot ETF. And since then, the tailwinds coming from the inevitable, I would say, or imminent approval of a Bitcoin spot ETF have overshadowed every single piece of bad news that we have had in this industry. Larry Fink went on TV and called crypto a flight

to quality. Talking about arguably one of the five most powerful people on the planet, he can go on TV and talk about anything and he's talking about crypto in a favorable light. The gravity and importance of this cannot be understated. And I will say literally by BlackRock filing for an ETF, he single-handedly erased all of the bad news and negativity that we had going against us for all of 2023. And we know that they're seeding it with 10 million on January 3rd and that we're going to seek an approval. If you guys didn't listen to my stream yesterday with Eric Balchunas, you should because he gave the full overview why he thinks maybe he even gets approved on the 8th and it's actually trading by the 10th or 11th. Really, really aggressive stance, 90% chance that this

happens. And this has been the thing. I don't know what's going to happen to price when or if the Bitcoin spot ETF does get approved, but I can tell you that it was big enough news for the industry that all the bad news has effectively gone away. And let's remember, just talking about the SEC and Gensler, A, he may not be the chairman a year from now. But B, these cases will likely take a very long time. There'll be appeals. There'll be pushback. Coinbase could get theirs thrown out of court next month, apparently.

But it's probably not going to be Gary Gensler who actually ends up finishing these cases. They take a very long time. The Ripple case took years, as you know. But man, what a year and what craziness. Bitcoin ETF approval tipped to be sell the news event. CryptoQuant, Cathie Wood was saying the same thing. But guys, who really cares? We have no idea what's going to happen. We know that it's long-term bullish. And here you go. Here's a list of Bitcoin ETFs. I mean, guys, so many things being filed for here. So many even already in existence like BITO, but this is ETF palooza. There's never been anything like it. There's never, I think Eric Baltruna says once a decade, you have even a new asset class that gets an ETF, but never do you have about 14 of them that are going to launch at once.

We also know in context of all this, that there is an Ethereum spot ETF waiting in the wings to be approved after this. Yeah. And so I think in context of all of this, that was number four. I think number five is just the fact that we had this major bull market. This wasn't supposed to happen. We look at the four-year cycle. We know that... Let me go ahead and just take this off so I can get to some charts in a minute. But we know that it's supposed to be really boring and down coming into the halving, and then we finally get into the halving. And then we finally get to the halving. And then we wait seven or eight or nine months. And then at the end of 2024, we start to spark a new bull run.

Hasn't happened that way at all this time. Right. And I think it's taken a lot of people absolutely by surprise that we are where we are right now. I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to find my halving chart. It wasn't. We'll take a look at this. Didn't have it ready because, you know, that was a lot to talk about there.

I wish I had Nathaniel here today, man. That would have been really fun for us to do this. But I've showed you this chart a million times, right? You get the bottom with weekly RSI oversold every single time, And then you kind of come out of it, but usually, you know, when you're coming out of the bottoms, you get a move, but then you get this kind of huge move back down before the having, and we just have not had that, right? That was when, uh, last cycle, we went all the way from under 4,000 up to like almost

14,000, all the way back down to 38 in COVID you go back to let's see the the first having back here the first bottom you know it was really sideways and then slowly up into the having this time we have really i mean prices over you know almost tripled from the bottom all the way up into this maybe we'll get one of those dips coming into it but we're not supposed to be this far ahead of the having cycle right now and it's all because of this spot ETF news. So imagine, talk about Bitcoiners prepare, 2024 will be crypto's most bullish year. I really believe that. I don't think it's a clickbait title. And that doesn't even mean that price has to go to a new all-time high in 2024. I don't think that's certainly, I do certainly think that that's a major possibility, but it means that for the first

time, it doesn't feel like everything's working against us. It feels like things are going in our favor. We have the tailwinds of a Bitcoin spot ETF, an Ethereum spot ETF potentially, the halving, the four-year cycle that always in the past, doesn't mean it'll happen again, but always in the past means that by the end of that year, 2024, 2020, 2016, you start to see things ramp up for the real bull market in 2025, 2021, 2017. We've seen it before. You have all of that, plus an election year when markets generally go up massively, plus markets have been ripping, even though we're not correlated, markets have been ripping, plus the world pricing in more liquidity coming into the market. Never say this time is different,

but it certainly is starting to feel that way. That was my review of the five things Misha's in the wings. Why the articles are so small on your screen? I don't know, man. I just saw his comment like 13 minutes later. I didn't know that the articles were so small on your screen? I don't know, man. I just saw his comment like 13 minutes later. I didn't know that the articles were so small on my screen. I was actually reading the articles and not watching the stream. So sorry if you couldn't read my articles.

But now what we're going to do is a little quick to end the year. Next stream will be next Tuesday, I think. It will be in the new year. Go ahead and ask me some questions. Do you guys have any big questions? What do you got? I see a question here. I don't know what it is. Scott, when ETFs are approved, what is the best place in my IRA to be come January? Cash, what do you see as the fate for stocks like MSTR miners? I mean, listen, I listen to people much smarter than me when it comes to miners.

Mike Alford has convinced me that miners will do exceptionally well over the next year or two. So I'm sitting in them. I don't like to get cute and get into cash and sit around there and wait because you generally just miss. And that's trying to time the bottom. I would just keep passively investing in your strategy. But if you do want to buy the spot ETF, obviously, you need to be sitting in cash. And probably my gut instinct says you'll be wanting to buy BlackRock. Misha, if you're there, can you pull up the questions? Because I'm having trouble figuring out. Question, what the fink? I don't know the answer to that one.

Oh my God, there's a Larry Funk here. I thought you were Larry Fink. Thanks for everything you do, Scott. You are welcome. What do you think about GPU? I don't even know what that is. So I'm sorry. What percentage of your portfolio is Bitcoin versus ETH at this point? So I like to keep my, you guys know, I've talked about portfolio construction before. It changes a lot when all coins go nuts, but I like to be 70% investments, like long-term, not touching it, 15% in cash so that I can buy dips and actually have dry powder on the side. And then 15% in all the speculative investments and trading and stuff like that. And so my split right now is about 60, 40 Bitcoin ETH in the investment side of the portfolio. And of course, there are other

things. The way that things end up in my investment side is it's Bitcoin ETH and then chunks of things that have done exceptionally well, where I probably took a ton of profit in previous cycles and then move a bit in there because they're lottery tickets long term so yeah uh let me see what else we got i'm trying to see what type of regulation do you think will come post etfs i don't think we're going to get any clarity on regulation at all, to be honest. I think we've got an election coming. I don't think anyone's going to do anything big. I think we'll see some of these bills maybe pass the House or pass the Senate, but not both and certainly not get past Biden. So that means, in my mind, that the SEC will just keep doing what they're doing, trying to regulate by enforcement and we won't get much clarity on law. So I think until we get a different,

I guess, administration regime change, I don't think we'll get any clarity. But I do think that they're going to kind of throw us a bone on the Bitcoin spot ETF and still come very aggressively for the rest of the industry. Top 10 holdings in your portfolio, stocks, crypto. I'm really boring. So I think I've made it very public that I have a very large position in TLT, which I bought right at the bottom. That was kind of the trade of the year for me outside of crypto. I own a lot of very boring mutual funds that are timed to my retirement date. And so like Vanguard mutual funds that basically reconfigure bonds versus equities by the time

I'm 65, a lot of that. But when it comes to crypto, my biggest positions are obviously Bitcoin and Ethereum. I own quite a bit of Egold, as you guys know. Matic. Metis became a huge one, which is another layer too that I invested in ages ago and just went up for hundreds and hundreds of percents of late. But I've got a pretty, to be honest, guys, I've got an injective, very boring portfolio. And then I've got a lot of leftover crap from the last cycles. Yeah. Okay. Do you really think... Okay. How will the market react if the ETF is delayed? Okay. Misha, I'm going to let you do these. I'm not going to look at the questions. How will the market react if the ETF is delayed? I think it'd be very, very bad, which I think is kind of funny

because a delay doesn't mean... If it's outright rejected, it would be terrible. But I think just a delay, I think the market will dump and then people will realize, hey, the same thing might just happen in another month. And so that doesn't worry me that much. I think at the end of the day, all of the major dips that might come from selling the news or delay any of these things are for buying because we will get the halving cycle and we will get the approval in my mind. Okay, next. If you had to guess the bear market bottom next cycle, what would it be dollar wise and percentage drop from time? Oh my God, I hate the crystal ball things. Let me consult my shib of admit. Would it surprise you at all? Would it literally surprise you at all if price goes to like 150

and then at the bottom of the next cycle, we're at these prices again in the 40s and 50s and we're depressed? No, it would not. But listen, I think if we're going to believe in the four-year cycle to the upside, which we continue to talk about, you have to believe it to the downside too. So wherever we end, why not another 75%, 80% drop? Maybe an ETF and institutional involvement smooths out the market and it changes, but prove it to me. So I think we'll have a massive pump. We'll way overshoot. Then we'll come back down below fair value as Mark Yusko always talks about, and then we'll eventually normalize. What is next? Price target for Coinbase this cycle? Let me bring up a chart. Okay. Well, I'm finally not underwater on Coinbase, right? Because you guys know my cost basis was in the low 100s. My first Coinbase purchase was the first day,

but at the dead bottom. So like 310, I bought all the way down. And my last purchase that I made was like 35, somewhere down in here. I got profitable right around when this flipped, which is crazy because I wrote it. But guys, I'm used to this. I started dollar cost averaging into SPY right before the Great Recession. I was underwater for like a decade. But that's the beauty of dollar cost averaging. I think that, well, right now, I think we should at least be going to 208. You saw I drew that.

It came down here. I mean, it missed by $2. I would not be surprised to see it come back up to the highest, 368, 370. I think that Coinbase, like Bitcoin, will make new all-time highs in the next cycle. There's my bold prediction. What is next? What do you think happens with the cycle if the ETF take a million coins off the market? I mean, it takes them off the market, but people are still actively trading the ETF for that to happen, right? So I don't want to make any bold predictions about the AUM of the ETF and how that will affect things. I mean, GBTC takes coins off

the market, right? But then you get GBTC. They hold the Bitcoin, you get GBTC. An ETF, they'll hold the Bitcoin, you'll get the shares of the ETF. But I do think that we will continue to be in an environment, especially through the halving, where we see reduced supply and increased demand, which means prices go up. But I think that, yeah, I think that we've seen each cycle in the Bitcoin sphere be muted, right? More muted than the last. It was like thousands of percent, then 20, you know, 20 thousands of X and 20 X and then

like three X each cycle, whatever it was. The top bottom to the top is the previous all time high to the new all time high is less dramatic in each cycle. I don't see why that wouldn't happen here again, because I think institutional involvement is going to smooth volatility on Bitcoin, but I think it's going to increase volatility on altcoins massively. People keep saying, I keep hearing it, that there will never be an alt season again. We would never see an alt cycle. Okay. First of all, that's already been disproven since they said it. But I think imagine, you got to remember these TradFi guys are degens,

just like the rest of us. When they get bored of Bitcoin and start to find all coins, when all of this money has flowed into the ecosystem, we're going to see just massive moves on all coins. I really, really believe that. All right, next. No, Everton Azul. I do not own any Cardano and it's nothing against Cardano. There's a lot of coins actually I like that I don't own. I'm not saying I do or don't like ADA, Cardano. But in the last cycle, I thought that Cardano had one of those irrational sort of sentiment pumps. It just went way too high based on what the fundamentals were because people caught on and it went mainstream. And I don't want to buy something that doesn't have the underlying fundamentals to track the price. So that's nothing against them.

It's just, I think the price went way too high for them or anyone else, considering that they haven't had as much advancement as others. And I know that's intentional in the underlying fundamentals. It just doesn't interest me. I really don't know how to value it. Next. Do you have any investment in memes? What's your opinion about meme points? I don't think you can ever use the words investment and memes in the same sentence. I think that's extremely dangerous. I have small positions that I have traded in memes. Everybody who follows me for a long time knows that Dogecoin was my favorite thing ever. When I got in, it's what got me hooked on crypto. I used to have these Doge cycles where you could predictably just buy at the bottom,

top, wait a couple of months, do it again. That's how I compounded Bitcoin back then, because you only traded in Bitcoin pairs. The bulk of my early Bitcoin position, I acquired through trading Doge. So I have a soft spot in my heart. But that said, these are not investments. They have no value. They're complete and utter lottery ticket trash. They're being pumped and dumped and manipulated. And if you can get on the right side of that, you can make quite a bit of money. There's not something you take profit. When it goes up, you just take profit. You don't wait for your meme. Oh, it's a 500 million market cap, but what if it did 10 billion? That is a trap. So I own a bit of Shiba Inu somewhere. Very little. I owned one that I never even forgot about and sold with a very small position like Elon, which is like Dogecoin, Mars or something.

Every once in a while, I'll buy one if I think there's a chance for profit. But guys, do as I say, not as I do. Unless you're going to actively flip these for profit to make more Bitcoin, they're easy to stay away from. 99% of them are going to zero. You have to have perfect timing even if they go up. Yeah. What's next? Do you think Link can make a place for its head and become the third must-have of portfolio construction? I mean, Link is pretty compelling. I think it's at resistance here if you're looking at the chart. But listen, I think if RWA and DeFi and all these narratives, they need oracles and Link is the leader in that space. I don't know if it can become third. I think a lot of people now would say it's Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana. That would be hard to uproot, but everybody has

a different opinion. But I do think that Link has some of the most potential for the older assets in the next and coming cycles and could actually become a legitimate asset as opposed to just like something that gets washed every single cycle. But people always ask me like, what'll be the biggest mover of this cycle? And it's probably something we don't even know of yet, something we've never heard of yet. Because every new cycle, these new things emerge, there's no selling pressure, there's no bag holders that go up only. Yeah. What's next? What projects are you most excited for in 2024, 2025? I don't really like to get into specific projects. I think we do have buckets though, like real world assets, RWA.

There's one coin that's gone absolutely mad that I bought a small position in with that in mind, which is called IX Swap. I don't really talk about these things to you guys publicly because then I get accused of being a pump and dumper and I'm not selling any of it. You know what I mean? So I know that I have influence, but I think RWA is one very interesting area. Honestly, I think seeing now that know, now that all these layer ones, like they have the speed, they're stable, they have relative security, they're cheap. Now I'm less concerned about like what project I want to see the actual killer apps that come in and give us some sort of mainstream adoption.

I talked about this on a space is yesterday. I talked about it all the time, but like last cycle, it was like, nothing's fast enough, nothing slow. We can't scale to a billion people know it. Now it's like we have this endless speed and block space and nothing to use it. So now you have to prove it to me. Like now we need to see something come in that brings a hundred million people into crypto and see if any of these blockchains can actually scale or are actually fast enough and cheap enough to do it. But I think now we actually need the killer apps. So I'm excited to see that happen in 2024, 2025. Take a couple more here and then I'm getting dry. What would happen to the futures BTO ETF? Well, gold futures ETF

still exists, but I think that slowly the AUM for BITO is going to just diminish and move into the spot ETF because why would you want a product that doesn't really track the underlying asset as effectively? BITO obviously has massively underperformed Bitcoin, which has massively underperformed GBTC. So I don't see why you'd want to have money in BITO once their spot ETF is approved. Do you think Wall Street will suppress the price of Bitcoin like they did gold? Did they? Now I'm going to go to GLD. I realize my screen has been up this whole time. Let me see.

I mean, GLD, if you call this price suppression, like we've kind of famously pointed out, GLD launched in 2005, right? It went up for, this is a weekly chart. So for three weeks, it went up big, bigly. And then it took 287 days to break that even just the beginning high, but then it was up only parabolic. You're talking about going from $45 with corrections up to $185. It's more than a 4X. So no, I don't think that they have interest in suppressing the price of Bitcoin. If they want to suppress the price of Bitcoin, they're already doing it because that's who's shorting on the CME and using the futures ETF. So it doesn't worry me that much. It's next.

Do you have thoughts with a grain of salt where Bitcoin next time all-time high would be? I mean, listen, we got to 70. So even a 2X is 140. That would be a really disappointing cycle. I think mid-200s. Mid-200s. But guys, I have no fucking idea. No idea. Next.

Next. Next. Okay, I'm going to have to find one. And Des, by the way, I'm wearing a McLaren hoodie, not a hat. I saw your comment. I couldn't find the hat, but it's around. But I wore the hoodie. Hi, Wolf. Do you think the high fees in ETH will hurt the performance and make the spot ETF less

attractive? No, I don't think anybody cares about the fundamentals, to be quite honest with you. I think there's plenty of people who want to build on ETH who are willing to pay the premium to do so. I think that people can obviously use layer twos. But to be honest, let's think about a spot Ethereum ETF where the issuer of the ETF could stake the ETH and make a percentage gain inside to the benefit of the holders of the ETF. I think that far outweighs any issues with the Ethereum fundamentally. What's next? Hi, Scott from New Zealand. I'm not from New Zealand. Oh, you're from New Zealand. Do you think the stock market crash can still affect the crypto market? Yes. I think if we see a major stock market crash, the crypto market temporarily, always happens, would go down

with it. But then let's look at March 2020. We talked about it. March 2020, COVID, Bitcoin was 14, went all the way down below four. But what happened after that crash? Because there's always going to be a rebound, right? Bitcoin went from under 4,000 at the bottom to 69,000, like 17X. Stock market doubled. Everybody talked about that. So where do you want to be even if all markets crash when that recovery happens? I want to be in crypto. Next. Okay. I would do like one or two more. What would happen for you to believe the four-year cycle are over? Yeah. I mean, I think it would be pretty clear. Like we don't make a new all-time high here, uh, or we like slowly go up and we never see the big

correction at the proper time, but right now everything's in line. So it's going to take years for us to see what happens each year of the cycle to judge that. All right, one more. Do you think XRP is dead? I mean, I'm not a huge XRP fan anyways. I don't think it's dead. Honestly, I just think that there's two headwinds for XRP in general. Besides the fact that they won, I think that was great for the industry. A, when XRP was invented, stable coins weren't really a thing. And why send a... Even if it's fast and cheap, why send money via something that can change price while you're sending it when you can send a stable coin just as fast and cheap? And B, that I think that a lot of people who would have used XRP, maybe the JP Morgan and such of the world, are building private blockchains of their own to keep walled gardens around their transactions. So I just don't see the case for it right now unless they kind of pivot

and do something different. Yeah. And I think that's all we got, guys. I got to go be a parent. Kids are home. 2023, guys, wrapped it up. Ended up being a much better much better year i think than any of us anticipated certainly about halfway through it's been nothing but really good news i think for the past six months wrapping everything in a bow i hope you guys have an amazing new year's i'm not going to do more thumbnails like that probably maybe probably um and yeah i think 2024 is going to be amazing guys no matter what happens, we'll be here. We'll be discussing it.

We'll be covering it. We'll have our good takes. We'll have our bad takes. Uh, but I really, I genuinely appreciate that all of you guys show up every day, uh, and hang out and listen to me because I have ADHD and it's literally probably half the time, like watching an insane person rattle off bad ideas that he forgets about 24 hours later. So I appreciate that you guys stick with me. You're an amazing audience and community. And maybe in 2024, we'll work on building that community a bit better so that we can have better interaction than just in the comments on YouTube.

Guys, thank you so much. Have a very happy new year. I'll see you in 2024. Peace.