The Wolf Of All Streets - Extreme Fear. Fundamentals Strong. Market Blind? #CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: February 12, 2026

In this episode of the podcast, host Dave and guests discuss Bitcoin's current price around $68,000, amid extreme market fear with the Crypto Fear & Greed Index hitting a historic low of 5, signaling potential selling exhaustion and a classic contrarian buy opportunity. Panelists debate sentiment extremes, institutional accumulation, quantum computing risks, macro mispricing, and comparisons to gold, while expressing cautious optimism for long-term holders despite short-term downside risks (possibly to $50-60K). The conversation expands to broader concerns like institutional trust erosion, recent political events (e.g., Epstein file discussions), economic instability, AI agents' future impact on crypto rails, and altcoin challenges in a maturing market. A candid, wide-ranging talk blending technical analysis, macro views, and philosophical takes on trust and value in uncertain times.

Well, good morning, everyone. Bitcoin is at, what a surprise, right around 68,000 again. And yet the extreme greed and fear index, at least alternative me one, is the lowest I've ever seen it at five. You know, at a certain point, you start to wonder how things are going. It's almost two textbook to imagine. But if you really want to articulate what excelling exhaustion looks like, this is what selling exhaustion looks like. Now, it isn't clear. I mean, it's not obvious, but every time in my career, I've seen people saying something is going to go to zero.

Everybody hates equities. Everybody hates this. Everybody hates that. It gets to the bottom. You have the sentiment getting more and more extreme at the same time as the volatility compresses more and more, and the volumes drop. And that's what we're seeing today. So maybe Gary will ultimately be right,

and the lack of buyers will determine but maybe it is that the lack of sellers will determine and those who have been steadily accumulating, i.e. the graybeard institutional types, will ultimately win out. I guess we'll see, but that's why we put it here. Tony, first hand up, go for it. Hey, Dave. Yeah, I wanted to add to what you're saying. I'm personally buying here. I was buying in December 22 and January 2020, that worked out well. And with this extreme fear, to your point, I think it's down to five, the lowest it has ever recorded. which is incredible. And to your point, I think sellers are going to get exhausted at some point. Not to mention, I think overall people have given up on crypto, retail sentiment. I see middle fingers

going up to the Coinbase Super Bowl ad and people booing. Is this the perfect contrarian move to buy the blood in the streets, buy the fear, the depression, the anger? And then, you know, I don't know how long it takes the bottom out, but I'm personally accumulating and just being patient. So I made a post this morning. There's a, I thought, absolutely brilliant article written in Zero Hedge by Hugh Hendry. And effectively, the TLDR in the article is comparing, it compares Bitcoin and gold within the Fiat system. And it says certain things that some people in the Bitcoin space would find heresy, yada, yada, yada. But basically his point is simple.

He says, listen, you know, Bitcoin could very well be a better version of gold. it could easily rise to those levels, but the market is pricing the fracturing of the Bitcoin consensus or inability to adapt to things, you know, whether it's quantum or otherwise. And that if as it becomes more institutionalized, my rejoinder to that, it's not even a rejoinder, it's an explanation, is as you have more power concentrated economically within Bitcoin, with the ability to potentially move and gain consensus to do what needs to be done, If as that is happening, that means that we are underpricing it. And I think I did a post recently.

I still have yet to figure out how to put something into the nest. I know that's completely ridiculous. But I think that that's kind of important because when you get to this level, the entire crypto community, I mean, pretty much everyone that you would follow, keep saying it's going to go low, we're going to buy it lower. Now, I don't know if they actually have money. I mean, Gary, when he says he has something, I believe him. Gary has, I don't agree on everything, but I damn well know that if he says X, X is what he

believes to be true. I think there are a lot of crypto KOLs who are tapped out, right? And so who the hell knows? Andre. Hey, Dave. Yeah, I totally agree with you. I think there's a massive mispricing going on. I've recently put out an X article saying it's the biggest macro discount in Bitcoin's history and you can actually measure like what Bitcoin is pricing in terms of global growth expectations and then compare this to like forward-looking indicators, but not even the ISM. I mean like even more forward-looking indicators like Empire State, future manufacturing expectations and so on. And it's the biggest, based on this kind of model, it's the biggest discount, macro discount in Bitcoin's history. And the questions of course, like what is driving it, right?

And of course, we know it's been driven by a long-term holder selling on chain, right, and 10-10 liquidation and so on. Maybe this kind of weakness in software equities, right, the latest lackdown. But I used to be like a skeptic of this kind of quantum discount argument, but I mean, there's definitely a case to be made that, like, there is some kind of quantum discount. And if you look at, for instance, the relative performance between Bitcoin Cash and, and PTC or Bitcoin core, right? It's probably around 27%, so around 25%, let's say. But even then, I think if you think that Q days at least like nine years away, right, because we need at least nine doublings, right?

And if you assume a kind of Navins law, right, it's at least nine years away, right? So in the best case, in the lower bound estimate case, right? So let's say a hundred percent. of supply was vulnerable at this point, right, to quantum. So you had like quantum discount of around 11% per annum, right? But not 25. So essentially the market, in my view, front trend, two and a half years of quantum risk discount in like five months.

It's worse than that, actually, if you think about it. Right. Yeah, of course, like we had like 50% drawdown, right, from peak to trough. But I'd say half of it is. probably explainable via this kind of quantum discount, you know, which I think is like a short-term overreaction. I thought your post was great, and I like that. I think I reposted it, even if I remember right.

But I think that the Hendry article actually gets at this thing in a much more basic way. And if you know, or if you've watched what's happened with Coinbase and their research center with strategy, what they're saying, where others are. coming around, it looks like the market has fairly significantly, I don't know, overpriced. Overcorrected in this particular time frame. I mean, but, you know, whatever. I mean, humans are going to human. And that's what we have.

I mean, Tony, is that a phantom hand or is there something else? I'm sorry because this platform drives us all nuts. Oh, it's phantom. Oh, there you go. But I agree. like I think we're definitely closer to the bottom, right, than the top, right? If you think about key pricing levels, right? I mean, there's definitely a risk that we could go lower, right?

To like 58K where like 200 week moving averages or realize price. There's actually this kind of confluence between the 200 week moving average and realized price around this level, which is slightly below 60K, so the previous lows. But still, I mean, if you investing for the long term, you don't really care whether it's going down another 10K, right? I mean, I think it's still, it's already very asymmetric at these levels. Yeah, I just find it funny how people love looking at linear charts of price of an asset whose entire, you know, the narrative that everybody has always looked at with Bitcoin is. is its pricing relative to gold because as an indicator of Fiat. And yet the people in the Bitcoin community are looking at an analog chart in linear terms,

ignoring its adoption rate, ignoring the network, ignoring all that, and ignoring the fact that gold has gone up two and a half times since, you know, in the period of time that you're looking. It to me is, I mean, I don't want to, I don't like to use words like crazy or insane because markets can always be crazier and more insane than you expect. But that's what we're looking at, right? I mean, I don't know any other way to say it other than that. Sasha, what do you think?

Well, fun fact, there was just an article published on Bloomberg this morning that standard chart, the bank, said they could slide down to 50 and they were expecting further capitulation. But yeah, I mean, strongly agree with you. I think there is a lot of fear going on around the narrative that how can Bitcoin be the digital. gold if gold is going up right like bitcoin is not doing what it's expected to do um while at the same time or other reasons why um there are correlations between uh other markets and and bitcoin but i think that's that's what's going on right now i mean clearly i look there was an article from deutsche bank yesterday and i and you know which i don't want to make fun of them look i spent a lot of time on wall street and if there's one thing i understand about wall street analyst

are, they are trend followers. They are not trend setters. And so they, whatever the price is doing, that's what the narrative is going to do. So when you see prices starting to go up, it doesn't matter what the asset is. The price starts going up, the analysts get more bullish. You see prices going down. The animals get animals. The analysts get less bullish. They are not paid to take risks. So every single time I see an analyst that says, you know, whatever, it's magnifying the current direction, I kind of look at it and say, well, that probably doesn't mean a whole lot. What does mean something is the rare occasion when you see an analyst actually making a call and sticking a flag in the ground, that's when you want to take notice. That's frankly, although I think a lot of Tom Lee's stuff that he said recently is,

is testament to the fact he's wearing the Ethereum jersey. What he did in 2009 was, and why he's so famous, is because he's, he literally did the opposite of what Wall Street analysts are trained to do. He said enough is enough is enough. Yeah, I mean, one thing that's different from previous cycles, though, is that the lower bound is greater than zero, right? Nobody is saying everything is going to zero. Oh, that's not true. I see plenty of them.

Yeah, but like not the financial times. I mean, I don't see that one. Yeah, the financial time says it. You know, leadership always says it. I mean, you know, this guy's so shameless that he says, like someone made some comment about how he's been saying, coin is going down since it was $1. And he goes, well, it will go down from there.

It's just a question of time. And it's like, so my question is at what point and that you're next? I just, just a question for the audience, when you make a prediction or you may have a thesis, at what point do you allow it to be considered provably wrong? I mean, to me, admitting you're wrong because the thesis has changed is the, is, that's where all your successful investors are. The successful investors cut their losses when they realize they're wrong. let their winnings run.

And yet people listen to these people. I try to stay away from pejoratives that don't have a way to be falsifiable. It's a pure conspiracy theory. It's like, well, it goes up what you see. It's manipulated. I mean, whatever. I mean, it's just crazy. I mean, Matt, your hand up.

So, go ahead. Yeah, man. I hope you get your ex account back. Dude, I'm really, I'm really, me too. It's crazy. I mean, look, at this point, I'm getting more engagement on this one, even though it is one fifth of followers, yes. For those, but for those who don't know what Matt's talking about, my at DM Weisberger, the account you see up here is a relatively new account and many people who think they're following me aren't.

Because at Dave Weisberger is there. So if you're not following me, please follow me. Yeah, that's my PSA. Yeah, got to get that in, brother. You know, you talk about how low can it go. And I, uh, interesting confluence I'm seeing here from a very banister, chief equity strategist over there at Stifle, got a target about 38K. And I was in a conversation with one of our. our good friends Jason Williams OG in the space for a long time. And again, kind of talking about

that 38K price level. And if you look at the Fibianci level, about the, I think it's the fifth fib level down, about 0.76 or so, that does kind of put it at about a 75% drawdown. And we have seen historically Bitcoin make these kind of drawbacks. I'm not saying it's going to go there myself. I think it's interesting. I'm hearing a lot of people talking about it, at least in my timeline. So I'm keeping a little more dry powder. If this thing should go that low, we'll see. Well, you know, you can't really argue about dry powder, but what I actually put out a video a couple days ago on this, the, when you start looking at that, understand that, first of all, three data points is, and I'm going to keep saying this, three data points. And I've been in quantum investing for most of my adult life. And three data points is so far from statistical significance as to be almost useless. But people treat it religiously until it breaks. Understand that, even those three data points where Bitcoin dropped into the 70s, you know, in that kind of magnitude of drop,

was off of a rally that was 4 to 6X, the rally that we saw in 2025 early war, the rally we saw when Trump got elected. So, I mean, yeah, that's true, but there's lots of reasons to understand why that doesn't make a whole heap of sense. And the real question is, is these drawdowns were people pulling themselves

the hell out of the market and liquidity flushes. Well, liquidity flushes seem to be localized now. The question is, is there really more money to be sold at these levels? That's the question. Amateo, I finally triggered you. Good. Hey, Dave, you trigger me all the time, man. I try.

Yeah, I'm just curious, like, there's a lot of smart analysts up here. And we've talked for years now about Bitcoin being the canary and the coal mine. And I know Scott has also mentioned the fact that he stopped dollar cost averaging the stock market. So if I, it's a little questionable. What do you guys think? You think we get a soft landing? You think that they're able to get this thing situated. Do you think that the CAPEX and AI is going to carry things where they need to be?

Or do you think that we actually get this potential recession in the United States? And it will all be obvious in hindsight that Bitcoin predicted it like it usually does. And maybe I can take this one. I could answer. I'll tell you what I think. But I can't tell. Right now I see Amateo, Matt, Andre, and Sasha's hands all up. I can't tell of anybody else is out there because that's what Twitter is saying.

Anybody want to take that? Yeah, I can take that. I think it's like a massive misprosing, right? Even if you think there was a recession, right? It's already priced in, essentially, right? So let's say a recession materialize, I think in that case, you get this kind of by the rumor, sell effect, right? Because I think Bitcoin's pricing in a recession, even more than it did during COVID, can

you imagine, it's like it has corrected so much that you have like such a big mispracing to the downside. Yeah, but I think if my personal base case is like US recession won't materialize and the reason why that is is, I mean, you've seen the decline in like job openings, but like even job openings, they tend to lack the ISM manufacturing. You've seen the spike in the ISM, right? And you see all kinds of other leading indicators, like the German iPhone index or Taiwanese semiconductor exports that they're like roaring higher and so on. And I think it's a pretty consistent picture. It's also consistent with the fact that commodity prices are rallying, right?

It's not only gold and silver. It's like copper, all kinds of like manufacturing sensitive commodities that are rallying, right? And so I think we actually, so global growth is not decelerating, right? It's actually accelerating. So I don't think we're actually sliding into recession. I mean, the backest that you could make is you have some kind of tightening in financial conditions because U.S. liquidity is going down, right? Because maybe the shutdown, like these shutdown effects, right?

You saw the weakness in software equities and like the spike in the bigs, which is like somewhat signaling, a tightening in financial conditions. But I think if you look at the gold price, if you look at other indicators for financial conditions, they're like, they're signaling that financial conditions are very loose, especially like the gold price. And this down spike by Bitcoin is essentially pricing a kind of tightening in financial conditions that's comparable to 2022, right? When we had this global contraction and money supply, so US money supply contraction, the biggest since 1929, I think, since the 1930s, right? And also on a global base, you saw this kind of contraction, but we're nowhere near this kind of contraction, right?

And I still think it's rather mispricing. And you can have this kind of mispricing between like market prices and fundamentals, right? It happens all the time, right? And Treadfi, but I think that's actually the case here. I mean, I look at it as Bitcoin being the canary and the coal mine notion for the global economy, I think at this point is ridiculous. You know, it's from a size perspective. it's ridiculous, but also from, if you look at at the investment flows, if you look at what's

going on everywhere, you know, there's, yeah, Bitcoin had, was highly correlated for a while to SaaS companies and SaaS companies are getting drilled because everyone's terrified that AI is going to, you know, get rid of and decrease the pricing power of companies who build software. So, you know, and you could look at that in a lot of different ways. And, like, for example, if you look at Salesforce, Salesforce is the classic example. of the behemoth of SaaS companies, except where is Salesforce, where are they even advertising their value proposition?

They're advertising, they did a Super Bowl at. What did they talk about? They talk about SlackBot. Why does that matter? Well, the reason Slack has value, and it's probably overpriced, but it has value, is because of the network effects that it is better to use a communications platform that you can protect

and that your customers use. So I ran a company and we engaged in, with customers on Telegram, we engaged with customers on Slack. We chose that Slack was better because it was easier to consolidate things around that, but it was the network effect, not the fact that a bot could create software that looks like it.

And so a lot of the SaaS companies are much more about networks than they are about the actual software. And people will start to figure that stuff out. And the ones that are pure software, yeah, pure software's gonna go nowhere. Pure software with networks and institutional knowledge baked in, that's a bit different.

So, but we'll see. Anyway, the point is the economy isn't going to die. What is happening is the value of labor is getting depressed relative to the value of assets. Bitcoin is actually partially a solution to some of what's going on. I mean, if you look at probably the most important thing that's going on today in our society is social division, right? It's trust in institutions. Those are all horrendous. Bitcoin, you would think, would benefit from that.

It is not for its own idiosyncratic factors. Now, I'm trying to tee you up, Gary. I don't see a hand going up, but I mean, I know you've been talking about this a lot and about what's going on with institutions. I mean, whether it's the Epstein files and that absolute clown show that went on D.C. yesterday or just generally the discourse, people don't trust.

and in a world where people don't trust and you have an asset that is literally designed to be able to allow transactions without having to trust, you would think that would be relevant. But I don't think anybody cares right now, do you? Well, yeah, I mean, listen, I'm really glad to hear people being so bullish

and thinking that we found a bottom and correlating it to past moves. That sounds awesome. But dude, I got to tell you, as an investor. What I saw yesterday is not like the kind of investment,

you know, if I was in another country and I saw that behavior, I'd pull every fucking dollar out of that country. So I hate, I'm a really optimistic human being, but I mean,

the behavior we're saying, I'm ashamed of our leaders, man. Like, there is nothing attractive about what, what I saw yesterday from,

anyone. People, they're acting like junior high brats, man, fucking rich kids. So I'm very bearish America right now. It's really disturbing. I mean, who wants to be super rich and live in a fucking shithole? Like, that's not, that's not cool. I mean, that's that, the shithole part is a bit, a bit silly, but you, but I don't. It is, it is a shithole, dude.

Because see, the problem is this toilet is so full of crap at this point, and no one's flushing it, no one's addressing it, and we're going to pretend like it's going to actually improve next year and the following year. This toilet will not improve. Like literally we are saying we're going to continue this behavior in perpetuity forever. That is what we are doing. We are literally saying we are not going to stop this. we're going to support it that's disgusting man yeah i i i can't argue too much because

just as i said it's impossible to argue at this point it was really i mean it's impossible to argue that the country can't rally around the notion of of just saying fuck it i don't care who is implicated we want to know i mean you know they the me too you have to know at this point, okay? We know there are redacted people. If those redacted people aren't unredacted, this world is very unsafe. Yeah, I think you're right. But to me, the funniest part, and funny is the wrong word, the most unusual part is the only thing we're fairly confident about, as far as Epstein is concerned, I know this is far afield from, from markets, but given the fact we have such a weird break in terms of fear versus market action, et cetera, which doesn't make any sense.

I mean, you know, this good an explanation as any. But the weirdest part is it looks like it's pretty clear that Trump turned on Epstein once he realized what the fuck was going on. So why the hell? What is his incentive to protect all the various people who, it could be, and we know it's going to be, it's going to cross party lines. I mean, this is about power. This is nothing to do with politics, right?

I don't understand it. I mean, you've met the man and you've been in those circles. I mean, does it make, other than the fear that it could just destroy, you know, that you might have 10, 20, Fortune 500 companies have their CEOs have to be forced to resign. I mean, why? And they're bored. So what? I don't, well, like, do you really, do you really think there was never any emails over 15 or 20 years at Microsoft about brand issues or, you know, litigious issues or class actions or problems?

Like, I'm pretty sure more people knew than just the redacted. Okay? And if you know there's felons going on and you're sitting on a board of a major corporation, that's gross negligence, man. The fucking lawsuits on this. That's what, Dave, I think actually, the motive, the motive is if they, if we discover how compromised, most CEOs are at banks, big pharma, big ag, everywhere else energy, the whole thing, the stock market would collapse. But you know what's funny? Because the earnings are fake, dude.

The earnings are fake. They're literally using the earnings to suck the life out of the consumer. That is a non-sustainable business model. So ask yourself the question, is that, let's just game theory that out for a second. Isn't that the ultimate bull case for Bitcoin? I mean, seriously, because what does the government have to do if the stock market starts to collapse? I think it is ultimate.

the problem is, you know, you could go to $30,000, $24. See, I think Bitcoin's telling us, hey, the fucking world is unstable. This space was downloaded via spacesdown.com. Visit to download your spaces today. To me, this is the best, hey, why is Bitcoin doing what it's doing? Now, maybe it's a four-year cycle, or maybe it's literally telling us, hey, this is fucking crazy. Like, if I was running this as a business, I'd be like, wow, this is so unsustainable. Now, how do we get here?

We got here because quarterly earnings, everybody's on the same fucking, the same drip. They have to show growth, quarterly earnings. You can't build shit having a report to 22-year-old analyst quarterly earnings and get graded every month on your stock price. And some of these companies are valued so fucking insanely. It's the price for super perfection. and we are not super perfection. We noticed yesterday, we're so far from perfection, it's fucking crazy. Oh, yeah.

I mean, there's no doubt. But I always want to stick to the game. Can you imagine what these meetings are like with this crazy cut? I can't imagine being in a meeting with this woman. I think that she, I don't know. I think, honestly, I think that she's over her head and asks to balance a fine line that is virtually impossible. I mean, for example, I mean, how do you sit in an administration where the only one of the only unredacted names is the Secretary of Commerce? I mean, I don't see how he stays, but Trump is a very loyal individual, which is laudable in many cases, but even if he didn't do anything, it's just, I just don't see how he survives.

But you're right. But if you gain theory out what you said, because I think that that is the disaster case. think that you're smart and you're making points that people don't understand. Your point about shareholder lawsuits is hugely important. Let's say the Fortune 500 starts to unravel. And let's say every board and every company that matters, and maybe not every, let's say that start to unravel. The amount of dislocation that would cause, the print to use Larry Lepard's cover, the reaction to that, which is absolutely certain because it would be worse than COVID.

certain in certain cases is absolutely certain. How many people want to sell before that? It's sort of like, you know, buying beachfront. Totally, dude. It would be Arthur Anderson on steroids. Right. But now imagine. A fucking massive Adderall hit. I mean, it's, like, they're still suffering from that, okay? 20 years later. It's selling Bitcoin here. I mean, I understand if you want to sell the Mag 7, which are prior, or sell companies that are priced of perfection or sell, you know, Microsoft because you got to believe that Gates is hip deep in it and the board is going to know and they're going to have all sorts of problems. I get that. That makes sense to me. But selling the

asset that is primarily going to be the biggest beneficiary if in fact that that scenario develops seems nuts. It's almost like buying beachfront property on an island because nobody's in and it looks like you have a big. Dave, nobody's in Bitcoin. The money that's moving out in the video is not coming into Bitcoin. The money that's going to come out of the S&P is not going to come into Bitcoin. Well, that's, it's the crypto money. You got not, you don't have any buyers here. You say that, but BlackRock made more money on Bitcoin ETFs last year than any other

product. So yeah, some of it is. But, but they're the only ones buying it, dude. Them and Sailor. Their, their customers are the ones who are buying it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. The customers are the reality. That's what I meant.

Yeah. Yeah. That's what I meant. But it's coming in slowly. And, and, and you clearly had more sellers than buyers. Of course. Well, we had more sellers than buyers until this week when we have, it's basically balanced again.

You know, 60, the flush down the 60 happened. The rally back up to the 66 to 68 level, you know, happened. And then we've sat here while markets are doing whatever. And it's not. But Bitcoin doesn't like just sitting around. No, exactly right. Test 60 or it's going to test 72. And I just think you're going to have a lot of selling at 72, 82, 82, 88, 98, 92.

And it's going to be a fucking slog here. I agree with it. We're months. I think that's absolutely right. And I think that, and I think a lot of people think that. The question is, will we get a hated rally? Because a hated rally is the kind of rally you see. It's like, oh, I don't know why it's going up.

People are selling, and it just kind of grinds higher. I don't. Based on the behavior I saw yesterday, we deserve the worst fucking market in the world. Seriously, man. I mean, it's hard not, I don't know about deserve. I'm not that theoretical. I certainly think there are a lot of people out there who deserve to have their balls smashed by a ball peen hammer.

Yeah, that's for sure. But I'm not sure, but I didn't do any of that. So I don't see why I have to suffer. But anyway, I'm going to tell you, is your hand up from before or what's going on? No, no, I'm here. I mean, I think Gary's got the hand on something that's really, really important here,

which is, look, and this is why I kind of, started to test the waters from the recession idea. It doesn't have to necessarily even be a recession, but there is a critical break in institutional trust that is starting to become ever more apparent. And this was the risk. This is why they didn't want to release these files. This is why they didn't want to have the implications to become public because there was too many high-profile people, people that we're tied up in it. And then we're saying people resign, step down, from royalty to executives, everywhere else in the world. And in the United States, there's no accountability. There's no response. All there is is plausible deniability. And if you can't, you know, if you

don't have blood on the curtains or blood on the sheets, it's DNA positive. Fuck you. I'm going to do what I'm doing and you're not going to stop me and I'm infalliable. And people have had enough of this. And this is that the shit show and the clown show yesterday was proof that there is going to be nothing but denial, culpable deniability and a complete lack of accountability. And that systemic break of trust in institutions is going to cascade. And maybe it's not mis-earnings, Maybe it's not a bad report, but guess what? Stocks are still dumping on earnings beats because there is starting to be a lack of faith in the system. So if someone asks you a legitimate question about investigating the most high profile case in the world and you reference the stock market and it's all time high, I'm really bearish.

It's like that's just facts. That's just facts. I think that that response we can look at and we'll be able to look at and go, okay, it breached 50,000. This is going to become a mega mean for a while that Pam Bondi saying that in response to a legitimate question in a congressional hearing will mark the top, right? I think that we'll look back and see that for a while. And I agree so much with that.

I totally agree with that. Yeah. It was horrifying. It was horrifying. There's no other words for. It's horrifying. But like the Bitcoin canary in the coal mine, it's not telling you that it's not a solution for this because it is.

It's telling you that the breach of trust is becoming systemic. And it's going to have a cascading effect that that isn't priced in yet everywhere else. So look, it is priced in in Bitcoin. And we can talk about where the confluence of quantum and the disresum. and the disruption of AI and all these agents, no one knows what the fuck is going to actually work and how fast things are going to spin up when it comes to software and how quickly we're going to be able to innovate.

So we have this completely like uncertainty with technology combined with a complete breach of trust. You put those together and I think that that's what's priced in. And eventually we'll get to the other side of that, but that's the signal that I'm seeing. Yeah, I think that, yeah, that's true. It just tells me, my intermediate term trader hat says, you know, a pairs trade by Bitcoin, short pretty much all the other shit.

And maybe by gold also. So we'll keep gold and silver out. But buy Bitcoin short the crap, you know, a basket of everyone who you might think is involved is the smart move. But I don't know. I mean, it, but it was ridiculous. I mean, I've never seen anything quite so, so stupid. I mean, I was going to tweet at one point, you can make what's your name, J-PAL look smart.

You know, it's you're, you've managed to accomplish something that's almost impossible to do. Yet, you know, it's just the whole idea of redactions. I mean, to me, at some point it's going to dawn on this administration that it doesn't matter what the consequences are. You're already pregnant, right? You know, you need to just unredact all the, all the emails that Epstein sent. I mean, you don't want to unredact the entire files because so much of the things in the files are complete crap. I mean, there are people in those files talking about, you know, how they're aliens, you know, coming in and doing this stuff.

I mean, that's not relevant. But if Epstein sent an email to a person, that person should be unredacted because then you know that that's real. At some point, that's going to happen. I don't, or if it doesn't, I mean, the public is just going to react incredibly badly. I mean, to me, this is nuts. But part of me wants to agree with Gary because we saw the same stuff. And if you weren't horrified, it's crazy. But the trader in me or the investor in me looks at this and says, well, wait a minute.

You know, this might be the pin that creates the need for the quote for Larry's big print. And I don't want to be on the other side. You don't want to get caught wrong footed about that because like have you sold based on what was going on with the pandemic. I mean, some of the smartest investors in the world were mapping out the transmission rate of the pandemic. And a week before, all the shit hit the fan started piling into shorts. And if you had sold during that period of time and didn't take profits before the Fed pulled the trigger, you literally got, you know, faces ripped off doesn't even describe how bad it was. And people learn from that. So that's why I wonder.

I don't know. I mean, you know, Matt, you know, you talk to a lot of people about this. I mean, do you think people are just kind of frozen or, or, you know, in terms of like seeing how horrible this is but not wanting to do anything? Yeah, I kind of do agree. I think that this has got a lot of people on the sideline kind of frozen. I think that's a great way to put it. You know, really at the end of the day, you've got Satanists that are eating people, it sounds like from the files. I mean, this is like, this is no longer a conspiracy theory, guys. this is real, right? And if you would have said this back in 2016, right around when Pizza Gate came out, people would have laughed at you. But now we have enough evidence here to see that there is some legitimacy here. There is reason to be concerned. And, you know, we need to just let it burn, man. We just need to pull the plug, let it burn. And I mean, I think a lot of people have that opinion. I mean, I don't care what party you're in. I mean, this is not, I mean, yeah, the political parties, I mean, the Democrats are more powerful within their own members. But, you know, the Republicans, all they can, all you'll hear about,

them is something that I actually agree with them on, which is, you know, voter ID and that kind of stuff. That's all they're trying to talk about. And fair enough, I think we do need that for lots of reasons. And I think the whole population does. But when you have so many people in the country seeing a clear validation of a simple fact that we've all sort of suspected but couldn't know for sure, which is that rich people believe they can do anything and get away with it. That's that's that literally the the undercurrent. You talk to people that have not all rich people though. That's just not true of all rich people.

I didn't say that. Well, Gary, okay, you know, let's do this. I'm going to be a prick now. Yes, I know you're absolutely right. Stereotyping all rich people is horrible. I will go so far as to say stereotyping, any race is horrible. And you know exactly what I mean. And it's something that happens a lot and a lot of people do it.

But the general person on the street, the person who is a, you know, whatever, I mean, it doesn't matter who you are. If you're not rich, they look at the rich people and they think exactly that. And that's the problem. When you talk with the institutions, I mean, Congress, what's the Congress's approval rating? Anyone know recently? But I know it was the lowest in history ever. If it doesn't sink lower still after yesterday, that's a bet I can't imagine, you know, not taking the other side of. the average person believes that the rich and the political class have their own set of rules we saw it in the pandemic when gavin newsome had his famous you know thing at uh what was that french laundry i guess that place is called or when nancy pelosi got our hair done you know or you know whatever there's so many of them it whatever we've seen it that is exactly where the pitchforks come from that's why mom dami who is well on his way already to you know embracing new york and the warm

of collectivism, that's how he got elected. It's because of that. If you think that's not going to soup up, it's crazy. I mean, you're going to see the Republicans and Democrats both get more and more extreme unless this is addressed. I mean, this is actually an opportunity. I mean, you would think if you, to, when, when Matt says burn it down, that's what it's neat.

That's what's needed, right? I mean, what am I missing? You don't think that scapegoating is, you don't think that scapegoating the rich isn't the next thing. You think, sorry to say this, but there is, always been a very thin line between scapegoating the Jews and scapegoating the rich. If you think that this isn't going to metastasize, you are just, that's like the people who started a fire in medieval warfare, and then the wind changed, and then they ended up getting destroyed.

You know, there's some funny stories about that. I mean, this is pitchfork stuff. And yesterday was right on display. Come on, I had to have triggered someone. I mean, am I crazy, Matt? Do you, you don't see this? I see it. I thought yesterday was a complete and utter shit show. It was just bread and circus. Again, it's more noise. And we've got to focus on the signal. And I think that, you know, having smart folks here on this panel and having these conversations are part of that. And it's then up and incumbent to each one of us in our spheres of influence. Gary does a great job of this. You do a great job of this. Amatea and all the spaces and across the line. We just need to continue to be that voice out there to educate and to inform. And so, yeah, I think you really hit the nail on the head there.

I mean, it's funny. I mean, you know, today, you know, the reason Scott's not here is he's up at, I guess, Bitcoin Investor Week up in New York, and you have an entire institutional confab of people talking about all the topics that we would actually care about if we weren't so preoccupied by, you know, the collapse of trust that Amateo described.

It, to me, I don't, an interesting juxtaposition. Yeah, it is an interesting juxtaposition, and the reality is, is that crypto growth, wallet creation, enterprise, institutional adoption, investment from legitimate institutions, the maturity of the technology and the players getting involved is growing. That's the irony, right? And it doesn't look like that the quantum piece, that the AI piece, is stopping this. it's just going through a process of maturity in very uncertain times. And ultimately, the people who don't leave, the people who keep building and focus on the right things in this space, give it several years will look like geniuses once again. That's the reality.

We just will. We'll look smart down the line. But the longer that this complete sponge of a foundation is withheld and doesn't just come crashing down, the longer it's going to take, the worse it's going to be, the worse it's going to be for more people. And the more pain that all assets are going to eventually go through until we have a rehardening process of value. But the foundation of trust is just too soft for that trust to be put in technology as a hard source of value right now. There's just too many questions out there. Yeah.

I mean, it's just, it's really hard to talk about actual, you know, actual topics. You know, I kind of, we kind of went down in this rabbit hole. But, you know, the truth is that we've seen, when you talk about institutional adoption, that means a lot. We don't know, like I put out something yesterday, a video on all coins, which this is crypto town hall after all. So I'm curious what people think. I mean, my thesis is that the crypto market was propped up from the beginning by founders and VCs that took advantage of the fact that you can get immediate liquidity on a project that was no more than a PowerPoint. You know, PowerPoint with a token. and that, you know, it evolved as a series of rug pulls and a series of incentives that were misaligned toward the creation of value.

And despite all of that, the technology is starting to penetrate into a financial system, which will ultimately deliver value. Now, the question is, is our token holders going to get that. What, you know, and what happens to the assets? You know, to me, that's an important one because I've been saying, and you've all heard this, and I'm the old guy. So I come, you know, like old man, you know, yells at cloud sort of thing, saying that, well, but the tokens have to provide values to, you know, the token holders need to receive some of that value for it to be useful. And yet we've had an environment where most of take Bitcoin out of the equation and even even take a theorem out of the equation because of its name recognition. If you look through the vast majority of the rest of the cryptovverse, people have no idea what token holders, you know, how they participate, even if the token project does. extremely well, right? And that matters, and that has to get resolved. And I don't know,

you know, what will be the path, but the path is likely to be, you know, disaster for lots of, quote, project tokens that people are just going to abandon. I mean, Sasha, you sit and you research these things. I mean, what are you seeing in terms of valuations? You know, I hate to put you on the spot, but you obviously are talk about the broader market much more than the rest of us. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, everything is, you know, it's, it's tough to put like, what are the, the actual fundamental of those things. And, you know, that's what we've been trying to do this for years, right? And then you get like, this piece of news that comes in and like everybody fomo's into something or just like dumps everything, right? It's very narrative driven. There's,

A lot of narratives, obviously, you know, like if you look at what's been going on recently, the ones that haven't, they have really had good pricing have been, you know, the more institutional strategy tokens like Canton has been able to sustain pretty good price action. Uniswap after the announcement of the of the Black Rock. and a lot of expectations on more tokens to come, but I don't see new token assurance happening in this market right now. Well, that's actually bullish in a sense, although I'm still extremely, I think I would say that there will be the total market cap of tokens, full stop will be significantly higher than it is today in 15 or 20 years or whatever the number is. number into the future may only be five or whatever, but it might very well be that that could

still, that could actually be true, but today's tokens might be worth less writ large. It's possible that it's all new. It's also possible that a handful of what we have today are massively undervalued and so many other things are overvalued, right? Yeah, and there's definitely some cool off in terms of retail trading activity. The big part where there's been a lot of trading has been actually prediction markets, but even there when you look at we've been looking at differences between polymarket and calchie there's such big differences if you look at calci most of the volume is sports if you look at polymarket

a majority of the volume is sports but like 40 percent compared to like 90 plus percent for calci yeah well that's interesting i'm not sure what to make a bit but it's interesting i mean the all i can say is the looking at my small old portfolio it's almost becoming less than the box and a single box of silver coins on my desk. You know, it's just, it's just, it's insane, right? You know, it's, it, you're seeing valuations or prices, even on ones that theoretically, you know, make sense to people are, you know, we're back to where we were before, quote, the bull market,

you know, well below where the bull market started from, right? So, you know, it'd be curious. I actually am curious, Sasha, you may actually know the answer to this. If you took Bitcoin out and you just look at the drawdown of the all-coin market, take Bitcoin, obviously exclude Tether, et cetera. Just look at global alts. What is the peak to trough now at in terms of correction? Yeah, I could get that, but I don't have that off the bat. I would guess it's in the 70s, if not 80s.

And if that's true, then that's kind of in that it, that's, that, it, that, that, to me it is also quite interesting. I mean, I'd be curious, maybe by tomorrow, or yeah, tomorrow, we're still here tomorrow, this Friday. That would be an interesting metric because I'd be very interested to know what that was, but I know you guys have access to that. Yeah, and I mean, Bitcoin's long-term sentiment, it has plummeted and it as a long-term,

as a pretty low. That's something we've seen. Yeah, I mean, right now, as we've been speaking, I mean, Bitcoin has fallen, you know, know down to below 67. Of course, the NASDAQ is down a percent and change. And so, you know, it's reacting to that. And we've seen that pretty much every single time that's happened recently. So who knows where all this stuff is going? I think this choppiness, this, this heaviness, this sentiment is just horrendous. And the question of how long it lasts, I don't know. I think

there's a real possibility we're talking about this next week and the week after. It wouldn't surprise me. It wouldn't authorize me if we stay in this sort of doldrums for a long time. Yeah. Dave, I'll just say, I'm not even thinking week. I'm thinking months. And I think it could be longer. But I will say one thing with optimism is that the agents have arrived. And it's the most viral moment we've had since chat GPT.

It's a much larger conversation. But they're already interacting in crypto and are more quickly. crypto native, then none of these agents are going to be using a Stripe API. They're not going to be going through Plaid unless they have to. It's all going to be native crypto rails and the transactions are going to go nuts. And it's already starting and it's going to be this dark horse that happens in the midst of all these doldrums that's going to shock everyone. And people, go ahead. No, I was going to ask a question about the agents in specific.

I mean, maybe I'm overly simplistic. Maybe I'm just flat wrong. But it occurs to me that because computers, and AI is not going to be very different than this, are going to look at things similarly, that the like, as agents get more and more into investing in trading, that the herd-like behaviors are going to become more and more pronounced, meaning momentum waves up and momentum waves down will become self-reinforcing. Correct, correct. But you'll also see, to a degree, right? What you're going to see is faster narratives, faster trends, quicker momentum of waves. But we're not just talking about that. We're talking about automated business. We're talking about agent to agent transaction. Trading is going to be huge. There is going to be a lot of hype around money printers. And obviously, that will get self-disrupted over and over again. But it's going to create hype. But But really, it's the economy side of it.

And the economy side being crypto-native as a whole. Now, I think that's really positive for crypto and for all coins. But at the same time, I think there's going to be a lot of agnostic relationship to these agents to these assets. They're not married to your bags, right? They're going to be very utility-driven, revenue market-driven, and whatever works is what they're going to use. They're going to find it anywhere to do it. Yeah, I think that's, I'm still trying to come to grips with when do I trust that I'm smart enough to set agents up without encouraging myself to being hacked, particularly when I realized just how incredibly easy it is. I mean, thankfully, I mean, I had X hacked, but that I have no financial anything on X, right?

In a world where X was, and by the way, X will not be a banking app or a financial app until they fix this because their customer service is. beyond atrocious, the ability or logging in or any of the fear that comes to having your life disrupted, what happens if you give everything to an agent and the agent gets hacked and your entire life has gone? I have a hard time getting over that. Now, that's me, but I'm also, I know what I'm not good at. And while I was a programmer for many years, I'm not, I'm nowhere near the level of skill that I would want to know exactly that I'm covering all my bases.

To me, that's the biggest adoption for individuals. Yeah. No, I think that's right. I think that's right, but that's going to be solved. And they're going to figure that out. Oh, absolutely. And it's going to be the same way you trust your phone and biometrics. We're not there yet, but there's enough of the automation tasks

and being able to put constraints on these things to run all sorts of stuff without a ton of security risk. And that's already. that's already humming. Yep. I understand. I mean, it's impossible to look at how, I mean, whether it's chat GPT or GROC or Claude, it doesn't matter. I mean, how many people do Google search?

I would actually be interesting in numbers. How many people do Google searches when they want to look up a recipe anymore, as opposed to asking whichever one you use, okay, what about this? Because it's just so much easier and so much faster. I mean, the adoption of these things when you get that product market fit will be, will explode. There's no doubt. And you're right. I mean, which is when you look at crypto, it's very important.

But, you know, Bitcoin is a different issue and deserves specifics. There, you know, the spam and the not versus core and BIP 110 are, you know, the question is, is if this is playing out now, how is, you know, how they get to react to. you know, all the threats. That's where the, where the issue is on Bitcoin. With the issue in crypto, it's about value, right? You know, what you described, Amateo is a voracious demand for stable coins, right? Because stable coins can be used. Yeah, veracious for stable coins, but also voracious for scalability, actually making, putting the scalability of these chains to the test. It's extremely bullish on interoperability protocols, bridges, exchanges, anything that's going to serve as bridges, rails for all of these transactions.

I mean, look, we may see tether past Bitcoin this year in total market cap, driven by all of this demand. Good. I mean, certainly all of stable coins could be, well, if the U.S. government has anything to do, that will happen. But anyway, so what we are at time, anybody else have any other stuff other than general disgust and burn it the fuck down? Nope, in which case, maybe we'll be back with something more to talk about tomorrow.

Hopefully it won't be as bad as today's. But have a great day, everyone, and we'll see you again tomorrow at 1015.