What Bitcoin Did - 2026 Macro Outlook and What It Means for Bitcoin | Joe Carlasare

Episode Date: December 30, 2025

Joe Carlasare joins the show for a breakdown of why Bitcoin’s sideways year has been so widely misread, and why sentiment today is the worst it's been. We get into why 2025 fell below expectations, why Bitcoin’s lack of volatility pushed capital toward AI stocks and gold, and the fall out from the October 10th liquidation event. We get into why the four year cycle narrative no longer fits a market shaped by ETFs, options, and institutional hedging, why calendar based thinking has become a liability, and why a year of consolidation may be working off excess rather than signalling weakness. Joe explains why a new all time high in 2026 would be one of the most bullish developments in Bitcoin’s history, permanently breaking cycle psychology, and lays out what could shift Bitcoin from hard mode back into a structurally bullish macro asset as liquidity, positioning, and confidence come back. THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: IREN ANCHORWATCH BLOCKWARE LEDN BITKEY SWAN FOLLOW: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny Joe Carlasare: https://x.com/JoeCarlasare

Built on a confidence game. It's built on people believing that these people have control over the economic apparatus, that they have control over the system. And when you expose the wizard behind the curtain, the myth falls apart. Nobody knows really what happens then. Whenever you disrupt the status quo, it can be very painful and unanticipated consequences can arise. I don't recall a period where there has been this much of a bearish sentiment. It is bizarre to me. People are afraid right now if they fomo back into the marketplace that they're going to get dumped on. When you start to see mounting evidence of this time actually is different, and then you say, oh, it's not different this time. We're going to sell off 80%.

I think Bitcoin can make a new all-time high in 2026. And I think you can do it convincingly. That would probably be one of the most bullish developments, I think, in the history of Bitcoin. Joe Kalliserie, man. Great to see you. Since we first spoke in Vegas this year, you have been one of my favorite people to have on the show. You have a very balanced take on markets, a balance take on Bitcoin. I think more often than not, you stay away from like the hyperbole,

and I think you're probably right a lot of the time. And so I thought a really cool idea would be to go over what's happened in 2025, which has been like, I think, I mean, we were just talking before the show. It's been an extremely disappointing year of Bitcoin from my perspective, at least. I don't know how you think about that. Like, I would never have guessed that at the end of the year would be trading lower than at the start of the year. That was not on my cards. And the markets in general have been kind of all over the place.

Like Trump has truly been like a bull in the China shop when it comes to like tariffs and things like that. So I want to get into everything. But just general take, like overview. Do you think, how have you taken in 2025? Okay. So if you start 2025 and it was funny because at the beginning of the year, I have all these tweets I put out. I had a target for the end of the year. My target was 130, okay, which I think we talked about on our last episode.

And when I put that out there, I was attacked, like, relentlessly. It trolled. People were making fun of me in June because we're almost at, you know, 125 and your target's 130. What are you thinking about? And I always expected, okay? I always expected most of the year to be choppy. I tweeted this out, particularly the beginning part of the year.

I had like my list of 10 predictions I put out, which I will be putting out later this month, you know, next week when I sit down and do the work. But I always expected to be choppy and more volatile than the prior year. And I, I, for one, thought, you know, we would get, you know, closer to 130, 140 range at the end of the year. Obviously, that's wrong, right, which is the nature of predictions. They're always going to get some of them wrong. But we got to 126, right? That was a big move. I think even from the beginning of the year, you know, we're starting out, you know, in the low 90s. We bounced up higher. We made a new all-time high on inauguration. day. And then we were due for a considerable volatility event for most of the first half of the

year, really the tariffs and, you know, the dynamo with Trump. But the economy hung in there. Markets generally overall were strong after, you know, April. You had, you know, what, six, seven months straight up only across the equity market. So nothing really dire, no, you know, huge calamities, nothing that's going to derail the economy as a whole. Now, on Bitcoin, was dealing with a few, I think, idiosyncratic features. is that we have to talk about. And I'll just give you the top three in my mind. Number one, you really have to talk about what happened on October 10th. That is sort of the heart, because I think of where I think the Bitcoin market is now. I think it's still sort of in this state of malaise

and almost depression, given that event. I mean, that really took people to the woodshed. I personally am involved in about a dozen cases now with exchanges and issues where people it really hurt bad by that liquidation event. That's a huge idiosyncratic Bitcoin feature. As big, although not as sort of particularized in a single data point, is this sort of malaise over the cycle theory, right? This idea that Bitcoin has to pump and then bust into the following year, that if it doesn't do well this year, that it's going to somehow, you know,

have a really bad, brutal 2026. I think that's a bunch of baloney and we can get into why. I think it, you know, it's like the analogy I always use is like a rubber band, right? If you stretch the rubber band really hard, right, it's going to snap back. And that's what I think you saw in a lot of prior cycles, particularly the 2017 cycle, where we went from like 1,000 to 196 by the end of the year. That was a rubber band stretched and we worked off that excess for, you know, 12, you know, 16 months. But then the final thing, right, that we need to talk about the cycle.

Then you have the 1010. But I just think that there's this issue with the Treasury companies that people, didn't really know what to make of them. There was a lot of people putting on speculative bets on the treasury companies, and once those entities were taken to the woodshed, right, that caused, I think, broader problems in the Bitcoin space. So those three major headwinds this year, I think, kept the lid on the price action. Right now, though, although I would agree with you,

I am slightly disappointed about sitting in the high 80s, again, lower than where I thought we would end of the year, but not, you know, not significantly. I mean, we're 40%. I mean, we went to 126. To me, I'm very bullish here because I think that the economy is overall is hanging in there. I think you had a GDP print that was really solid. I think Atlanta Fed, GDP now is showing like toward 3% for Q4.

I think that there are pockets of weakness, but there have been pockets of weakness for several years now. And I think you can make a case that there are green shoots in what Morgan Stanley calls the rolling recovery. So that's fascinating because, you know, Bitcoin, I think, is going to respond to a broader equity market rally that is not concentrated in mega cap. And you're seeing that. You're seeing that in small caps. You're seeing that in the metals, which we can talk about in the broader story. So a lot of stuff going on. But I will push back hard in this whole interview because I don't believe in the very negative sentiment. I mean, I tweeted out today. We're recording this on the 23rd of December. I was, you know, I helped Bitcoin through from since 2015. I don't recall a period where there has been this much of a bearish sentiment. It is bizarre to me.

It is, I think it was more optimistic when the FDF collapse went down, which is saying something because people were pretty distraught at that point. They thought it was dead. But this one is really bad. I talked to a guy who's been holding Bitcoin since 2017. He's a seven-figure position, and he was considering, you know, just dumping his whole position going into stocks. And, you know, his whole reasoning is that,

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with each hosted miner purchased. So I think the sentiment is really bad. Like, when I say this year's been disappointing, it's not at all what I expected. And I actually just recorded a show a couple of hours ago with Hoddle and Odell. And they were also saying, like sentiment feels as bad as I've ever felt it,

and they've been a bit quite longer than me, and they were saying the same thing. And the thing that I think is interesting, comparing it to the FTX time, is when that happened, it was so extreme, well, it was relatively extreme to the upside, then very extreme to the downside, that cycle. And so you get the sort of payoff, you get the euphoria, you get like the buzz from the dopamine hit from Bitcoin doing well. And then because it was such extreme on the downside, you also get the dopamine rush from that. And I think you kind of band together, be like, you feel like we know something that someone else doesn't. Bitcoin's still going to recover. We're still right.

Whereas this cycle, there's been no dopamine rush, really, and it's down. And while Bitcoin's not really done very well, gold's performed incredibly well, AI stocks have been booming. So I think people feel like they've missed the boat. They've not really had the uptime. And now it looks like there's people who still believe in the four-year cycle that think, now I've got to wait another two years of bear market or whatever until we can go again. So I think the sentiment kind of makes sense.

Although, I mean, I don't agree with it. And I'm actually quite bullish going into 2026, but I'll be interested to hear why you are. But I do want to go through a few of those things you said just then. One is, why did you pick 130K? Because I've said a couple of times recently, I don't think anyone called this year. Although I would say 130K is a very good call. Like that is close enough to be right, I would say. We hit 126.

We're down a bit from there. But I would say you nailed it. So like, why did you think 130 when everyone else was saying much higher figures? Or even like price predictions aside, just expecting a better market. Yeah. So we were, keep in mind, we had already went to the 100K mark in 2024. Okay. And at that point, I represent a lot of people that have been in Bitcoin for a long time,

some of the OGs. And I was tweeting this out. And again, it's amazing when you get like a violent reaction on Twitter. Honestly, this just doesn't aside. I kind of love when people get really upset and mad you're saying something because that tells me that there's sort of a cognitive bias there that is like you have to attack that. to figure out. It might be just, it may be just something like people have blocked out. They don't want to think bad things. They want to sort of push you aside because they,

because it puts a little seed of doubt in their mind. But when I started talking about in late 2024, I was hearing from quite a bit of people that have been in Bitcoin for a very long time who had psychologically this target of 100. They had 100K Bitcoin, this idea of 100K Bitcoin. So the reason I bring that up is that I think that there were a lot of people that said, look, I have been holding Bitcoin for many years. I had always said I was going to lighten up at 100K. I was going to buy that house or that yacht or whatever. And I started this here anecdotally numerous examples of this.

So why do I start there? Because I recognized and I started to talk with checkmate and others about there was some evidence, even early in 2025, of on-chain data showing some of those OG holders were selling. Now, when you look at markets, right, it's not just the next marginal selling. it's the next marginal buyer. So I expect, okay, it's going to be an exciting year. You're going to have a positive catalyst in the administration.

You're going to have a positive catalyst in these treasury companies. You're going to have the ETFs continuing to gobble up coins. So which one of those wins out in the end? And my belief was that I thought the 13140 target was really like, okay, what would make sense is a reasonable target with the marginal buyers and the marginal sellers would be 150. But we know that people front run those markets. So the reason I, and this is just basically, there's not much more scientific of this, it was the idea that if you have people positioning for 150 and that seems like a sensible target, it's very likely will undershoot the target.

There will be people that will front run that move because they're putting on these leverage positions and they have to sort of close. So it's really that. It's really just the psychology of the marketplace between the marginal buyers and the marginal sellers. And technically, you know, I have some things I've built over the years of Bitcoin proprietary. I think I talked about one of them on a prior episode, but it was telling me 136. 136 was like the top for the year based on the technical proprietary indicator I built. So like I had this confluence of factors where you have marginal sellers, marginal buyers meeting, you've got a time frame, you've got the four-year cycle headwind, you know that there's only a

limited time frame, you know there's going to be uptick and volatility in the equity market. You're balancing all those things together. And to me, 130 to 150 seemed like a sensible range. It's, I mean, that's a good call. We basically hit it. I'll be interested to hear your call for next year. But before we get on that, you said October 10th is one of the big castlers for this. That's an event that I kind of ignored just because it seemed to be a much more crypto problem than a Bitcoin problem.

I know that, like, Wintermute, one of the big market makers had a big cuffle with Binance about that and like potentially they're suing Binance. I'm not exactly sure what's going on there. But why was October 10th that big like crypto liquidation event? so impactful to Bitcoin? So, you know, their public statements allude, Binance allude to this platform issue exposure, right? And which if you look at the broader crypto market, and this is not something I say with delight as a Bitcoiner,

but you have the whole DGEN space, which holds a fair amount of Bitcoin as their underlying collateral. A lot of these folks that are smart in the DGEN space, they're trading to try to require more Bitcoin to catch up. you know, the catch up trade. So if, um, if the broader crypto market suffers a, you know, Category 5 hurricane and everything is pulled down in that space and the market makers pull bids and there are entities that I know of personally and ones that are rumored at having solvency issues, you have them trying to degross and shore up their balance sheet for a period

of weeks to months thereafter. So, you know, it's, it's not like a bullet to the head where it's just dead. It's basically that people have impaired balance sheets thereafter, and they need to get those balance sheets clear. They need to get them in the right solvency position. Sometimes they're selling slowly and gradually at a loss, assets. Like, you know, when you're handling massive positions, I think retail struggles sometimes to understand that you can't just market sell. There's no liquidity there. So you have to sort of slowly, you know, put the ask out there. You slowly build up a sell and do it over weeks. And I think you saw major market makers and hedge funds and other big actors in the space slowly degross their portfolio over the subsequent weeks. And that was a liquidity headwind.

So that really, I think, culminated in the November 21st bottom that we saw that we put in around 80K on Bitcoin. My view is that they've largely repaired most of the damage in their balance sheet. So what happens there? Once we made it to March 21st, or excuse me, November 21st, once we're sitting there, you're in this weird situation where I think half of the marketplace

thinks the cycle is over, that there's no movement forward, there's no obvious catalyst, but then you've got the diehards that are just saying, well, fine, even if that's true, I'm not selling. So you kind of stuck in this range, and it feels like that's what we've done.

We did. We had the 80K bottom, bounced up to 94, hovering in the 80s, bounce, you know, we tried to reclaim 90 a couple different times, just kind of sitting here, no obvious, you know, person willing to step in.

And I think the reason for that, obviously, at this point, is because people believe in the cycle theory, even if it has no analytical reason, because Bitcoin is, you know, it doesn't have earnings, doesn't have cash flow, there's not going to be a new report about, you know, here's the latest, greatest sales that they're doing this quarter. It really is a sentimental-driven market

in these ideas about Bitcoin that are sentimental, drive the price action. So people are afraid right now if they've fully, into the marketplace that they're going to get dumped on and they'll be ending up regretting it. You know, if there's a bunch of people right now who they didn't sell the top, they sold in the high 90s and you're going to have to really incentivize them to come back into the marketplace or you're going to have to create FOMO to get them back in the marketplace. What is the incentive?

The incentive is if Bitcoin dumps to 50K or 60K or is much lower, that's a reasonable range, I think, where people are going to say, yes, we're going to step back in and buy those coins because they're significantly lower than the high 90s where we sold, even if we didn't sell the top. Then there's a whole other group of people, I think that if Bitcoin starts running above 100K, they will start to sweat and they will start to move back into the marketplace. So anyone's guess, I mean, my view is that it's probably the latter because that's unexpected at this point. I think that we were likely to take out that 100K mark in the new year. And once you do, I think we can move very quickly through a new all-time high.

But the problem, you know, just overall in making these predictions that are Bitcoin-specific, is that you have to sort of digest the greater macro story. You know, I always say, like, as much as a bull I am on Bitcoin, if your belief is that the stock market's going to decline 30, 40% in, you know, 2026, which is not my view, but if that's your view, I don't see how you could simultaneously have a bullish Bitcoin stance. I don't believe at some point in the future, give it 20 years, Bitcoin might be able to perform, like, more like a risk off and a risk on asset.

But right now, I don't see that at all. Like if the stock market's going down, Bitcoin goes down with it and probably more volatile. But like, so what do you, I don't know whether we should jump head here. Yeah, let's just jump head. Let's jump into the macro stuff. Like, what is your take then going into the next year? Because I just did a show with Jeff Ross. I know you're friends with Jeff, but I think you probably disagree on a lot of stuff as well.

And he was basically saying he thinks we've been in a sort of recession, depression, type environment for the last year. I know that's something you've kind of faded quite a lot. And he puts that down to like manufacturing, struggling and things like that. So going into the new year, how do you think the economy will perform? I think the economy is about to re-accelerate. And I'll give you some clean examples of why. Number one, let's just go back to what the concerted policy objective for the Federal Reserve

has been for the last several years. There are articles, Danny. You can link them probably in the comments. I could give you some if you want. But back in 2022 and 2023, Jerome Powell's, said repeatedly that the labor market was out of balance. What does he mean by that? He was citing examples before Congress how there were two openings for every one job applicant and how there was unnecessary power that labor had. That literally we were fighting just to see the most mild

tick up in the unemployment rate. Unemployment rate was hovering in the fours and we're getting to four, six or four, seven. Why were they trying to raise the unemployment rate? It is so obvious because the Fed can only control the demand lever of the economy. They can only destroy demand. How do you destroy demand? Well, they won't admit this, but the honest answer is they have to make it harder for people to obtain jobs, and the people that have jobs,

they need to have some decreased negotiating power for wages. So if you can put a lid on the wages, you can control the inflation picture. And if you can control the inflation picture, it makes it easier for our debt servicing. It makes it easier for us to keep lower rates. It makes the Treasury. market shore up. The whole system breaks when you have runaway inflation. And we saw that in 2022.

Now, you know, the question was always, was that going to be a transitory event like the Fed thinks it is? Or was it going to be, you know, persistently higher inflation that compounds on itself and builds the price level. People are pissed off right now because the price level overall is higher, right? Like you go, everything is higher. But the reality is the year over year increases and a lot of these things is relatively tame outside of some services. It's that bulk of that inflationary pressure was in fact transitory. It really happened in 2022, 2021, those supply chain overhangs. That's where you saw this burst higher prices. And since then, you've had modest increases that are closer to the target. So why is that relevant here? Because if they can raise unemployment, they can slow down the labor

market, that will give the effect, I think, of having a clamp down on inflation overall, which gives them room to navigate, which you've already seen with their cuts this year in September, October, and December, right? The reason they're moving is because labor market is finally cooling off, and they want to get out in front of it. They're talking about it in terms of like risk management cut. That's the language that Powell uses. He says, I want a risk management cut. Okay, what he's really saying is that we know of the long and variable labs, the monetary policy, that we have to act now because it won't really be felt until next year, until the middle of next year. And what is my evidence for why you think you are going to see this reacceleration?

Look at the industrial metals, okay? Look at some of, look at things like, you know, I was talking about palladium, okay? Not necessarily gold, right? Gold can rally and do very well in periods when I think that there's sort of the fear trade that's going on. But look at silver, look at palladium, look at platinum, look at even tungsten, okay? Look at those charts and how they're rallying hard. I mean, some of these metals are telling you there's a reindustrialization that could finally get ISM going again,

finally get manufacturing going again. You're going to get stimulus from the big beautiful bill. You're going to have an election year where they're going to be very reluctant to issue a lot of treasury coupons. You're going to have a whole stimulus package, right, that's coming from the administration. They're talking about stimmy checks that they want to dole out to try to get these commodities and try to get this economy moving at a faster rate. And by the way, Danny, it's already running, you know, let's say conservatively, two and a half percent. Two and a half percent is, you know, I think that's a fairly strong growth rate for a developed economy. So to me, I think you can see these green shoots out there.

And if the broader economy starts rallying, Dr. Jeff is exactly right. The way I look at Bitcoin right now, for the last several years, we've been on hard mode. Okay, it has literally been on hard mode. We've not seen a broad-based economy, and we know Bitcoin from any, individuals, investors, it's sort of, they perceive it, not necessarily it should be, but they perceive it as being further out on the risk curve. And where is the capital being directed? Capital has been directed at the sure bets, the solid things like the AI stocks and the, and the tech companies and the mega caps, which are all the same names, right? They're all just

trading amongst each other. But IWM, the small caps, the companies that are completely under pressure from higher interest rates, they're rallying. They're breaking out to new all-time highs. So to me, like, I can't, I don't understand the argument from those who are negative on 2026 as to why those things are rallying. Why would the companies that are not AI plays? They're not, you know, just built on hype. They're not built on, you know, the massive cap acts. These are mom and pop shops in a lot of respects, you know, industrial companies that are rallying really hard. And they're, I think you're rallying all in response to the fact that the inflation rate coming down and the unemployment rate comes.

coming up is going to give the Fed to navigate in other central planners a lot more room to navigate with lower interest rates. So that's going to change a lot of things going into the next year. And Bitcoiners are focused on the four-year cycle. And to me, that seems my op. Yeah. I mean, I want to be fair to start, Jeff. He said that he thinks we may have been in some kind of recession, but he is also very

bullish going into 2026 for a lot of the reasons that you just said. Like he mentioned the big beautiful bill stimulus package that like that is one of the key things that he's looking at. You can't call it a recession because there are a period. So like, let's talk about how difficult this is. And let's just acknowledge both sides. Okay. So the reason I, I find it somewhat cringeworthy about a recession call is because I can look at any economy, literally any economy in the world, and I can show you there are sectors and pockets of weakness. Right now, you name a country, we can go through and you can say, oh, the airlines are struggling here or manufacturing struggling here or services are struggling in this country. They're, they're weak on

tourism, okay? That's not what the NBR, the National Bureau of Economic Research, is trying to do with a recession. They're trying to find a broadspread decrease in economic activity that is coincident with a spike in unemployment. That's how they're trying to find it. You could say that's a BS definition. It's detached from Main Street as detached as CPI is. That's fine. But if your, if your argument is going to be we're in a recession, then name a period in the last hundred years when we haven't been in a recession, because I can show you entire decades where manufacturing in the United States was struggling. And I can tell you periods for multiple years where services were struggling. And unemployment was much, I mean, you had a period in the 2000s where unemployment

was well above 5% consistently. We're not even at 5%. So, like, it's almost like we argue over these semantic discussions about what is and what is not a recession. By the way, if you're navigating markets, what do you care about whether there's a recession? I mean, if you have a small technical recession, there are periods where stocks have done fine. You know, they've held up in United States history where, you know, you have a technical recession. You had a technical recession with, you know, although the NBR didn't clear it with these two quarters of negative growth in 2022. Assets really fell out, the bottom fell out, really, the summer into the fall of 2022. After we technically started to see growth again in the economy, just on the quarter over quarter basis.

I don't find it very useful, like, to talk about, is this a recession? What I think you can say is that manufacturing has been in a slow growth phase or contraction for the better part of three to four years. And that's a true statement. Manufacturing has been very weak. And if your view is, as Dr. Jeff, I think is espoused that manufacturing really picking up is key for Bitcoin's price to really appreciate, I don't believe that. I think Bitcoin can appreciate in any environment.

But if that's your view, as is his, then I can see why his argument would be that, you know, next year might be more optimistic. Well, I hope I'm not putting words in his mouth there. But you say, like, these kind of get into semantic debates and just have another semantic debate. I want to pull you up on something else you said there, which is that, like, the bulk of or a bigger majority of inflation was actually transitory. Do you think that's true? Because, like, it depends, I think, what you're measuring it against. Is this just the CPI quoted numbers? Because it doesn't feel like inflation's been transitory for just normal street people on Main Street.

Like things have got expensive. Like I don't think 3% inflation is probably accurate in terms of what people are actually experiencing. This is because if you come from a classical training in economics, when you talk about inflation, people like me, and I'll just define it. When I talk about inflation, I'm not talking about the absolute price level of. of goods and services. Let's just be very clear. What do I mean by that? The fact that a $300,000 house now costs $700,000, okay, is in my, that absolute price level has risen. It's more than double, okay? We can all agree in that. The absolute price level of going out to eat has more than double, okay? But what is the increase in the price level from 2024 to 2025? Because if I look at the

Zillow and Redfin ratings near me, and I see houses that have either been flat or trickled down in the last year. I see countless examples even in my own subdivisions here. It's either flat or mildly come down. So in an economist language, right, the economists will say there's no inflation there. The prices have made stable or trickle down. However, if you look at the absolute price level over the last several years, people, I think the more precise term is, if you hear cumulative inflation, the cumulative inflation is, you know, up 50% or 60%. So, you know, in terms of like, let's communicate the same thing, I think what I'm saying is that the cumulative inflation since the pandemic has been extreme.

It's been very difficult for people to navigate. It has been backbreaking for some of the working poor. They literally are, you know, struggling to survive. And that is not in any way to be discounted. But what I'm talking about is now on a going forward basis, okay, after that we've digested that, where does inflation go from here? Now, you may say, you know, I know there are people out there in the Bitcoin community, Larry Lepard, and that we're headed for runaway inflation from here, okay? I don't see any evidence of that. I literally can't find any evidence of runaway inflation.

I think you see, you know, some elements of services being sticky high, you know, say closer to three than two percent, which is what I think we were talking about back in May when we had our last podcast, but the notion that, like, we're going to head to 10 percent or Zambawai-style inflation in the United States, I think there's zero evidence of that. So, you know, when we say inflation was transitory, it was a communicate, in my view, it was a clear misread on how you need to communicate with the public. You need to explain to the public that there's going to be a massive price shift across the curve. Everything is going to go up significantly, but then it's going to peter out in terms of the year-over-year increases going forward. Does that make a

sense? That does make sense. But so with the Fed coin rates now, while inflation's still above target and QT coming to an end and there's this like not QEQE happening now, do you not think inflation could come back in the next year? No, I don't because I think to trigger the inflation we, first of all, there's always inflation, right? We're always going to have, I think, some periods of inflation, 2%, 3%. When you say come back, would I mean significantly above 2%. Yeah, yeah. So like closer to the post-pandemic style inflation, right? Is that fair? Read.

Yeah. Well, really, like, anything that's like 4% plus seems like too high. Like, I mean, any of it can be argued that it's too high. But when it's above 4% it feels slightly not in control, unless you think that's wrong. I think it is really wrong because there are some people that they could easily digest 4% inflation. I mean, there are union workers near me who are getting cost living increases of 7% year over year. So they're seeing real increases in their jobs. So this is the problem with this because inflation is uniquely personal.

Like, you know, we try to make these models, which are just BS, right? Like, what is the median worker across the whole United States? And, like, the inflationary pressures of someone in California or in New York, I think are worlds apart from the inflationary pressures of someone in, you know, in Idaho, right? Like, to draw these cross samples and data and analysis and, I mean, even the Fed acknowledges there's problems with these models. And all they're doing is trying to get just a bellwether, trying to like a gauge on what the inflation in area pressures are out there.

But, you know, when you talk about the QE, not QE issue, and I want to go back to like, I think people forget this. Before 20, really 2019, there was QE1, QE2, and Yellen and her cohort, and many people stood around. And they said, well, we can't figure out how to generate inflation. Like, the inflation's under our target. We're running CPI at 1.6%. There's a meeting minute notes where they,

and there's a famous even, I think it was an economist article about how, is inflation dead? Will it ever come back? Like, you know, that was the front cover of the magazine. And the reason I start there is because, like, the QE programs, I don't think have a strong record alone

of causing inflation. What causes inflation, I think, is a growth in circulating money supply in government spending that's being directed into the economy into the hands of people that sell that they actually spend it very quickly so obviously what did what happen with a pandemic we sent out stemmy checks and we gave PPP loans and we gave all sorts of incentives to businesses and entities to spend real dollars into the real economy and those people needed to spend it because they wanted to survive many of them but others they had they you know they never missed a day of work and they got people

PPP loans, right? So like, what am I going to do with all this cash? I'm going to have to spend it in the real economy because I want to go on a trip or I want to go on, you know, redo my house or do any number of things. That money filtering the real economy causing demand for goods and services, that's going to cause an inflationary burst, okay? And also the relocation dynamics after the pandemic with remote work. I think that totally messed up the real estate. You know shelter is one of the biggest components of CPI. So now with the not QEQE and these, you know, duration management programs from the treasury market, I'm skeptical whether that alone is going to cause any sort of new burst of inflation.

I think the far more likely scenario is that if there are stimmy checks, that would cause, you know, probably a short-term burst of inflation that's spending in the real economy. But the easiest way to think about this, which I think sticks with people, Danny, is like, if I were to go and I'm the Federal Reserve, and let's say tomorrow, I print a quadrillion dollars, like the most absurd amount you can imagine. I print it for quadrillion dollars.

I take that quadrillion dollars, which is not really physical, but let's assume it's physical. And I bury it in the desert. What is the impact on inflation? Zero. Zero, right? Like, the fact that they're, quote, unquote,

printing or expanding the money supply, if it's not circulating into the real economy, it, in some ways, has a muted inflationary impact. So why does that relate to QE? It relates to QE in my mind, because if QE is pushing up asset prices and making very wealthy people wealthier, okay, unless that money filters through to regular everyday people, it's going to be very challenging to get inflationary dynamics similar to what we saw before.

Now contrast that with, we're going to send every man, woman, and child a check, okay? Or we're going to give every business that applies and doesn't lay off workers millions of dollars in PPP loans. That's going to have much more of a pronounced inflationary effect. And by the way, you're doing that in an environment where you're shutting down the global economy. You're telling people like, your supply chains are going to be screwed up for 18 months. So you have this massive supply hit, but you have a supply hit in the sense that they can't produce goods fast enough to get them to market because the supply chains are all screwed up. But you also have a demand catalyst in the form of more dollars, right?

And people that, you know, wanted to spend money after they were locked into their homes. So that unique dynamic, I think, caused that once in 40-year burst of inflation. Now, does that mean we can't stick around 3% inflation for the foreseeable future? I think we absolutely can't. I don't see. The reason is because our housing market is completely out of whack for a lot of different reasons, and housing is very challenging to get to fall. A lot of times it can just sort of stagnate.

But if you're sitting out a 2% mortgage, why are you going to sell that? Unless you absolutely need you and you go into a serious, you know, a serious down. or broad spread recession type of event. So if two, three, four percent inflation is all like in your wheelhouse as being okay, like when does it get too much? I wish inflation were, I wish inflation were lower, okay? I wish it was around the 2% target. It's not okay.

I view it more as sustainable. I think it's sustainable. And people don't want to hear that. So when does it get unsustainable? I think it gets unsustainable when it's, it's reaching levels where the shelter costs, I think, and I want to be careful on this, the shelter costs, because shelter always, shelter, people,

they have to live somewhere, right? Like they're going to basically pay whatever the need is. When the shelter servicing costs for many people become just simply untenable that they have to sell the houses. And the problem is that the data I was looking at from Revolt and some of these entities, they're saying like, you know, there are people just breaking even. a lot of a lot of a lot of Airbnb owners that they're not really losing significant amounts of money

they're breaking even on a lot of these deals and even the ones that are selling at a steep haircut you know those are a lot of investment firms they're the people taking write downs and capital losses but it's not in such a sense that they have to do fire sales um i think during periods in the great financial crisis when you had a huge unemployment wave that cost a cascade a supply to come to the market. I don't see any sort of significant event like that that would cause a massive supply to come to the market that would leave home values to drop, you know, double digits nationwide. Those events are extremely rare. The more likely scenario is it just stays like flat and loses ground in real terms. There's no competitive pricing. You can't,

you can't raise your prices because no tenants can afford them. And homeowners are going to sit on those and investors are going to sit on those houses for 10, 20 years. They're They might not make any money on them. They might lose in real term, but you're not going to have this exogenous shock where they have to be four sellers. Do you wish you could access cash without selling your Bitcoin? Well, Leibon makes that possible. They're the global leader in Bitcoin-backed lending, and since 2018, they've issued over $9 billion in loans with a perfect record of protecting client assets. With Leiden, you get full-costly loans with no credit checks or monthly repayments, just easy

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in inflation. You think this will be positive for the economy? I think it will be positive. And the impact on inflation is maybe you push it above three. Maybe you go to three one, three two. You know, maybe you have CPI sitting at three two. and at that point, you know, the question really becomes, why are you having rates lower in the environment? And you're going to have to get answers from the new Fed share on this. Why are rates negative in real terms, you know, because of inflation? You've gotten the three cuts this year, right?

You've got September, October, and you've got November, right? So I want to make sure I'm not misquoting this. The current effective Fed funds rate is 3.65. Okay. So you've got a new Fed share coming. in and the obvious mandate will be we want lower interest rates, right? Like everybody in their son thinks that we're going to get lower interest rates from the new Fed chair, the new Fed share will be beholden to the administration. The administration has said overtly, we want lower rates. Okay,

fine. So you got inflation at three points, or yet, excuse me, the Fed funds at three. And if inflation ticks up above three or at three, how much more can you cut? I mean, that's really going to be the question. I think we're talking about middle next year. Because if the new Fed chair comes in and wants to send a signal that he is in line with the president, the president said that even at 3.65, they're too high. Are you going to cut rates into the twos with inflation potentially still near the threes? Because that's negative real rates. And negative real rates, I think, are a disaster for an economy. Far more, far worse, I think, than, you know, keeping the interest rates where they're at.

So when either before we started the show at the very start, depending on how I cut it, you were saying that you can kind of see a case for both a bull and a bear economy in the next year. And is that what would be the bear case? I think the bear case, the single biggest issue for me is if you have a issue with Fed independence next year where you have revolt in the bond market, that is probably the biggest, boogeyman under the bed. And again, I discount that because I think ultimately it's going to be politically managed. And I think once the new Fed chair gets in there, he's going to go out of his way to appear

independent while behind the scenes really taking marching orders. I think it would be a disaster for him to say, well, you know, in front of a, just imagine there's an FOMC presser. And he's, instead of debating the data and why they should cut or shouldn't cut, they're just saying, well, what does the president want? And I'm going to, I'm going to do whatever the president. it wants. I mean, you lose face and credibility, and the system is built on, I think, believe it, whether you want to admit this or not, it is built on a confidence game. It's built

on people believing that these people have control over the economic apparatus, that they have control over the system. And when you expose the wizard behind the curtain, the myth falls apart. And that's very dangerous. Like, you know, nobody knows really what happens then. Like if there's total loss of confidence in the Fed chair and it really is completely subsumed, we don't really know. And, you know, there are people on Twitter that will say, well, there were periods where, you know, Fed lost independence and it was politically beholden and FDR said rates should be X and they were X, right? That's true in a sense, but like, you know, we've never experimented with that in the modern economy.

And capital flows today are very different than they were in the 1930s in, and sub, in prior periods. So I'm always hesitant for people to say, oh, there's this historical analogy where it's worked pretty well in prior dynamics. So why do you question it now? And the question is because whenever you disrupt the status quo, it can be very painful and unanticipated consequences can arise. So for me, like I think that's, it's a fundamental thing that we've grown accustomed to, which is the Fed can act independently from the policymakers. And when you've, when you abandon that and when you make effectively the Fed and arm of Treasury, you know, it's going to be different.

Now, again, maybe it works out great, you know, maybe we're being overly pessimistic. I'm just answering your question, like, what would give me pause? I think a 10-year above 5% gives me pause, okay? If that were to occur, I don't believe that's going to occur, but if the bond market in the early part of next year to start selling off, and you get the new Fed share and the new Fed share is, rocking the boat, that is perhaps the biggest concern I have. I'm not as concerned about the overall economy and the economic data because I think, if anything, the stimulative impact of the lower

rates and the big beautiful bill and other programs they're talking about to manage duration, I think you're going to provide a liquidity catalyst for manufacturing other aspects that have been beaten down the economy to re-accelerate. So I think one of the things, you can criticize drone power for a lot of things. But one of the things that I think he has been good at is, remaining as independent as possible. Like, he is not just at the winner. You're going to get completely rinsed in the comments for saying that he's independent. Because what people are going to say, oh, he was helping Kamala Harris.

And, you know, he was trying to be, he was cutting. And then, you know, there are people that will rinse you for that one. But, uh, well, that's fair. But he's remained relatively independent from Trump at least. And, like, assuming the next Fed chair that comes in is like the puppet to Trump. And even like in fact, let's just say he managed to keep up that charade and people still view the Fed as an independent institution that can do whatever they want. But if we still have negative real rates in that environment, what do you think would actually happen to the bond market? How would the bond market react?

I mean, there are periods where I think loss of confidence in the Federal Reserve, I think could potentially cause a massive sell of the, the long bond, you know, 30 year plus. I think that the 10 year could, could again, it could trade north of 5%. And if you look at 2022, the story of 2022 is that when rates were getting unwieldy and bonds were selling off, that has a reflexive effect with the mechanics of the current portfolio construction that causes a selling inequities. And if there's a selling inequities, that's going to cause Bitcoin to tank and because there are funds that hold it all, right? So just think about this mechanically.

Okay, I know that we in Bitcoin, we were very skeptical of the 6040 portfolio. I'm sure you're up to speed on that, why that the 6040 is a lot of concern about why people have allocated their retirement nest egg in that allocation. Well, if you're in a 6040 and your bond position gets cut in half, right? So say, like you're in bond funds, rates go higher, and the value of those bonds, although they're all money good, you get paid your principal, but, you know, look at an example like a fund, like a TLT, it gets cut in half or 30%. What happens at the end of the quarter rebalance, you know? Tell me. Okay.

So at the end of the quarter, if your bond portion, that 40%, that income-based part of your portfolio gets cut in half, the rebalancing factor of the fund will sell your equities in a mechanical way and reallocate them to bonds. Bonds. Did you do the same thing again next quarter? Yes. So if people are allocated in this spread where they're trying to rebalance in a 60, 40 allocation, there's mechanical selling that takes place into out of equities into bonds.

And I think one of the interpretations of 2022, where we had a real nasty year in the bond market and in the equity market was that as yields rose, there was mechanical selling of equities that wasn't about a big recession or, you know, economic collapse or unemployment about the skyrocket. There was an interpretation that literally like all these people have this passive indexation, passive investment vehicle of 60, 40, target date funds, all these things. And as their bond funds got killed in one of the, worst bond bear markets in modern history in 2022, they had to sell their equities to rebalance

into the bonds. And I think people don't think, they don't think enough mechanically how that works in a allocation theory. And there are FAs that will do this really without even thinking, without even question it. They were selling equities because, well, you have to have 40% of your bonds because you're, you know, particularly with a big boomer class, right? There are a lot of elderly people in the United States that have huge fixed income exposure. And when those allocations get, you know, slacked, they're selling equities to rebounds. So they're just selling their winners to buy more losers just because that's the way they've always done it, essentially.

Yeah. It's not even like, it's not even like a thought process. It's like it's mechanical. If I say, as your FAA, I'm going to put you 60% in fixed income and, or sorry, 6% in equities and 40% fixed income and your fixed income falls 20%, you're going to be selling your equities. to rebalance to keep that allocation. Have you been watching the Japanese bond market recently?

I mean, I'm sure you have. But what's your take on that? Because you hear a lot of sort of Duma takes from probably two sides. Like one is that inflation seems to be coming back in Japan. And it was always like this strange economy that could have really high debt to GDP without really having inflation. And then secondly, like the carry trade blowing up and what impact that may have on other markets. Yeah.

I mean, I think that the Japanese, so my overall take on this is that folks mostly in our markets care about it because of the yen carry trade, right? And I think the framing on the yen carry trade is usually incorrect because people think of it as a static thing that will blow up and that's the end of it, right? Like at some point that the yields are going to get too high on the JGBs and that puts an end. the reality is like this is a sum of numerous individual actors who are borrowing, you know, in that currency, taking advantage of it in U.S. markets. And yes, you will have people squeeze, you have liquidation events, you will have people

have pressure on them as the yen rises, as the as the JGB yield rises, whatever it be. But it's a dynamic process. In other words, we saw the blow up in, you know, 2024. And people, some people, month later, are putting on those exact same trade. They got squeezed out of the position. They had to degross their portfolio. So it will always be a feature when you have this currency arbitrage that you can play in. So I don't view it as a systemic issue unless some entity or actor gets taken to the woodshed

and it is so significant that it causes sort of this cascade of effects. Any, you know, any marketplace, a hedge fund has, you know, obviously a hedge fund, can lose money or, you know, a big actor can lose money or a market maker could potentially take, you know, huge losses. But, you know, the system is constructed in many ways to anticipate that, to try to put safeguards in that place, to have forced degrossing of positions, and then it's done, right? To me, I don't, I don't ever understand the argument from folks that this somehow causes some permanent impairment or is going to be big enough to cause some sort of cascade that would take down all U.S. markets in a long-standing way or an immediate term way. To me, I think it's

going to continue to be an issue. I think the bond route could persist further. Yen could further decline and have a further rise in yields. But that's sort of a long-run issue. We've been talking about this in Japan for decades. And I guess I failed to see the urgency of why this time is different, right, as opposed to something they will structurally be dealing with for the next decade or more. So this isn't the start of Japan blowing up? Yeah, I mean, look, like the interest rate differential is not going to go away. I mean, I don't, I think it's going to narrow, it's going to widen, it's going to narrow, it's going to widen. I mean, there's different aspects of, you know, the rate policy in the countries, there's different inflationary dynamics, there's different demographic dynamics.

Those should keep a differential on interest rates probably for the entire foreseeable future. So whenever, whenever, let me just tell you my shorthand, whenever there is a period where people are saying, this is going to blow up and everything's going to be different tomorrow, okay, I generally fade that. Because in the real world, change tends to be slow, incremental, messy. There are tail events. There are these things where we wake up and there are, you know, there is a fundamental difference. But that's not the majority of events. Majority are sort of the slow train wreck that you see coming for a long,

long, long time, and it gets worse and worse, right? That's kind of how I think most economic issues arise. Yeah, I think you're probably right. So we've done 50 minutes, basically touching on one of the three things you're looking at with Bitcoin. The other two was the cycle narrative, like the self-fulfilling prophecy of the cycle narrative and treasury companies. Which one do you want to get into next? Should we talk about the cycles first and finish on the treasury companies? We're talking about the cycle. So, okay. One of the things I want to start with on that is that we have had limited, depending

of how you measure it, you know, some people say they've been, you know, four epochs and whatnot. We've had limited sample size. It's still a young asset in Bitcoin. Okay. So for people to draw conclusions about how Bitcoin has to trade with a sample, size of four is not statistically significant. Okay?

No serious data scientists or technician would be able to tell you that because the thing happened three or four times in the past, that that alone is going to be compelling evidence for anything to happen in the future. Moreover, some of those early examples, as you know, Bitcoin was effectively a science project. You had very limited exchanges. You had no regulated exchanges, no regulated exchanges, no head. hedging tools, limited derivatives market, no futures market, how you can compare a nascent asset that was really infantile to something that the Bitcoin current marketplace where basically anybody,

even if you hold spot Bitcoin, you could fire up a Robin Hood account and hedge your position with Ibit, you know, options, your entire position very quickly. I just don't understand it. It's beyond me why people would suggest that the Bitcoin market of today bears in any significant material comparison to the prior Bitcoin markets. And as Bitcoin matures, what have you seen happen? You've seen Bitcoin start to slay these, what American Haldicalls, these sacred cows of Bitcoin, things like, oh, we'll never go below the prior all-time high, which we did in, you know, 2021. or we'll never make a new all-time high before the halving, which we did, right?

Like we keep doing these things repeat or Bitcoin, for example, the most recent one, Bitcoin always pumps in the year after the halving that coincides, you know, well, we didn't. Like, you know, we basically chopped around the entire year. So when you start to see mounting evidence of this time actually is different for structural reasons, for dynamics of like the vehicles that are in place, for the hedging tools that are in place, for, you know, even something like investor preference. Like, you know, there's been this massive interest in AI,

which to me, had that not occurred, right, I think more dollars would have flowed into Bitcoin. 100%. Right? Like, I don't know why you see all these data points of like things that are different this time. And then you say, oh, it's not different this time. We're going to sell off 80%. I mean, even 2021, okay, which most people say,

oh, that was the quote unquote cycle top. Look what we just talked about in 2021. In 2021, Bitcoin peaked the same month as the NASDAQ peak. In November of 2021, many other risk assets were peaking in the summer into the fall. What happened in November and December of 2021? We got clear guidance from the Federal Reserve that they were behind the curve and they were going to have to engage in the fastest rate hiking cycle in 40 years, right? And then the S&P peaked, I think January 3rd, 2022, and we consistently rolled over the entire year

alongside the broader equity market. So, Danny, for someone to say, oh, that was a cycle, a Bitcoin cycle that was driven by the halving and it was destined to fall. Was it, was it destined that FDX would commit a massive fraud? Was it destined that you'd have all these entities like Three Arrows in Alameda that were, you know, experienced a contagion level event? Was that all just programmed into the, the, the, the block reward? And every four years, that has to repeat.

I mean, we see, it's almost like, to me, it's almost like you, you, this after-the-fact narrative construction where there's so many examples of what was driving the Bitcoin price section that had nothing to do with Bitcoin itself, had a broader economic factors, just like now, right? This year, in what you and others think is disappointing, I would say it's mildly disappointing the performance this year, you have a dynamic where there are pockets of the economy that are strong, but there are pockets of the economy, as Dr. Jeff Ross points out, that have been struggling for three years. And I talked about this earlier in the interview. I think the economic

environment has been challenging, but it hasn't been dire. It hasn't been disastrous. There are certainly segments in sectors that have done very well. There's ones that have done really poorly. So wouldn't you expect a deep liquid instrument like Bitcoin to respond to that dynamic? I sure do. And if the economy starts to take off next year and you get a manufacturing revival and you have a broad growth impulse in the economy, why wouldn't you expect Bitcoin to participate? Why wouldn't you, why would you take new all-time highs off the table? I mean, personally, I view most of 2025 as a long, bearish consolidation. I know we piqued our head above 120 a couple times and we made these new little highs,

but, you know, we began the year roughly around 90K. You know, we made a new all-time high inauguration day in January of 108 or 109, and then we bounced around that range the entire year, you know, and now we're under it. To me, markets correct in two ways. They correct in price and they correct in time. I think the entire story of 2025 was largely, in addition to some of things we mentioned, it's working off the bullish moves that we had, 2023 and 2024 after the ETF launch. I mean, you had the most successful launches of an ETF in history,

and Bitcoin spending, you know, weeks and months above 100,000, that's a monumental year. I know it's not, you know, Lambo money type years for some people, but I think it's huge. I think it was, I think it's positive. And, you know,

obviously if Bitcoin sells off down to 50, 60K, you can hold me. That's extremely disappointing in 2026. But if it rises here, if it reclaims 100, if people start to question whether they should just look at the calendar and that's all it matters,

rather than all of this data and all of these bullish cash, catalyst that are out there. I mean, I think Bitcoin can make a new all-time high in 2026, and I think you can do it convincingly, you know, far above the 126 mark. And what happens then? I mean, this is one of the things. There's one thing a listener is who's beat up and, you know, downtrodden about Bitcoin or disappointed, whoever you want to put it. One thing I wish you would take away is this just picture for a second here. If a new all-time high is made in 26, if that would probably be one of the most bullish developments, I think, in the history of

Bitcoin. And the reason for that is you would absolutely shatter once and for all this four-year cycle myth. People would look at this as an institutional asset that can rise and fall with the broader macroeconomic environment, and they don't have to time it like people have gotten accustomed to, trying to look for exits. I think that is massively bullish. The destruction of that narrative is probably what we need to send Bitcoin orders of magnitude higher. I totally agree with that. And one of my favorite narratives that's come out in the last year is, like, not necessarily the super cycle thing,

because who knows what anyone's definition of a super cycle is. But I like the idea that maybe cycles did never exist. And I can completely believe that. I think everything you're saying there is true. And so if we've been playing in this, like, economic environment, as you described, is on like hard mode, are we going into easy mode, going into 2026? I think so, absolutely.

I really do. The one, again, I'm trying to present most, I think the economy is going into easy mode. I think potentially we could be going into hard mode for geopolitical reasons. Obviously, you're following what's going on in Venezuela. I think there are potential issues with the midterms that could be political challenges. I think those, the concerns that come to the top of my mind outside of the Treasury market and the economy, I think largely focus on the political dynamics because I think we live in a very tenuous political environment right now. And I think that going into an election year, it's always going to be

challenging. You're going to have a lot of actors who are hell-bent and determined to frustrate the Republicans from continuing their hold on the Congress in the United States. And to me, that's the bigger risk. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so on to the last of the three Treasury companies, they've had a brutal time in the back half of this year. Everything is down close to 1XM now below pretty much across the board. What do you think they look like in 2026? I think some of them are not going to survive. I think the bigger ones will do well.

Now, the attractiveness from an investor standpoint of a treasury company, let's be very clear and honest about it, is that it can outpace Bitcoin. Yep. Leverage play on Bitcoin. Yeah, it's a leverage play on Bitcoin. So the question is, like, how can you, from a shareholder, a common share standpoint, how can you outpace Bitcoin if your sole, how do I phrase this? If your primary way of securing more Bitcoin is to dilute your common shares, okay, that is to me that's an irreconcilable issue.

If you want people to invest in your company and the thesis is that your company is going to outperform Bitcoin and that comes into question because you're doing a heck of a lot of dilution of the common, I think investors throw up their hand and say, I'm not going to be holding the bag while you dilute me year after year or month after month. So if you can figure out how to be able to

secure more Bitcoin without diluting common, that's going to be a killer application. And to me, I think there are ways to do that. I think they're exploring, they're experimenting. I would not write any of them off at all at this point. But I do think the smaller ones, the ones that were on the hype train, they caught in sort of late, as you always do, you know, in these sort of frenzies. I think many of them will be folding up shop into 2026. So this is something I completely agree with.

I think the idea of just selling common stock to buy more Bitcoin is, probably already over as a game plan for these treasury companies. I think strategy launching the preferreds was like the end of that. Suddenly there's something much more interesting in the market, and I don't understand how they can survive just doing that same thing. And issuing preferred isn't necessarily an easy thing to do. It's not something everyone's going to be able to do, especially at favorable terms to what strategy can do being 10 times a size of more. So when you say they're going to shut up shop, what does that mean? Is this like acquisitions and mergers amongst these companies, or do you think they're going to just sell Bitcoin?

No, I think it's far more of the latter. I think they're going to be a cannibalization, consolidation. You know, I don't imagine they're just going to, you know, dump the whole pile of Bitcoin. Some of them may go private. I know one that is considering that. So that's generally, it's not going to be any one-size thing. It's going to be case-by-case basis. Is there really a product fit?

And to me, there was a flurry of them that launched. And I think it just got excessive. Yeah, that'll be really interesting to watch because, like, the challenge for any of the very big treasury companies that aren't strategy is how do you catch strategy? And I guess, like, acquisitions when you can essentially buy Bitcoin at a discount if they're trading under one XMNAV is potentially the easiest way to do that. Yes. Yep, that's exactly it. Like, my take on that would be, I don't think regardless anyone's going to get close to strategy. I don't, do you think that we may see one, you know, approach that kind of size?

No, I would fade that. I don't think there's anyone as determined to acquire more Bitcoin out there yet of the known treasury companies as Michael Saylor. So I think it's going to be challenging. There's also sort of that first mover advantage, you know, the big get bigger and the small get smaller in some respect. So I think there are a lot of people that fomoed into the treasury company narrative, not as a long-term investment thesis, but as a short-term trade in a bull market. which happens every bull market. In some ways, it's kind of like an alt-coin, right? Like you think that, oh, liquidity is rising, Bitcoin's rising. We're going to roll into X, Y, Z coin, and it's going to rise very quickly in a bull market. And I think some of them, unfortunately, there's no reason that makes a compelling case for buying it versus just if your bullish treasury companies, just buy strategy. You know, explain what is the differentiating factor?

Buying Bitcoin alone doesn't make a whole lot of sense, I think. as a treasury, like buying a treasury company just because it buys Bitcoin alone, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense in my mind. Yeah, one thing that I will be willing to stick my neck on the line on in terms of predictions 2026 is I think we'll have less treasury companies this time next year than we do today. Yeah, I think that's right. But I also don't think they're all going, they're all going away. I mean, I think there will be, there will be treasury companies, some will survive,

we'll get bigger, some will do well. And, you know, again, if you have a very, you got to remember, like, when, you're you have a bull market, people's reaction to everything changes. Like, if Bitcoin is at 150K by the middle of the year, just hypothetically with me, I could see companies coming out with Treasury strategy and trying it again a different way in the middle part next year, new Treasury companies we haven't even thought of if Bitcoin is truly, you know, ripping higher. The Bitcoin bull market drives all this sort of fervor and leverage bets and everything else.

So it's sort of, as you can see, it did it this year, and I think you can do it again next year as long as you get the Bitcoin price going higher. Yeah, I totally agree with that. Okay. My next, this is like the big question I have in my head at the moment, which is this year, I think, and Hoddle actually said this to me on a previous show, he was saying that Bitcoin's not been volatile enough for people. And so that's led people to buying treasury companies going into AI stocks instead of Bitcoin. gold, all these different things. Like there's money going elsewhere and Bitcoin's not really had any kind of phomo around it.

Is there a reason that you think 2026 could be different and Bitcoin can actually outperform things like AI stocks and gold and all these other markets that have done so well in 2025? I mean, there's many reasons why I think that could occur. But I'll give you a few. I mean, the destruction of the halving cycle as a narrative, I think is a prerequisite for us to have a very powerful bull market. And the reason for that is that if you believe that all you need to do in this asset is to sell it every four years, like just, just think about this logic.

I know we cover this, but I just want to, it makes no sense to hold Bitcoin for the long term. If you think we are determined to have four year, repeatable, just look at the calendar, circle November 15th or October 6th and just sell it X amount of days after having. That's all you need to do because it's, I mean, I had a guy telling me it's program, Satoshi, programmed it for Bitcoin to rise and fall, I think it's a bunch of nonsense. But just imagine that was the only case. Why would anyone have a long-term investment of Bitcoin? Just trade it. It's a tradeable asset. But of course, we don't look at stocks like that. People, I mean, I don't, I'm not a huge fan of bonds or fixed income, but you don't look at bonds or fixed income like that. You look at for stability, predictability. You buy it because it has liquidity and you could sell it

very easily if you need to. Same thing with stocks, right? They're liquid. They've got cash flows. You're not trying to time economic cycles. You're buying good, solid companies or an index for the long run. You're buying hold forever, right, as the equity get people say. They don't say, oh, we're going to time it so we sell the top. But in Bitcoin, you have this DGen culture, right, where what does it do? It levers up in certain years, and then it tries to time this whole exercise and a big game of chicken with everybody else in the marketplace and trying to get it right. That is, in my view, it's a headwind for institutional adoption. Institutions do not want to buy an asset that's going to fall 80, 70%.

Okay. They'll buy assets that have a very violent upside, or they'll buy assets that just trends sideways and shop and consolidating, which, by the way, I think that's the new norm for Bitcoin. Like, I think my new norm is what we saw in 2024, and we talked about this in the last podcast, where you see Bitcoin trade in a range for like six months, like post-DTF launch, and then we rip higher to a new level. And then you trade in a range, say 90, 80, you know, 100K for a range,

then you rip higher. You make that floor. And there are a lot of commodities that trade in similar ways. They just sort of chop around and consolidate it for a long time. Then they rip higher. I mean, gold fell. It had a decline after the, you know, a 2000, or 2009 bull run, right?

And then it chopped around for years in a range. And now it's having this epic bull run, right? One of the best bull runs in gold's history in the modern era. And, you know, at some point, what will happen is, gold's not going to, I don't think gold's going to crash back down to like, you know, $900 in house or something. I think it would likely happen is it's going to find a range where it's going to consolidate where suppliers and demand meet.

And it just, you know, stays there for two, three years and then takes another leg higher. If Bitcoin were to do that, that would be extremely bullish for long-term investors. It would be bullish for the institutions looking at it. So I think that volatility is going to pick up. But other issues that I think could be volatility catalysts in the coming years is that if you see a real dynamic economy start to hold and take hold, and the Trump administration's policies really start to help in Middle America,

if you were to see that, I think you'd make a case that Bitcoin is going to respond to that and the equity market is going to respond to that. and you're going to have a very bullish move. I mean, there were periods in the 1950s, but I just bring this up in the equity market, somebody was saying, well, there's never been, you know, X amount of years where we've had positive equity returns

three or four years in a row. That's nonsense. There were periods in the 1950s where we had back to back to back to back to back, double-digit gains on stocks. Okay? So like an economic cycle does not die of old age. It usually takes some exogenous shock, Danny,

to the market that pulls it off the rails and then everything goes to hell and they have to reignite the bubble or whatever it is. But it's not something where like we just, because we've had three or four great years that suddenly all investments have to tank in 2026. I don't believe that. I love it. So your base case, I think when we were speaking in Vegas back in April, you said you think this is just like a stair step grind to a million dollars. Is that still your take? Yeah. And again, like it may take longer than a lot of people will, like, okay? But, you know, I think Bitcoin can still on its current pace reach a million dollars in the next five years. I don't think that's crazy at all. I think that that's probably not my

base case. I would probably expect, you know, just conservatively, if you want to go real long out, I'd say Bitcoin's two to three times higher in the next five years, which people will say, oh, that's depressing, that's bearish, whatever. I mean, two to three times higher than that. It's a massive move, right? Like, I don't know. Like, find something to channel your productive enterprise towards that is not staring at a chart all day. That would be an incredible move because I don't think equities are going to do to two to three X in the next five years. I love it. You know, that's just my view.

Well, Joe, this has been awesome. Thank you for doing this. You really are one of my favorite people that have on the show. I don't know when I'll see you next, but I'll definitely be in Vegas again. Maybe we should do another in-person one there. I should absolutely do another one. That's always fun. It's a good dynamic.

And I did enjoy the one we did with Matt Pines and Checkmate earlier in the year. That was fun too. When you have back and forth, those are great great as well. Yeah, maybe we need to set up another roundtable. I think Pines is on a hiatus from podcast,

but we can find someone to fill his seat. Yeah. Well, I hope everybody has a Merry Christmas. You'll probably be hearing this after Christmas, but definitely excitement and don't let the bears and the negativity grind you down. I mean, there's a lot to be excited.

about and I think that if you're in Bitcoin now, there's still plenty of things that I think are on the horizon that could be really positive. And they generally are all adjacent to Bitcoin, but that doesn't mean they don't affect Bitcoin in indirect ways. Yeah, I think this is the last show that I'm recording now before Christmas. A great, bullish way to finish it. Thank you, Joe. This is awesome. Cheers.