What Bitcoin Did - Did the Bitcoin Bull Market Just End? | Checkmate & Alec Dejanovic

Episode Date: November 24, 2025

Checkmate and Alec Dejanovic from Checkonchain break down what’s really happening with Bitcoin’s price. The unprecedented long-term holder sell-off, the spot buyers absorbing billions, and why this cycle looks less like a normal bull market and more like a Great Rotation. We get into old coins coming back to life, sovereign accumulation, stalled ETF flows, and why the real story isn’t who is selling, it’s who has the balance sheet to buy this much Bitcoin. Checkmate also explains the true market mean at $82K, how to spot bottom formation, why 70% of Bitcoin’s cost basis now sits above $85K, and how ETFs and iBit options are reshaping Bitcoin’s entire market structure. THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: IREN RIVER ANCHORWATCH BLOCKWARE LEDN BITKEY FOLLOW: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/\_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny Checkmate: https://x.com/\_Checkmatey\_ Alec Dejanovic: https://x.com/alec_rhythmic

When I see all this selling, who is buying? Who is buying? It feels to me like it's got to be banks and it could be sovereigns because it's in the spot market and the size. The size of it is just extraordinary. But this cycle has been very, very unique in just the scaled dollar value. Is it a new cycle or is it a super cycle? Is it a four year cycle or is it a five year cycle?

Gold doesn't move until it wants to move. And when it moves, you should pay attention. It's telling us that the system is bankrupt and we have to move to a new reserve asset. All roads converge to there's going to be more dollars. 200 would be fantastic. I do think it's going to be a positive year. Get bullish because Bitcoin's not going anywhere. It's going to come back like a cockroach.

Happy days. All right. It's rock and roll. Checkmate. You're on this show every week at the moment. I know. How's it going to go, man? This is the first one in person, though, since the new pod.

We're talking about what we're going to talk about today. It's like, I don't know, maybe the red candle, the 80,000. might have something to do with it? Well, the plan was, I was obviously coming down here to do a couple of interviews. I wanted to record a show with you that was like Evergreen so we could release it on the first episode of the next year because you started off the podcast. But Bitcoin didn't let us do that. A bit of volatility, though.

I mean, like, I'll tell you what, how bored was it at 100K, at 110 going sideways, doing nothing? Like, I've been thinking about this. A lot of Hodlors, the 15% down sucks because it's like not enough of a discount where you're like, yeah, okay, now I'll jump in. Once you start talking about like 25, 30, 30 something, everyone's like, okay, now it's like, now it's like cheap sats, right? Now we're trying to find where that bottom is, but like it just fires up the hoddlers again. I mean, I felt myself, 100K, I'm like, eh, it's a dip. Like, I stack sats up there, but I'm like, now we're ready. I'm like, let's go.

Oh, this is value. Oh, yeah, this is value. But before we get into that, Alec, welcome to the show, man. How you doing? Very good. Super stoked to be here. You're the, uh, You're the man behind the scenes at Check On Chain. Behind the scenes, yeah. So introduce yourself. Wow. Well, yeah, I'm Alec. I'm co-founder of Check On Chain and been working with James for about four or five years now.

We started a Glass Node, actually. So I was like the first marketing hire at GlassNode. We were trying to build some stuff over there. And then we decided, you know what? It's time to do our own thing, bring back to Home Soil, come to Australia and kick off Check on Chain. What's with the Aussie contingent at GlassNode? Is that just the question? We were in.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. No, we were it. So I think I was employing about eight. You would have been like 12 or 13 or something. But Alec and I, we've known each other our whole lives. Oh, cool. Yeah, yeah, since we're like three years old. Preschool buddies. Yeah, yeah.

It goes back a long way. And then we worked together because, you know, I was a civil engineer working at a data company sending marketing emails. Like, it's horrific. So I was like, I just need help. We were living together at the time. And I said, can you give me a hand with these things? Sending emails and all the rest of it.

And the next thing you know, we've got a marketing hire and I lived in Mexico for, what, nine months after the pandemic. kind of building out all different products and things there. And by the time we got to 2023, it was like, you know, it's time to set our own sale. And check on shame was always something I wanted to do. But it's really that challenge of like, let's start the business, you know, start from zero. You've got to find subscribers. You've got to keep them, right?

You've got to actually give people value. And we spent a lot of time designing what the product was going to look like. And, you know, at the end of the day, you've got to give people something that's worthwhile reading and watching and, you know, value their time. And I'm also a big fan of valuing out. time, right? So everything we do is paywall because it's, you know, I value my time, even like Alex's time. And our customers, we value their time as well. So it's part of the mission. And yeah, we've got some exciting stuff coming up. I consider myself like an on-chain Padawan, I've been able to sit with check. I mean, I moved in in the pandemic. We had nothing

to do. We couldn't go outside. So I'm just soaking up all this on-chain information, information, sorry. And yeah, just over time over-al-alzmosis, I'm kind of getting used to all these charts. I consider myself kind of like a plebable. the hoddler if you can think of that way. But yeah, I love helping and teaching and making sure hodlers are coming along on this journey and like just getting that data-driven side of the market is super important. Like getting off the price chart specifically and getting off X and just seeing all these crazy M2 charts. And by the way, which drives you mad. Drives you mad. Yeah. Yeah, the database approach with Bitcoin's like beautiful blockchain is just so fascinating. So

yeah, we're also building an exciting. new project which a bunch of people are going to be pretty happy to see coming out a new charting platform. Long time coming. Yeah. I mean right now, so the charting platform we had, I started building that in 2019 and that was actually my excuse to learn Python. So back then, I'm a civil engineer and what a civil engineers do?

They use spreadsheets for everything. So I would download, I think coin metrics had the very first like on-chain data set. I download that, plugged into my spreadsheet, all the charts would update once a day. I was like, I just can't do this. anymore. There's got to be a better way. So I taught myself Python and check on chain that the software, it's like 150,000 lines now that runs every day. Oh, yeah, no, there's a lot of code. There's a lot of duct tape and a lot of zip files in there, but I know where they are. So, yeah, I mean, it's basically pulling all your different on-chain, on-chain, futures, options. And that's what I love about,

I think a lot of people know me as like an on-chain analyst, but I consider myself a Bitcoin analyst because we've got all the different market sectors. And more often than not, the ETS tell the same stories, the on-chain dar, which have the same stories, the futures. They just have a different way of displaying it. But anyway, that software, I mean, it's literally the charting platform right now is a handwritten piece of HTML that I wrote many years ago. It's, it's real, it's real basic, but it's a journey to try and get it to do it. I remember, I remember when we used to hang out when we were much younger and we played Counterstrike, like the Counterstrike 1.6, which is like an FBS shooter, if you're not aware.

And he was coding up bots and like customizing in the console and doing all this wild coding stuff back then and like making all the custom maps for us. So like I can really see is basically a whole that was just training. All that was training. And now's a giant code base of a million lines. You don't leave university. That's the other thing. I paid off my student debt for my engineering degree on the day that I quit to go and work a glass node. So that was the, it's kind of like a nice way to wrap it up.

So it got me through my first 10 years of work experience. And then, yeah, I mean, consider myself a Bitcoin analyst now. So it's, you know, it's one of those fascinating, you don't set out to be a Bitcoin analyst. You don't even know that Bitcoin exists. You don't set out to be a Bitcoin podcast. You don't set out to be a Bitcoin podcast. It's just one of those things where it's, it pulls me back in, right? Sucks you back in the industry and you just can't leave.

Honestly, one of the things I find most fascinating is when you meet people who have found out about Bitcoin, they know in a little bit and then they can just go on about their life, like nothing changed. Yeah. Like I don't understand how that mindset exists. What's the line? Is it nobody who's a Bitcoin critic once you understand the difficulty adjustment? Yeah.

Once that part clicks. And the other one, have you seen the Matthew McConaughey scale? Like the grid of nine, Matthew McConaughey's smoking on one of them? No, it kind of goes like he's really green, he's coming in, he's like looking all happy, he's got his cigar, like before the bear market hits. And then as you go down, you go through the bear and he's crying. And then by the time you get to six, panel six is where he's staying there with a shotgun, right? Standing out there like...

I am number six for sure. But I was number six. That was like my 2019, 20, 21 era. I don't think you ever leave six. You always revert back to six. I feel like I'm a six right now. So I gradually get up into like a seven and an eight. No one gets to a nine.

Like nine's, you live on a boat and all the rest of it. You get hauled back to a six when you, especially on drawdowns. Because I'm not crying because I know what this bear happens, right? Bears go down. The market's going to recover. Bitcoin's going to be fine. But you get that like hardcore cold card wielding. Bitcoin, I'm holding my ground, I'm standing my floor, you know, keep stacking set, stay humble.

It's funny. When stuff like this happens, I love it. That's great. And obviously, I don't want to see anyone getting wrecked and all that stuff. And that is obviously happening right now because people are taking leverage or whatever, but I love it. I know. It's like, this is the stuff that makes you feel alive. But it's weird because this year, like we did off, the first show on the new what Bitcoin did was with you. We recorded it twice because the first time we recorded it, it was like 95K, and then it went over 100K. I was like, dude, we've got to do it again.

I don't think if you ask many Bitcoiners then, if we would be at a lower price in 12 months' time, they'd have said yes. This year's been really strange, I think. It's not really gone up much. Now we're entering this period where who knows if this is just a dip or if we're going into a bear market, what that's going to look like. But has this year surprised you? It has. I mean, it has. And I think the back half definitely surprises.

However, I think the story of where we are right now is unfolded progressively. So if I was to really just like recap this cycle, let's call it, 2023, I would broadly just say was the recovery from the bear. There's rumors that start to come in about the ETS, but like there was a lot of PTSD. That was the recovery of PTSD phase. 2024, ETS go live. We get the pump to 73K. And then we had the first period of chop consolidation, which a lot of people were calling for a

bear market there too. And just for a bit of context, the 2024 chop. the tariff tantrum, and right now, all very, very similar, all very, very similar in their structure. This particular dip is the angriest of them now, but back at 95K, and we'll talk a lot about 95K shortly, at 95K looks exactly like all the other dips. Like that level was where it actually looks just the same as a dip. Now, this chop consolidation thing, this sideways grind is obviously new. 2025 going sideways, in my view, there's a few, there's three core pillars that I think have really driven this market cycle, and we were talking before about how data gives you just like,

you look at all the Twitter narratives, and you just don't see it happening in the data. How many people have seen people talking about OG selling in the last like three weeks? I've been writing about it for six months because the, and that's not because I'm overly pressing, it's because literally you can see the amount of sell side that's going on. So the three pillars, ETFs, massive, big demand vector, in my opinion, just orders a magnitude more important than treasury companies in terms of the actual demand. And they're more like a passive bid. They've just been consistently buying.

And honestly, we're seeing outflows. The outflows we've seen in this entire correction is about $3 billion. That's been one day of Hodler's Sellside in recent weeks. So Hodler's sell side and people can argue and debate and so long-term holders, not really six months and they're not an OG for 25 years. Drop the terminology. Somebody had an opportunity cost of six months where they could have bought Nvidia. They could have bought literally anything else.

they held the coin for six months, and the beautiful thing about the six-month period, ignore the fact that they're a long-term holder. Whatever your precondition of, like, is it really long-term? They gave up six months of opportunity cost, and that naturally filters out the guy who bought yesterday and sold today, which is kind of just daily chop. You don't really care that someone bought yesterday and capitulated today. What do you care about is someone who bought and is now selling later on? So the second pillar is that Hoddle-Sell side.

It's been absolutely enormous and has been accelerating. it continues to accelerate. We're talking about billions of dollars a day in these revive coins. Now, not every single one of those coins is sold, but a lot of them are. You know, like a lot of them are. So you've got to just look at it from that perspective. And whenever you see revived supply ticking higher, the market is usually rallying and then peaks and then slows down and then backs off. So, you know, it doesn't take your rocket scientist to say there's a lot of old coins going back to market and the market stop going up. If you already self-custody of Bitcoin, you know the deal with hardware wallets.

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Good question. Good question. So I've been calling it more recently, to be fair, the great rotation. I think Jordy Visser actually had a really good piece, which captures the zeitguise of it. Now, I don't know if it's 100% accurate, but I do think that that essence of like the existing holder base rotating out. And this is the story that I think people really want to capture. So let me just quickly before I forget, the three pillars, I think, changed this market, ETFs, the Hoddle-Sell side. and the ibit options, which is going to move forward,

be a massive, massive fact of it, going back to the great rotation, huge amounts of coins being sold. Now, we did not see those show up as demand in the ETFs, not even close. When you compare the amount of sell side pressure, profit taking, no matter how you want to frame it up, the ETFs typically are 20 to 30%.

So we're missing the other five, you know, there's five times more stuff happening in the spot market. Same for Sailor. you hear these narratives, a sailor has cornered the market and he's the only one who's captured all the ETS have captured Bitcoin. They're kind of forgetting that the existing spot markets are still out there and there's still the dominant factor in what's going on. Now, obviously derivatives and stuff are a layer on top of that, but when I see all this selling and we went sideways for 12 months, so 2025 has been a sideways grind up until very recently,

who is buying? Who is buying? This is the thing, it's an unanswered question at this point in time. I'm dissatisfied with the answer, but I like Geordie Fisher's idea of like this great rotation or this IPO moment. I've been called the great rotation. All hands getting out. No question. It's been massive. 110 billion in 24 and 25 combined from five-year-old plus coins to, you know, you don't

move a five-year-old coin unless you mean it. You don't just go moving it around because you want to. There's a rhyme and reason to it. Who are the buyers? Because it's not happening in the ETS. So it's not some hedge fund. It's not some like random entity. It's spot.

So the fact that we went sideways under tens of billions, I mean, you could argue, and I'll talk about today at the conference, like hundreds of billions of dollars worth of sell side this year in spot markets and the price went sideways until very recently. Who's buying? That's the really interesting question that I don't have an answer for, but it's fascinating to think about. Just for anyone who's listening who doesn't know what the Geordie Vista piece was, basically he called this Bitcoin's IPO moment.

And he sort of draws a parallel to traditional markets where people take an early stake in a company, they're taking high risk. And the IPO moment when they've gone through all the pain to get there, go public, like these are now publicly traded shares, that's their opportunity to see liquidity for the first real time. And so what happens is a load of those early investors will dump their shares. Who knows? Normally you get an IPO pump and then price comes down. And he says that this is happening now in Bitcoin because for the first time, if you bought Bitcoin in 2010, 2011, like you're sat on hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. in a legacy wallet somewhere.

Yeah, and like this is the first time you actually have the liquidity to get out with the ETFs and all the treasury companies and whoever else who's on the other side of that trade. I like that framing. I don't know if it's correct, but I think it's interesting. The other thing to think about is like imagine selling, we saw that dude who offloaded 80,000 Bitcoin held from like 2011. Can you imagine offloading $10 billion worth of Bitcoin in the previous US administration? You'd have the feds up your ass.

You know what I mean? Like you'd have your bank account shut down. So for the first time, the regular. environment, there's the price, there's the demand, there's a liquidity, and there's just you're not going to get taken out the back by the government. So I think there's a lot of elements here, which it kind of makes sense. That's what I'm saying, I think it captures the zeitgeist of what's going on. Yeah. It may not be perfectly correct, but we always have to use simplified models to understand the world, and I think it's actually a very valid way to think about it. It makes sense

from just a narrative perspective. And importantly, he calls this like a sign of success, not failure. Like, this is a good thing that this is happening. Um, like, there's also the, the idea that this is moving funds from being concentrated in a number of massive whales to being in everyone's hands, which is, again, good for Bitcoin. But I think does he say that he expects this to last somewhere between six and 12 months? Yeah, I mean, it's hard to tell how long this whole process lasts. I mean, to be fair, this rotation, like the majority of this selling has occurred really within the last six months. So that was, and a lot of it was above 120K. If we look at, we use metrics like realized profit, which shows the delta between when a coin was.

acquired and when it was disposed of, we saw, you know, again, billions of dollars a day in realized profit. And this is the other thing you can see coin day destruction, lots of old coins coming back to life, revived supply, the volume of them, how much profit they're locking in. All of these things were like record highs in the March pump in 2024, in November, December, January when the kind of called the Trump pump. And then this has been a very sustained period of the back half of 2025, just tons and tons of sell site and ramping up. But what we're now seeing is the folks who are selling, there's a lot of people who are like six months, six months to a year.

Those guys are people who wish they had a board in video. They gave up the opportunity cost. They held Bitcoin. The momentum went nowhere. There, a lot of those guys are now selling and taking a loss, crystallizing a loss. And this is probably, if there's one thing I can just help people understand right now, 70% of all of the wealth that's ever been invested in Bitcoin. We price every UTXO based on when it last move, 70% has a cost basis above 85K. That's insane. 70%. This is Bitcoin's new home.

So, you know, if you're talking about 30K and 10K and 5K Bitcoin, the truth is it's just like ancient history. It just doesn't matter. There's not enough wealth down there. The wealth is all up here. Now, because we're below it, that's a lot of potential sellers on the way back up. So the bulls have got a lot of work to do to get us out of this mess. However, the rotation of this capital. Think about who these new buyers are, right? These aren't retail hoddlers putting in their pocket money. You know, no one's got these kind of deep pockets. We're talking if there has to be. Could be banks, could be sovereigns, could be a bit of everything. I saw the other day, I forget which Gulf state, but there's a golf state that bought like half a billion dollars worth of the ETF.

So like sovereigns are interested in this kind of thing. And these folks feel like price insensitive buyers where they're just accumulate. They're just forever allocators. So there is going to be this rotation. Markets are got to go through this process. It'll take time to hammer out this bottom, but at the same time, these guys probably aren't, you know, they're sailor types. They're not going to sell. So there's going to be this process of, you know, as we hammer out a floor, where we find that clearing price, you know, Bitcoin's got a really bright future ahead of it. In terms of revived supply, so what's the average age of coins being sold right now from the

long-term holder cohort? Because when we studied this data, like long-term holder sell side has been incredible this cycle. Like, nothing like it. We've never seen something like this, but a lot of it's from younger long-term holder coins, which kind of can be a little confusing, but it basically means one year plus held Bitcoin. They're all kind of just, get me out. That's the kind of vibe with that.

Yeah, so the way to think about it, and Glassstone actually ran a really good study, I think maybe last year called Time is Money. And they basically showed that there is a very clear power law relationship. It's a beautiful power, the perfect, perfect power law relationship between the probability of a coin or a UTXO being spent on any one day and how long. it's been held. So in other words, that means most of the coins, like 90% of them that move on any one day, moved yesterday or the day before. The vast majority of on-chain volume moved recently. The older a coin is the less likely it's to be spent. But once you get to about five months,

you know, what's the difference between a probability of 0.01% and 0.000001%? In practical terms, nothing. It's the same probability. It's a very, very unlikely. So five months is where they get to the point where for practical purposes, we can just consider them to be a long-term holder. But within that long-term holder set, they're very different to the short-term holders in their overall behavior. But you're right, the six-month-old long-term holders are more active than the one years, and the one year is more active than the two years in a power law relationship. And another fun fact is that the on-chain volume, if you break up what the size of a per

transaction is, the average transaction right now is moving a million dollars. plus, 75% of on-chain volume is moving a million dollars plus, all-time high of that ratio. So institutional capital is what's moving around on-chain. And you asked before what's the average age of things. The baseline through most market cycles is the average coin that moves is 30 days old. On average, the average spent coin is 30 days. This cycle has been an almost linear up trend and we're now at about 100 days. So that's more than three times as big as what your average is over any other previous cycle.

So it always spikes in bulls because old money takes profits. But this cycle has been very, very unique in just the size, scale, dollar value, coin day destruction. There's a metric we use called liveliness, which shows all the coin days that have ever been destroyed and all the coin days have ever been created. Dave Pule and I, when we wrote coin time economics, we kind of described that since 2017, the 2017 bull was actually where the most coins came back to life. and a lot of them were because of the Bitcoin Cash Hard Fork. They wanted to move coins to a new wallet, take advantage of the dividend. We've just broken to new all-time highs in liveliness,

which means... I guess people were getting them off exchanges then as well, so they could have the... All sorts of things. So there's just a lot of activity. And the thing with liveliness, it helps you understand how many coins are not lost, right? Because if a coin has been spent,

you might move it to your wallet and then immediately lose the keys. But we're not going to know that until 10 years down the road when it still hasn't moved. And the probabilities increase that it's lost. when coins come back to life and liveliness, it's just punched a new all-time high, which is honestly something I didn't expect to happen.

I thought it was going to be range-bound for a long time. We have seen just an old coin transfer that is, frankly, it's unprecedented. The only other time you can put anything similar is the 2017 bull, and a lot of that was the Bitcoin Cash Hard for. Yeah, and in terms of bull market correction drawdowns, we have a chart that compares all of the drawdowns in the current bull market, if we still think it's a bull market. Right now we're down 30.

I believe. That happened in the tariff tantrum back in April when Trump announced his with that big huge board of crazy tariffs and everything new. A tariff for penguins. Yeah. Is this not more than 30% now? 35 is the deepest. Okay. Yeah. But it's similar to the tariff tantrum, but we were under 100K at that point, right? I think the 100K, having six figures is a very key, like, psychological level for a lot of human beings, just looking at the price. So people who got in a year ago at 100K because we're basically down on the year now.

Like, they held for a whole year and they got invalidated. They saw AI just ripping. And missed everything in the opportunity cost. The government's very, very kind to AI. You can see, like, the Trump administration is very, it helps AI pump right now. They're doing whatever they can to, like, make sure regulation is lower. The smart money, he just

go, I'm just going to, I'm just going to rotate into AI. Why wouldn't I? Like, Bitcoin just didn't do the thing. The AI is going through a generational run. like why wouldn't the smart money, this is my perspective anyway, the smart money should rotate into something that is more of a guarantee and that's kind of, to me, it's kind of simple almost why Bitcoin's a bit weak right now. It's just because there's a more, I don't know, people lusting over AI and it's just a better trade right now. Well, I mean, the world's a relative place. Capital markets,

money will move where it's treated best. Market doesn't go anywhere. That's why you can see these six months guys, they're momentum traders, but also Bitcoin will find a floor. We all know we'll find a floor. We're talking about this before. Shitcoins. The problem with shit coins is that you don't know if they will ever find a floor. You don't know if they're already going to come back. Bitcoin, you know, we'll find a floor and we'll start moving. And that momentum money will come ripping right back back. For me, as a hoddler, that's why 15% down, you're like, okay, but once it's like 30%, you're like, oh, maybe I should start driving Uber's as well. Like, you know, like you start thinking for other ways. You can, maybe I can delay that bill. Maybe I can sort

this, you start getting hungry for the sets again. So once that market finds a bottom and starts moving, the momentum money is going to come roaring back in because the same reason I started buying Bitcoin in 2019 when like it finally dawned on me that, hey, the government's are bankrupt and they're going have to print money to solve it. We were talking about this morning over breakfast. When you play forward, whether it's AI is deflationary or if it's inflationary or I don't know which way you go, they're really going to have to pump the market because

it wants to collapse because we're seeing the popping of a bubble. or they're going to have to UBI because it's displaced everyone. So pick your poison, all roads converge to there's going to be more dollars, and there's going to be 21 million Bitcoin. There's 5% left to mine. It's going to take 110 years or 130 years to finally mine them all. All roads lead back to Bitcoin. Stacks that.

One of the interesting things, and I think this is because we didn't have a bull market that almost anyone expected is sentiment is absolutely shot, right? But it was shot 10% below the all-time high. It was shot so quickly. This has been a really interesting dynamic is watching how flaking sentiment has been. Now, I don't really have a good reason for that. I think it's because we didn't have a ball run, at least not one comparable to previous bull run.

Yes, and I heard Lynn say this in your pod, and I've been saying it for a long time. Expectations not meeting reality, massive, massive reason, because people had the green, green, and the last green was the big green. And if you actually look at the average monthly performance, I've run this for like the whole of Bitcoin's history, I've run it for just from 2015, onwards from 2020 onwards, from 2023 onwards. And the pattern is very similar. September is the only month. We're on average, it's shit and every other month is pretty good. And then the last part of the year is the best. This year, every single month has been out of consensus. September was a good

month. November's been terrible. October's been terrible. So like it's just been a different year, but expectations not meeting reality, I think is a big part of it. The other thing is like, no one cares about who wins the bronze medal, essentially. And we've had gold. tearing, ripping, and we've had the AI. So Bitcoin's kind of like had bronze medal this year, and comparison is the thief of joy. Totally. It's a quote I love. And basically, all Bitcoin has been doing, especially on X, is comparing to things that have outrun Bitcoin, which just makes everyone so sad. Like, there's no way to, even though Bitcoin ripped 225, but everyone should be joyous, it's like, goes down a little bit and then, but gold. But AI,

Oh, this sucks. Like, immediately, especially humans just like getting that third bronze medal is just never a good thing. It was so funny watching Bitcoin has become gold bugs when gold went on us run. And like gold is the other, like I have 90% Bitcoin, 10% gold. That's my portfolio. And I sleep very well. And I actually heard Luke Graham, I can't remember when he said it, but he said it some time

back, someone asked him, what's his like non-consensus opinion? And he goes, that gold's going to have a period of time where it outperforms Bitcoin. And that's stuck me for a long time. And the reason I have gold is like it's almost like a ballast in my portfolio where it's the same trade. It's just not as volatile. I can tap it when I want it. And also I just sometimes want something that's not going to rip, go down from 125 to 80. That's where it's like a ballast part of my portfolio.

And in fact, I always try to get gold to 10%. But as we know, Bitcoin runs too hard. So I'm always chasing. I literally have to continue to buy gold to get it to 10%. We might have finally hit it now at Bitcoin. I think the interesting thing about Luke, like Luke's clearly a genius. Like I love talking to him. I get his newsletter.

I don't think there's really very many people that are better than him at doing what he does. But in one of his recent newsletters, he basically said, you need to start trimming Bitcoin. I think he might have even said time to get out of Bitcoin. Do you think the fact that the bull market was obviously completely different, if it even was a bull market? The bear market is going to be completely different. Do you think if you're selling now on cycle expectations, that's a mistake? That's my view. So there's no reason that the four-year cycle has to play out.

A lot of people are going to say that it has played out, but we are down 35%. My base case for now is, and I've been saying this for a long time, there's a model called the true market mean, which is 82K, which we tagged overnight. So the true market mean, again, Dave Puehl and I built this in coin time economics. There's a model called the realized price, which is the average on-chain cost basis per Bitcoin. But the problem with the realized price, we've actually traded below it way back in 2015, way back in 2018. Like it's always been we trade below it and that's when bottom formation really starts. I was of the view that we shouldn't actually have hit it in 2022. And the reason why

Satoshi lost coins, early miners, they're sitting on tremendous unrealized profits, but they're not going to take them because they're lost. Put the quantum thread aside as a potential of bringing back to life. Those coins are not coming to come back to market in just normal participants. So in order to hit the break-even level of the realized price, you need, let's say, Satoshi's up $25 billion. People who are active in the cycle need to be holding $25 billion of losses to offset it, to get to break even. So the bigger that the higher the price goes, the larger the market gets, the more those unrealized profits swell, which means the larger the damage has to be for people who are active. And what happens when people go underwater, they sell. They capitulate out.

those losses actually get kind of tempered because people respond to the sell-off. So the true market mean uses livelihoodness, and I won't go to all the details, but it basically zones in on active investors. The older coins that haven't moved and have just huge amounts of coin days within them, we start to discount them the more that they have. And from that perspective, that's like the average cost basis for active investors. And it's, statistically speaking, the price oscillates around this thing. It is the middle, statistically speaking, of the,

bull of the entire Bitcoin market. It's at 82K. You know what else is at 82K? The average inflow cost basis for the ETFs. Sailor, who I would say is, broadly speaking, the average dude in terms of like they buy all the time in a bull. His cost basis is 74, which is not too far from 82. And the reason it's there is because they've been struggling to buy more coins, which if there's one challenge I'd give to Saylor, it's like you need a bare market strategy here because these coins are cheap. And for me, as a hodler, I'm happy as Larry, right? I'm going to keep buying down here, but the average hoddlers about 82K. The average ETF investor is 82K. That also tells it that the ETFs are also kind of the average market participant. The average market

participant is around 82K. If we were to bottom there, it was at 30K back in the previous cycle, what did it take to get us below that level? Because we bottomed there in like mid-20201, that we bounced off it. We came back down to it. We needed lunar to market sell 80,000 Bitcoin in distress. We needed three. Three arrows capital to be a fraud. We needed Genesis and Celsius and then finally FTX. That's the kind of damage we needed to get below down to the realized price. So I actually lost a $100 bet with my colleague from Glassnode because I was like,

I don't think from first principles, I don't think we get to the realized price. I didn't know all that fraud was there. And that $100 is worth a whole lot more now. Bitcoin with it. But for now, unless Sailor implodes, I'm not sure where that G. C grade de-leveraging comes from that could take us down to the realized price of 56. Yeah. Could it happen?

Yes. It's not my base case. So my base case for now is that we probably hammer out of bottom somewhere, like we might tag the 70s. I think getting down to the 50s is, you know, Bitcoin's a trillion dollar asset now. If you have 50K, it's, you're almost undoing the ETF. So like, can it happen? Anything can happen. Is it my base case?

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And if you're looking for the ultimate VIP experience with exclusive networking plus premium food and drink, then grab the whale pass and the whale night party even include surfing, so you know I'm going to be there. Tickets are on sale now. Use code WBD to get 10% off at checkout on all pass types. The website is Mina.b.tc and use code WBD for 10% off. I think in a lot of ways, the market is far more healthy than it was back in 2022. Like, I can't think of besides some treasury companies imploding, anything that could do that. I don't think there's any, I can't see. I mean, touch wood.

I don't think there's any like fraudulent businesses in Bitcoin at the moment. Like, it seems like everyone's learned their lesson from 2022. And if we have a bare market, let's just say for argument's sake, we bought them at the true market mean at E2K. If we bought them at the true market mean, it's 35%. Is everyone going to reset their cycle chart at the same way that they did at FTCX? at the same way that they did, and this has been my case for a long time, I think the bull isn't going to be that, like, we didn't have a blow off,

but generally speaking, the bull market did exactly what a bull market does. Price go up, old hands sell. It's how they use things generally play out. My view was always that the bear was going to break people, because they're not going to know when to reset their chart. And if we bought them at 35% down, and in six months' time, we're toying with all-time high, is it a new cycle or is it a super cycle?

Is it a four-year cycle or is it a five-year cycle? it was a five-year cycle. And again, this is all speculation, but I just wonder if you have to be so flexible in your thinking moving forward. You've probably seen people sharing. There's like a big table of all the metrics that didn't hit, zero out of 30 hit their on-chain top.

And it's like, yeah, but that doesn't really matter because there was a tremendous amount of sell side. When we started talking, I think it was about 113K, I wrote a piece called On the Cusp. And on the Cusp is where I sold my MSTR on 300 bucks. And I said, I think, check the answer, Analyst who's supposed to be very objective said something doesn't smell right here. We're below the short-term cost basis.

We've failed two all-time high attempts. Something's wrong. I'm selling my risk position because I want cash for the road down. And I started highlighting, and we were talking about before that, 95K. 95K is where we got about 60% of all the money underwater. And I said, look, the road from 115, we're down around the first line of defense. 100K is the next line of defense. once you get down to 95, we're really testing the waters and the trip from there to the 80s

will be swift. So we've kind of watched this thing devolve over time. And again, no one can predict the future, but what we can see is where is everyone's cost basis? And just drawing that line on the sand and saying, and I called it the Bull's last stand, and when we got to 95, what happened? Straight to 82. And that's not because I can predict the future.

That's just because there's a lot of people suddenly understand. underwater, we can see all of their cost base, and you go, it's a sensitive spot. It's where people's sentiment is going to shift to, oh, shit. We might have just flipped over and I could be late to this party now. So what's the check-on chain take now? Is it that we're going to hammer out a bottom basically where we are? Or do you think we go lower? Yeah, so my base case for now, there's two elements. One, I do think, so for the longest time, I think in 2024, I wrote the true market mean, wherever that was at the time, 40K or 30K or something, I said, I wrote a piece called Rethinking Bears. And I said at some point, when the bear shows up, here's the fundamental

reason why I think the true market mean is more likely, which I was describing before, more likely to be that floor level. It's at 82 now. That doesn't mean that we bought them at 82, but that's kind of the realized price. I think we chop around it. It's kind of a center of gravity, I think the ETFs being there is also a very good confluence. We also have, unfortunately, in the very, very near term, so probably by the time people will listen to this, we've probably already seen this, there's a ton of people longing the bottom with futures on leverage. So what I suspect happens is we probably get a wick. We probably tagged seven something, but I do think that gets bought up. So I would be very surprised if we go down too far below the

2024 chop zone. My base case, and again, we can only work in scenarios. My base case is that 2024 chop, you know, 70 plus, I think that's going to work as support. I mean, you're going to give me coins at 70K. I'll think about this in the shower this morning. If price goes down to 50k, you can now with a 5K slug buy 0.1 corn. To me, give it me. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but we're not going to give me 5 grand and I can buy 0.1 corn. Suddenly people can start being whole coiners again. I'm sorry, that it's too cheap. It just doesn't make sense. There's too many people like me. I'm going to step in before that. So my base case is somewhere between when we've tagged 80. Could be the low, probably get retested because of futures, but this zone, this

air gap between, you know, 70 to 80, I suspect we'll find a base somewhere in there. That would be my base case. Yeah, I would take that all day every day. It's too cheap otherwise. Have you guys been following this winter mute finance thing? No, I'm sure there's bodies out there, but, you know, this is the thing. Everyone goes looking for a boogeyman, you know, from my perspective, we broke below the base of what I called the Hodler's wall where all that supply is.

A bunch of people are now scared that they bought the top. They start responding. there's no support between there and 85. So you don't think it's down to these market makers. So just for anyone listening who's not aware, like I've not been following this super closely, but from my understanding, it's that Wintermute, when crypto,

like the broader crypto market had that big crash a few, like a couple months ago. Binance's API stopped working for Wintermute, and they lost, I think, billions of dollars in it. And so Wintermute are now suing finance, I believe. And like one of the theories that I've heard is that market makers are like, pulling liquidity from the Bitcoin market. I don't know if you've...

Yeah, I mean, look, I'm sure all of that's true. I think generally speaking, there's 50 different things that are going on, right? So they all have different components. But, you know, from my perspective, we got below 95. We got below the Bull's last stand. That was my thesis. Next thing you know, we're at 80K. Whatever the cause, the thesis was, there's too many people who are underwater.

Keep it simple. So you talked a little bit before about who's buying here. Because like someone's buying in massive size, volumes are high. Who do you think that is if you had to speculate? Because you mentioned before banks, I could believe that. I think especially in the US, the banks are going to be stepping into Bitcoin in a pretty big way over the next few years. I think they'll start custody in Bitcoin offering loans and all this kind of stuff. Who do you think that might be?

It is very interesting because it's not happening via the ETFs. That to me is the most intriguing part of it, which also means we don't know. Yeah. So you can never know the buyers until later on, but what I suspect we will see, long-term holder supply takes five months till the coin reaches that level the amount of buying that's occurred over the last six months so we're probably getting close to it i would say that long-term supply starts bottoming soon and starts moving significantly higher if it breaks to a new all-time high this is the only way we can really speculate about this stuff it feels to me like it's got to be

banks and it could be sovereigns because it's in the spot market which is a strategic position and the size, the size of it is just extraordinary. And how do we know it's big? Because we saw the selling. The sell side was massive, like $3 billion, $2 billion a day. I'm not bringing that in. I'm talking about being happy with a 5K clip. You know what I mean?

So like the average investor is not bringing tens of billions of dollars a week. And it's in spot markets. Yeah. Feels meaning. Like I'm buying here, but the market doesn't care that I'm buying here. I want to know who the big buyers are. Totally. So, yeah.

They're very interesting. One sold Bitcoin is one sold Bitcoin. Doesn't matter who's selling it. That's why we use that six months cut off because at least it's a sold Bitcoin that we know wasn't just transacted day to day and part of the noise. Well, all of these long terms that sold it above 100, they could buy back in. And they will. They just made the best decision of their lives to sell at 120, 110. Now they're going, oh, okay, I just clean that profit, jump back in slowly. Props to Mr. 80,000 Bitcoin who sold the pico top.

He literally could just have a bid now. What a go? Like, why wouldn't you? Like, you can now rotate right back in. Like, that sell side could literally just go, okay, thank you. Imagine the tax bill on $9 billion. Oh, my God. That's a good problem.

That's a great problem. You need a legal deal. I always think about the prep you need to sell that much Bitcoin would be a nightmare. Totally. You're just sitting there with spreadsheets and just talking to accountants and being like, how do I get, like, I need to find the right OT. I need to find the right desk. How do I even sell this thing?

I mean, is it hard, though, or is it literally just like, Alex Thorne, I'm going to send you a bitcoins with taxman. Yeah. Thinking about the tax part, I think that's what's really hard. If you think about it, if you're cashing out that much, you're setting up an estate. That's a job. That's like a whole thing. And there's a lot of people who are like, why didn't they sell the first time we go to 120K?

It's like, because these decisions take time. Yeah. Big job. It's a huge job. A lot of stuff to do. Yeah. Alex Thorne is the reason for this bare market. Cheers, Alex.

Thank you, both. Obviously, while Bitcoin's been crashing, it's not like the whole macro world has been super healthy. Like, everything's going down at the moment. I don't know what gold's at the moment. But how much of that do you think is playing into this? Oh, macro is a huge part of it.

So I would generally just go to listen to your podcast with Lynn, who's going to have far more review. I consider myself a macro tourist, so I certainly rely on other people to think about it, but also like considering these ideas. My general view is that liquidity just hasn't been ripping. There's been a whole bunch of things, TGA, sucking liquidity and all that stuff. My kind of, if I was to give it a general description,

we're at the very tail end of all the money that got pumped in in COVID. And it's now, as Alec was saying, trying to just find the place where it's being treated best. And it's a bit of a dog-eat-dog world. I think actually if you look at the way that the Bitcoin crypto world has operated this cycle, there's been Bitcoin that's run and like the occasional pump somewhere. Meme coins. Well, they had their time in the sun.

Then what do you hear about them anymore? Salana had a time in the sun and it's, who cares? Heath got there's only like 50 bucks if its all time behind is now in a horrendous bear market. So there's all these things where like money just kind of rotate. So if you think about if you're a wash with liquidity, rising tide lifts all boats. If there's a limited amount and it's starting to get scarce, this is also why I think and TXMC and I have a very same opinion here that all coins were a Zerp phenomenon. Yeah. We are now, there's no narratives left. There's no reason for anyone to like be bullish on this stuff.

So they're just kind of chasing that final pump. Everyone's now decided the Zcash is because like, we can't pump all the tokens. We can't pump 10 tokens. Let's all just get a marketing team and just pump one. It's just a VC company. It's a VC company. So everyone just goes for the one thing because like at least we can pump one coin, right? Can we do that? Have we got enough money left for that? So I really think we're at like the tail end. And also interest rates aren't zero. Yeah. And that It's a harder, like it's not a hard money environment, the dollar's still a shit coin, but it is a hard-earned money. So as a result of higher interest rates, people have to be more, you know, they have to think

about. I mean, if interest rates went to 20%, you better believe that people would only be buying stuff that's worthwhile. Yeah. It's the same idea of moving to a Bitcoin standard. People only are going to invest their Bitcoin if it's a good idea. So in a harder money world where it's not Zurp, Fartcoin doesn't make as much sense. So I think people are going to start having to think that way.

I think when I was speaking to Lynn, she said a load of interesting stuff that I'd not really consider before. So she, first of all, was talking about liquidity potentially drying up. She actually said it's not a bad spot right now. But like QT is coming to an end. And she was talking about this idea of QE, but following GDP. Obviously, in Bitcoin, people like to talk about these huge print events. And like if we're not going into that world, and instead it's just going to track GDP at 3, 4%, or whatever that is, I think that's going to change Bitcoin's market dynamic completely.

And I think it might look more like 2025 for a longer period of time. Potentially, but at the same time, so I do think that everything about rate of change. So a lot of people like to look at absolute value. But in reality, the rate of change is in most things, engineering systems, in markets, the whole lot, rate of change is actually more important. So we haven't seen an explosive growth in liquidity. But if you think about what is likely coming down the road, QT comes. to an end. So at the margin, the rate of changes, that's going to be less restrictive.

They're going to have to go back to balance sheet expansion. And my general thesis, like, in the macro world, I don't have the skills and the chops to like get into the plumbing and understand sofa rates and all of that. I certainly, I mean, we work with the Bitcoin layer. We rely on Nick for a lot of those types of things. Nick's the guy for that. Luke, understanding the plumbing. But I'm just, I'm a simple dude. I just look at gold. And I think gold and Bitcoin to very special assets because their prices are not just a price, they're actually information. When you see something happen on a Sunday night, you see all the TradFire guys posting the Bitcoin, like, a little shitty store of value. This is. I'm like, that's your equity portfolio

tomorrow. So what you're looking at is a lens into what's coming down the road. So gold doesn't move until it wants to move. And when it moves, you should pay attention. And it's clearly moved. the most overheated has been since 1979 in terms of distance from the 200 week moving average and no matter how you want to cut it. It's telling us that the system is bankrupt and we have to move to a new reserve asset.

That is a very important signal. In my world, gold tells me where we're going. Bitcoin is much more sensitive to the near term. And the near term, the rate of change of liquidity hasn't been great. It may actually be kind of hairy moving forward. You get any weakness in equity market. That falls off.

suddenly collateral goes down, bond volatility goes up, and everything gets squeezed, that doesn't mean that the follow-up is not going to be tremendous on the side. So I do believe there is a convergence of Bitcoin and gold that shows up. But I think Bitcoin goes the road to get there. And it's been telling you that the equity market probably is due for a pullback as well, kind of front runs that liquidity profile. So my base case is that Bitcoin will probably lead us back out of this thing when all the equity guys are going, shit, call J-Powl, it's all over.

and Bitcoin's going to start bottoming out and moving and say, here it comes. Do you know one of my favorite, this might be a really stupid take, but one thing that I quite often watch is, so UK markets open five hours for New York, and it seems like for those first five hours, all that those markets are doing is basically guessing what the US markets are going to do when they open.

So there's no signal there. It's like we think it's going to go down so everything goes red or whatever. But if you watch that happen and then you compare it to Bitcoin, like Bitcoin is actually the signal. And I don't know why the people trading UK equities aren't just looking at what Bitcoin's doing and be like, today's going to be a green day. Absolutely. No, I fully agree. And like on Mondays, I often see the Australian stock market doesn't know what to do. Yeah. Because it's been the weekend. And then on Tuesday, America's done something in Australia. It's like, oh, yeah, we've got to sell off as well. Like, something wrong. So it's very much, it's a response type factor.

I love the idea that Bitcoin is basically just a global prediction market. It's the index. Yeah. It's the index. And I think that is coming more and more into people's view. Like, again, let's think about where we are right now. We're at a point where sovereigns are taking positions in Bitcoin, right? We're 16 years into this experiment.

We don't have to convince anybody that Bitcoin is going to stick around. Even the bears that are out there are like, okay, now it's starting to get a bit undervalued versus gold. Yeah. Right. It's probably going to come back. It's a cockroach that keeps coming back from the. these 80% drawdowns like, oh, it might go down further. It's like, yeah, but they also know that they should probably buy that dip too.

I think even Andy Constan bought this dip. Yes. No, even guys who don't like it, like Peter Schiff eventually he's going to realize that he should probably just actually just actually. And a couple of our, or one of our orange subscribers said something very interesting, which is I don't care about Bitcoin tops at all. I care about the bottoms. That's all.

And these guys are like serious, serious traders. And so that's a really interesting. way to start thinking about Bitcoin, especially as a hoddler investor, where is the bot? Like, as long as the floor keeps rising over the long arc of time, that is actually the success metric of Bitcoin. Like, there's always a fair value of Bitcoin that, and the price is like oscillating around it up and down, up and down. We're kind of a bit too high.

This is the way I frame it in my mind. And now we're just finding that fair value and all the smart money, they literally just go, where's the bottom? That's all I want to know. I just want to know when it finally, after this really human, organic hype cycle comes over and they're finally back at that fair value, which Bitcoin should probably have just been priced at that level this whole time anyway, if it was like not a human market, that's all they care about. So it's super interesting to think of that way, which is why this

bottom formation period is going to be like super excited. I'm super keen to just watch this bottom happen and be hammered out because that is the fair value of Bitcoin that is now being reset. So we're in like a new chapter now. So it's kind of cool. And this is where you start thinking about the psychology of resetting cycles. We were talking about the small. morning, there's this process where everybody over the next, like, a couple of days, you were using the term is going to have to grieve this red candle. We need to grieve a little bit. So people's going to grieve.

But like, even just having this. What does grieve mean? Go sideways for a bit. No, no, no. People need to like come to terms of the fact that you can. Okay. Yeah, yeah, they're going to come to terms with it. So I think people are going to go through that process.

I mean, even just having this conversation, I'm like, fuck, I'm actually more bullish than I was this morning and I bought it this morning. I don't know. When you see a 30% down and you've invested in being watching this thing and, like, being a fan and really excited. and then you kind of get denied and then Thanksgiving is coming up. Christmas is coming up. You have to see your family that you've been bullish to. You all just, you have this heavy, heavy heart. You sold them on it last year at 100 something K. Exactly. And you have this heavy heart,

especially men. We don't take the time to just sit and feel that, oh, yeah, kind of have to, like, feel the loss and like breathe through it, talk to some friends. But you need to do that ASAP instead of sitting on X and just watching all these charts because every single person who was saying it's going to go to 250K is now calling a bottom and calling something. No, no, no, we're going to go straight back up. It's fine. We're going to be 100K in no type. You need to stop looking at all that.

You need to grieve a little bit. I think, yeah, and it's okay. It sucks. It's okay. It's a new chapter. It's going to be exciting. And that's the thing, bear markets, and I think the correct way to think about this current market structure is to think about it as a bear market.

Yes. And do not anchor to bear market must go down 75%. Or must go down 55%. Drop those type of metrics. bare markets are things that reset investor expectations, right? I think most people, after we hammer out this floor, we'll have reset their expectation to say, okay, we're probably not going to a million dollars

on the fourth year of this halving cycle, right? People are going to have reset expectations. In fact, people are going to probably have expectations that go too far the other way. Everyone's going to converge, and you'll start seeing those dudes on Reddit, being like, I've sold everything, I'll buy it back at 12K, right?

That's what we saw back down there. that 15K when FCX blew up. When you start seeing everyone overcorrecting in the wrong direction, we have now reset expectations, which is the job of bear markets. Probably a few Treasury companies have to puke as well, but that's a different topic. Do you know, can you remember what we closed the year at in 2024? Yes, it was 92 something, I think. Okay.

Do you know the thing that I'm most concerned about is that Hoddles's green, green, green, green, red is wrong. We need to get above 92K by the end of the year to keep that meme alive. If we get above 92K, I mean, that's a pretty significant bounce. I mean, again, 95 is a very important level. The Bulls have a lot of work to repair this price chart, no question. Not impossible, but I'm not anticipating all-time highs this year. Oh, no, me neither.

No. However, I also wouldn't be, honestly, I wouldn't be surprised. I mean, my base case has been the true market mean. Now, again, true market mean 82K, that doesn't mean that's like the wick of the bottom, we've historically traded below it, but that is the zone where investors are going to be so sensitive that they're going to have to reconnect. So if you think about an ETF investor, they've been DCAing since they went live, they are now underwater or at their cost basis.

They now have a decision to make. Do I still like Bitcoin? I liked it at 95 and 100 and 110. And I liked it at 70 and I liked it at 45. Do I still like it? And if the answer is yes, we'll start seeing the ETF outflow is slow. We'll start seeing realized profits on chain slowing, which we're seeing already. We'll see the people who bought the top and don't have the conviction realize losses will spike higher.

We saw a billion dollars yesterday. I'm sure it's high today. We'll start seeing these signs of like a reset. People who bought high are going to get out. The people who bought high and kind of don't care are going to huddle. Long-term supply will start climbing. We'll probably start seeing bare market formations, I think, hammering out now. I thought back in 2022, the 17K, the first.

we got them three arrows blew up, that's when I think bottom formation started. And every metric I look at says that that's when bottom formation started. I have a feeling that this might be. And perhaps with that wick to just get rid of all the leverage, I want to see all the degenerate leverage guys get washed out first. I have a feeling somewhat similar to that. We still went down lower because of FTCX. But it was like down sideways and then straight back up. It was like a hyper extension.

And a lot of buying happened there. But bottom formation, I don't think we're too far. fire away from starting to hammer out that floor. That's my base case. Again, base case is just base case, but that's where I said at the moment. Based on nothing analytical, I think we might be getting close to the bottom, just because I've started seeing the flood of techs come in from people. I actually got my favorite one yesterday from one of my friends. He's been in Bitcoin for a little while, but he's not like a full-on Bitcoiner. I just got text from saying, why Bitcoin cheap? I think when you start seeing that, you're probably getting towards the bottom, at least from a

sentiment perspective. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And bare markets aren't a drawdown percentage. they're not anything other than resetting investor expectations. What resets expectations? People flying high and then being brought right back down to reality. Once your feet are on the ground, you then go, okay, we're at 80K. I'm going to accept that we're at 80K. You're telling me if we go down to 50K, I can buy 0.1 with a 5K slug. I don't think we go there.

So therefore, am I happy with 60? Am I happy with 70? Am I happy to start just like DCA now and like taking nibbles? Like you start making decisions accordingly once, you have just come back to reality and said, well, look, we're not at 100K anymore. So one thing's for sure, the top may be in, but we're not at the top right now. Yeah. Once people start doing the calculations to figure out their net worth, that's normally a sign

that we might be getting too close to the top. Well, I mean, for me, I knew that the gold had hit its top of 4,300. Why? Because I updated my precious metal spreadsheet three times in a single day, right? Normally I update it once a week at most. Did you sell any? No, I didn't. And the main reason is a tax thing.

I still think that gold's going to have a good year. So for me, it just wasn't, it's not a good year for me to sell the gold. I thought about it, for sure. I'm actually kind of thinking about, like, even can I make the tax work? Because I, like, would rotate the gold into Bitcoin now. So I'm actually playing around with that idea. That's certainly where I sit. But I knew that it was the top for the meantime because I changed my spreadsheet three times.

I'm like, that's it. It's over. So going, like, there'll be a lot of people out there panicking at the moment. Sure. What would your kind of message to them be? So I think really you've got to just, why are you here in the first place? Right? Most often, your expectations don't align with your time frame.

So a lot of people who buy and then the price goes down straight away feel bad, but you have to remember who did you buy that for? When I'm stacking stats, I'm buying them for like my future self in many, many years. I'm buying them for my son who's, you know, 10 weeks old. I didn't know. You said you had a son publicly. No, no, so 10-week-old boy at home. He's going to be 18.

It's the best fucking thing ever, isn't it? It is. No, it totally is. So he's going to be 18 before he starts seeing any of those stats. I'm like, if I'm buying an 80K, 82K, and it goes to 70, where is it going to be when he's 18 years old? Substantially higher. We talked about this when we're moving our retirement fund across to Bitcoin.

That was the case. It's like, okay, I'm going to retire in 30 years. I'm going to need this in 30 years. Where the hell is Bitcoin going to be in 30 years' time? Much higher. I mean, I do the same thing. Since the day my daughter was born, she has a DCA that just hits every week. And like, if you're buying Bitcoin for that long term, just who cares about this?

Exactly. So I think first things first, just accept what has already happened, right? Go through the grieving process. If you bought the top, it's okay. There'll be many tops. There's always many tops in Bitcoin. And you have to then make it, I think really the right way to frame this up, no one can predict the future.

But if you prepare for it, like I've been talking about this 82K level ad nauseum when we're up at 100 something, and it seems completely irrational to get there. But the idea is that by the time we get there, we've all, like our subscribers have already mentally processed it. So the grieving period for a lot of people who have no idea what's going on is going to be months. And what's going to happen is they're going to get increasingly bearish as the bottom gets hammered out, and every sell-off goes down lower and lower and they're going to get disillusioned out and they're going to walk away. What you actually need to do is think about what would happen if we go to 80K. You can't control the markets, like the tide.

You get sucked out to see if you swim against it. The only thing you can control your decisions. I've already made my decisions at 115k when I sold my MSCR. I said, I'm going to start allocating that capital if we get anywhere within a sniff of that true market mean. Here we are. What am I doing? All the money I sold for my MSTA is now allocated.

And now any income that I kept coming in, straight in because I believe this is a good place to buy. The funny thing as well is, like, when Bitcoin is flying, when it's 120k, people like, oh, I wish it was 80K still. And then it gets here and everyone panics. Like, instead of grieving, you should just celebrate the opportunity to buy more. If you're buying for the right reason, you're buying for the right time frame, then just buy more. Absolutely. And for me, like, I'm a simple dude. I don't trade. A lot of people think that you should trade. Trading is a horrible sport. I don't. It is a horrible sport. Everyone's tried to do it. I learned my lesson in 2017.

Yep. You've got some stories for it. Oh, my God. Same. Same. So trade. as a horrible sport, it consumes, like for me, if I put a $100 perp on, I don't care about my net worth, which is 90% Bitcoin. I'm the same. It's so weird. I'm worried about the 30 bucks that I'm down on my perk. It's because it's gambling. I was talking to me and Pete were in Vegas recently, and he was like, we were talking about

betting, you know, $100 on blackjack or whatever. And he was like, why am I more worried about this when my net worth in Bitcoin is fluctuating and orders of magnitude more than that every day? Because you believe in it. So a few kind of tips for people. one, if you're levered and you're looking at a liquidation level that's like anywhere close to this, just sort it out. Don't dick around with it, sort it out.

As the market belts out of bottom, work out who you're buying for and what time frame. Allow yourself to just like realize that we're not at the top anymore, right? So you're now to ask, are we going much lower? And if so, by how much? And like, as a hodler, you never buy and it goes straight up from there. You always go down 5, 10%. So work out what you're paying. threshold is, there is a thing called pain to the upside. It's rare. It's rare. Most of the time,

pain is always to the downside because you're allocated. And the people saying the pain is to the upside, generous because they're super long and they want to tell Peter shift that he's wrong. Pain is usually to the downside. And markets love to hunt pain. So if your liquidation level is close, get rid of it. If anything in your portfolio, and this is just like a general piece of market advice, if anything in your portfolio has you unable to sleep or you think about it every single day, you are over exposed. Like, it's just really simple. If you are thinking about this thing and it is like drawing your mind power for me,

I don't think about my big kind of my gold ever. Yeah. Honestly. So I avoid buying the tops, right? That's for me, if I just stop buying high and really, I didn't buy very much above 100K, if I stopped buying high, I have cash to buy when it goes lower because it always does. So that's the same thing as selling the top, just minus the tax bill. Just understand who you're buying for, what your time,

frame is, if your position is keeping you awake, you're too exposed, make some decisions, and try and make the months ahead of when you actually need them. Totally. And we're, I don't know how long ago it was. It was maybe, was it about two years ago we made our bet for the end of this year? It would have been 2024 because I think we would have just started check on chain when we had that. So it'd have been early 24 probably.

So maybe 18 months ago a bit more. And mine and Pete's guesses look absolutely moronic at this point. I think I said 282K by the end of this. year. And it was the maximum price by 2025. Yeah, Pete said 350K. And my was 250, which to be fair, I think like back then, it's much harder to read this thing, right? The ETF had taken live. 250 was where I kind of said that's probably as high as we go in 2025. However, I would say, you know, a couple of months later, a lot of people have been calling me bearish all cycle because I said like 150. I'm one of the people who's been calling

you Barish. I was saying 150 is, and to be fair, I wrote a piece at the top, right, where I said, called Add Another Trillion where I was like, you know, honestly, I think we deserve a run at 150. And that was because back in January, this is looking at capital flows and how much money had come into the ETS and whatever. And my view was when we're at 100K in January, I don't think we deserve a run at 150. I don't think we've had the inflows yet. When we got to like, it was like 118, we're going for the second all time high. I wrote a piece saying, look, I think we deserve a run at 150.

We got to 126 and that was the end of it. The reality is we then have to adjust. And by the time we had that second all time high fail, we had that second all time high fail, We had the liquidation event. By the time we got to 115, 113, 113, 112, I'm like, I think something's up. So you've got to update your prize and say, look, I still think we deserve a run at 150. People call me a bear because that's not high enough. It's like, yeah, but that is also the level where, statistically speaking, people were going to offload.

It just turns out they were offloading at 126 rather than at 150. And to be honest, through the whole 100 zone. So you've got to be flexible, right? You've got to be flexible on you're thinking. And like Lynn said in the show, we did, there's probably some amount of self-filling prophecy that people think a cycle's still alive, so they start selling. But I think here right now we should make our prediction for 2026. Oh, we can have, so I owe you 100 Ks Sats.

Pete owes you 100 K sites. I'm willing to concede that here. You're conceding December already. I don't think we're going to go to 282K by the end of December. What are you thinking? Honestly, I actually think 2026, I mean, it's going to be driven a lot by macro. No question. I think 2026 is actually going to be constructive, honestly, because I can't see.

see a world where the liquidity doesn't come back in, I do think the Fed's going to have to expand their balance sheet. So if we think about like 150, I think probably happens, honestly. And the thing is now that we've had this at another trillion, we've had the capital flows in my mental model to actually justify a run to 150. I don't think we had that in January. Let's have another year of bottoming out, 80K, maybe it takes a couple of months. By the time, we start drifting up towards the all-time high, the capital flows that I personally, and I stand by this, I still think that the capital flows justify that move to 150. There's going to be more capital coming in by that point.

So then you start talking about, well, maybe the level start drifting higher. So, look, 200 would be fantastic. I do think it's going to be a positive year, and it's a positive year coming off something like 80K. So for me, if I'm buying 80K and we're going to go up to like 150, 160, I'll take it. So look, let's stick with 150 as a level because we're talking about a 12-month time frame. I think we could probably get there, truthfully. I hate price predictions, but they're quite fun.

But it is a bit of fun. Like the thing, when I look at next year, Jerome Pals out, someone's going to come in, step in at the Fed who is probably going to be more in line with Trump, if not just an outright Trump stooge. They've got midterms. They're going to want the economy flying. Like, I can see a lot of reasons why macro starts going ballistic. Show me the incentive and I'll show you the result. I'll go higher than you just because I may as well keep the theme going to get your

case that's back. I'll go one, 190. Ooh. Yeah, I mean, you mentioned midterms. I think Trump and the Republicans are going to have a really rough 2026. Like I don't know if they're going to be able to keep the house. They have a stacked house, right? And Senate.

If that flips to Dem, I don't know if that's looking good, especially for AI and that type of trade. So for me, to make a prediction, where Bitcoin bottoms is super important. If we bottom around the 80s, yeah, easily we're going to surpass all-time high next year, I think, I think. But it depends how low we go. So my prediction is going to be 126K. Just tag the heart. Just tag. By like end of year, by this time. I'm pulling east. Get 50% 50 bucks below you're off and then we're going to have this discussion again. And we're going to be like, so now what? Like, it's the same as last year. What the hell?

I feel like that's the type of vibe that I'm feeling. Probably statistically, that's probably the best guess. I would say so. Yeah. That's good. We've got a nice spread, actually, there. So there's enough gap between them. I hope you're right.

It's near as you do too. It's like if I would never have guessed we were going to end this year below 100 when we made that. No, that is surprising. Yeah. It's exciting. Especially inflation adjusted. Yeah. And to be like, that's the thing, right?

When you're at 126, it's actually not the worst. year, right? I think a lot of people expected substantially higher, but like, 126 is still within like reasonable bounds. But coming down to 80, I think that's surprised a lot of people, no doubt. Do you think that we're going to see a rotation from gold into Bitcoin? Oh, totally. Totally. I mean, I'm literally thinking about do I take an extra tax hit to do so. But you're an outlier there because you're obviously, you're a Bitcoin who has a bit of gold. Most people are gold bugs that maybe don't have any exposure to Bitcoin. Yes, but at the same time, people, like, Love momentum. And I think if we find a floor and then Bitcoin starts moving, because again,

once the thing starts moving, everyone's going to go, oh, that cockroach didn't die. I get, oh, shit, I sold my Bitcoin. Maybe we should get back in. Smart money wants to find the bottom, man. They don't want to, they don't care. They want to find the bottom. I can't stop thinking about the just sheer magnitude of selling. Who are the buyers? Someone serious. It's someone very, very serious. And we're going to find out at some point, but it's someone very, very serious. has to be because otherwise we'd be at zero. You know what I mean? Like the scale of it is just too big.

When you say sovereigns, you mentioned that a couple of times in the show. If you had to guess, what kind of sovereigns do you think are buying? It's not some pee-wee country in Europe. You think it could be like Gulf States. So my base case is it's going to be either the biggest countries or the smallest ones that had nothing to lose. They're the most likely. Like Australia ain't buying Bitcoin anytime soon.

Neither is the UK. Neither is the UK, neither is like probably Germany sold theirs. I think these like middle of the road countries, they don't have the incentive. The little guys have the incentive because they could get shut out of the financial system. They could also just like, you know, like El Salvador, they want to get ahead in some way. And then you've got the big dogs, the China's, the US, the Russia's. These are like the big countries who are like they have a real incentive, which is we need to save that money somewhere. Do you not even think like Australia's sovereign wealth fund could be buying?

I don't think they're that smart. Because it's interesting, was it the Belgian sovereign wealth fund that bought some recently? I'm not sure. I could be wrong on that. But a country like that has recently come out and said they bought Bitcoin. Was it? Czech Republic? That would make sense.

Yeah. Yeah, they're pretty bullish on Bitcoin, I think. I feel like any carbon neutral, like, government isn't going to be able to buy it yet. Do you think that narrative? They still care about that narrative. They don't understand yet. Like, especially Australia, like, they'll get one bit of pushback. It burns all this.

And then they'll be like, okay, we can't touch it. Yeah. I mean, even though the economy's run on oil there. There's a good story. There's a good story. There's up in Newcastle, which is about an hour north of Sydney. There's a bit of an uproar because it's a little bit old now,

but there's these wind turbines have been sitting on the docks for like years. And there's all these like government proposals about they want to build offshore wind turbines. People like, no, the whales and blah, blah. It's finally come out that those wind turbines actually aren't for the offshore. They're actually for like an inland wind turbine, but they can't fit them on the trucks because they don't fit on the roads. because they don't fit on the roads. So these wind turbine blades are just rotting on the docks because they can't move them.

That's your Australian government in a nutshell. So I'm not too, I don't think they'd be clinging to Bitcoin any time. That's almost any government in a nutshell, I think. It's kind of sad. It's going to be a, this year, even though it's been maybe disappointing from a ballmark's perspective, is probably the most interesting year in terms of what Bitcoin is going to look like in the future. Total reshaping of, and that's what I mean, the three pillars, the ETS changed a lot, not because they're like the biggest buyer,

not because they've changed market structure or the way the on chain works. Like from my view, they're 20% of the demand. They changed the regulatory understanding. They allowed institutions to come in. They can put on basis trades. They can put on long positions. The Ibit options are now 60% of the underlying.

So you've got 60 cents of options. Now they can buy Bitcoin and rent it out with covered calls. And we're going to see a lot of that. So I think that the ETS just completely changed the perception and the access. The Hoddle-Sell side and the great rotation has genuinely been a changing of the guard. It'll take time to process it and for the market to hammer out a floor and find that new equilibrium, but that has changed the holder base. And then the world of options is going to be very, very interesting moving forward. It's going to change market structure forever.

It already has, arguably. But we're going to see a lot more of that. I mean, again, Gold's options are 120% of the underlying for GLD. If you look at Ibit, we're halfway there. So they're going to get much, much bigger. Well, I think, so we should talk about why we're here. Oh, yes. Because there's a shit coin conference going on in Sydney at the moment.

I had no plans to come, but a few my friends were coming down. I was like, okay, I'll come to a show. We can hang out. I have a few beers. But I went to the opening party last night, and it really surprised me. So this was a room full of shit coiners. A couple of people came over, joined in with our group and started talking. And they couldn't understand why we only cared about Bitcoin.

Crazy, right? Like, I don't know. I think we're really interested. We're in a bit of an echo bubble, an echo chamber with like the Bitcoin community. Like, we think everyone thinks like this. So being in a room with people that are like talking about meme coins and like whatever shit coin under the sun and then them totally not getting why you're into boomer coin. Like how weird is that that still exists despite the market just absolutely tanking?

Totally. And I tapped a mate because I very much. being here is a it's a business maneuver because I just want to get exposed because the Australian Bitcoin scene is actually very strong. There's some great Bitcoin. The great Bitcoin is in Australia. The Bitcoin Bush Bash is fantastic. Bitcoin alive is an actual conference, Bitcoin only. Really, really good. So the Bitcoin contingent, albeit small, right? The conference has 400 people there. So it's a sport, which by the way, makes them better. Yeah. Small, small. But they're like hardcore. Hardcore and really high signal. But the Australian crypto scene has

no idea we exist and we don't care that they exist. So I very much view this is like, it's like going to the zoo. And we were talking this morning about like the impacts of AI. And I'm, I'm a little a bit more skeptical about like how much AI is going to, it's going to be transformative, no question. I don't trust it for anything that I use it for. Like it makes mistakes all the time and I find I'm constantly checking it. But I also like to think, like thinking is one of my favorite things to do. So for me, I actually don't like outsourcing my thinking. So for me, as a professional, AI doesn't help me. But then we talk about like the zoo that we're about to go and see,

you then realize where the actual bell curve is. People still think that Ripple's going to be a thing. I was talking to a mate the other day, you said that like the Solana and the Ripple ETS had really, really strong inflows, like the best ETS of the year. And I'm like, okay, so AI may be retarded, but so are the people that's going to replace. So I'm like, it's actually not that AI is great.

It's the bell curve is kind of challenging. And we're about to go and look at it. Yeah, the bar's not that high. I know. That's the scary thing about it. I was there for like an hour last night. And then people around we were talking about shit coins. I was just like, I'm just going to go home and watch the ashes.

I literally, I just bailed and came home and watched the cricket. Honestly, it's just fiat. They're just stocks that can pump and make. Ozies love just making money. Like, we're a super rich country. Everyone just, you just invest in ETFs here or property. And there's just this new thing that's just stock. It's just stocks.

Yeah. So people just can get rich off of it. It's just rich guys doing rich things. They don't care about the fundamentals. The reason they don't understand Bitcoin is because they have never actually studied the thing. All they know is that is this thing going to go up? Like that's kind of the questions that they have with each other is like, is it going to pump? Like we don't talk about that with Bitcoin really.

Like the fundamentals of Bitcoin are why we're here and just a lot of people don't have the time or I don't know. They don't have the long term vision to actually. to actually buy into that. So they just don't understand it. Like, why would you buy that? It's not, it's not just going to rip a million percent. It's like, it's not about that. Well, I've actually been enjoying because you've recently been going down the level six,

Matthew McConae scale, like getting into like the Y Bitcoin. Like, you've been in the industry for years now. Ages, yeah. Tell us about like going into the actual Bitcoin rabbit hole, because it is. You go through this phase and it's very nostalgic. As you were telling me the stories, like, damn, I remember when I went down the gray days. Yeah.

We're like understanding, mining and all that. Yeah. No, I mean, I got a little too attached to the price with Bitcoin and short term. And I really needed a way to zoom out a little bit because Bitcoin is not a 2025 asset. You do not buy it. I mean, if you're a hoddler and you're trying to accumulate for your 10 years self, price movements today shouldn't affect you as much as they do. And they were affecting me a lot.

So I was like, I need to study UTXOs. I need to study how the blockchain actually works. I need to like go deep. like read the Stoci emails like really understand the fundamentals to like build my trust again in the actual asset itself in the system in the software in the group of nodes in the world and I just got like I reinvigorated my excitement for Bitcoin because I'm like no this thing fucking is amazing was there anything when you were doing that that was like holy shit like even if it was just like learning something again or was there something that really sort of settled you

Oh my God. Just like the brilliance of the design of nodes and mining and the how multiple nodes can have different copies of the ledger. And then you must require one node to decide that this is this is the next, this is the next block. Is everyone happy with this? Yes. If something goes wrong, it auto corrects itself. And it's just like, and then I was imagining how banks manage their ledgers and humans, manage ledges right now. And it's no one knows. It's a black box. Humans make wrong decisions all the time. It's not automated at all. They can shut down your accounts. They can move your money. Like so many governments just take people's money. Like I think Lebanon, like a bunch of places, right? All over the world. And just the brilliance of the Bitcoin network and software to just automate and take the human error out of that. I was like, no, nothing can fuck with this. Because, and nothing will ever get the amount of broad reach that Bitcoin has. Like, I just don't think so.

There's a first mover advantage. Like, the whole Satoshi story is also just fascinating. The fact that he hasn't come back. The fact that there's no guy that he can, imagine Satoshi could tweet. Like, I feel like, dude, I swear, like, he would say some whack stuff and, like, tank the market. I don't know. I just, I love the entire, it's almost like a biblical story. Like, the narrative of Bitcoin is so strong.

So I think just it has all the elements to be a long-term stalwart asset. And price this year, it doesn't really matter. You know what's actually exciting? We can buy cheaper Bitcoin. Exactly. This is not something to be scared about. This is opportunity. The last bottom was, what was it, FTX was 16.

15K. 15K. If our bottom now can be anything over that, that's fantastic. Again, if you zoom out, like if you zoom out to the 2028 when the politician, switch over in America, that's going to be a whole other world. Do you think Bitcoin will be up or down by then? It's like, I'm damn sure it's going to be up. Yeah. Let's fucking go. So, fuck yeah. Yep. I'm at bullish. I'm excited to go and see this too. I'm going to go for exactly 20 minutes. I'm going to watch your talk, watch you dunk on the wall, and then I'm going to leave.

And basically, like, a lot of the things that we're talking about is like the ETFs, granted, mine excluding the last couple of days. The ETFs are bigger than like in terms of capital inflows, just the dollars people have actually invested are bigger than every single ASX stock in the Australian stock market, except for the big four banks and BHP. So, like, the inflows are the six biggest company in Australia. And if you look at the AUM, where the AUM peaked, it was bigger than everything except Combank, which is our biggest bank. So, like, the scale of it is just tremendous. And they've been around for...

Since January 24. Yeah. So it's remarkable just seeing the scale of it. And actually, I should close my favorite metric in... all of on-chain data, and it's the backbone metric is the realized cap. The realized cap values every UTXO at the time and it moved on-chain. If you bought a coin in 2019 at 10K, it's saved at that 10-K price. The realized cap is how much we as Bitcoiners have entrusted to the asset. $1.12 trillion. So whenever someone tells you that Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, there's

$1.12 trillion that disagrees with you where Bitcoiners have gone, no way. I trust this thing to look after my savings. It's a monumental amount. At the all-time height, we had more unrealized profit. That's our cost basis. We're at two and a half trill. We had the unrealized profit in Bitcoin is bigger than Berkshire Hathaway, right? Rat poison squared by R. So get bullish because Bitcoin's not going anywhere. It's going to come back like a cockroach. Happy days. Let's fucking go. All right, this has been awesome, guys. We'll be back in a year together. Can I add one more thing before we funds? Because something I think is actually important, Charles Edwards has been on about the quantum threat recently.

It's very hard to handicap what is true and isn't in the quantum space. I do think it's worth, like Bitcoin is just generally speaking, having a conversation about what we do, because you know what would just destroy the final piece of fud that's out there is having a strategy, working out what it's going to look like. Whilst, you know, I'm not quite sure that I agree with like that it's coming in a year or it's coming in two years' time, I still think, Charles is very right that we should start talking about it now and we should just have a game plan.

If we have a game plan by the end of 2026, let's use this bare market, put aside the price, let's work out what the strategy is. And if the strategy is we need to do more coding, more work, more research, which we will, I'm in no way qualified enough to understand what needs to go into it. Let's have that conversation now because I'll tell you what, when you solve that problem, there ain't nothing left. Well, let's have the conversation because I think this is super interesting. I, again, have no idea what the time scale is on this, but let's just assume it happens at some point. And over a long enough time span, it will happen.

Yeah. So the question is, like, what happens? We're going to move to an address format that is quantum proof. I don't think that will be contentious because everyone will have to do that. So that part's easy. The tricky part is what do you do about all the coins that are in these old Path-Pubkey hash addresses or whatever? Do you freeze them or do you let them be stolen? So first things first, I think separating those to their two separate issues, it is an absolute mistake to put them in the same bit.

Two separate issues. We have to deal with them separately. So first things first, let's build, research, design, whatever we've got to do. I know a bit 360s out there. Again, I'm not smart enough to understand any of it. Let's get the option, the option for people to upgrade built first. Ship that. Well, that's happening.

Like, Hunts of Beasts work on this. Like, maybe it needs more eyeballs on it. I think it needs more people to understand what it is, how it works. So I think first things first, just get that done. Now, on the second topic of what do you do with old coins, if you solve that first bit, this is law of the jungle until proven otherwise, but at least you had people with an option, sort that out first. My personal view on the, what do you do with the old coins, they come back to market.

I totally agree. I don't think, and the reason I want to go down that approach, there's two angles, and we had a big talk about this in a cheat code last year. There's the argument of if someone's coins get stolen, the security assumptions of Bitcoin get broken. But then the other side is if you free someone's coins, I think you taint the idea of Bitcoin, which is property rights. If someone has your private key, they legally don't own the coins, but they do own

them. Yeah. Right? Possession is nine tenths of the law. If you leave your private key in a desk draw and someone gets it or someone uses quantum to extract them. you have kind of made the decision to not upgrade. So if we take Satoshi, for example,

if we freeze his coins, we are doing so before Q Day, because otherwise they would have been stolen. If we freeze Satoshi's coins, we made that decision for him. What if it was on a Monday and on a Tuesday, he comes back from the dead, or he is Hal Finney and he's frozen,

and he brings back man in the coma, and he goes, whoa, quantum hasn't been invented or it failed, and you'd bugger sold my, I froze my coins. If we freeze other people's coins, irrespective of flag days and all of that, we made the decision to take someone else's coins. Yes. If, on the other hand, we build the system and allow people to migrate, which will take time, and that's a whole process, Q-Day comes along and they get taken. In that instance, they chose not to save their coins. That's their decision, not our decision.

Now, the one proposal, I think Hunter Bees talks about this, which I think is potentially worth thinking about, is a rate-limiting approach. Yeah, so he talks about only one transaction per block to be a non-quantam-proof address. Yes, and I think of the legacy coins. Yes. I think that his rationale there is a sound one, which is that if you look at the current performance of the chain, you're very, like the on average is less than one per block. So right now, the rate limiting wouldn't affect anyone on average. Could you break down the rate limiting just for their play? Yes.

So the idea is that you could set a rule where the miners could only include like the legacy addresses which are vulnerable to quantum. you could basically say that they're only allowed to include one of those spends per block. So quantum comes along, all the lost coins that were going to upgrade, upgrade. The ones who don't, we presume they're lost and going to get stolen, quantum shows up, and they don't steal them all in one big chunk. They steal them one per block. They have to drip feed them out. Now, the other thing I think is also worth thinking about.

Just quickly on that, there's also an interesting dynamic where, say, quantum computers can steal coins from these old addresses, there's then a fee dynamic that goes into it where say you have a UTXO that has 50 Bitcoin on it, you want to steal that as quickly as possible before someone who owns that Bitcoin upgrades. So what do you put in as a fee to make sure you're the one transaction in the next block? And it might end up instead of giving all those coins back to the market, just give them to the miners. Well, that's an interesting thing. And I think that comes down to the next point, which is who is going to invent this quantum computer? Because IBM invent it.

What are they going to do? Sotoshi's coins? Like, what are you going to launder it through Binance? Like, you're going to get a benevolent dictator most likely. It's going to be Chinese or US government. It's going to be a high-flying tech company. And if you're unlucky to be North Korea. Yeah. Right. It's not going to be North Korea. Exactly. So you've got to think about, like, who is actually going to be the one to crack this quantum thing? What are they going to do? Start ripping into banks? Like, I don't think so. And again, it depends on access and all these types of things. Irrespective. I actually think all that stuff is kind of irrelevant. The threat, if you run the human

experiment long enough, we will eventually break electric curve photography because we're smart. Don't bet against innovation. I also don't want to bet against innovation by, you know, I certainly don't think Bitcoin's going to die. I think the coins come back to market. I think that's a separate conversation and it's a mistake to cloud the tech with that decision. Separate the two.

Get the option for people to upgrade first. Do the requisite work. If we as Bitcoin has solved that problem in the next 12 months, just what we're going to do. have the plan, what's the FUD? Yeah. What fund is left? On that point, though, I think there's a really short-sighted view on the sort of market impact of all these coins coming back to market in that, like, to me, I agree with you totally. Bitcoin and Shrine's property rights, that's like one of the absolute fundamental things to me. So if we as Bitcoiners say, we're going to freeze those funds so a bad actor down the road doesn't, then the property rights are broken.

Agree. And so if that happens, what should the price of Bitcoin be? And to me, it's far lower. So like even though there might be short-term impacts on the market, if these coins do go to like bad actors, they dump them. Like in the other scenario, Bitcoin doesn't have the same future value anyway. So it's actually a really short-sighted way of looking at it. I would put it in the realm of reputations take forever to build and one bad tweet to destroy. And I think that's more or less the way I think about this. We've built such a tremendous thing with Bitcoin.

It will take one mistake like that to affect you can't undo that from the idea you are actually hitting the idea of Bitcoin. And if you take that to its log for me, if I take that to its logical conclusion, I don't believe that the price is something we should care about when we make consensus changes. When we make consensus changes, that should be about the security and the decentralization and the properties that make Bitcoin worth something. The market will then value that. If we start making decisions because we're afraid of Satoshi's coins, which, by the way, Satoshi's coins come back to market. They're going to auction.

And I don't know about you, but I'm going to buy some for sentimental value. How many Bitcoiners are going to go buy a million stats of Satoshi's coins? I'm totally, let's go. It's the ultimate ordinal. It's my rare set. I don't think, you know, I really just don't think that anyone's going to, aren't the ordnals guys going to go nuts over that? There's your rare sets, right?

No, look, I think the idea is build the tech, have the option. let's have the conversation now. I'm not smart enough to work it out, but I think more public discussion about this is going to be really healthy. It's going to set up Bitcoin off of just a tremendous, tremendous road ahead. If Bitcoin has freeze that, that's the equivalent of the US freezing Russian Treasury. I fully agree. I fully agree.

Same framework. If you freeze that, if you freeze Satoshi's coins on a potential that quantum is going to come out, there's older coins that are going to be aging as well. So do you start freezing more? Well, it'll depend on the address format. Address format. Yeah. But it would be a monumental mistake.

And more importantly, I actually think from a pragmatic standpoint, I believe we can come to consensus on this. I think there's zero chance we ever come to consensus on this because immediately I'm not changing anything. So for me, my note says no. There'll be a lot of people in that same cap. And there's a lot of people who want to freeze it because they don't want the market impact. We will never hit consensus on freezing the coins.

I'll take an air drop. Therefore, exactly. Therefore, the base case for me is you spend time arguing over this. You're going to waste time. let's focus on this. Yeah. Makes sense. This has been fun.

It's really good. It's way better. It's way better. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'll come down to Sydney whenever. Maybe we just refuse to do remote shows from now on. I'll fly back originally. There you go.

Done. Hell yeah. All right. Thank you guys. Thank you. Oh, actually, before we close, check on Tane. Tell everyone about it. Yeah, mate.

Send us off. Oh, well, check on chain. So we run a newsletter on Substack. And we basically help hoddlers navigate the volatility. That's kind of our major. kind of selling point where basically your Bitcoin personal trainer. We have a big community now. We have a couple of chats. We also have Check on Chain Orange, which is for more institutional, larger investors, and we have a private telegram there. A lot of insights are shared.

And yet, we generally just want to give people that data-driven approach to stay calm, stop looking at the price chart, stop looking at X and believing any narrative and that big anxiety that builds up when kind of crazy movements happen. Our job is to help guide you through that. So yeah, we work every day. We fucking love it. We talk about this 24-7. And yeah, come join us, come along with the ride. And it's going to be a fun next year. I mean, my main motivator, I don't make price predictions. I don't price calls. I just want people to have made their decisions, which is the only thing you can control months before you need to use it. And if you make a decision, like, let's say we got to 95K and we just bounce to all-time highs.

totally was a valid thing. If we didn't need our bare market decision framework for what am I going to do at 82, that's great. I'll put it in my back pocket and I'll use it when it happens. Now that we're at 82, I don't want any my subscribers to ever feel like a deer in the headlights, not because I can predict that it was going to happen, but because we just thought about that scenario as a possibility ahead of time. So they're prepared. That's it. You prepare yourself. Can't predict, just prepare for it. I love it. It's one of the best newsletes in the space. I read everyone. Thank you. Thank you, man. You guys are awesome. Thank you, man.

Thank you for asking too, man. Thanks for inviting me. Of course.