Bitcoin Is 'Dead' Again — That's When You Buy | Checkmate

Most of the time, Bitcoin does nothing. If you put that on a quarterly basis, how does it move on a quarterly basis? Suddenly you've got a really positive skew to the upside. It does nothing most of the time. And then sometimes it goes up 100% in 1/4. And if you're not there for that quarter, you kind of miss the whole run. So Bitcoin goes on these repricing events, but it doesn't do it often. And you know, it's one of those things that I think a lot of people fantasize is probably the right word about perfectly selling the top of the cycle and perfectly buying the bottom of the cycle. And they kind of missed it. Like there's about 10 days that you have to be there for and you have to be allocated for because that's where it happens. And most of the time people who are trying to bottom ticket, they missed the first three of those 10 days because they tend to happen very early in the ball cycle and then they come towards the back end of the cycle. So a lot of people who are trying to bottom tick this thing like, and, and what I've been saying to folks, if you look at mean reversion models of them, 200 day, 200 week, realized price, yeah, literally every mean power law, choose your weapon. Any mean reversion model you look at, we're in the bottom 20% of days at 70K and below AT60K, we're entering like 10% of days territory. Why did gold do what it's done? Because people took physical delivery. And by people, I mean large scale entities, we saw there was a period in time when they first launched all the tariffs and suddenly there's just mountains of gold being shipped across to the US. So much so they had to adjust the GDP numbers because there was so much gold moving. Why? Why did gold go up? Because people took physical delivery. What's Bitcoin really good at? Physical delivery. You know what I mean? Like the, the more that people just stack the sats, you just put the bottom in like that. That is where this goes. And when you watch something like silver and gold add trillions of dollars in a, you know, what looks to be like a blow off top, but trillions and trillions of dollars. Bitcoins going to go on a run. What you're telling me is that music is about to stop and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of odorous extra never assembled in the history of darkness. 1974198792972000 and whatever we want to call this, it's all just the same thing over and over. We can't help ourselves. I say when we sell. Hey, I say when we sell. We are back, Brian. Good to see you, James. Check. Welcome back to the last trade. What's going on, man? Thanks. For having me on, yeah. No, it's good mate. It's exciting times to be in Bitcoin. As always, it's exciting, right? Right before we hit recording, we were just talking about on both sides, a lot of panic, right? Not not from us, but from people that we work with. There's a lot of uncertainty in the markets right now. Last time we had it on on the show was I think the week after we hit a new all time high of 126 or it may have. Yeah, I think that sounds right. And then since then, we've just kind of tested new lows just for the audience to remember. So this is back in October. I think at that time, James, you were pretty, you're pretty balanced as you usually are. And I think your take was may be perceived to be bearish relative to other analysts who were still calling for us to hit new all time highs again before the end of the year, you know, surpassed 126. But you said let's pay attention to what's happening on chain. Let's take a look at, you know, various metrics that you do and get a sense of like, all right, what are the key thresholds that we need to be paying attention to? And I think you'd referenced some points around 95 K. There are some other things to be paying attention to as well. And alas, here we are in the 60s. It's been a wild and I think for some people unexpected past couple months, but maybe it was exactly what you expected. So I'm curious just what you make of it all in the past few months and where we are today. Yeah. Well, First things first, nothing in markets ever. If anyone says that it was perfectly expected, they're lying to you because that's just not how markets work. It's always surprises in the mix. This is one of those great examples of expectations not being met and that creating a bear market in my view. Like there's a ton of, like there was a ton of selling that and I think we might have, we probably would have talked about that back in October because it was just a ton of Hodler selling. And that really has, it's fallen off an absolute Cliff. We're back to 2023 levels of profit taking. I did a study yesterday, like the last 30 days we've gone down from there's like 95 or 98. So very close to that local high that we hit, we're down like 37% since that local high. That alone, that 37% drawdown in a bull market context, that's like the deepest dip that you get. So we've had within the context of a bull market, a 37% dip in the last 30 days. Now on that 37% dip, what would you expect to see in a, oh man, like the bulls, sorry, the bears going to get considerably worse. You would see people taking profit and going Get Me Out of this thing because I think it's going to 10K, like Get Me Out of my profitable position at 98 or at 60 or at 80 or at 70. What we're actually seeing is people who are from earlier prices are below 60 K sitting tight. Less than 8% of the coins that moved were coming from below 60 K in that last 30 day period. The majority of them are people who bought high going I'm a it was unexpected that we went down at all and they're in the process of capitulation. So I'll give you a quick summary of my views. You mentioned 95, I said 95. Ki called it the bulls last stand and the reason I called it that I like to think about. I mean, I believe on chain data is a fantastic measure of human psychology. Where is everyone's cost basis? Where is price relative to their cost basis? How much profit are they in? How much loss are they in? And most importantly, when do those things flip over? When do lots of people who are in profit suddenly go to not in profit? Is profits evaporating sucks profits going to losses sucks more. Selling the bottom and crystallizing those losses is the worst. But that's what most people do. 95K was where I think at the time it would have been 65%. It rose up to about 70% of all the wealth that's been invested in Bitcoin was above 95 K. And my general framework as as we sold down from the all time high was I had these key levels and they have to be nice 5K increments and 110 was a short term cost basis. Any time you go below the short term cost basis, you just have to be at a minimum cautious. You're no longer in an uptrend, right? On the on the short term timeframes, by the time we go to 105 K, which is not a long trip from 110, we got past the midpoint of that 70% of the wealth. So suddenly you've got half of all those guys are underwater at 100K. We hit the long term average of everyone's portfolio value. Bitcoin's an old beast. The average portfolio value for all coins in the system is plus 80%, right? People are up 80% on their position on average. So what that was at 100K. And I'm like, now you're beyond the halfway point of all the recent buyers. You're also beyond, you're at the halfway point of everyone all time and 95 K. Like, I don't know how you want to, you know, what is the correct number of too much money underwater 6570%? It's big enough that I'm like, I think things change if you get down to 95 and the trip from 110 to 105 to 100 to 95. It, it happens quickly, right? It's not a, it's not a large price gap. And my thesis was if you, if we get down to 95, we're probably going straight to 80 because that is the long term average for like the break even level for investors on chain. So and it's also where the ETFs have their cost basis based on inflows. So my rationale was between 100 and 10105 and 100, your exponential risk of going to a bear market just climbs. You know, for folks who are really want to stay in the bullish camp, stick around at 110. But once you get to 105, you have to lift your probabilities of there. Once you get to 100, you got to lift them again. And once you get to 95, if you're not like seriously thinking about your bear case, good luck. ADK was in a very important level because most people I'm of the Vol and just you know, I base this on Twitter and sentiment and messages that you get that process from ADK until we broke it in February, I would describe that as like the stages of grief. The vast majority of people were still in the early stages of grief about it, like believing was a bear, sorry, believing was a bull. They, they didn't want to accept that we were in a bear market. The break below 80 in February, we reached the acceptance phase. Everyone now believes it's a bear and all the people who thought it was a bull market dip are now reassigning their bear probabilities down to 30 K 40K10K1K, right? They're all adjusting their price targets that they never had to lower levels. So I think we've hit the acceptance phase of the bear. I also think we've like that sell off both in November, but then again in February we had over $2 billion in losses on a single day on both of those days. They are like some of the biggest capitulation events we've ever seen in Bitcoin's history. In dollar terms, I'm of the view that I think we've had a a meaningful capitulation. That doesn't necessarily mean the bottom is in, but I do think it means we've hit a inflection point in the bear. If you go back and look at all previous bears, there's like the initial shock value. You come into the bear, no one really believes it. You know, a lot of people get chopped up in the in the bear flags and all that kind of thing. Then people reach acceptance and then a lot of people just like, I'll come, I'll see you in a year, I'll walk away. You get a lot of people who just exit. You get a lot of people who panic out, a lot of people who go and just get bored and leave because of time pain. But generally speaking, a lot of the price damage is done, right? That doesn't mean the bottom is in FTX. But yeah, what's the difference between 17.6 K and 15K in 2022? Not that much. We hit 17 six in June. FTX took us down to 15 six. We range for a while. Like as a long term investor, that's irrelevant in terms of price action, but there's a 678 month period of time that just beats people down. So I, I'm of the view that we're probably, we've done most of the price paying damage. What we very likely have ahead of us is the time paying component of this thing, which is often as brutal if not more brutal for the investor mindset. So that's my big picture view of where we are at the moment. All right, it's 2026 and. We have a new year ahead of us. It means it's a great time. It is an opportunity to take inventory, think about your Bitcoin custody, your inheritance plan, your broader ownership structure, and your goals. If you're looking for more Peace of Mind this year, get in touch with us here at On Ramp. We're working with individuals all over the world, people who've been in Bitcoin for a decade, people who got in for the first time last year. 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So hope you enjoy the rest of the episode. Thanks for being here. Yeah, that's that's all Fantastic. James. Thanks for walking through that. I guess one question that came to mind as you were mentioning some of those numbers and thresholds that we talked about on the on the last episode, given the capitulation from what seems to be a lot of people who had a much higher cost basis. How does that then sort of reframe those health sort of health gauges or numbers in terms of where we are today? Like, you know, are we in a healthier position basically because a lot of those people are now out and we sort of cleanse the system of people who bought much higher, don't have as much conviction as longer term holders. And does that help sort of set a base, even if that, even if 60 wasn't the exact bottom, maybe you know, it's around here because it's a, it's a healthier sort of composition on chain. Yes. So I was, I'm actually running this study at the moment to just fully quantify this compared to the 2018 and 2022 bottoms. So I don't have all the numbers yet, but the answer is yes, in part we have started to get that capitulation type effect. The general way that I would frame it up, if you compare 2022 and 2018, they're actually very, very similar. So in whatever you want to call the bottom formation range in 2018, that was like 3K to 5K. That zone where we chopped around for a couple of months in 2022, it was like 15-6 up to 25. It's kind of a larger price range. At that point in time, we had about 25% of the wealth just in that zone. Now before we got down here before when we're trading up at 80 K earlier in the year, there was only 10%, less than 10% of the total wealth was in this current zone that we're in between let's just say 60 and 70. Now we're up to 15 1/2%. So we've seen about it's about $50 billion of coin has been deposited from higher cost basis down into this zone. So, you know, through this kind of boring choppy, as the dust is settling in this process, we've seen $50 billion reallocated. It's more than 50 billion reallocate to new investors. And if you think about who is buying right now, the headlines are horrendously bearish. The price is down 50%. People are saying that gold is going to be the future of the Internet. Like get out of here, right? Tokenized gold. What are you talking about? So there's a bunch of these narratives that are like it. It's a really, really bearish setup. And for me as an analyst and for me as an investor, that's fantastic because when everyone feels safe to jump in the bearish pool, and I've been using this, this concept like why don't journalists bring out their bear articles at 120 K? Because it doesn't feel safe to do a bear article. Then it also doesn't feel safe to take out leverage into a Bitcoin back loan when the price is down 70%. But I'll tell you what, I got a lot of calls to do that at 110 K because it feels safe to jump in the pool on the bull side. So we often see this like investor mindset where people want to feel safe to take risk. For a journalist, what's taking risk? Putting out a bold headline, that strategy's going to implode and bitcoins going to 0. It's a bold headline that you're only willing to put out when the price is down 5060%, right? So the journalists now feel safe to jump in the bearish pool. The people who I thought it was a bull market 4 weeks ago now have a price target of 30K, right? This is again, the bears feel very safe to jump in the pool. And yeah, this doesn't mean the bear is over. In fact, I don't believe the bear is over. We've got a long process of painful grinding, maybe lower prices. There's a journey ahead of us. But the signals that we're seeing, just if you put all this together, do you ever see this at the top? No. So at a minimum, are we at the top anymore? Absolutely not. Like we are much, much closer to the kind of environment and sentiment that you see near bear market floors and certainly not at bull market tolls. Yeah, that's very well said. I mean, just the the note on a a very strong single signal historically being people boldly proclaiming Bitcoin is dead. We've seen a lot of that over the past couple weeks. One thing I, I did want to go back to was like, you know, we talked a lot about investor psychology and sort of the behavioral elements of holding this asset. And I think it's, you know, part of the reason that this down move has been, you know, maybe more uncomfortable for some is because there isn't a specific thing that people can point to if there's not like an FTX implosion. You know, I would say there's a lot more sort of macro uncertainty in the world, geopolitical uncertainty, which I think are factors, but I think it's a confluence of things. And so I think that that is on settling for folks to not be able to point at something specific because then you kind of never know if it's over. And so I'm curious from your perspective, like beyond just the simple sort of maybe the easiest explanation of investor psychology cycle thinking, what would you pinpoint as like the cause for for a lot of this decline? Yeah, yeah. No, this is a really, really good point. And there's a few elements here. So First things first, I actually think the economy side of things is actually really important. You know, I'm not one of these folks who'll anchor to one. Everyone's got a store in narrative. And, you know, you always see these metrics. The last couple of weeks have been, oh, look, bitcoins perfectly correlated to software. It's like, OK, yeah. For like, what? The window of the chart that you didn't trim because the rest of it looks like looks terrible. So it's one of those classic things. But like there, there is a relationship, a correlation, let's call it between Bitcoin and your and your Pmis. And like if you look at the USPMIS, they've just been grinding along with nothingness. They're just like in this neutral zone of not doing well. So I would just generally say that the real economy hasn't doing been doing that great. I think that's a component. In fact, I actually, I've got this idea, I'm still formulating and need to put some numbers around it. But I do think that we should pro, I'm starting to think about this 23 to 24 period a little bit more like 2019. It's like a echo bubble hangover from the bear that came before it, 2019 and 2020. That was very formative in my Bitcoin years. So I remember the, the emotional journey I went through quite closely and it feels like we're in this. We didn't really deserve to go up like in 2019. It's because we had the plus token Ponzi that sucked in like 2% of the supply and then they unloaded in July onwards. So there was like a big supply demand that created a bull, but it wasn't really a bull. We had the ETFs and treasury companies that kind of created a bull, but it wasn't really a bull. So I think there's this like transitional thing that we're going through and you can, there's a whole lot of economic relationships between those two periods as well. Like a bit of a, you know, we had the repo rate spikes. Like there's a lot of things with the economy wasn't in and I think a lot of folks thought the debasement trade. I don't think we've been in the debasement trade. I mean, if you actually look at the way that the system is currently operating, it's kind of like clinging on, not austerity, but it's certainly not throwing money out the out everywhere. So I don't think we're in this like just raw debasement trade. There's a few elements that I think have probably people don't fully kind of put them all together. But first of all, I know a lot of people are Bitcoin only. I'm certainly Bitcoin only a lot of people who aren't. And if you aren't Bitcoin only in the crypto space, your portfolio has been a bag of dead weight. It's done terribly. So the crypto world has done horrifically for many very easy to understand reasons. There's no value capture there. So I think that the crypto industry's been a drag on people's portfolio. I've actually had a lot of messages from people who have been like a diversified crypto portfolio who are going even in this bear market saying that's it, I'm done. I'm totally done with altcoins. I'm now just, I am now going Bitcoin on. So I'm, I've had a lot of those messages recently. I think treasury companies mute a lot of people's portfolios. I think a lot of marginal demand went into these inflated stocks, which then proceeded to not inflate. So I think that crushed a lot of marginal demand. And then I also just think like the 100K level was, you can just see it in the data. People like to say, like, why would you sell at 100K when it's going to a million? It's like, because they've been holding for such a long time. Like the dude that people made fun of the dude who cashed out $9.6 billion via Galaxy, they made fun of him at the time. It's like, but what's going to go higher? It's like, dude, the, the guy top ticked it with $10 billion sell. He's fine. You know what I mean? Like, so there's, there's those components of just like 100K was a very special number because it was, it was the unbelievable impossible stretch target for all of Bitcoin's life. So the way I've been thinking about it, I kind of liked Geordie Viss's IPO moment. I think it's a nice way to think about it. That's not going to be a perfect analogy, but from a mental framework, I think we're in that transitional period from the Bitcoin world too. So I, I actually reflect on my own journey. So I'm like 90% Bitcoin, 10% precious metals. And I've been, I've been buying a lot more precious metals than the last since 2024 really. And yeah, I can go through the details of why that is, but for me? I'm divesting out of Bitcoin. Not by selling it by not, but not as buying as much personally. So I'm actually allocating more of my marginal capital to other assets. Why? Because I'm at a stage in my life where I've got a kid. I need to get a house like bitcoins down. My my net worth got cut in half, 50%. Now I don't need to sell my Bitcoin. But what if I needed to go? And what if I needed to pull the cash? I would hate to have to sell my Bitcoin in a distressed position, and I've had plenty of friends call me recently saying I'm in that position. So I use the precious metals as ballast in My Portfolio. I think there's a lot of Bitcoiners who are just like us, and they're at a point in life where they actually realize they've finally clicked, that they can't be 100% Bitcoin anymore because life is life and life is complicated and so is Bitcoin. When you put two complicated things together, you get chaos. So they're looking for, I just need to stock. I need some stocks, I need some gold, I need some something that isn't Bitcoin. So I'm not like my mood isn't anchored to this price chart. On the flip side, the institutions that are coming into the market, first of all, they take a lot longer to move. But second of all, they're diverse and flying from a 100% not Bitcoin position to a small percentage of Bitcoin. And the capital that they bring with that small percentage offsets everything that we're going to divest. So I just think that that that 100K zone has been a almost like a end it if you want like a full stop on the end of Bitcoin's early life, I think 100K is it. And we've watched a very, very big capital rotation. And you know, I, I try to help people understand you have a decision tree. Bitcoin is either dead and going to 0. If you choose that, if, if you fundamentally believe that it is not going to 0, which I certainly do, then eventually it's going to put in a bottom. And when it put, when it puts, it puts in a new all time high, which it will do when it puts in the next all time high. You can't blame it on the Icos. You can't blame it on stimulus in 2021. You can't blame it on the ETFs. You can't blame it on the president. It's just demand. So I think that we're in this this rotational period where a lot of hodlers, they can't, they extrapolate what they wealth could have been and will be eventually. But patience is a part of markets. The institutions are only just starting to on board, getting all the tooling, the wire houses, all that kind of stuff. All of those things are in the process. The infrastructure is there. And when we take out that next all time high narrative follows price, the amount of like there is, there is nothing that the critics can throw at it like that is just you are now objectively wrong in every possible way. You can't pinpoint it to anything except people just wanted to buy this thing. So I think we're in that process. So for me as a long term investor and a Bitcoiner, you're going to give me these prices, I'm going to take them the whole time. You're going to give them to me because this took like I've restarted my Bitcoin accumulation quite heavily. I've basically turned off everything else because I'm looking at this and it's going, this is the time to be DCA ING as hard as I can. And once we get back back above 80 K, I'm going to do exactly what I did before. I'm going to stop buying as much. I'm going to start reallocating to other things, do my divestment strategy. So that's how I'm currently thinking about it. That is what the people want to hear, James. We're going. We're going long Bitcoin. We're going short. Traditional finance journalists calling Bitcoin dead. We're just. Waiting for the IMF to bottom ticket with a 250 page report on why it's going to 0. Yeah. I mean, they the ECB did the last time in 2022, yeah. That's the story. ECB, yeah. Bitcoin's last stand at like 16. It's in like a a final death spiral. Yeah, shame that was, that's, that's a great one. I mean, look, there's a lot, there's a lot of different themes we can get into. I think we'll try to cover them all. 11 point you did make that I I think is often overlooked is there is this forget about the uncertainty around the price. I think you did a great job explaining what's actually going on there. There's just uncertainty as relates to what is Bitcoin right now. It is weird as it sounds, you know, you have the treasury debacle that we saw in 2025 and there's obviously a lot of people in this space who've been in Bitcoin 51015 years who didn't necessarily appreciate what was happening there. And it was certainly at odds with their vision of what Bitcoin was in terms of decentralized peer-to-peer money. And it for it to be Co opted by just Wall Street traditional finance, you know, the SU coiners. I think there was that battle in the culture between treasury companies and just say, at least when I got in, the culture was very heavily towards self custody, you know, very ideological driven. Nothing wrong with that. And so there's these kind of two opposing viewpoints. And then you have the the true sue coiners coming in or the the traditional finance pools of capital that are really only starting to creep in. So then you have them coming into the picture and then you have all these competing narratives of like, what is Bitcoin? Why should you own it? How do you own it? All these different things. And then to add another layer of complexity to it. It's exactly your point, right? People who are Bitcoiners, a lot of them look like you and I and they are a lot more mature than they when they first got into Bitcoin. Their situation is different. They probably have families, they may be looking to own a home and there's just a lot more complexity than at least there's more complexity for me than there was 5 or 6 years ago when it was just like I have nothing else to think about besides myself and I'm just going to smash buy Bitcoin and I don't really need to keep any capital on the sidelines because I have no responsibility to really. Empty my bank account. Yeah, yeah, I just anymore. Yeah, I've just, I, I don't have to be responsible. I have no one, you know, counting on me. And so things are definitely changing. And so I think there's that aspect to it as well where it's always hard to quantify just the culture around it and how that's developed. And I think ultimately as well, what happened last year with the treasury companies, I mean, we talked about it on the the last show that you were on and, and Michael's not here today, but Michael in particular on our side has been very vocal against them since really the inception of it all. And I think we're kind of in a process now of having to flush through all of the access that happened there. And maybe some people will atone for their sins and we can move on. But I think there's just, you know, I'm rambling at this point, but I think the broader point is, look, we we don't have certainty on the direction that Bitcoin's headed. And that's part of that. That's OK. Like, you know, Bitcoin is for anyone to to interact and own in whatever way they'd like. And so we don't need to have one cohesive Bitcoiner to own the asset. But I think there's still this aspect of like what, you know, what are the next couple years look like from that perspective? Yeah, no. And I actually think there's a there's a component here which I, I won't stick on too much because I've spoken about this a lot, but I think that the gold rally, the parabola envy cooked a lot of people as well. Again, if I come back to my original point of like the debasement trade, I don't think gold went up for the debasement trade either. I think gold went up because the world at a sovereign level goes, hey, we can't trust treasuries anymore, which is, by the way, the same thing they've been doing since 2008. It's just hitting that wall of hey, they're taking physical delivery. And this is where I think it gets really interesting. Why did gold do what it's done? Because people took physical delivery. And by people, I mean large scale entities. We saw there was a period in time, I still have no idea what was going on, but there was that period of time when they first launched all the tariffs and suddenly there's just mountains of gold being shipped across to the US so much so they had to adjust the GDP numbers because there was so much gold moving. Why did gold go up? Because people took physical delivery. What's Bitcoin really good at physical delivery, You know what I mean? Like the, the more that people just stack the SAT's, the you just put the bottom in like that. That is that is where this goes. And when you watch something like silver and gold add trillions of dollars in a, you know, what looks to be like a blow off top, but trillions and trillions of dollars, Bitcoin's going to go on a run. And you know, it just makes all these things, you know, once these things get moving, now, you know, on those rallies, it's a bit of a repricing event. We see Bitcoin do this through its history. And I, I actually think another thing people should always remember Bitcoin, if you look at it on a daily price performance basis, it's like 40% of the time it goes less than 1% in either direction. 40% of the time Bitcoin does actually nothing. Each on there's about a 30% tail where it goes up more than 1%, down more than 1%. Most of the time Bitcoin does nothing. If you put that on a quarterly basis, how does it move on a quarterly basis? Suddenly you've got a really positive skew to the upside. It does nothing most of the time. And then sometimes it goes up 100% in 1/4. And if you're not there for that quarter, you kind of miss the whole run. So Bitcoin goes on these repricing events, but it doesn't do it often. And, you know, it's one of those things that I think a lot of people fantasize is probably the right word about perfectly selling the top of the cycle and perfectly buying the bottom of the cycle. And they kind of missed it. Like there's about 10 days that you have to be there for and you have to be allocated for because that's where it happens. And most of the time people who are trying to bottom ticket, they missed the first three of those 10 days because they tend to happen very early in the bull cycle and then they come towards the back end of the cycle. So a lot of people who are trying to bottom tick this thing like, and, and what I've been saying to folks, if you look at mean reversion models, all of them 200 a day, 200 a week, realize price, yeah, literally every mean power law, choose your weapon. Any mean reversion model you look at, we're in the bottom 20% of days at 70K and below AT60K, we're entering like 10% of days territory. So unless Bitcoin is really just a completely and utterly broken market, which it just isn't, then if if mean reversion is a thing, then we're in that zone, that Val, what I call the deep value zone, right below 20% of all days. Those 20% of days occur in the bottom end of bear markets. Price can go lower. Yeah, but I just want to buy the whole thing because if I buy the whole bottom, then when I get I'm going to get all those 10 days, right? I'm just going to get the whole 10 days because that's sometimes in in the whole 4 year cycle. It's literally what makes the whole cycle. If you remove the 10 best days, I need to actually run it for the cycle we've just had. You're actually flat or down right 21. If you miss those 10 days, you you lost money in 2018. I'm pretty sure it's. Flat. And you know, that's, that's just how markets tend to work. They reprice rarely and it catches people off guard. But that is why it's a time in the market type thing. It's it's just how Bitcoin works and how all markets work. Yeah, that that's very well said. I think also just on the the debasement trade thing, I think it's a very salient point because last year this notion of the debasement trade sort of entered the zeitgeist, went very mainstream. But I think that in hindsight, that's kind of a classic case of just ascribing the the rationale for price movement as it particularly as it relates to to precious metals. And I think you're totally right about the spot delivery aspect and central banks buying larger entities buying and and demanding physical delivery. I guess I'm curious like on a go forward basis, like I do still think this sort of like fundamental tenants of what the debasement trade represents are in place to happen at some point. And I guess the question is like, well, when does that happen? What what needs to happen for, you know, either the Federal Reserve or other central banks to take serious action and turn on the money bazookas per SE? I would say right now people are kind of looking at AI disruption as like a a natural thing to to point to in terms of, you know, massive displacement of white collar jobs that's being forecasted. Curious what you make of that. Like is that a reasonable go forward sort of projection that there's going to be so much disruption, so much job loss, so much credit losses as a result of that, that they're going to have to turn on the money printer, Whether it's like, you know, probably won't sound like something like Ubi, but like they're going to have to print money to basically repair the economy when that does happen. Is that? So. Going forward, what you think might happen or is there are there other reasons that the the real debasement trade might play out? Yeah. So I I agree with all of that. And I think that the the debasement trade is it, it's a thing, but it's like all things in macro, it moves at glacial pace and then it cracks and it all happens at once. So I very much view, and again, we can borrow a lot of rationale from the gold bugs because they're right on this kind of stuff. Gold and Bitcoin in my view are insurance against something that is mathematically programmed to happen, right? Bitcoin is mathematically programmed to have just less than 21 million coins. Gold is programmed to have, you know, 2% inflation because as technology gets better, we mine more of it. But it's still hard to get. There's a whole lot of gold seems that are now accessible that weren't previously because the price has gone up. And eventually technology will get better. Right now it is hard manual things like digging holes in the ground. Yeah, we get some technological developments, but dynamite's still dynamite, you know, like it's, it's kind of hard to have bigger dynamite. So generally speaking, physical deflation occurs at a slower rate than digital deflation. Now on the AI thing from I've like, I've got a few different views on AI. I've been using it in two different ways. Up until very recently, the primary way was just helping me fix up some of my chart code and stuff like that, right? More of the programming side of things. I don't use it for any of my writing or my thinking because first of all, thinking is like my favorite thing to do. So that's just not going to outsource my favorite thing to do. And I also think that the human element of having lived through Bitcoin cycle helps me contextualize the data that I look at. So in many ways, I try to take all the complexity of the data and just explain the narrative of what it's saying. And a lot of it is drawing on my own lived experience of going through those market cycles in the past and then how it displays in the data. So that's a big part of my writing style and my thinking style. But I do do it like, you know, I don't want to copy paste a bunch of chart code like I'm using templates, go and fill this stuff in. It makes a ton of mistakes. It still makes tons of mistakes. And I do find that sometimes I literally just sit down and just do it myself because it, I just couldn't be bothered checking it's work. Now the other thing I've done more recently is I've been playing around with these open claw things where it kind of takes over your whole machine, right? And just trying to get it to run my code because I, I have a system that runs it to see if I can get the AIS on like a System Administrator to sit there and run it for me, which is going to be really useful when I'm travelling or whatever else. Something goes wrong in theory. Again, something I took away from it. First of all, it's incredible. And I have no doubt that the path that's going to go down, you know, in, in two years time, in one year time, it's going to be a fully fledged System Administrator. I'm not a developer, I'm not a System Administrator, but I understand technical stuff. Like I use Linux as my main operating system. I find that it's still just like you've got to get it, you've got to ask it three times. It makes mistakes regularly. Now, my general framework is that I didn't hire a developer. By the way, the whole thing, I was watching how much it cost me in terms of tokens to to spin this whole thing up. It cost me about 70 bucks Aussie, like 50 bucks US cost me about 50 bucks to set the whole thing up, get my system running. It would have cost me two grand to pay a human to do that. So I chose not to hire a developer and this piece of what is fairly early software did it for me Yes, it took a little bit of hand holding from my side, but I didn't have to hire a developer and and at the end of the day, I could have learned to do all the things that it was doing, but I just don't have the time and the bandwidth to do that. So what it really replaces me hiring a junior and I think this is where it gets really hairy because I don't need to learn how to use GitHub and all the insurance and outs and the detailed stuff of it. The AI can do that. So I don't need to hire a junior developer. And I think about what that means for bigger firms. A lot of the call the generational divide, you often hear this kind of thing. There's like a ladder pulling, you know, house prices go up, people pull the ladder up behind them. So then there's all these young folks who are coming out of university and can't get jobs because it's replacing exactly that part. Now I, I try to balance these two views and go, well, I learn. I mean, for me, I used to be a civil engineer. The amount of value I got from being in the office and just hearing, conversing, talking with all the Gray hairs and learning the human side of engineering. I can't imagine juniors not going into the office and not getting that experience because what happens is you end up with no Gray hairs. And that, I think, is a very, very scary proposition. Now, this is the generational thing. It's going to take decades to get here. But we're at the phase now where the initial ladder of being an intern has been pulled up. But then I also look at how much value I can create with my human thought and how much value. I mean, the graduates that worked under me, they were so much smarter at me, at new stuff. They could use new tooling, whatever. And you know, we're only talking about, you know, 567 years difference in terms of age, but they were able to do what I was doing to my boss, which is bringing in new ideas, fresh ideas, new technology. And I just, I actually really worry about what the world looks like. Because when at engineering, there was a lot of folks who were saying quite concerned that there's a huge pool of experience. The baby boomer generation, the Gen. X is when they retire, we kind of lose a lot of human knowledge, a lot of human knowledge. And we actually saw a lot of this after COVID because the stock market went up so much. There was a lot of retirees who were like 5-6 years away from retirement. Bang, COVID retired them straight away because their portfolio just took them out of the market. You lost a lot of that human experience. And then I, I do worry about the world where people are overly reliant on AI. So I find myself, I'm a bit resistant to it because I literally like to think, but I can also see how a lot of people will become addicted to using it to think and they won't actually learn how to think. I worry about that component a lot because I think that's a the problem isn't that AI is smarter than humans. The problem is that the bottom end of the bell curve of what people do, a lot of it, like a lot of jobs are kind of replaceable. They they are replaceable. They're, you know, administrative type roles. The challenge is that there's a very large pool of the economy that is disruptible. The top end harder to disrupt at the bottom end is easy to disrupt in the knowledge worker base for sure. I mean, robots is a whole another thing. So look, all this is a long, long winded answer of saying like it's not there yet. I don't believe this stuff. We're like we're going to lose all the jobs tomorrow, but five years time where the technology's better and we're further down this ladder pulling process. Yeah, they are. Now it starts to get really hairy. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a hairy topic. I would say my my thoughts on it all would be, I agree with a lot of what you said James, but I also wouldn't necessarily. I don't think you were negative, but I personally am not negative about it, especially for younger generations because I still think that while someone like yourself or me like Sup or Brian, someone who's actually using these tools everyday or if you're setting up open claw like you're, you are just so far out there compared to where most people are. And so I still think that there's a huge opportunity for particularly younger, younger generations, recent graduates, entry level roles, because while a lot of those roles are going to be obsoleted, the fact of the matter is that about 10% or so people actually report using any of this stuff on a daily basis. And you'd have to imagine that out of that 10%, it's a very small percentage of people that actually use it for any sort of strategic work. Like I'd imagine most of that 10% is prompting ChatGPT to like give them a recipe idea for what to make for dinner and so. There's still a lot of opportunity to the extent of people who are willing to lean in and learn the skills like it's there for the taking, but I just don't know how long that window of opportunity lasts because everything is moving incredibly quickly. I think where maybe the most pain happens is middle management. I would imagine like A, you know, they're, they're typically getting a nice salary, they have benefits. B The large companies in the multinational corporations are extremely bloated. You know, there's all you always read about people who work remotely and they don't actually do any work or they do work like 1520 hours a week, not even close to 40, let alone more. And so I think there's a lot of bloat there. And they're also in a tough position. Like I think that someone who's more Internet native, digitally native, 20 years old, 30 years old is more likely to actually become proficient at this new technology than someone who's like 4550 kind of at the tail end of their career. And so that's probably where, and that's an unfortunate thing. I mean, those people are typically in a position of providing for a family. They probably have pretty significant obligations. And that's probably where I'd be worried if, you know, in terms of the workforce. So, yeah, I mean, it's it's a challenging thing to think through. And then to tie it back to Bitcoin. I mean, there's so much uncertainty. And I think, Brian, kind of where your head was at with it all was we're we are going to see some deflation. And James, you started talking about the deflation of of gold of Bitcoin, right? It's going to be incredibly interesting to watch this play out. I mean, Jeff Booth I think has the best thesis. I remember reading that book for the first time, The Price of Tomorrow. And it was like blowing my mind whenever it was in 2020 or 21 because I've never really thought too much about just how it odds these forces were and the degree at which the the pressures would grow both ways, right? Deflation from technology, inflation from the monetary system. And so it kind of gives me a little bit sense of relief and peace knowing that Bitcoin is just programmed to do what it will do and knowing that there's going to be an insane amount of intervention in the economy and in the Fiat financial system to try to patch over as much of these losses and pain that will be presented from from artificial intelligence. Yeah. And I think there's like there's a few elements here. 1 is we're going to get a move back towards and we're in the move back towards real things. So for example, engineering, I know that if I go back and put myself in my old shoes, I'd be able to use AI for stuff, but there's no way it can replace what I would what I was doing at the time. Why? Because a lot of it is dealing with contractors who are digging physical holes, who are dealing like mechanical machines and like steel and concrete. It's not something that AI understands enough to be able to automate those rolls. You can't really automate a plumber your toilet stuffed. Until the until the humanoids. Until the humanoids, which may not be that far away. Yeah, look, that the last humanoid robots that I've seen was a dude dressed up in a suit, right. So I think it's it's it's going to take time for that to become like, where's the for sure self driving cars? Yeah, you know, they're just they're just not a thing at this point. So there's there's a bunch of these things where like it'll get there, but we're a long way away from that. So I think physical trades, sorry, yeah, literal physical trades, physical jobs, physical things are required. We're also seeing this from like EU s s industrial policy. They need to reassure manufacturing as a national security interest. It doesn't really even matter if it's that profitable. They need to do it for a national security interest. They're going to subsidize, they're going to support it, and that's physical stuff. So I think in that sense, there is going to be that move back towards the physical world and there's a lot of physical jobs out there. I, I agree with that kind of middle management side of the equation that, that that's where a lot of this stuff really hits home. The bloat, right? The bloat starts to kick in, but also there's a reliance factor of these things. So I think that's definitely a key component. And really at the end of the day, the way I view Bitcoin as a gold holder, as a Bitcoin holder, I know that Bitcoin is just a whole lot easy to use. And I think about my young son, is he going to be using gold coins? Like, guys, we're not Romans anymore, you know, if we're, we're in a Internet native age, it's a real pain in the arse. In fact, I can't remember who exactly said it, but when we're talking about when France tried to get their gold back, it was like hundreds of ships to take their gold. Like taking custody of gold is a, is a, it's a job, it's a physical job or it's a 10 minute Bitcoin transaction. So I think the world is over time. It's just a game of trust. And the way I view Bitcoin and gold, they have one very, very important role, not to die. That's it. As long as those two assets don't die. Gold's got the atomic side of the equation. Bitcoin's got the human incentive, the greed side of the equation. Why does it operate? Because people want it to operate, right? I am not going to change the supply cap because I'm self-serving. It's my in my own interest not to change it. The miners are going to do it because it's profitable to mine. When it's not profitable to mine, they'll sell their reach to someone who is profitable to mine. Bitcoin is based on a very, very simple assumption that humans will be greeted and it's just a very, it's a very reliable assumption. So I think though both of the assets, their job is to not die. I very much view them as insurance to get to the other side. And that's that line there is really what I think is the most interesting and challenging part. Get to the other side of what that's the that's the debasement side of the equation. That's the mathematical challenge that a inflationary system. Why does the ECB bottom tick a Bitcoin bear market with a price about a paper at what's dying? Because their system is dying. It's a defense mechanism. They do not want people to buy Bitcoin. They do not want people to buy gold. The IMF will buy gold, but they'll disparage it publicly whenever they can. And like, I've, I've recently been doing a, a very deep dive on, on just history civilizations. And like there's a podcast called Fall of Civilizations, how the Byzantines fell, how the, you know, the Aztecs fell. I've also been listening to the audio book of the Bible. Not because I'm a religious person, I'm just curious from a historical standpoint. Gold, silver, gold, silver, gold, silver. The amount of times that things happen because of gold and silver, when you study how the monetary system came to be, the amount of mechanisms that were designed to say, give us all your gold, we'll give you a token. There you go, there's your token. Go and spend it, pleb out in the economy. But we're going to hang on to the actual thing, right? The custody of the asset was the thing they wanted. This is the story of human civilization is and honestly, it amazes me how many thousands of years ago we'd already converged on gold, right? And if you just think about why do we converge on gold because of its properties. Bitcoin is what, 1617 years old? It is so young in its process of becoming understood. There's no chance that the first human, the first time they saw God like, oh, that's money, right? There has to be no, they had to like the, the goal had to compete amongst the copper and the rocks and the shells and and all that stuff. And eventually we all go, Oh yeah, you know what? That's actually, that's actually kind of the one Bitcoin's going to go through that process and it's going to do it at a much faster rate because of the Internet, because of AI, because of just the the transfer of information. So it is a sound money for the modern age. So yeah, I think it's it's just a game of patience, time and and process. In case you missed it earlier, we are offering a limited time opportunity to sign up. Use code TLT for 50% off your first month of on ramp. I just want to reiterate, stakes are high and this is an important decision to think through. So I would fully expect that you'd want to have a conversation with someone on our team could speak with Cam, myself, Michael, go to our homepage, book a consultation. You can speak with us for 15 minutes, thirty minutes, no obligation beyond that. You can just ask us questions, learn about the solution. And I just want to make sure that as you as a listener, whether it's for you, your friends or family, I just want to make sure you have Peace of Mind and you feel good about this year ahead of us as it relates to Bitcoin ownership, custody and inheritance. So again, limited time offer 50% off your first month use code TLT. You can just mention that during the consultation. Or if you do end up just going direct to sign up, mention that code on the website and you'll be all set. So thanks for being here and hope you enjoy the rest of the episode. What do you think about the the droids being the ones that usher in hyper bitcoinization? You know, I mean, like it's at some point, at some point we will be incredibly reliant on these models. I don't know when, I don't know when that happens. But I mean, I already feel it in my own work. Like I'm in Claude all day, every day. If someone took that away from me, I'd be like taking a pacifier away from a baby, right? It's it's a problem. And so at some point, we're going to become so reliant on on it as you know, just as companies or individuals, and I would imagine like it, it makes more sense than taking dollars. You're not going to take gold and you're not going to want to take an inferior Fiat currency. And it works from instant settlement, it works from microtransactions, it works very quickly and you can spin up wallets very easily, right. And so there's and then obviously the scarcity, but all that is well understood. So like, I'm curious if you think that because you said this will happen faster than we think. But I think people were also saying that 5 or 10 years ago. Like they're not saying you were. I'm just saying people when I first got into Bitcoin in like 2020, like more seriously 2020-2021, I think people thought that was imminent. People, you know, most people were saying no dollar collapse is imminent, hyper Bitcoinization happens, Bitcoin standard a couple of years from now. And there probably are still some people who say that. But I would say, like most people still don't know anything about Bitcoin and they don't give a shit about it, and they probably aren't going to give about it until they're forced to. And maybe it's the fact that we have to rely on certain technologies that require to be paid in Bitcoin in the future. Most people don't own like stocks outside like a forced retirement vehicle either. Most people weren't lining up outside gold shops when the price was low. Most people don't think about any of this stuff because life is already complicated enough. Like I was talked to my old man quite a bit. You know, he went on a fishing trip with a couple of his mates, you know, 1010 blokes, all retired. And you know, he and I talk a lot about his finances, trying to help him put in the right, right things. And you know, he was saying, I asked them how many of you guys know what's in your superannuation fund, which is our Australian equivalent of a four O 1K? How many of you guys know what your super is invested in? No answer. No one, no one, no one knew a thing about what was it? They're all retired and this is literally the money they have left for the rest of their life. They only know the number that was on the screen when they last checked it. They have no idea what it's invested in. And I can tell you right now it's almost certainly invested in bonds. And there's no doubt they would have took a big haircut in 2022 because they had no idea. So that's where most people are. They won't. They just won't do this ever because it's just human condition. So I think Bitcoin's one of those things. This is where it's actually very favorable that we move to a world where Bitcoin becomes like a half a percent, one percent, 2% part of just a typical normal portfolio, which means the investment advisors have to become comfortable, which means the firms that run those investment advisors have to become comfortable. And this whole thing just takes time. There's always going to be early adopters to this stuff. We now have the fastest growing ETFs ever, ever. I, I can't imagine what's going to come out that's going to beat the Bitcoin ETS in terms of their launch. I think that will hold that record for a very, very long time. You know, these things have been tremendously successful. And when you look at the outflow profile from those ETFs, by the way, we're down what 50% from the highs. The AUM is down like 4% in Bitcoin terms, the total flows are out like 12%. So we've just seen. And most of those flows, in my opinion, you can link them to the CME open interest. They all happened before December. It's a bunch of hedge funds doing window dressing to close the end of the year, closing out of basis trade. Not, it's not like sell this thing because it sucks. It's a structural like it was a trade. So I, I, I think that it just takes a long time for this stuff to happen. And the vast, vast, vast majority of people have no idea what they're invested in. And they don't do any investing. Even a lot of a lot of people that I know best things, just not a thing that they do like, they haven't really gone through the motions. Eventually it hits them in the face where they go, oh, wow, things are getting really expensive and I've got to retire and I've actually, oh, wow, I've got to actually save some capital. A lot of people saving cash in cash because they think that it's like, oh, I need some cash on the side. It's like, yeah, but it's inflating away. And like I've heard stories of some people who've got hundreds of thousands of their life savings in dollars earning .1% in a bank account somewhere and you're just like, even at 3 percent, 4%, great, you get 5 grand and 100 grand, well done. Like that's what are you going to do with that? So in many fronts, I just think people don't think about it, which means that the system has to evolve. And that's a slower beast, right? You're always going to get the early adopters. And you also, this is the other thing when you think about the size of the capital, right? Well, if you look at I need to do this study again, but you can look at all the 13 F filings. Who owns the Bitcoin ETFs last I did a very outdated study, mind you, it was like somewhere in 24. When I looked at that then it was like 25% was institutions, 13 F filing institutions. Of those, there was a very clear pattern. The smaller the firm, the more likely that we're going to have like a one or A2 or a 5% allocation. The bigger the firm, the more likely it was a 0.001%, like peanuts. But that 0.001 was all, if you put those big firms together, like all ten of them, it amounted to like 90% of the capital of the 13 F filing companies. So what happens when they go to 0.002? That's all you need. But I think I've seen a lot of narratives of folks being like, we need the sovereigns to come in, right? The individuals bought Bitcoin, they're the companies now we need a sovereign to buy others. It won't go up. No, you just need those firms to go up a fraction of a fraction of a percentage point and it just absorbs all the sell side because the numbers are just tremendously big. So that's where I think Bitcoin's isn't. It's just overall life cycle journey. And yeah, it's just a game of patience, as all things are. Yeah, it's it's really good points there on just the one sort of the the slow moving nature of of institutional allocators. But I would say like zooming out a bit, like if we rewind, you know, pre ETFs 2-3 years ago, like there was no sort of acceptance of this thing of people actually thinking of it in a way that you described earlier around like this thing just needs to not die. It's a hedge against this mathematical certainty. People were not thinking about it in the institutional world like that. They were thinking of it as a speculative Ponzi. And we are still there in the very early stages of that shifting and those, those allocations changing and, and it feels like, and maybe it's just 'cause I'm like tuned into this stuff. And so maybe it's not more broadly known, but like every day, every week, there are announcements from the incumbent Trad 5 firms that are hiring for dozens of roles for digital assets, Bitcoin, new products, you know, Morgan Stanley filing for an ETF. And then you have like the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund continuing to build a position. And, you know, we got excited about Harvard buying last year. It sounds like they trimmed their position a little bit and bought Ethereum, which is unfortunate. But the reality is, is, you know, they're going to have their learning curve as well around crypto and Bitcoin. And, but I think the broader trajectory is like extremely constructive and like couldn't even be imagined 3 years ago that this would be the case where you had all these firms hiring for these roles now actually like beginning, just beginning to solicit their underlying clients. Because even for the first year of the ETFs, it was like the, the end client had to like demand to get into it, even if it was on the platform. And we're just now being seeing like the, the early, early stages of like people actually selling these products to people. And so like to your point, like you don't need a, a huge turn in like what those percentage allocations are to get to a place where like going back to what sort of Jackson's question was around is like people don't even need need to know that they own Bitcoin. Like it's just going to be in their portfolio at 1 to 5%, maybe 10% if they're younger in age. And that's going to be, that's going to be all we need. Totally, yeah. And you know, I think something I often reflect on is you get, you know, something happens on a Sunday night, Bitcoin price goes down 10%. Every macro analyst and commentator in the world posted Bitcoin chart. Why? Because it was not not because Bitcoins are relevant, because it was so relevant. It was on their Bloomberg Terminal. It is now so relevant that every macro analyst has Bitcoin on it because they know it's information. They may hate that it's information, but they know it's information. When we break the next all time high, it is going to be a moment that I just don't I don't think folks have probably comprehended how many critics are going to have to realize that they can't keep doing this jump in the pool at the bottom thing. You know, they're going to realize maybe there's something here. And that's why whenever you see a critic, this is one of my favorite things to ask them. They post some nonsense headline or reason like why, why Bitcoin's going to die? And my favorite question and it never gets answered ever is what is your threshold? Give me any metric. What is your threshold at which you will reconsider your bias that you might be wrong? And they never answer the question. Is it a market cap? If it gets to 10/10 trillion, if it flips gold, if it flips, you know, what, what, what, what does it have to do? What is your success metric? And the only time time I ever see a reply, it's something totally ridiculous where like it has to consume the US dollar. I'm like, OK, then that's really bearish for NVIDIA, isn't it? That's really, really bearish for gold. It's real. Like set your benchmark up here, OK? By the way, when that happens, and by the way, I don't think Bitcoin's going to replace the dollar. But, you know, Bitcoin gets as big as the dollar. Great, you can buy it up there when it's, you know, Lord knows what the price is when that happens. But I'll happily sell you some. Yeah, I mean, it's great point. Like I to be honest though, like I thought that that level, that dynamic that you described would be the 100K and it clearly wasn't because people are are dancing on graves after a 50% decline from 1:26 or whatever. But I think you're right. Like there, it can only happen so many more times. Like there has to be a finite number of times where the psychology can can not break effectively to where these people have these 20. 17 It's too small for them to take it seriously. 2021 Stimulus. Maybe this time it's just like, oh, this is Trump. This is a Trump thing. Just. ETS and the president and then you're like the same rate the same way. There's no clear narrative on the way down when there's no clear narrative on the way back up, aside from just kind of ran out of sellers. Hey, right, too many buyers that when that happens, you just what what do you, what do you argue? What do you debate? Now, maybe there'll be something that happens and they'll be like, oh, look, I could point to that too. Keep going. Give me your threshold. What's your threshold where you accept it? Maybe you got it wrong. Now, if Bitcoin goes to 0, then everything about this is irrelevant. But unless you can formulate A fundamental case for that right, that's a whole different discussion. Yeah, I love it. Yeah. Just wake me up once, once we get to that point, James, you know, like wake up one day. Price is pumping every day. There's no narrative. Everyone just wants the coin. The coin is alive forever. Headlines. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But look, in my view, and this is again, it's why I love the, the data that I study is it helps me understand why things happen just like the, the fundamental why. And when you understand the why, the journey becomes fun because it's about trying to understand like, OK, so we've got a bunch of top buyers, we're in a bear market. Once you accept those things, we're waiting for the price and the time to be painful enough that those people capitulate out. And unless you start with a base case that Bitcoin is dead, what's your what's your threshold? If it's not dead, then we're going to form a low. We're going to get all these people capitulate out. There'll be a bunch of people like myself who pour coins at higher price and just sit tight and do absolutely nothing with them. There's me a ton of that that goes on price, bottoms out, narrative follows price. And and you know, Bitcoin has this beautiful property where it just reinvents itself every single time it comes back with a new reason why it's awesome. And it just takes time. Like we know it's awesome. It just takes time for people to remember and finally work out that it's awesome. And once you realize, like there are very few people who become a Bitcoin and then go like, yeah, actually, you know what, it really sucks. Like very few people drop off the other side of the map. They tend to come in and go, yeah, OK, I get it. Yeah. If you liked Bitcoin at 126, you're going to love it at 66, right? I mean, like that's, that's the crazy thing about this asset. It just the volatility. I forgot, I think I said it on a recent podcast, just like the monkey brain, it doesn't compute well with bitcoins volatility. And so for a lot of people, they feel like they have all the conviction in the world. To your point, you know, they're jumping in the pool at 1/10 1:20 and then a couple months later we're in the 60s. Nothing's changed about Bitcoin, but it's like, well, shit, is it? Is it going to 4? Is it going to 0? Right? Like people get really scared very quickly because it happened so quickly. I remember the start of the year, we were getting close to being back above 100K. We had Marty bent on the podcast and we were like, you know, just Joe, We were joking, but we were talking about all right, like we're going to be ripping higher super cycle, all that kind of nonsense, right. And then funny enough, you know, we're in the 60s just like 2. It happened in two or three weeks. So you know it's the. Funny thing about sentiment. So I did a pod similar time. I would have been on with you guys in and around October. Audi and I spent like 80% of the podcast describing that 100 and 1000 and five. We're probably not going. If we do, if we take out these levels like the bear case, we're probably going to 80. We spent 80% of the podcast talking about that. And then right at the end he's like, come on, give us a bullish throwaway tire. I look, you know, probably go to 150. That's like where I like a throwaway comment. And then I did a, my most recent quarterly with him and in the comments, everyone's like, this guy called for 1:50. What an idiot. I'm like, did you, did you miss 80% of the pod that we were talking about? Like not that like being able to distinguish between by the way, First things first price predictions. If I can just give the audience something that's like really valuable stop looking for them. No one knows. No one knows not even myself that spent all day in data trying to work out where we might go. Everything is a probability distribution. Everything is a walk, random walk in the short term, even more So what you're just looking for like, and this is where I come back to like the probabilities of things. Just give me an environment for Bitcoin where the odds are much more in my favor, right? I want to go into markets are a casino. I want to go into the casino with the best edge I can possibly get, the best edge I can possibly get. You can look at main reversion, you can look at investor behaviour, look at capitulation levels. You can look at the volume, who's transacting, who's not. Right now in this current market environment, every main reversion model is in the bottom 20% and that bottom 20% corresponds with their market bottoms. Can it go lower? Yes, but it's all part of the bear market bottom. I don't care that I bought an 8K6K4K5K back in 2018 or 1516182022. All of those are great prices. I'd buy all of them again right now. Buying the bottom is like a thing rather than an event. Stop thinking about the bottom is like a day. Right now we're in the bottom 20% on every mean reversion model. Deep values under my opinion and that's below 70K. We've got capitulation where people who bought the top are now the primary sellers in the market. So people crystallizing losses. We've seen the number one headwind from 2025, which was all long term holders taking profit has collapsed back to 2023 levels. So that is and that is not picking up on any rallies. So we've seen profit taking go away. Losses now dominate the market. Prices massively stretched below in the bottom fifth of all mean reversion models. What are you doing? The headlines are bearish. Like this is the time where the pool, the bull market pool is the coldest and it sucks jumping into it. But I don't regret any time I've jumped into that cold pool, Right? And if your stomach is turning and churning on both when you like, if it's a bull mark and you're going to sell, if your stomach is in knots because you're afraid you're going to miss the top and it's going to keep going, press on. Commit to your plan. Write it down months in advance and commit to it. Do it when it happens. What happens is people in the bear market, they see the red candles and they update their thesis, They update their plan. You probably said to yourself, man, I wish I had bought more back at 70K60K50K in 2024 as we rallied out of it. You go, damn, I wish that I bought more. That was your plan. You wrote that plan when you actually had a clear mind. Now you're updating your plan because the price is red. But in reality, you should actually stick to your plan. And that's what I try to do. I format. We might go down to 80 and I believe the 2024 zone is going to be very, very strong support. We went to 80. We went down to the 24 zone. My thesis hasn't changed. My thesis is exactly the same. All I'm doing now is executing, executing the plan that I've been thinking about planning for a long time. And actually I wrote a piece in January 2025 when we first hit 100 and 100K and I wrote a piece called Rethinking Bears because I was actually starting to think ahead and say, well, what would a bear market look like in the future? Because I don't think it's going to be the same as previous ones. And that's where I identified the true market mean, which is a an on chain model. We can go through details as we want, but that's where I believed the bear market was going to start forming the floor. And that was about 80K. And then you've got the ETF cost basis converged on over the course of 2025. Now that doesn't mean it's the floor. I don't believe in floor models. When I talk about floor models, these are zones where once you're below them, you're in, you're in really attractive territory and breaking through that ADK, that ADK level. I just saw so many people accept that we're in a bear and in the heat of the moment revised price targets that they never had lower and you just love to see it. Yeah, Yeah, You know what I mean. I love that. I love that conviction. Not, you know, Bitcoin aside just but like sticking to the plan, having the discipline, just good, good mindset to have What would be a killer, a killer business would be buying Bitcoin like pretty much sticking to the plans, like, all right, I wish I bought more Bitcoin in the 50s or 60s. All right, well, you're going to lock in this amount of capital. And if Bitcoin does hit, like it's a limit order, but you cannot, you can't cancel it, right? So it's like, all right, I wish I had this much Bitcoin when I was in the 60s. Well, man, you shouldn't have backed out. You shouldn't have backed out in the first place. So look, man, before we wrap here, just if you could spend a couple minutes talking about what's exciting to you. You know, before we hit record, you were saying that there was like some interesting things. You were digging into the data set, you know, I guess build out some new models or new, you know, you tell me. I don't know. I don't want to put words in. Yeah. Yeah, no, I got a good question on a on a podcast the other day, which was what's the most exciting thing in Bitcoin too? And I was thinking about it and like, you know, a lot of people are like, oh, there's this protocol or I'm really excited about this thing, institution, blah, blah, blah. I'm just really excited about my job, honestly, because there's, there's a couple of guys I've been giving them shout outs because they absolutely deserve it. Research bitcoin.net and Bitcoin Research Kit, both of them, they've basically built their own software that passes on chain data tremendous value. Like, you know, Bitcoin Research Kit. You can self host research Bitcoin's like 100 bucks worth of Bitcoin. You get just infinite credits. You can study anything on the Bitcoin Ledger. And my favorite thing about Bitcoin is how robust the UTXO set is as a source of information. You can see when old money buys, you can see when old money sells, You can see when people take profit, when people take losses. There's error bars around everything, but it actually just doesn't matter because people take the most profit. They sell the most old coins. Well, spend is the correct term. They spend the most old coins when the market's going up. Everyone wants to debate me over the they're not really a long term holder because my arbitrary definition means they have to be at least 55 years old. No old coins come back to life in bulls. One spent Bitcoin is 1 spent Bitcoin. It's the same things now. You can see so much, so much clarity. I'm waiting there. There will be a day at some point in the future where the NASDAQ calls me and goes, hey, we've got all these like we know we've got all this data. How do we turn it into models for Tesla and NVIDIA and every stock under the sun? Because they've got this data right? On chain data exists for gold. We just don't have a chain to study it off. Bitcoin is just like this beautiful raw. And actually, I find this a real grounding anchor for me. The consistency of human behavior that I see in the on chain data set, It's so, it's so reliable. People, when the narrative is the most bullish, ignore all the evidence that people are selling huge amounts of coins at a huge profit. And then what happens? The price stops going up and people go, why did it stop going up? Sailors buying ETF's are buying. I'm like, because they're selling a lot man. Like no, they're not really long term hold like they're selling a lot man. So from and then what happens? Those folks who buy the top, ignoring the data, looking for confirmation buyers, they huddle through the whole bear and then the poor souls sell everything in a massive loss at the exact bottom on the same day. And to me I'm like, that's a capitulation and I'm paying attention to that. That's now interesting information. So honestly, the most exciting thing that's happening in Bitcoin is just that the UTXO set keeps evolving and it keeps being so incredibly consistent. We can also see things that are different. This cycle is different measurably on a number of different wavelengths. For me as an analyst, I've got all my historical patterns, and I assume every single one of them is already broken. A lot of them continue to play out, but I also know that a lot of them are going to break. So for me, I'm very much on the on on the edge of trying to work out what has changed horizontal thresholds and all things that used to get hit. I don't really use them. I have to. I'm continually adapting, adjusting, correcting for just really understanding the true psychology, what's going on. So for me, the most interesting thing that's happening in Bitcoin for me is, is literally my day-to-day job. It's fantastic. Man, I mean, you, you, you couldn't ask for a better setup than that. Like you're, you're spending your entire day doing it. And so it is exciting. And it's funny that you point out that the human psychology of the, the data set doesn't change, right? Like at the end of the day, it's, it is just, it's so hard to, it's so hard to stick to the plan sometimes, right? Like it's hard to do exactly what you described. And it's because this thing is just so crazy. It's unlike anything we've ever seen before. And it really tests you, even for the most speaking. Of testing, 50% of all the coins are underwater, 50% of the Bitcoin supply is currently underwater. And that's like we've got a crossover of the number of coins in profit, number of coins in loss. When do you reckon we've seen that happen before? And market bottoms, it's like every single cycle, we've always seen 50% of the coins go underwater. And now folks are like, Nah, the bear's just starting. I'm like, I don't know man. Looks looks kind of late in the pace. Well, I'm going to stick to, I'm going to stick to the guns then here like I, I'm not going to fade James. I, I like James for a number of reasons, man. Thank you for coming on the show. I like that you just tell it how it is. I like that you're balanced, you're measured, you stick to the data. And I think this space has a lot of jokers, man, and I liked it. I like that you're a real one. I, you know, you mentioned the price targets earlier in the show. It just, it's crazy to me how people just throw out price targets year in, year out, but they continue to. Get engagement. Yeah, I know, but they it's bait. Continue. To get the engagement and then there's no reputational damage. There's no recourse for just throwing bullshit out, like day in and day out. And that's probably the most frustrating part. And you have a big platform. You could throw bullshit out if you wanted to, and you'd probably get more engagement. But I respect that you don't do that and. Couldn't I actually couldn't care less about engagement on Twitter? Yeah. In fact, I'm spending so much less time on Twitter now, obviously because I got a kid that I just, I just like, I just find the noise levels. And you know what, It actually inspires me to just do good work on my own. Like I'm just turning off the Twitter machine because like, every time I log on there, I'm like, I'm never going to get those 20 minutes back. And I just turn it off and I get back to doing my own study. Because you know, for me doing that thinking when I go on Twitter, my, my favorite thing to do, which is thinking just turns to mush and I'm like, Nah, castaway. Yeah, I feel that too, man. Well, appreciate the time. We don't want to send people to your Twitter. Then where do we want to send them? Where should we send them? And just head over to checkonchain.com. We've got charting website, which is, I mean, literally every chart that's on there is, I've made it because I use it. So there's AI mean every Bitcoin metric could possibly want is there. And then our newsletter, which is where we do 2 posts a week, written and video, you know, generally 23000 words and 3040 minute videos, more or less the same thing. But the writing is where I do my thinking. And then the video is where I summarize it for folks who are visual learners. And some people read, some people watch. And we'll do both. But yeah, just trying to help people understand why things happen. Not entry, stop, loss, exit. Couldn't care less about that. Why do I think things are happening? And here's my worked example. Check on chain.com, smash the DCA button. We're in the bowl bottom. We're in deep value. We're in deep value. Smash the DCA button, smash the like button and the subscribe button as well. And go to check on chain.com. James, appreciate you, man. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks man, good on. You lads thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. If you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show notes inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that Onramp Media is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are on your Bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit onrampbitcoin.com contact to schedule a consultation with one of our private client advisors.