# The REAL Reason Bitcoin is Pumping... (Mando) Thread Guy · 2026-03-05 · 27 min · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPn3lsVD8iA ## Transcript Thread Guy How you doing? Mando What’s up, dude? The world’s been crazy since I saw you. Thread Guy Yeah. Wow. I remember because I was in New York, and then they bombed Friday night. When I landed back in Europe, I was like, “I missed quite a big move.” But it kind of looks okay for crypto, right? Mando I mean, when this happened—I think it was Monday, or maybe yesterday—I was listening. I think it was Monday when you did the livestream with those Bitcoin guys. You and the UNKs [?] give you a pass. Thread Guy You mean the UNS? Mando I’ll give you a pass. I was kind of like, “Yeah, Bitcoin looks decent here.” It also looks like maybe we’re done escalating for the time being. I’m not sure if that part is true, but Bitcoin definitely looks like it’s making a move. I don’t know what Saudis are bidding or what Dubai’s bidding. Is this just a technical pump and then we’re back? What do you think? There are a few interesting things just looking at the charts. Bitcoin broke up, and so did Bitcoin dominance, so this feels like a Bitcoin-led move. You just know the moment Bitcoin drops a little bit, all these alts get absolutely smoked. That’s what it feels like. It happened even this morning. It’s kind of happening again right now. Bitcoin’s dropped a little bit, and everything’s kind of lost its momentum. Just think about it from an emotional standpoint. Anyone who sold above $100K had that brief period where it looked like Bitcoin was going to break back up around $90K or $95K. We broke back up, then it went to $97.5K and reversed. If you sold at $100K or $120K, you didn’t really get that much FOMO at the time. But now you look at this chart and think that if you sold above $100K, and it’s sitting at $72K and looks like it’s just broken back up, that’s psychologically the sort of level where people go, “Fuck, I do not want to miss this rally.” I think we’ve got clear air up to around $76K. We just broke out of the small range we were in for the last month, and then we broke out of the range that was basically the 2024 range, which I thought would be much stronger. I think this is going to $76K. Thread Guy What is that? You’re saying all these guys who sold at $100K have FOMO, and this has legs to $76K? Mando Well, maybe $80K, but $76K is the April level from last year, where we kind of hit a low. The thing is, I’m not that bullish right now. For this to actually be a proper bull trend, it has to get above $85K or $90K. But I do think this is going to continue to bounce. Thread Guy In order to really reclaim the trend, we have to get above $85K? Mando Short term, yeah. But in general, we’re outperforming gold for the first time in a while. That’s the main thing I’m looking at right now. Thread Guy It feels significant that we’re outperforming gold for the first time in—I don’t know—since 2010. It’s also happening on the back of geopolitical unrest, basically war, and Bitcoin is ripping. Is it a coincidence? Is it because of that? It’s unclear, but the timing feels relatively significant. Mando Also, Saylor has a bit of a technical bid right now. He has this product where he’s offering 11.5% interest. Have you seen this? Thread Guy This was STRC, right? Mando Yeah. It’s one of those products where he was just jacking up the interest until people would care. It’s now gotten above a level where he can print quite a lot. That might be the reason Bitcoin is slightly outperforming here, because people are expecting Saylor to come in and buy a ton of Bitcoin again. Thread Guy Does Saylor have money again to really buy? Mando He will. He will, given where that thing is priced right now. That’s the other reason Bitcoin might be slightly outperforming everything else. I’m not super bullish, but this is the best breakout since $92K or $93K. This is the best one we’ve seen, and I think you’ve got to go for it a little bit here. It’s probably going to go up to the high $70Ks. After that, I prefer Bitcoin because dominance is breaking back up. There aren’t that many altcoins I want to run out and buy. Apart from Hyperliquid, which looks okay, but it’s looked okay the whole time. Thread Guy Yeah, Hyperliquid is a weird one. Hyperliquid looks good when everything else dies and the market is getting crushed, and then it underperforms when everything is going up. Mando Yeah, exactly. It’s because of the buyback. You want to buy when everything else is terrible, and you don’t really want to buy on days like today. But I don’t know. You’re still in Bitcoin, right? You’re only in Bitcoin? Thread Guy Mostly in Bitcoin, and Palantir is my new one. I’m in Palantir. Mando Really? Thread Guy Yeah. I’m in Palantir. I was sitting here thinking, “All right, Bitcoin’s getting hammered. We’re about to go to war. What do I do?” I just started buying Palantir longs, which has actually played out pretty well. Mando Yeah. Look, I just don’t think you can look at yourself as somebody who’s been in crypto for this whole downward move and not own Bitcoin. Thread Guy This is the best take. Mando You know what I mean? You’ve owned it all the way down. If you’ve owned it all the way down and you’ve been looking at crypto the whole way down, this is the best breakout you’ve got a shot at making here. If it goes up to $75K or $76K, I do think there’s a lot of FOMO because there’s a lot of air that’s happened all the way down from $100K. If I thought I’d missed that move and had been really smart up until this point, this is where I’d question myself. Even if you’re the biggest bear out there, you kind of question yourself and think, “Fuck, I don’t want to miss this ripping back.” I reckon we just get a bit of a FOMO pump here. $76K is guaranteed, then $77K, and maybe $80K. Thread Guy Before I ask you some more questions on Bitcoin specifically, how significant do you think it is that it’s reacting right now? It’s making this move right now. Is this really significant? Mando Really significant, right? This is the first time we’ve seen this for months. Thread Guy Since what? Since SVB? When was the last time Bitcoin reacted well to genuinely bad news? Mando But also when gold is trending down. Thread Guy When gold’s trending down. Mando When has that happened? I don’t remember the last time Bitcoin outperformed gold. If you bring up all these Bitcoin-versus-gold charts, which everyone’s been talking about for months and months, this is the first time it’s broken the other way. I think you don’t want to miss that. Gold went from basically all-time highs back down to around $5K, and everyone’s slightly worried about the dollar. Bitcoin suddenly looks decent, and it’s Bitcoin, so it feels more like safe-haven-style demand. I don’t think this is because everyone believes clarity is about to happen. Thread Guy I fully agree, by the way. I feel like people have just written off clarity as ever happening. Mando Yeah. This feels more like, “Right, we’re going to try and do a bit of a FOMO pump in Bitcoin here.” So, yeah, I would own it. Own it. Thread Guy Are you long spot or leverage? Mando Leverage. Thread Guy Always. You have no spot? Mando Well, I want to put on big size in this one, so it’s got to be leverage. Thread Guy Okay. So, on the broader stuff, we basically pivoted over the last 3 days. I pivoted the stream. We’ve been watching Pete Hegseth livestreams and Breaking Points videos. We’re a geopolitical stream here. I don’t know how much geopolitics— Mando I’m British enough, I think, to be that guy, right? I could be the new Breaking Points. Thread Guy No, you 100% could do it. They don’t talk about markets ever, either. Mando I could do it, right? Thread Guy What do you think about where we’re at right now? I don’t know how much you keep up with it, but I’m sure you keep selling because you’re trading. Where are we at? How are you watching oil as the proxy? Where are we? Mando I kind of don’t think this whole conflict is going to go on for that long. I’m surprised there wasn’t even a deal made. It’s kind of crazy how much of the leadership has essentially been decapitated. You basically do not have—well, there’ll be someone to make a deal with—but what are you really fighting about at this stage? I feel as though there are going to be deals here. The main thing is that they could maybe attack tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. But that hurts Iran’s allies as well, so China would not be happy if that happened. That’s a final move to cause that much disruption to global trade. If you take a step back, the U.S. is tightening the noose around China here with these moves. I think they’re probably going to get close to achieving whatever objectives they can. There’s some talk about arming the Kurds, which— Thread Guy I think that’s happening. Mando I mean, it’s been happening for a long time, but I don’t know if that’s really enough. You have to understand, Iran is absolutely massive. Iran is bigger than France, Germany, and Spain combined. Basically, it’s a huge country with 100 million people. It is not an easy country to invade. Thread Guy Yeah. Mando It’s got mountains, right? It’s a huge mountain range. It’s got deserts. It’s got a coast. It would be one of the most difficult countries to invade, and it’s not like you can get huge ground troops or anything like that. So the idea that you’re going to get regime change with boots on the ground kind of just doesn’t make sense. Thread Guy I don’t think—I’m kind of new to monitoring geopolitical situations, but at some point here the Strait is closed, right? At some point ships and oil tankers are going to have to go through, and if they start fucking blowing up oil tankers, the situation escalates. If they don’t, we kind of just are like, “All right, we probably are done here relatively soon.” If they fucking blow up a tanker, we have bigger problems, right? Like, no one’s even trying. Mando This is also Iran’s only source of revenue, and it would be a big deal for their partners as well, China in particular. So I don’t think this is going to be easy. They’re not closing the Strait of Hormuz for weeks or months. It’s just not a credible threat for them to do that. They may have said in the past, “Look, we’ll let only Chinese vessels through,” kind of what the Houthis said they did. Maybe they could say that they’re only going to let certain vessels through. The US could—I mean, they’ve destroyed part of the Iranian fleet today, right? The naval fleet. They could destroy the whole fleet tomorrow with the aerial superiority that they have, so it would really just be from land-based attacks on this sort of stuff, very similar to what the Houthis have been doing. Again, I just don’t think it’s a credible threat for a long time, and I don’t think it plays in anyone’s interest to do that, even the Iranians. Thread Guy Got it. Over the course of a month, there’s no way. And Iran going into this wasn’t in some great situation. They’ve been having massive energy shortages. They’ve been having massive water shortages. This isn’t a country that’s really doing that great. That’s why some of these protests were happening, right? This was teetering before this. I kind of think the US can just make a deal with whoever is in charge now, and there’ll probably be natural regime change already over the next 12 months. I don’t think Trump’s going to get himself drawn into this. He knows his base. He knows this isn’t something they want to do, and I don’t really see it being in anyone’s interest to continue it. So I’m more of the view that this is going to be short-term and isn’t going to be something that drags on. So, if a deal gets done, are we ripping markets? Mando Probably, right? It feels like it. At least some things would rally. I think crypto would probably rally. There’s some talk about the fact that a lot of miners are based in Iran. Thread Guy There are a lot of miners in Iran. You talked about this—I heard you talk about this on Monday. Last time they did this, you saw the hash rate decrease when they did the attacks a few months ago. Maybe there won’t be as much supply online during this period. There’s a lot of talk about capital outflows via crypto at the moment from Iran. It kind of feels like maybe that brings more short-term supply on, but otherwise I think we’d probably see a rally on the back of this. So I’m pretty bullish if this gets resolved. I would say that stocks don’t look that amazing to me. They still look like they’re due for some sort of breakdown. I was more worried about the stuff we were talking about last week, which was SaaS getting destroyed and deflation. That seems like a more medium-term trend. Mando The stock equity thing is so weird because it doesn’t go down. How do you short this? How do you short SPY? It looks like it’s ready to roll over and just die. There’s a rounded top here, right? Thread Guy It does look like such a perfect rounded top. Exactly. Look at that fucking thing. It just looks like it’s about to head lower. Maybe it’s too perfect. These things normally drop violently, but it does just look like a top. Mando And put premiums are crazy right now, right? To go short this thing. I saw people posting about this. Thread Guy Yeah. So maybe it doesn’t go down as much, and maybe we just keep fucking rallying. Mando So what do you think? Thread Guy I’m definitely more bullish on crypto than I’ve been in a bit. Mando For a long time. I know when the last time you— Thread Guy Well, I got bullish when we broke out again at 92K or 93K. I was like, well, this could be a breakout back up to 100K, maybe 100K plus. This feels like it could be a bit more. If this really does pick up pace, there’s going to be quite a bit of FOMO from people who didn’t buy the bottom of Bitcoin—much more than there was at 92K. Mando Man, I don’t know. I’m trying to keep calm on this one. I was kind of hyped about 97K. I’m not going to lie; I was pretty excited when 97K happened. What’s the worst that could happen here? I feel like maybe you get a retest of the chop range that we had, maybe back down to 70-ish, but I think there’s a good chance that this is a break. Thread Guy Well, one of the things about BTC—I agree—is that all of our bear cases for BTC, if you just think through it logically, have been washed out. Saylor’s still in, obviously, but most of the DAT tailwind is gone. You got the 10/10 huge wipeout. That thing is done. Alts are destroyed. The memecoin leverage and slop is out. It feels like you kind of got a wiping of the table. All the bad things that could happen to crypto happened really fast. I don’t know how significant the Jane Street stuff is, but it’s gone. Mando It’s out. Thread Guy Did you see that story today about the guy who flipped his $200 million fund to $5 billion? Mando No. What are you talking about? Oh, Leopold Aschenbrenner. Thread Guy Yeah, of course. The OpenAI guy. Mando Yeah, the OpenAI guy. Thread Guy He’s different, bro. He wrote Situational Awareness, right? Is that what it was called? Situational Awareness. Mando Yeah. Thread Guy He’s married to someone who’s a VP at Anthropic or something. Mando Situational Awareness. Thread Guy Why didn’t we fucking do this? Mando I know. He didn’t flip his fund to $5 billion. He had massive inflows from shorting equities under pressure. Thread Guy Oh, is that what happened? Mando Yeah. He’s married to the chief of staff at Anthropic. It’s crazy. He’s 24. Thread Guy Oh, if it’s just inflows, then it’s less attractive. I thought the guy fucking did a 20x. Mando I think he made some sick trades. Bloom Energy was one of them. Thread Guy I have a second one here for him, but I haven’t gotten to it yet, so I don’t know what happened yet. I have it; it’s in the Notion doc. Mando It’s in the Notion doc. Thread Guy Fletson [?] said he’s made about 2B— Mando On 3.5. Thread Guy That’s pretty good. I mean, it’s not as good. Hey, do you know the guy I just had on? Did you see him? Did you know that guy? Mando I never heard of him before, but I’ve now followed him. Thread Guy He’s sharp, huh? Fletson [?] said, “I track this guy religiously.” He’s obviously mogging me. Leopold. The thing about stocks is that this guy is chilling, showing me this super-niche ticker that you have to sort through 500 tickers to find. There’s a ticker for everything. It’s some German production company off the street. It goes deep. I think it’s easy to sound smart in TradFi. Coming from TradFi to this space, it’s very easy to sound smart. That’s all I would say. There are a lot of very smart people working at investment banks and hedge funds, and sometimes the smartest thing to do is not trade in the markets that they’re trading in. There are lots of people analyzing all these stocks to the fucking nth degree, and then you’ve got algos trading all of them. I’ve never been—and I used to trade in these sorts of markets—but these are fucking geniuses. Sometimes it’s easier just to trade more left-curve stuff. I’ve always found, or simplified stuff. I’ve just found there are sometimes better returns that way. Mando Also on the BTC thing, credit where it’s due: Fletson [?] was very bullish. At 61K or 62K, whatever, he was tweeting every day that he was buying. Thread Guy Yeah, he had a good call there. It’s just not generally how I trade, which is catching bottoms. I like to buy breakouts, and this looks like a breakout. Mando What are your levels? Is it a 60% or 70% chance of a breakout? Thread Guy If we break below what level? Break above what level? Where are you out, or where are you getting increasingly bullish? To be fair, we’ve already broken above that level that we were in for the last month. Then you’re really looking at the levels from 2024, because there’s this really long range we’re in, right? And that, to be honest, is around here. So, we kind of broke straight through that. The next candle on that breakout was the Trump inauguration candle, where we just gapped to 90. Mando Yeah. Thread Guy When we broke out of that, it was aggressive. I say 76 because that's the level we hit in March or April last year, and that was really strong support. We tested it a little bit on the way down, but to be honest, if this is a breakout, you're talking about the low 80s. Mando Why don't we hear about Jack Mallers? I don't hear about these guys anymore—all these degen guys. Thread Guy That guy should be in prison, bro. Have you seen the shit that's been going on? Mando David Bailey, just chatting about insider trades and buying their own companies. It's fucking wild out there. Thread Guy It's fucking hilarious. Mando What's Tom Lee's entry? I know that's your guy. Thread Guy I remember I came on this show, didn't I? We all spoke about it, and they were like, “Oh, yeah.” They were bragging about how much money they had made. Mando How much money they had made? It was insane. Thread Guy Yeah. Mando Someone said you should take a look at the Korean stock market. Were you on here buying Korean stocks? Thread Guy Was I? Me? I don't think I was. I don't think I've ever bought Korean stocks. I originally bought Indian stocks way back in the day, but I haven't bought Korean stock. Mando Is it something to do with—oh, was he? Thread Guy Yeah, he was on that Morgan Stanley interview. Mando Very good interview. Did you watch it? Thread Guy No, we've got to watch it on stream, but I got distracted. Mando We were at war. Thread Guy No, I was like—he was talking about Brazilian stocks, the Brazilian index. It's like, dude, not right now, you know? Mando He is long copper, he's long gold. Interestingly, all these guys have just stopped talking about Bitcoin, which says a lot. He used to be a Bitcoin guy, but he doesn't really mention it. Thread Guy Yeah. And Ray Dalio has also just gone very anti-Bitcoin. I've been seeing bearish takes from Chamath on a bunch of things. Mando Well, their takes suck. They're like, “Oh, it's not private.” Dalio says the same thing. Thread Guy Exactly. Mando Did you just buy the ETF for a central bank? I think they've just got themselves a reason not to like it. Do you know what I mean? Thread Guy Yeah. And they all think they can say the same thing, which is smart. When was it ever not fucking private? Mando I know. What are we talking about? Thread Guy Oh, you just realized that a public fucking blockchain is not private. Mando It's not private. Thread Guy I know. That is not a new take. It's not like, “Oh, sorry. I've done the fucking research here, guys.” Mando Just discovered something about Bitcoin. Thread Guy Yeah. It just feels like something smart they can say to podcast hosts. It's interesting they're all doing it at the same time, and it's not like they're turning around and shilling Zcash with the same breath. They've just decided that's their new thing. Mando They didn't pick the alt. Thread Guy No, no. Nayib's by himself. What's that fucking island off Singapore that the nation-state guy's got? Mando Oh, I was going to make an Epstein joke, but I figured maybe not. Thread Guy No, it's less Epstein, more like Y Combinator. Mando Oh, it's Forest City. Thread Guy It's the guy who thinks that Bitcoin's going to a million—the Network School guy. Mando Yeah, he's the Network School guy. Have you not seen where this thing is based? It's off the coast of Singapore, one of the islands in Malaysia. Thread Guy Forest City, they're calling it. Mando That feels like a place you should go to. Thread Guy Flood said they sold the top. They sold the top, so it's easy for them to FUD it. There's nothing more I desire than an asset I've just sold going down. Mando Yeah, fair. Thread Guy That kind of feels exactly what it is. I actually think a lot of these macro guys got out of the trade, and they'll realize that maybe they don't care about it being a public blockchain on the way back up again. I think they're probably just FUDing it on the way down, which, again, is quite nice. The FOMO, I have to say—just look at the fucking chart. You sold, but think about if you had sold it at these sorts of prices, because a lot went through. Remember all the Bitcoin OGs who were selling? We saw billions of dollars come out while it was “going to a million dollars,” and then you look at it now and think, “Oh, so smart,” when it collapsed again and went all the way down to 70, 60, and now you're like, “Fuck.” Mando Yeah. Thread Guy This could be something. That's all I'm saying. I'm just getting in the mind of the person who has sold it, particularly a Bitcoin OG, and thinking, “This looks—” Mando Do we need a new marginal buyer to step in that's going to send us to 150, 200-plus if we get back to that stage? Are we searching for this new marginal buyer? Thread Guy I honestly think it can just be the old buyers buying back. A lot of this is just OG guys who sold, looking at it again and thinking, “Four-year cycle—this is not a bad time to get involved.” They might not think it's immediate. I think a lot of them think Q3 is when this turns around, and we may see a few more weeks on the way down, but they definitely don't want to miss it. If I was going to start DCAing, that's when you would traditionally see the four-year cycle working out. So if you believed in the four-year cycle, which you've been fucking right about, that's when you would say, “Hey, this is time to get back in.” Mando The four-year-cycle thing feels like we're praying for it to be true now, after we were saying it was invalidated for 6 months. Thread Guy Yeah, yeah, it is. I was very wrong about that. Mando You were anti-four-year cycle. Thread Guy Yeah, yeah. But I think the STRC thing is also part of the drive. It's just kind of funny. He's increasingly interested in this vehicle until somebody wants to buy it. It's the most Ponzi-sounding— Mando —and to buy Bitcoin. Thread Guy Where does the interest come from? Mando It was—I think it started at 9%, and now it's at 11.5%. He's just increasing the interest until somebody comes in to buy it. Now it's gotten to a level where people want to buy it. I think you're going to get a buy from him too, which may be being front-run slightly here. Thread Guy Are you buying this vehicle? Mando What? Thread Guy I'm not buying the fucking vehicle. I'm not getting involved in Michael's chess at all. But if I was to buy the vehicle, I'd be involved in the prefs. I wouldn't be involved in the common stock. You shouldn't be cheering on the fact that he's printing 11.5% coupon prefs in front of you. Mando How does this end? Thread Guy Strategy? I don't know. People get annoyed whenever I talk about it, but I don't think it ends well. Let me put it that way. Mando It's funny. All the MSTR bulls flip to Udi, and they're mad at Saylor now. Thread Guy Oh, really? Didn't see it coming. Mando You know what you fucking signed up for, Saylor. Thread Guy You know what you signed up for. Mando Yeah. I guess we'll see what happens. Thread Guy But honestly, there's not that much else I look at right now and think, “This is something.” I still like Google. I still think that's going to be the most valuable company in the world. I think it's going to flip Apple and Nvidia. I still like that one. Other than that, Bitcoin stocks feel a little bit shaky to me. Mando Suddenly, Palantir is a good call. I don't know. Thread Guy World surveillance. I don't know ethically what it entails, but— Mando Yeah, but I know how you— Thread Guy You're the one who owns it, brother. You're the one who owns it. Mando I love how you just moved to New York and now own Palantir. Palantir. Thread Guy So on brand. Mando Yeah. Thread Guy All right, man. Are you the GOAT? Give us a hot-take sign-off. Mando The Degen Spartan quote is just the quote right now, right? You cannot be tuning into this market for months on end and then be underexposed when you get a breakout like this. So, if you're going to shoot your shot, this is the time to fucking do it. We've just broken out of a range. Bitcoin's down $60,000 basically from a high. It feels like the best shot you're going to get. Thread Guy You're the GOAT, dude. Mando All right, brother. Thanks for coming out.