Can Bitcoin Break Through $70k, Or Lower? | 1000x Live

We have 2,000 people watching this livestream, and you just blew up. That was crazy.

There’s no way we have 2,000 people watching this thing.

Yeah, we do. I can see that.

There are a shit ton of podcasts with people who don’t trade and are never—

Yeah, guys, look: if the market’s trading, the market’s trading. Sorry, I had to short the entire market.

This is our first time livestreaming on YouTube. This is going to be a recorded podcast, but it’s being presented as a stream where you can join in and chat, and we can all talk about crypto together. We can put different comments up on-screen to discuss what people are talking about if there’s something relevant to go over.

It feels like it’s been a pretty massive week of news and an accumulation of coiled springs in the market. We haven’t really broken out yet, but there’s a lot to talk about. Don’t you think?

Yeah, I mean, the last 5 days, there’s just been a lot of volatility in the market: up to $65K, all the way back down to $61.5K, and now nobody has any idea what’s going on.

Jonah, I don’t know if you saw, but I tweeted out a poll that said, “Is Bitcoin going to be up, down, or sideways in September?” I voted up. Up and down were within the margin of error. Nobody has any idea what’s going on, which, to me, is pretty bullish. I’m not going to lie.

I’m as bullish as ever. We’re locked in this range and can’t seem to break out of it in either direction, but I think the next move is up, not down. I’m really convinced of that. Every time it starts to trade back down toward the bottom of the range, everybody freaks out: “Are we going lower? Are we going to lose all our money? Is this the final time Bitcoin goes to zero, the charade ends, and we all have to go back to our day jobs?”

My take, for what little it’s worth, is no. We’re just ranging like we have during every other non-2022, non-2020 summer, because people are off and not paying attention. They’re on vacation. When people get back in the saddle in September—which does tend to be a pretty bearish month for Bitcoin, unfortunately—I think as we go into the fall, we’re going to get some serious bids here for a variety of reasons.

Yeah, we’ve talked about this for a while: September is probably going to be bullish for BTC, and I stand by that. When we were trading below $60K, we were both sitting here. I literally had a bullish background, saying, “Guys, this market is going up.”

Just to recap, at least in my opinion, what happened and why we sold off so hard: You had a lot of selling for technical reasons. As the yen carry trade unwound, the Nasdaq came off, Bitcoin came off, and that caused the sell-off down to $50K. What wasn’t true was that there was overwhelming weakness in the market. It was just a technical move.

Now that we’ve rebounded, that entire move went back up to $65K. I think it’s possible that we can trade between $61K and $65K, maybe $60K and $65K, for the next 2 weeks or so. But at some point, I think the allocation we’re expecting comes into the market. Then you’re probably looking at $70K, with no supply overhang, which to me sets up for a very, very, very bullish Q4.

Quick question for you on that: Why has the supply overhang gone away? Are you talking about the U.S. Marshals selling Silk Road coins?

It’s not that the overall supply overhang has gone away, because I still think there are going to be some government sales that need to occur. It’s that you’ve had a lot of the weak hands sell out, and the average price at which people own Bitcoin has gone up a substantial amount.

Just to take a step back, something I’ve always used for trading this type of market is: What are people’s price targets? What do people think Bitcoin can go to?

Basically, the people who bought in the $30Ks and $40Ks, when the average price of buying Bitcoin was in the $30Ks and $40Ks, had price targets around $70K. Now that the average purchase price has gone up—because a lot of people have taken profit, gone out, panicked out, and then bought back in—price targets are starting to go higher. They’re starting to go to $100K or $150K.

People are less likely every day to sell at $70K than they were before, as long as the average price goes up.

How do you track UTXOs? Is there a metric on one of those Glassnode sites that you look at a lot?

Yeah, you can use on-chain metrics to track it. Glassnode is pretty good for checking when the last Bitcoin moved and the average price of that Bitcoin.

More generally, the yearly and weekly moving averages are still going up.

Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I completely, wholeheartedly agree with that. One thing we should talk about, because I’ve got a sideways background behind me, is that my process for dealing with these types of markets is to do nothing—not to stop paying attention. I’m super dialed in, but I’m remaining disciplined and not trying to overtrade.

Part of it is because I don’t want to realize a bunch of gains for tax purposes, churn around, and maybe miss a rally. More importantly, I just think we’re range-bound. I don’t think I have the ability to predict when we’re going to break out. I feel confident in the direction of travel when we do break out, so I’m just trying to remain disciplined and do nothing.

It’s not the most exciting strategy. It’s not very sexy, but frankly, it works. There’s plenty of money to be made as an active trader—buying dips and lightening up on pops. You’re very good at that, Jonah, but I’m a little less active, so I think my strategy works in a slightly different way.

Isn’t it crazy, though, that you pay taxes to have people arrested for memes?

Well, I mean, should we talk about Telegram and Pavel Durov’s arrest, speaking of whatever the heck that was?

That was honestly insane. I have a bunch of normie relatives reaching out to me: “Why do you use Telegram so much? Are you a criminal?”

Basically. My dad texted me, my mom hit me up, my sister, and a few friends. They were all asking, “Did you see this news? It’s crazy. Telegram—the guy got arrested for crazy stuff.”

What’s insane to me is that he decided to go to France. Come on, what are you doing? At the same time, it’s ridiculous to arrest the CEO of a social media platform. It’s not like he was doing it himself. Obviously, every platform, including Facebook, has illegal things that happen on it.

It’s crazy that they arrested him. He must not have cooperated with whatever they were investigating, whereas the telling thing is that Facebook and all the other platforms must be cooperating. It goes to show who’s forking over your data and who isn’t.

It’s also funny that he knew if he was in France for an extended period of time, he’d probably be arrested—and it wasn’t even an extended period of time. He was there for about half a second. He just got swiped off the tarmac at whatever private airport he landed at north of Paris.

Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, tweeted his take on it a few hours ago. Should I read it?

How’s your French accent? You speak French, right?

Yeah, I’m married to a French lady.

I’m so sorry.

He said, “I’ve seen the false information regarding France following the arrest of Pavel Durov. France is deeply committed to the freedom of expression and communication, to innovation, and to the spirit of entrepreneurship.”

Isn’t it amazing that the president of France can’t speak English? Everyone’s supposed to speak English. Entrepreneurship is a French word.

This getting arrested for building software is picking up, and it’s kind of freaky. It’s one step removed from getting arrested for saying something on software.

I’m not an anarchist or anything. I don’t know whether being in the crypto community has turned me into a paranoid schizophrenic, but it’s kind of unsettling to me. I love Telegram. I use Telegram. What I told my mom today is that I use Telegram because it has the best user experience.

You can use the same Telegram account on multiple phones with different phone numbers, which other platforms won’t let you do. It’s fun, and half my community is on there. What the heck is wrong with Telegram?

The craziest part is that it’s not even safe. It doesn’t have encryption by default. If the feds wanted to, it’s not as hard to crack as WhatsApp.

The issue for us, and for crypto generally, is that Telegram is associated with scammers, bad people, and bad things. Then it taints the reputation of crypto, because crypto and Telegram are intertwined in a big way.

Going back to what you were saying earlier, if you can get arrested for posting a meme on X, at what point can you get arrested for just using Telegram? If there’s a government out there that brands Telegram as this haven of criminals, then using the platform could become enough to get you labeled a criminal.

To me, that underpins the need for a decentralized social network. If the centralized version gets shut down, at least all of the data and the way you interact with people can be ported over to a new front end.

That’s really the beauty of decentralized platforms. Whatever front end you have—whether you use a Telegram app or another app—if the back end is on-chain and decentralized, then if Telegram gets shut down, you still have your data.

That’s actually something I worry about on Twitter. If my Twitter account gets shut down, how do you rebuild the same followers, the same DMs, and the same contacts? It all just goes away.

This is the future, in my personal opinion, of the Telegram blockchain, which is why I’m still personally very bullish on Telegram. I’m not saying this is super bullish for Telegram’s coin, because their visionary founder is now distracted, but I think it’s bullish in the long term.

The idea is that decentralized social should exist, where you have skins for decentralized chat apps that look as beautiful and work as beautifully as Telegram. You have end-to-end encryption that uses the same open-source library that Signal uses. All of the data is stored on your device, not in the cloud, and the back end is on-chain.

Now I see the rationale for it, because this is ridiculous. It’s a chat app. Of course people do nefarious things on chat apps. They probably do them on WhatsApp and iMessage as well. I don’t understand what it is about Telegram that’s so special.

On that note, everybody join our Telegram channel. Jonah started one. Hop in there—we talk markets. It’s fun. You can find it on Twitter somewhere. I even post pictures of my dog. It’s a very, very cute dog.

I think there are 30 people who work at Telegram—the actual Telegram app—but the TON Foundation is separate. The TON blockchain is separate from the Telegram app. They obviously have a relationship, and they were started and ideated by similar people, but then they split off.

What this does is light a fire under the ass of the TON Foundation and the people building on TON to produce something really incredible.

That’s a really nuanced, amazing take. You’re saying this is one of those misunderstood dips to buy. I have the mid-curve take: “Pavel’s gone, sell it.” You’re saying, “No, no, no. While all the Jonahs are selling, buy.”

Not the Jonahs. The Jonahs wouldn’t buy back. But you, Avi, would buy back.

Let me pull up my little TradingView chart. Hold on a second. What’s our TON coin doing right now?

I’m of the mindset that his getting arrested is actually a version of the Barbra Streisand effect, where now everyone realizes the value of the fact that Telegram had built out a blockchain. It’s like they knew something like this would happen.

The price action is really interesting. Obviously, the news gets announced, it was trading at $7, and it immediately got nuked down to $5 a token. Then today, you’ve got somebody like Avi Felman, or somebody like you, sneakily bidding it on this thesis, and it’s kind of rebounded.

It does feel like it’s bottomed out. Again, none of this is financial advice. It never will be. In fact, if you listen to the words that come out of my mouth, you will lose money, go bankrupt, and probably end up on the streets.

With that being said, it’s important to remember that there are a lot of people who hold TON in a pretty deeply concentrated way. What we don’t know is how they’re going to react to this.

In the long term, I think this is very good for Telegram. It lights a fire under the team to go build a good product. At the same time, if it goes back up to $66.50, I think that’s probably a sale, because a lot of people are going to be selling out of their positions slowly. They’re very concentrated, candidly.

That probably gives you an opportunity. In the long run, a year from now, I think that will lead to a much better distribution. If anything, a year from now, TON is going to be higher than it is today. But you have to be ready for the volatility of this thing.

You also have to benchmark yourself against Bitcoin, ETH, Solana, and the other things that could also be substantially higher a year from now. You don’t want to be up 10% on TON, patting yourself on the back, and have missed a 100% rally in Ether or Solana.

Honestly, what’s interesting is that I listened to Pavel’s interview with Tucker Carlson. I’m not a usual listener to the Tucker Carlson show, but I did want to hear Pavel talk for an hour about his product, and that was the most recent podcast about it, so I checked it out.

Tucker being annoying aside, what I took away from that podcast is that this is Pavel’s second rug pull. Vladimir Putin pulled the rug out from underneath him with VKontakte, the Facebook of Russia. He basically told him, “Become an oligarch and publish whatever I tell you to, or sell your stake and get the hell out.” Pavel chose option B.

This is the second time he’s had his baby taken away from him. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s thinking, “I literally can’t trust anybody in this world anymore. I’m going to put it all on-chain and make it this permanent chat thing that exists in perpetuity and can’t be shut down because it’s decentralized.”

If anybody’s good at building chat apps, it’s this guy. Telegram is literally 5 years ahead of iMessage, Facebook Messenger, or WhatsApp. It’s crazy how good this app is. I could totally see him doing that, and that would probably be bullish for the Telegram crypto ecosystem.

It should be, obviously. One of the things that’s really important to remember is why we’re here in the first place. We’re here to build censorship-resistant applications so that no matter what governments try to do to you, and no matter how they try to mess with you, you can escape that.

That’s the key. That’s why we love Bitcoin. That’s why we love decentralization. That’s why we’re here. At least in the beginning, the intentions were very pure.

Now we’re here to trade 5-minute charts and make money, but in the beginning it was very pure.

Speaking of trading 5-minute charts, one of the worst 5-minute charts I’ve seen in a while is the ETH chart.

Do you remember when I told you that ETH was going to be the XRP of this cycle?

I’m going to pretend I don’t remember, because I’m long a lot of ETH.

I said it about 2 months ago. ETH/BTC was trading at 0.55 at the time, and I said, “ETH is going to be the XRP of this cycle.” I got so much hate for that. The reality is that I think that’s actually what’s happening right now.

That’s wrong. That’s wrong. A lot of interesting applications are quietly getting built on ETH.

Like what? Even Vitalik says, “ETH sucks.”

Well, if something gets built on an L2 that rolls up to ETH, does that count? Or are you saying nothing going on on Base or Polymarket matters? Let’s just ignore it and pretend it’s not happening?

You named one. You named one real thing. Polymarket is great. It’s on Polygon, it’s probably going to move at some point in the future, and it could be built anywhere.

Some memes happened on Base, too. There was a thriving moment there.

Memes, brother. Memes.

There haven’t been many applications built anywhere this cycle. The two are basically Polymarket and memes.

Do you smell the cope? I can smell the cope. We are deranged.

We are deranged. I’m also holding ETH.

The issue with ETH is that it’s slow and more difficult to use than Solana. Even its founder, Vitalik, is saying, “What’s going on? You guys are only trying to build weird DeFi stuff. We should build some real things.”

Should we read that? For anyone who isn’t paying attention, Vitalik tweeted something that pissed off, or got under the skin of, a lot of people. He basically came out attacking DeFi on ETH.

He called it an ouroboros—a snake that eats its tail. In my California accent, I’d call it “ouroboros, bro,” surfer style.

Basically, he’s saying it’s purposeless money chasing money for the sake of money. It’s some sort of reflexive, cyclical money-washing machine, to paraphrase, and there needs to be something more purposeful built on ETH than just lending money to people who want to trade with it for the ecosystem to grow and flourish.

The reason I disagree with that is because I worked in traditional finance for the better part of 2 decades. My humble, respectful question would be: Vitalik, what do you think goes on in the normal world of TradFi?

It’s exactly the same thing. It’s a pipeline of money that’s sort of circular, and people derive value from it. To me, the most important basic primitive of DeFi is yield.

Most of the world can’t get a JPMorgan Chase high-yield savings account. If you live in one of the world’s 150 emerging economies with a relatively uninvestable currency, and you decide to store your money on-chain in stablecoins and earn a percentage yield on it—say, 5% in line with T-bills—you can do that on-chain. In many cases, you’d be foolish not to.

I don’t understand why that’s not valuable. It is valuable, but it’s not an argument for ETH, because you can do the same thing on Solana more easily, in my personal opinion.

That wasn’t his point. He wasn’t saying, “I hope this goes to Solana because I want more pure things on ETH.” He was calling the entire activity worthless, which is what pissed people off, myself included.

The issue with Vitalik’s statement, now that I understand what you’re saying, is that I think he wrote it off for a very good reason. He’s still, candidly, stuck in the 2020 era of DeFi, when you had an explosion of different Ponzi schemes and yield-generating games.

That doesn’t really happen today in the same way. People still try to do it, and I see a lot of projects trying to raise money for it or lean into it, but the reality is that they’re not getting much money because people have figured out that’s not the game.

If what Vitalik said were true, I would like ETH more, because there would at least be a ton of activity. There would be a ton of people chasing yield, and a ton of people using these Ponzi-esque programs. Activity on ETH would be up, and gas would be up.

The reality is that nobody wants that anymore, because they realize it’s all short-lived.

The one thing people say is “yield,” which is funny to me, because it’s not like crypto develops new yield out of nowhere. It just opens access to a market that already exists.

Right. It’s exactly what it’s supposed to do. It’s democratizing, permissionless, and yet another reason—aside from censorship resistance—that we like crypto. It’s the whole point: to democratize financial services in ways that centralized entities don’t like.

That’s not the snake eating its own tail. It’s borrowers and lenders doing their thing on ETH instead of through TradFi, like a T-bill ETF. To me, it’s very fundamental and democratic.

I agree that what you described is extremely valuable. The issue is that ETH isn’t going to generate meaningful activity from it.

What you described is extremely valuable and will be used in a substantial way. I disagree that it’s going to take place on ETH. Coming from somebody who has interacted with institutions a lot, there’s no actual reason an institution would choose ETH over Solana, because Solana also has a lot of institutional backers.

No, I disagree with that. It’s about the application, not the settlement layer.

For example, if you want to launch a tokenization project—let’s say Donald Trump decides to do his real estate tokenization—it’s very possible that he builds that on Solana. It’s equally possible that he builds it on ETH.

I guarantee you that if we’re in a world where real estate is being put on-chain and a substantial amount of assets are being tokenized, a lot of that activity will be on ETH. I don’t think it’s a random coincidence that BlackRock launched its tokenization fund on Ethereum and not Solana.

Both chains will probably get a lot of activity. I don’t think it’s going to be one or the other. Solana is faster and more performant, but frankly, it breaks more often. ETH is older and hasn’t broken, but it’s slower. Each one has benefits and drawbacks.

If you’re a slower institution trying not to get fired and looking to build on something with the longest history and the most stability, you could choose ETH and not get fired for that decision. If you’re trying to build a new application that requires a lot more entries in the ledger, you’d probably be safe putting that on Solana, especially as the blockchains mature.

I don’t think it’s either-or. I think they can both coexist.

The issue for me is that there’s really not that much differentiation in terms of risk. If you’re going into crypto, that’s 95% of the discussion in the first place. The fact that you’re going into crypto is the risk. Then there’s 5% of the discussion around how you get into crypto.

I think people differentiate between ETH and Solana a little bit, but not as much as you think, at least based on my discussions.

I mean, I trust you. The question is whether, once they cross that chasm, they’re headed straight to Solana and won’t even bother with ETH. Or, if they head to ETH, they’ll partner with Coinbase or somebody else, and it will go on Base, with no fees accruing to the mainnet.

The other thing is that a lot of this will have to do with business development. Right now, Solana is more centralized than ETH in terms of BD, and nobody does BD for ETH. Vitalik does, I guess. L2s do BD, but ETH itself doesn’t.

The fact of the matter is that ETH has no business development. Number 2, L2s have BD, but ETH doesn’t. Technology doesn’t always win out.

Let’s try something different instead of arguing about the philosophical part of it. Do you think ETH/BTC is up or down in a month?

Probably down.

Why do you think it’s down?

Because the trend is your friend, and that’s just the way the flows are going right now. Between now and next year, ETH could be up a lot versus Solana. Solana is near its cycle highs, and ETH just isn’t.

I think the ETH chart is going one way, and that one way is up and to the right.

It certainly isn’t going to the left.

I know it’s going up and to the right, but unfortunately, unless it gets a Michael Saylor moment—

That would be great. If ETH got a Saylor, that would be a great thing. We could all just go along ETH/BTC and make a ton of money.

ETH needs Larry Fink to come out and say, “I’m replacing my back office with this,” and go on CNBC once a week to re-explain why.

That would be the moment.

With that in mind, I wonder if you just stay short ETH/BTC until you get a piece of news. What we’re saying here, if you really step back, is that there’s no narrative and no reason for ETH to go up. It needs a catalyst.

The catalyst will probably be telegraphed in the sense that it will be an announcement. It probably won’t be anything other than an announcement that sends this thing back up. On any bounce, stay short and use that as a hedge for your book.

That’s probably the way to play it. In TradFi markets, when you collect some carry trade—borrowing yen, swapping into dollars, and lending dollars—it’s just up and to the right. Then one day, you’re down 3 years’ worth of money.

I don’t think it’ll be that kind of violent move in ETH/BTC or SOL/ETH. You’ll probably have a chance to flip before you get ruined if you’re paying close attention to the charts.

I agree with you, Jonah.

Maybe Larry Fink will come in and save you.

My thesis is always that I hope richer men will save me.

Until the SEC allows capital to flow into our space in new ways—such as allowing tokens to pass through dividends or allowing tokens to give you equity in projects, basically tokenized equity with a very clear regulatory framework—the only source of capital inflows is richer people buying your bags or armies of smaller people buying your bags.

I prefer the armies of smaller people, because it’s a lot easier to sell to them personally.

I noticed when I was getting out of BONK that big pumps can occur on small volume. Little amounts of volume can send the price down quite a lot when you try to push through the exit. I did notice that.

You have to be really careful trading those things. There’s a specific way to do it.

I just ran into this because I’m accumulating a small-cap token that I can’t talk about because I don’t want to get in trouble. I think the best way to accumulate these things is to put in small market orders that spike the price. That always attracts sellers, and then people sell into that. You can do it again.

What people look for when they sell is weird price action. If you have one candle that’s up 10% in a small-cap, people will often take profits into that. If you TWAP into the token over time and it goes up 1% an hour, people are actually a lot more likely to buy it.

It’s counterintuitive, but I think it’s better to market-buy than to TWAP in.

I don’t think that’s kosher in TradFi. I can hear my compliance officer from Goldman Sachs over my left shoulder saying, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” That’s basically called painting the tape.

No, I don’t think so. If I have a reason for the trade, I can do one market order an hour. Why is that bad?

I’m genuinely trying to buy. Instead of putting in one order every 5 seconds, I’m choosing to put in one large order every hour.

You’re absolutely right. If you’re trying to get more liquidity by executing a different type of order, it seems totally legitimate.

Obviously, none of this is compliance advice or trading advice. We clearly don’t know what we’re talking about. But it is an interesting concept: How do you get the most liquidity? How do you attract people’s attention? How do you sell?

How’s the OTC market, Avi? Since I left it a year and a half ago, has it evolved? Is it super deep and liquid for random, low-market-cap coins, or have things gotten worse?

I have absolutely no idea, to be completely honest with you, because I don’t trade OTC anymore. I just trade directly on exchanges.

Having run an OTC desk, I would not trade OTC. Frankly, I don’t understand why people do it. If you’re trading in this asset class, especially if you’re short-term trading, it doesn’t really matter if you’re gunning for 2x, because your execution costs are negligible. If your execution costs are 3% to 5% each way and you’re gunning for a 2x, 3x, or 4x, who cares?

The issue is that a lot of people are gunning for 20% and don’t take execution costs into account. They don’t take smart accumulation or smart selling into account. If you’re gunning for 20%, and you’re 3% in one way and 3% out the other, you’re really hurting your risk-reward.

You have to be very careful. Whenever I trade this asset class, especially on choppy days like today, the goal is always the Costanza rule: When things are down, that’s when you buy, and when things are up, that’s when you sell.

I definitely think anyone who’s click-trading more than $1M in volume should invest in a good execution tool. Doing more than $1M in volume is actually pretty easy. I know a lot of people doing $100K, $50K, or $10K who somehow hit $1M in volume.

If you’re doing that much volume a month, or even every 6 months, it’s worthwhile to pay $55,000 for a good execution tool, whether that’s Silico—I don’t use them—or CoinRoutes.

Lily says, “Limit buy, not market-buy,” and I kind of agree with Lily. Unless you’re in a hurry and FOMOing into something, it doesn’t hurt to stick a bid in there and wait for it to get filled.

The information is too transparent in crypto. If you have a limit buy and put in a limit buy that’s visible—whether it’s an on-chain limit buy or an exchange limit buy—I don’t like it.

What I like to do is sweep at a certain level, which is why I think execution tools are great. You never want to broadcast that information out there.

That’s fair, especially in really thin markets. With some of these low-FDV, low-market-cap, low-float coins, if you’re getting in there trying to do a prop trade, it’s often just you.

Without you, the only thing you’re seeing on-screen is market-maker-on-market-maker violence. If you get in the middle of that, those market makers will notice you immediately and make the price do things you don’t want it to do.

This is why you have to be careful. This week in TradFi has had the lowest liquidity—basically the lowest liquidity week—of the entire year. It’s the dog days of summer, which is to be expected.

Bitcoin is trading like an illiquid shitcoin right now, which is one reason why you probably just need to walk away. Establish your positions and walk away.

There are a lot of good catalysts coming up that I personally like. You have Solana Breakpoint coming up, Stacks releasing its Nakamoto upgrade, and Aptos running events during Korean Blockchain Week.

Remember the Aptos and Koreans meme: “1 APT equals 1 apartment.”

With all due respect to the cool guy with the long hair, why? What’s the point of Aptos? Somebody explain to me what problem it solves.

The point of most of these things is to trade them and make money, then watch them go to zero after 3 years—not like Cardano and Polkadot, obviously.

What’s the market cap of Cardano? I haven’t thought about Cardano in a while.

It’s still in the top 15: $13B, with $300M traded a day.

That’s good.

The point of these assets is to trade them. There’s a select group of assets that are actually going to do things in the future and be useful, but the majority of these things are just for trading.

I think you and I have both worked in pretty professional trading floor environments, where we have a conversation like this in these trading floor environments, and I find it refreshing to hear other traders talk on a trading floor. I don’t think there is any of that for crypto. Another shameless plug for our Telegram chat room. Jonah, do you own any Solana altcoins right now?

The answer is no. I’m completely flat on memes.

Why be flat on memes?

Here’s why I’d be flat on memes right now: There’s no catalyst. There’s literally no reason to be long a memecoin as the space consolidates and you have more and more supply getting printed on Pump.fun.

on Pump.fun every single day. I think that’s going to distract from WIF and MOG and all of the other ones that are still alive. BODEN’s dead. That’s why I think there’s no real meme trade right now.

I think memes are going to be the last thing to rally after a big Bitcoin pump or a big Solana pump, but I think it’s too soon for that. I think you’re safer in the majors. I think we need to just weather this next sort of fall period of chop.

Let’s see what other interesting comments are in here. This guy, Robin Debates, says, “Bruh, you have 300 viewers. Don’t be pretentious.”

Bruh, we have 2,000 viewers right now. 300 of them are on YouTube and 1,700 are on X, so you can see this stream in multiple locations. That’s why it’s like that.

It’s over for Helium if Avi’s truly on Helium in Puerto Rico right now, which I think there’s a 60% chance of. Then, yes, it’s definitively the beginning of the end for Helium.

This—okay, don’t even start.

Welcome back. I’ve been monologuing here with the chat room.

What the fuck are you monologuing about?

We were monologuing about how Puerto Rico is not necessarily up to snuff in terms of Wi-Fi infrastructure and how you were shilling Helium while your Helium Wi-Fi broke down.

I’ve got a few rebuttals to the peanut gallery. One, I’m on Verizon. If I was on Helium, this wouldn’t have happened, just saying. Two, I don’t live in Puerto Rico.

“What is my daily trading routine?” Now, this is a very good question. The most important thing in trading to me personally is the ability to reflect on my day, because when you’re trading, you make a ton of decisions every single day. If you don’t have a process or system to understand what decisions you’re good at making and what decisions you’re bad at making, you never get anywhere. You just end up making the same mistakes over and over and over again.

I always write down literally every decision that I made that day and why I made it, and then review them at least once a week. That way, when I go back, I can say to myself, “Okay, I’m good at this. I’m good at that. I’m bad at this. I’m bad at that.” This is very important. By the way, I just found out that Bloomberg has a Notes app, which is great, so I just take all my notes.

Finish the thought. Tell us about your daily trading routine. Come on, stay focused.

The other thing that I think is really important is a trading journal with your trades: the P&L of your trades, and then making sure that you can actually tag them and say, “Okay, well, this is a long/short trade. This is relative value, long ETH, short BTC.” I call it a blot. That’s what us old guys used to call it.

Yeah, like a trade blot with reasonable tags.

So that you can go back and say, “Hey, I’m really good at trading events. I’m really good at trading product launches. I’m really good at trading unlocks and flows. I’m really bad at that.”

The other thing that’s important is making sure that you end up with a system in place. Once you figure out what you’re good at, you stay away from doing the things that you know you’re bad at. I know that sounds really simple and straightforward, but you cannot imagine the number of people I’ve seen who know that they’re bad at something and can’t help themselves because they think they can do it. They’re like, “I know I’ve messed up in the past year doing this thing, but this time will be different.”

Trading does put you into that weird mind warp where sometimes you think you’re making money on something when you’re actually losing money on it. There’s so much weird psychology. I saw this a lot when I was in sell-side trading. You’d have people out on a trading floor making markets or, in the case of physical commodities, buying and selling actual commodities, and they thought they were doing great prop trading.

But they weren’t. They were actually losing a little bit of money prop trading and making a lot of money on the business that they were operating. There’s this weird mind-meld psychology thing where, almost down to the last person, all of those people thought they were fantastic prop traders. Then a lot of them went on to try to trade prop at hedge funds and failed.

If you’re just trading your own book, or if you’re trading at a hedge fund, you don’t really have as much ability to get caught in that bias because there’s no asset to hide behind. There’s no market-making. There’s no business that you can basically misattribute P&L from to your own genius.

However, there is one thing that you can do when you’re sitting by yourself in a room trading that really messes with a lot of people’s minds. I’ve seen a lot of people trade like crazy, churn in and out of stuff, make a little bit of money in the middle of cycles where Bitcoin doubles, make 10%, and think they’re doing a great job.

Then, after tax, they’re left with even less than what they thought they made, and they’re forced to sell things to pay their tax bill. Basically, the importance of a process is to know not just how much money you’re making, but whether you’re outperforming just hodling Bitcoin and doing absolutely nothing.

That’s really important to monitor in terms of process. Otherwise, you may actually be losing money versus what you would have earned if you had just stuck your money in Bitcoin, walked away, and spent your precious time earning more money in another way rather than trading. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I mean, I 100% agree with that. There are a lot of interesting comments in this chat that we could talk about. Is there anything in particular you want to discuss right now?

Avi, I mean, both of us are a little off-balance because this is the first time we’ve done this format, but it’s freaking awesome.

Yeah, this is great. Why don’t we do one again? We can even do one on Thursday.

I’m down. We’ll maybe invite another guest, but I’ve got to hop, unfortunately.

Okay, well, it was a good time talking to you. Thanks for making time, as always. I loved it.

No, this is great, and keep the comments coming. We love all of you. We love you guys.

None of this is financial advice. Apologies in advance to our producers who are going to have to hack this together into something that seems halfway professional for the recorded episode. Anyway, we’ll work on it. I’m going to find better Wi-Fi for next time.

Use that Helium. Sign up for Helium and tell us how it goes. Yeah, definitely. High Stakes Capital.

Yeah, that’s a great idea. Definitely bring on High Stakes Capital for sure.

Yeah, we’ll try to get a guest for the next one.

All righty, Jonah. See you later.