Crypto Struggling, Metals Ripping, Active Trading, Death of Crypto Twitter

I think it’s really tempting to quit right now. Metals seem to be stealing crypto’s thunder for reasons that I don’t really believe are long-term. Crypto—if you look at Bitcoin, Bitcoin’s kind of the most durable crypto asset—hasn’t moved. It’s basically unchanged since mid-November 2024, when the election happened. So realistically, the last 14 months have been a wash. And I think that’s testing the patience of a lot of crypto participants.

1. Crypto Struggling, Metals Ripping

What’s going on, Jonah?

Not much, man. It’s just watching metals rip and feeling the FOMO because I kind of missed this one. Bitcoin—something’s wrong with it. I can’t figure out what.

I think I can tell you. I think it’s pretty straightforward, unfortunately: there are just too many people holding this useless asset, and they want to get rid of it. That’s really what’s going on. Let me give it a second. Let some people get on the livestream before we totally commiserate and tell everyone that it’s completely over.

But I will say, look, things are not looking great for crypto. And I guess we’ve been saying this for a while. Altcoins are getting absolutely obliterated again. We talked earlier on a previous podcast about how we thought altcoins were going to do pretty badly this year. And so far, that was wrong in the beginning.

But the specific thing that we said was, “Hey, we think there’s going to be a great chance to short after a pop.” And guess what? We got a really nice pop. If you look at the Pepe chart, if you look at the Worldcoin chart, if you look at the Shiba chart, if you look at the WIF chart, basically—

The Fartcoin did pretty well, too.

The Fartcoin chart. You basically look at the first week of the new year, which we said, “Hey, the first week of the new year is probably going to be bullish as all the tax selling abates, everyone rebuys their positions, and everyone gets back in.” The first week of the year goes by, and then every week since has just been straight down, basically. Everything’s down like 40% again.

I was hopeful that Bitcoin could potentially break that. This actually started with altcoins. Altcoins basically got 1 week of being up post-January 1. Bitcoin, at least, was going up until really this weekend. There was clear buying, and then what ends up happening is you sort of tap that key level at 97, and then sellers come in at that 97K level because that was the previous point of breakdown.

That’s where a lot of people entered, kind of sub-100, and then watched it go down all the way to 80. And so you always have to pay attention to that. If you have a lot of people entering at a certain number, and then you trade back up to that number and all those people are at breakeven, they probably start to offload because it’s just classic human psychology, right? You don’t want to lose on a trade.

And so if you’re underwater, if you’re down like 15% on a trade, and it comes back to where you bought it, a lot of people are just going to chuck it out. And that’s what’s happening.

But I think the biggest thing here to note is that gold and silver and palladium and uranium are doing extremely well, and Bitcoin’s not. If I told you the reasoning behind why these metals are doing well, you would think that would extend to Bitcoin. But so far, we still have a lot of sellers that are working through that, I guess—getting out of Bitcoin.

You can look at the statistics on this: there are people who have held Bitcoin for 10 years, never touched their stack, and only in the last year have they sold. I think the percentage of old bitcoins that are moving this year is sort of unbelievable compared to previous years. So I really think this is going to be a tough one to chew through, but once we’re done, we’re ready to go. We’re ready to go up. It’s just a matter—I think it is just a matter of time. I don’t know. What are you thinking here?

I agree with you. I think it’s really tempting to quit right now. Metals seem to be stealing crypto’s thunder for reasons that I don’t really believe are long-term. If you look at Bitcoin, Bitcoin’s kind of the most durable crypto asset. It hasn’t moved. It’s basically unchanged since mid-November 2024, when the election happened. So realistically, the last 14 months have been a wash. And I think that’s testing the patience of a lot of crypto participants.

Because, let’s say you’re a newer entrant. You’re not taking all this risk in holding crypto for a 10% return per year or a down year. You’re taking the risk for a multiple. You want real upside. And then if you’re an OG, you’re sitting on all these crazy unrealized capital gains. It almost starts to look like a stranded asset.

I’ve been talking to people in the crypto industry, some of the OGs. They’re really looking for new things to do with their money. I’ve been speaking to the founders, just for 1 example, of what you would call a multibillion-dollar, 2017-vintage vaporware chain that still has a ton of value in it.

Mhm.

These guys were early Bitcoiners, and they founded something during the ICO era that lasted. These guys are billionaires now, but they’re not just like, “Okay, we’re billionaires.”

Basically, the way that getting some money works is—obviously, I’ve never made a billion dollars, but I’ve made some money—and I think what happens is, in the beginning, you have a 6-to-18-month honeymoon period where you’re enjoying your newly upgraded lifestyle and lower stress level. Then, like months 18 through 36, you sort of start to plateau. And then from then onward, it becomes about the pursuit again, the chase: What am I going to do with my life now?

I’ve seen this happen, a little bit of it in my life, because I’ve made some money in oil and in crypto. But I’ve seen it. I know hundreds of people who are orders of magnitude wealthier than me, and they may fly to higher heights in terms of lifestyle enjoyment—cooler cars and private jets and all those nice toys—but they level off, too. It’s just human psychology.

I think what’s going on here is the OGs have finally sobered up from the “we’re changing the world” narrative. They’ve leveled off, and they’re looking for new things to do with their money.

Back to the original story that I just told you about speaking to a couple of old protocol founders who would be considered Bitcoin OGs: these guys are trying to found a trading firm, right? And it’s probably 7 years too late to do that in this particular part of the market, but they want to do something with their money. You have to sell Bitcoin to fund all those salaries.

Ultimately, they can’t sell their shitcoin; otherwise, it’ll go to 0. So they’re selling their Bitcoin, and that’s kind of what’s going on across a lot of these OG wallets. I think it’s literally just that.

You mentioned psychology. I kind of broke down the psychology for you right there. So I think that’s what’s happening. Meanwhile, gold is like 18 months ahead of Bitcoin, right? I think a lot of gold bugs had a very rough period of sideways consolidation, and now they’re having their moment. Bitcoin will, too.

2. Ads (Kraken OTC)

Just like you said, it’s not over for crypto. It’s just over for the impatient people in crypto. I think patience will pay in the long run, and we just have to get through this wall of selling.

3. Altcoins With Hope

There was an interesting question in the chat. Mint Berry Crunch says, “Thoughts on revenue-generating coins? Pump is still generating well over a million a day.”

Well, I think those are the only altcoins that have any hope of performing this year: the revenue-generating coins.

Just looking at Pump, where is it? In December, it was 0.0018; then it almost doubled, and now it's back to 0.0025. It's still about 50% off the lows. I think if I had to look at Pump versus PEPE or Pump versus Worldcoin, I'd be long those pairs if I cared enough to put that on and weather the insane volatility of the two.

100%. I mean, the issue, obviously, with revenue-generating coins is where the revenue is coming from. When you have something like Pump, you look at it and say, okay, we're looking at a $2.5 billion valuation on this thing, and we're looking at about $300 million in annualized revenue. But the issue, obviously, is that if crypto doesn't do well, that revenue is—it's always a trick. It's always a little bit of a trick to look at annualized revenue, because if you look at the last 30 days and crypto's done well, you're looking at $300 million. Crypto falls off a cliff, and suddenly you're at $50 million in annualized revenue, right?

So you sort of need crypto to do well in order to actually generate revenue. There are assets in crypto—

Where that's not true, right? Syrup is sort of insulated from the ups and downs of—

What about Hyperliquid? That's a revenue-generating—

Year to date, right? Year to date, Syrup is still up pretty well. I mean, I guess year to date, Bitcoin's up as well, but you do have these coins that I think will do well because they're generating that revenue. I think the question is, obviously, how do you express that?

A great way to express that is to go on Hyperliquid and actually pair trades. Pair Protocol is a good way to do that, if you want to. I've been looking into it recently. They allow you to put together pair trades very easily, which is why it's called Pair Protocol. Though, yeah, I guess it's a funny play on words that they went for there.

But, you know, really, the best way to trade crypto, in my opinion, is to express divergences in value between the things that are going to go to zero. You're telling me that you're talking to founders of a vaporware protocol that's still worth somewhere in the billions. People like that, once they step away, that thing is probably going to start trading to zero, especially if they're looking at setting up a trading firm. My guess is they're setting up a trading firm to try to get out of their stuff.

Mhm.

4. Avi’s Options Trade & Active Trading

There's a lot of supply that's going to hit the market. So, basically, I know we both started as crypto traders, but I've never felt more disillusioned with the state of trading crypto specifically than I have right now. The only way that I can think of to really make a lot of money—

Longer term.

—is, A, longer term, or, B, if you're trying to trade, you're trading super actively now. This is an environment where you have to churn and trade super actively. That's why, when a lot of people were asking me about the calls that I bought at the beginning of the year, from bottom to top they were up 200%, and then now they're down 80%. If I hadn't traded that—if I hadn't sold some at 94, 95—that would have ended up being a bad trade. And so the question is—

Walk us through that. Did you sell half your position? Are you still long some? Did you sell all of it?

I converted all of my calls. One thing I wish we had had on other podcasts—you know, our producer was off this last Monday. We were celebrating MLK Day, so we had to talk today. I guess I've been taking a break from Twitter for a bit, so I didn't tweet it out.

Same.

One thing that I've mentioned on calls before, or on podcasts about calls specifically, is that you really, especially with short-dated calls, have to be careful with that decay. I bought 1-month calls, and with 1-month calls you have to be extremely tight on timing. My thesis when I bought these 1-month calls was that the first 2 weeks of January were when you were going to get the most bang for your buck in terms of the trade. It was a tax-selling trade; that was the thesis: tax selling.

At the beginning of the year, we're going to get new allocations, that overhang is going to go away, and we're going to do really well. So basically, I think all that happened within the first 14 days of the year. Then you start to think to yourself, okay, well, we just traded up in pretty quick succession from 87 to 94. Do I still want to hold calls here? Would I buy calls? Would I buy $100,000 calls 2 weeks out at 94?

The answer is no. You're not going to do that, right? So what you do is you sell the calls and then you buy spot.

You kind of synthetically exercise your calls early. By the way, for the people listening, never exercise a call early, because then you sacrifice time value. What you do is you sell the call and buy the delta. That's how you capture the—so that's, I'm sure, what you did, Avi. I'm just breaking it down for—

Yeah. You never want to exercise a call early. I've actually seen that happen once and only once, and, man, that was—

Did somebody get shouted at? What were you thinking?

Somebody got shouted at because they were 3-month calls. Oops.

I was like, you shouldn't even allow that to happen.

Time value is very important. So what I did, I didn't buy the full delta back. I bought some delta back because, at 94, obviously, the risk-reward of my—

You sold the call delta-hedged.

I sold the call delta-hedged. My goal was to take that tax-selling trade and then sort of wait for confirmation. I got pretty bullish because we got up to 97, we sold off to 94, we defended it for about half a second, and I'm like, okay, maybe we can get to $125,000, right? Then we broke 94, and now we're trading at 90.

I originally entered at around 87, and basically just kind of scaled out of the trade, sort of waiting. So basically, look, it worked out. But now I guess we see where we go.

I would love to be able to buy 80 to 85 again. That would be ideal, but honestly, metals are just doing so damn well. It's just offset by the Nasdaq going down 1.5% right now, and Bitcoin's obviously tracking equities a lot more right now.

Phenomenon.

First of all, I feel like I've—it's interesting to hear you say you've never been more disillusioned with crypto trading in your life. You're trying to take risk with a little bit more intention and a slightly more medium-term time frame. I've been pushing for that since the inception of the 1000x podcast.

Is it okay to suggest that I take a victory lap here? Can I say maybe I was right? I'm glad to see you come around. Welcome to the boat, Avi Felman. Can I—

On what point specifically? On basically stepping back a touch from the super-active trading, or being disillusioned with active prop trading? More medium-term risk-taking versus an active kind of mindset? Or is it more just—

I don't know. I think there's still a lot of money to be made in active trading. Think about what happened—

So why? Think about it—I mean, just think about the trade that I just took out, right? I mean—

Dude, of course markets go up and down all the time. If you actively trade really well, then you can make money anytime in any market.

But I'm saying, given that you're disillusioned and you feel like the best ROI is at a slightly slower pace, that's why I'm asking: do I get to say I was right? Or, basically, what I'm getting at here is either I've been right all along, or a paradigm shift has happened that makes you want to shift your horizon. Or maybe your life has changed.

In either case, I want to delve into that. Either I've been right all along and you've been wrong all along, or something changed, either in your life or the market. This is what I want to double-click into.

Well, I think the way I would phrase it is that the opportunities to actively trade have definitely shrunk over the last 3 years. So you're now getting into a period where, if you're actively trading, the real alpha is actually in public markets, in equities or in commodities. There are a lot of trades to take out there.

I mean, I think our track record has been almost better talking about equities and commodities than it has been on crypto. And the reason that it hasn’t been as good on crypto is because I think we’ve generally had a more bullish view on crypto. That’s the world we come from, and presumably a lot of people on this stream as well, and a lot of people that we talk to tend to have a more bullish view on crypto, and that infects our biases.

5. Crypto vs TradFi Opportunities & Shorting

The reality is that crypto has been in a bear market for the last 7 or 8 months, even. Obviously, active trading in crypto just isn’t going to be as fun. It’s also because the traders that make the crypto market liquid and make the crypto market move are moving over to equities.

I mean, I just see it between you and me. One thing that we’ve talked about over and over and over, and that I’ve tweeted about, is that you have to sit close to the government spigot. Right now, we’ve moved very far away from a free-market economy, and the government is actively dictating flows of capital in a way that we really haven’t seen in a very long time, basically since World War II.

Sitting close to that spigot is the way to make the most money. When I look at the calls that I’ve made and try to think about what the best ones were, it was buying uranium, buying REMX, and buying Intel, right? All of these things sit so close to what the government actually cares about. It’s easier now to trade that than it is to trade crypto.

Three years ago, all the inefficiency was in crypto, right? You were looking at open interest, funding rates, and on-chain movements, and you could come up with certain outcomes. You could look at where the flows were when it came to altcoins and say, “Okay, well, if this happens here, then maybe we need to…”

Can I just add one quick asterisk to that comment? There’s still humongous inefficiency in crypto. It’s just to the downside, Avi, and neither of us have figured out how to get short without getting our balls blown off.

For example, you had FUD going around on Twitter like, “Hyperliquid’s the future. It’s going to $1,000 a token. You all are stupid. Have fun staying poor.” I sold all my Hyperliquid at $45 because, to your point, Avi—or maybe it’s Ari Paul’s point—if the target is reasonable, which most people’s target was like $50 to $100, then it probably topped out. I sold all my Hyperliquid at $45, missed the last 20%, and now it’s trading at $20.

Why? You could have seen it a mile away. The team unlocks, right? The problem with getting short Hyperliquid, though, is the fact that it could 2x on you and wipe you. So, what I’m trying to say is that you’re right about the inefficiencies being in public markets like commodities and stocks, and not really in crypto. But I wanted to add that there’s still humongous inefficiency in crypto; it’s just not to the upside like it used to be.

The risk-reward suddenly goes from inefficiency with tremendous positive convexity in your favor to inefficiency with tremendous convexity against you. That’s really difficult to navigate in crypto. There are people who will—

—and they’ll get rich, but it’s basically 10 times harder.

I mean, really, the answer there is that it’s going to be—and this is one thing that I do miss about trading at a large firm—the balance sheet. It’s so much easier to take trades out like this when you have a balance sheet.

One thing that you can do as a trader at home, if you do want to get into shorting, is that you never want to short one asset. Unless you’re very, very targeted on shorting, you want to try to find multiple assets—a portfolio of shorts. Entry point is also extremely important when it comes to shorts.

You almost never want to short any crypto on the lows. You want to wait for it to bounce a little bit and then short it there. You want to craft a portfolio of those shorts. Maybe you have 3 or 4, and even then, you probably want to cap that at 20% to 25% of your overall cash balance. That’s the way that I would construct shorting.

The reason retail is never really going to short, unless they’re super tactical about it, is because it’s very difficult to make a lot of money. You can’t—

An insider is going to sell, though. That’s what happens.

You can’t 10x your short. It’s just math, right? You can buy something and that thing can go from $1 to $10. But if you sell it at $1 and it goes to zero, you just double your money. That’s it. That’s the absolute best-case scenario for shorting: you’ve doubled your money.

Exactly. I’m just reiterating it. For the 90 IQ crowd out there—

I feel 90 IQ right now. Basically, my point was that I’m used to this. If you’re in commodities, very rarely are the opportunities positively convex. It’s a mean-reverting asset class, so you sell a lot of vol, collect a little bit of premium over time, and then occasionally you wake up one morning and you’re missing an appendage. That’s a challenging way to trade.

But, like you said, in those environments, the big balance sheets win. Maybe this is the environment where, after years of this being a retail-optimized asset class, it could shift to a big-balance-sheet asset class, which is kind of happening in the backdrop, right?

I think the hot take this year is that this is going to be the year when all the big shops—Jump, Jane Street, Citadel, and whatever—start really creeping into crypto quietly behind the scenes. They’ll link their infrastructure to the New York Stock Exchange’s crypto infrastructure, wiring that tubing into the more crypto-native sides of the market, like xStocks, Kraken, Solana, and whatever’s going on on-chain.

They’re going to deploy big capital and big balance sheets. They won’t have to worry about a Gary Gensler suing them out of business, stalling them, or jeopardizing their super-profitable trading businesses. That may result in more money coming into crypto and a little more efficiency.

Yeah, I think that’s probably accurate, but it also makes it harder for the small fish, right? Maybe what I’ll say is that you’re right: right now, as a retail trader, you basically just have to pick your spots very, very carefully. It’s very easy to overtrade in an environment like this, and I think overtrading is really where a lot of people mess up.

The fun part of crypto 2 years ago was that basically every day there was a trade. If you were paying attention on Twitter, deep down the rabbit hole, and looking, every day there was something that you could actually find and try to make money on. That’s why a ton of people left their jobs and quit to go trade crypto in 2021, even in 2023, right? People were leaving to come into crypto.

Now crypto is becoming one of those things that you can set your levels and pay attention to in an abstract way. If you spend 5 to 10 hours a week on crypto today, you can stay up to date with everything that’s going on. It’s amazing how it shifts.

In 2021, it was impossible. You had to be online 24 hours a day. You would go to bed, wake up in the morning, and something would have launched and gone to $1 billion, and you’d think, “I can’t believe I actually missed that. I’m going to kill myself—throw myself out the window right now.”

Now I go to sleep, wake up, and go, “Same old. Nothing’s changed. Time to expand my time horizon. Time to actually go look at other things.” I think that’s really the biggest thing that’s changed when it comes to market structure: the opportunity set has shrunk a lot.

If you’re a trader or an investor, you basically have to broaden your time horizon and broaden your product horizons. Think about it: my biggest wins in the last year—there were 3—were buying gold and then selling it way too early, buying gold at $3,000 and selling it at $4,200 or whatever; buying silver at $30 and selling it at $62. Again, I want to blow my brains out, because now it’s at $90.

And then RKLB, which was a space stock. I bought it on the pullback when everyone was freaking out around $40 and sold it at about $80, right? It was a 100% return there.

6. Kraken Ad

And these 3 things, as somebody who was so focused on trading crypto, are the things contributing most to my P&L return. Obviously, I made a little bit of money off of Bitcoin this year from the original Europe-open bullish trade, but other than that, all my big trades have come from the equity markets, which is why this podcast itself has shifted toward talking more about generalized content. And actually, I've got a good few trades up my sleeve that I want to talk about, but maybe we hit an ad break and then come back and chat about it.

7. Crypto Twitter’s Decay

Before we move on to your favorite trades, I just want to talk about one thing. I think a big sentiment detriment—first of all, it's called the 1000x podcast. I think it used to be the 1000x podcast in people's minds because it was like, “Listen to our podcast, and we're going to tell you what shitcoin to buy, and it's going to 1000x, and you're going to quit your job and live on a yacht.”

I think that was never really our intention. I basically see the name of our podcast as an aspirational way: You should think about 1000x-ing your net worth over the course of your early career to the end of your career, but it's about process, not about winning the lottery. So I like that we're both—you and I—have called for a shift in the opportunity space from just pure crypto trading to a broader basket of things. And I've actually gotten a lot of positive feedback from people about how we've started talking about other stuff.

Now, what I would say is, I think one dark-horse, unmentioned contributor to the dire sentiment in crypto is the new algorithm on X. That really is the sort of group chat for crypto. It feels like a lot of the crypto voices that I follow, I just barely hear from them unless I hate-post NFTs. I'll get 3 weeks' worth of NFT content, but it feels like I'm mostly getting served things that piss me off.

I wanted to ask if you think that the new algorithm has made it harder for crypto people to connect and discuss opportunity in a user-friendly way before we move on to the favorite trades of the week. For me, it has impacted my visibility into crypto. I don't know if the sentiment is actually bad; it's just that all sentiment on X now looks bad across every vertical that I pay attention to, whether it's geopolitics, crypto, or whatever it may be. It's all nasty, and I wonder if that's impacting our perception of sentiment.

I think it's definitely—I mean, the X algorithm has changed dramatically over even the last 3 months. There is no crypto community anymore. This is what Nikita was getting sort of destroyed for on Twitter. And unfortunately, I'm actually contributing to this. I'm not tweeting out as much crypto content because, candidly, it just doesn't get as much engagement as it did.

So it's a feedback loop, right? If I'm posting a bunch of crypto content and it's not getting any engagement, what's sort of the point? Why not keep the crypto content and trading content to the podcast? If people want to come listen to us talk about that, they can come over here. They don't need to scroll Twitter, because Twitter has become what I call the great flattening right now.

Twitter has really flattened out. Six months ago, if you took your average person on Twitter scrolling through the feed, the feeds were pretty different. Now the feed is probably completely the same, right? It's probably 80% overlap with 20% unique content. And it's because I think the average amount of likes that you see on a post on Twitter now is higher, because they're just pushing out the big bangers to you.

Which is fine. I don't think this really has anything to do with crypto, because I do think that crypto Twitter had fractured. If we're going to do a sociological deep dive on this, I think crypto Twitter fractured 6 months ago, just because there wasn't much to talk about. Once people started getting very bitter, everyone just coalesced on group chats and Telegram.

I mean, Telegram is really where everything takes place now. Everyone's just talking there because you can curate your audience a little bit better. And also, I think that people have been burned too many times by KOLs at this point, to the point where if you're a KOL on Twitter, it's almost like a counter-signal, right?

So, I do think that—I don't know if that has directly contributed to the death of crypto, but probably in some capacity. You're right in that it's contributed to the fact that we used to have so many inside jokes that would get turned into memes, and you would end up buying them on Solana. They'd run to $50 million. You'd go to Twitter, you'd post about it, and it'd get tremendous amounts of engagement.

It would onboard new users, too. Maybe it's killed the memecoin game.

But I don't think it's killed crypto as a whole.

It hasn't really impacted crypto as a whole, but I do think it's definitely killed the memecoin game.

I think it's impacted crypto as a whole from the perspective of it not onboarding new users. It used to be a really engaging place to learn, and now it's not. And the other thing is, I think existing crypto people like us, when we go to X to look at content, the overwhelming negativity of it and the basically downsampled portion of crypto that we care about—the fact that it's getting kind of suppressed by the new algorithm, which has changed a lot—and all that's left over is more just rage or things that do get a lot of engagement just because of human nature.

I think it makes existing crypto players a little more disenchanted. In the group chats, though, like you said, there's still a good drumbeat of activity, but that's just not enough to expand the pie and expand the attention.

So, I don't know. I wanted to touch on that because I'm sort of molding a hypothesis around how crypto, philosophically, is a community engagement mechanism. It aligns the incentives of people to promote ideas, memes, financial products, networks, social things, and art. It basically is a community engagement flywheel.

Even Bitcoin is just that. The flywheel has grown so large that it's enveloped the president of the United States, the president of El Salvador, and the government of Russia. There are all kinds of cheerleaders for Bitcoin that are much bigger than some little meme community on X, but the underlying architecture is the same.

Crypto is a community engagement mechanism, and every community engagement mechanism requires a sort of distribution channel for existing insiders in a network to bring in outsiders. X used to be that mechanism. So, given that the algorithm has shifted so much, and Nikita has specifically said, “We're getting rid of crypto Twitter and similar bubbles,” now everybody's feed is just going to be 30% Elon Musk, 30% rage bait, and 40%—

Yeah, 20% hilarious memes and—

Don't forget the bangers—the hilarious bangers.

10% Sydney Sweeney if you're a guy, or I don't know what women look at, if women are even on Twitter.

There are like 4 or 5 women on Twitter.

Yeah. And the final 10% is just a pastiche of things that you might care about. Maybe 350 of my 450 follows are crypto people, and that ends up getting suppressed into the final 10% of what I see.

So, it's definitely thrown a much bigger wrench into the philosophical raison d'être of crypto. The reason that crypto exists has been effed with by this algo change. And I think that there's probably a lane for a new crypto product, like an actual crypto Twitter, an X clone. I know that we've had Farcaster.

I mean, at the end of the day, it's just Telegram. It's just going to be Telegram. That's where everything's going to move to. That's where everything has already moved to, right?

Telegram has a problem, though, which is that it’s a firehose.

No discovery. No discovery mechanism. I think that’s the biggest problem, probably: no discovery mechanism.

No discovery. And also, when you do get in, you’re either in a super-curated, tiny chat where there’s groupthink and alignment and no fresh ideas, or you’re in a mega-chat where it’s a fire hose. After a while, you’re like, “I’m interested in Aster.” I join the Aster Telegram, and it’s just 38 messages per second, most of which come from Asia in languages I don’t understand, and I just give up and leave because I can’t handle it.

Sounds like you need better group chats, brother.

I’m in a lot with you, Avi. What are you talking about? Yeah, we do have a lot of overlap there. That’s the issue. You can’t get away. You can’t find new people or new ideas, but I think it is moving toward walled gardens in terms of actually useful content.

One thing that Twitter has definitely changed on is that it’s become—it's far less useful for active ideas.

Yeah.

What do I mean by that? I used to find at least 5 or 6 trade ideas a week on Twitter specifically. I’d be scrolling through my feed; somebody would mention a stock, somebody would mention this. Now, I can still do that, but I have to dig for it. It’s not going to be on the For You page anymore, and I think that’s the biggest change.

But that actually maybe presents an opportunity, right? To curate your own community and be ahead of everyone else. Don’t give up on Twitter, because the content is still out there; it’s just a little bit more difficult to access. I think you just need to use lists a little bit more. You need to use your Following page a little bit more. It’s definitely fixable, right?

I don’t know if it’s for old people like me. I know you young Thundercats would just—

That’s what you used to call me when I first started the podcast, but don’t forget: when we first started the podcast, I was 27 years old, and now I’m 30.

Wow.

Crazy how time flies, Jonah.

Time flies when you’re having fun podcasting as—

Now I’m annoying. They call me “unc” anytime I talk in group chats. Like, “What’s up, unc?” I’m like—

I think young people in 2017 to 2023 would just eat a pile of Adderall and go sit sleeplessly, navigating and changing the channel between 100 different Discord channels and Telegram rooms, learning about all these esoteric projects and trying to find signs of early activity that hadn’t filtered through to X yet. Then it would filter through to X, then it would filter through to more mainstream channels like podcasts.

I don’t know. There used to be a sort of progression, and I think now X has kind of disintermediated the weeds from the megaphones. So, it’s something I’m trying to figure out. I think it will impact price action in the short term. Short term, I think it’s bearish. In the long term, I think it just generates opportunity for people who have enough conviction in this asset class to hold the right stuff, like Bitcoin and a few select things that still generate revenue.

I think Hyperliquid’s probably a dip buy, too. I think that the whole cryptoification of the financial back office probably ends up piping a lot of liquidity into Hyperliquid. I think a DEX that works, even if it’s not that decentralized, is fundamentally a better business model than most centralized crypto exchanges, with the exception of the top 3 or 4. So, I think that Hyperliquid will probably continue to grow.

After the team finishes yeeting out of their positions, we could probably rebuy that one. Maybe it’ll go down to $12 again. Maybe not. I think NFTs are a big fat no. Maybe I should finally give Pear Protocol a chance at what was likely ETHDenver 2024. I think I promised the Pear Protocol guy at an Irish bar, when we were having our event, that I would use Pear Protocol, and I never did. I still owe him a trade. That may be the way to go.

It’s just—I think you’re right: you have to diversify your pair trades and your shorts across a broad basket of pairs, because if you go all-in on one, timing it might be just too difficult and you get blown out. We’re in a negative-convexity crypto world here, which, aside from Bitcoin, is really, really difficult. So, I don’t know—what trades are you looking at?

What do you think of all that? I always like to leave people with something actionable to do, something actionable to look into, and this is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot. We’ve been seeing it play out over and over, in small ways and big ways, in a cycle. And the cycle is this. I know I just spent a lot of time on the lead-up, but the cycle is this.

Ever since Trump got elected, Trump has been taking actions that have alienated allies and made people feel like the United States is an unreliable person to do business with. He’ll make these grand, sweeping gestures, like implementing tariffs. And what will happen after he implements tariffs, or after he makes passes at Greenland and forces Denmark to send in troops to defend it? The world divests from U.S. equities, specifically because they don’t want to be at the whims of the U.S. government, and they know that the U.S. government has undue influence on the stock market.

So, you’ll have billions of dollars sitting with European pension funds that then get sucked out of the U.S. They’re getting reallocated. One of the reasons that gold is doing well is because of this reallocation. People in Asia, Australia, and Europe are all divesting from the U.S., slowly but surely, over time. And when Trump does something like say he’s going to take Greenland, regardless of what happens, that accelerates it.

Europe now goes, “Well, I definitely can’t trust the U.S. If we’re actually maybe even going to war—not only are they going to put tariffs on us, we might be going to war—time to suck out more capital. Suck out more capital. Suck out more capital.” And then what ends up happening? Same thing that happened with the tariffs: there’s a mini panic, and then people realize, “Wait a second, there’s nowhere else to put our money. There’s nowhere else to go.”

You can say all you want, “I’m going to withdraw from the U.S.” What other innovative companies exist on this planet? Where is capital actually going to accumulate, with the companies that are pushing the boundaries and making real money? It’s all happening in the U.S. But now we have something slightly different, which is that there is an exit: gold, silver, palladium—precious metals. That’s a little bit of what’s happening, in my personal opinion, and why gold is doing so well.

It’s not going to hard commodities. It’s going to precious metals.

Precious metals. Big. You’re right. Big distinction. So, if I’m trading this, which I am, what I’m doing is waiting for the flush-out. When Trump talked about issuing tariffs on the EU and was saber-rattling on Greenland, that was a sign that maybe the markets were probably not going to react particularly well to that.

When the markets open on Tuesday, what’s probably going to happen is you get this pullout effect, and that probably lasts until the Greenland thing resolves, or at least until you can forecast, “Hey, maybe this thing is going to resolve in the next week or so.” Then you get back in, and then you’re sort of back in the trade.

But the mega-trend, the full mega-trend, is still there, right? The mega-trend of capital finding places to go that aren’t the U.S.—that, in my opinion, is going to continue. But the short-term trades are just sort of: wait. Wait for this Greenland thing to play out, and then come back in.

So, that’s sort of my take. I actually don’t think we’re late. I think we’re late to the silver trade. I don’t think we’re late to the gold trade by any means. I think that this is very much a trade that’s going to continue. I could see gold hitting $10,000 in the next 2 years.

Yeah, me too. I mean, I’m still bullish on Bitcoin. I’m still bullish on equities. I’m not bullish on metals.

I don't believe in buying precious metals at the highs, but I'm not a precious-metals trader. It's not my thing. Gold probably could hit $10,000, but the risk-reward feels terrible. It could also hit $3,000 before it hits $10,000. Ultimately, it probably won't, but the risk-reward doesn't look that good to me.

I want to talk about this comment for a second because I do find this very funny. If you listen to this podcast, you have to understand that you have to change your opinion when new information comes out. You have to. You also have to understand what the trade was when we talked about being bullish. Go back to the podcast. Go back to what we said specifically.

What I said specifically was that I'm bullish because end-of-year tax selling is going to abate and New Year allocations are going to come in, and that's probably going to lead to a bounce. You should buy at the end of the year, and then you'll probably get a good bounce. Then Bitcoin went up 12%. Then Trump threatened to put 100% tariffs on the EU and invade Greenland. Then Bitcoin went down, and it's like, what do you want me to do?

Do you want me to sit there and be like, “Hey guys, he just threatened to invade Greenland. You have to get out of the trade right now”? That happened 4 days ago. I was upstate. Relax. Use your brain.

Did you go to Wildflower Farms?

That actually pisses me off. Use your brain. I'm not your dad. I'm not here to fondle your balls and jerk you off.

I'm not your dad. I'm your uncle. I'm going to be a dick to you.

I give you a trade, and then Trump threatens to go into Greenland, and I'm having a romantic weekend upstate, and suddenly everyone's up my ass: “You were bullish last week.” I'm like, “And then things change, buddy.” What do you want me to do?

Yeah. You're the angry uncle now. You're not the dad; you're the angry uncle.

I can't do all of your thinking. I can give you ideas. I can give you direction. I can make you think, but I can't click the buttons for you.

I can't make critical decisions for you. I can't think critically for you. You have to do that for yourself.

Yeah. ThousandXing your money is about process, not about being given a trade served up on a silver platter like a stock pick from somebody and then timing it exactly the same as that person.

In the same way that I'll read an article and think, “This person is right on these things, but really wrong on those,” that's how you should think about us. You can think that I'm completely and utterly wrong on something, but on the other thing you might be like, “Hey, that guy has a good point.” You can listen to me and Jonah tell jokes and, by the way, no, I was at the Chatwal Lodge.

8. Luxury Hotel Thoughts

Oh, wow.

Different. It's basically 2 nice resorts upstate in the Catskills that aren't super far apart. Well, I guess Mohonk as well, so there are 3: Mohonk, Chatwal, and Wildflower. I know you love Wildflower because that's your buddy's resort.

Yep. Shout-out to Wildflower Farms. Go check it out. Pay. It's worth the $1,500 a night, Avi.

It is not $1,500 a night, buddy. I was looking; it's expensive as hell, man.

What is it now?

Auberge Resorts. I mean, I think it might be more—

Bearish. When it got pitched to me back in 2017—

You didn't invest.

No, I didn't. When it got pitched to me back in 2017, it was like, “This resort will basically break even if people pay $800 a night.” Back then, $800 a night was like Amangiri in Utah or Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur. It was the kind of hotel price that you would only pay if you were a tech mogul.

So I was like, “This sounds like a lot for the Catskills. I like the Catskills. The founders, the creators—I used to hang out at their house in the Catskills. They love it up there. They're great people, really brilliant hotel and interior designers. But $800 a night? Come on. Even a nice Hamptons hotel doesn't cost that.”

The vision was there. For the cheapest room—for a 475-square-foot cabin—you're at $800 a night.

Yeah.

Which is actually fine.

They're averaging way more than that.

But okay, so this is the difference.

The founders are geniuses, basically. For a suite, it's $2,100 a night, and that's pretty nuts. I don't know. I think it's still worth it.

Basically, what I would say is that the lesson to be taken from that is: if you have a vision, you're smart about finances, and you have a little bit of trading experience, which is what these guys had, you can lock in fixed-rate debt rather than floating. You can make all sorts of good business decisions. You can pencil out a conservative model and then outperform it, and set yourself up with optionality to profit from what ultimately happened, which was that orgasm of COVID-related, post-COVID-related spending.

So, ultimately, I think it's a really exciting thing that they've done, and I have just so much respect for it. It was a big swing, and they knocked it out of the park. And you can too.

9. Final Thoughts

So, are we going to start an offshoot of the 1000x podcast that just talks about the hotels that we go to?

ThousandX Hotels.

ThousandX your money by investing in hotels.

We're really struggling for content here, huh?

Crypto's rough. It's a dark time. People get upset at us when crypto doesn't perform because we're long-term bullish.

That is something I've noticed. When the market's down, people are just so angry. They get very angry, and I get it. When you lose money, you get put in a bad mood. But I think GCR said it best: you have to expunge your brain of your peak net worth. If I thought about my peak net worth, I'd probably jump out of a window. So I don't do that anymore, Jonah. I just think about where I am today, and I'm grateful for what I have, and I try to do my best for the future.

That's really, I think, the key. Don't worry too much about the losses that you took, because you have to have a short memory when it comes to trading; otherwise, you're going to—

Go nuts. That's a good note to end on. Avi, why don't we bookmark it there? It's always great talking to you, and I value these conversations a lot because they help me. If I were just sitting on my own, never talking to you about crypto or listening to crypto people talk about crypto, I think I would be way more disenchanted than I am now. I'm just frustrated because the human-nature impatience within me wants more than what I'm getting, but these conversations make me realize that it's about the long game.

All right, Jonah. Well, as always, it was a total pleasure.

This is awesome.

Likewise. Love you, buddy. Until next week.

Peace.