Is Bitcoin Heading To $150k?

We tried to sell off. We tried to collapse with equities. It didn't happen. Now we're back above all-time highs.

Equities have still not reclaimed their all-time highs. People are starting to realize Trump is in power for 4 years. He has repeatedly done things that are good for Bitcoin. Maybe we should stop fighting that trend.

It has been an eventful week. But Jonah, I hope you had a good Memorial Day weekend. Maybe you got a little bit of time off, time to chill. Maybe not.

It was fun. I went to a party at an undisclosed location that was awesome. It's good to see you, Avi.

I've heard similar things—that this party was pretty crazy, by the way.

The party was pretty crazy. What a fun time. I'm feeling good. I'm feeling refreshed. I'm feeling like I lost a few brain cells, but no worse for the wear.

1. The 2021 Cycle vs Now

I feel like I should be more euphoric about crypto. The whole space is—if you had told everybody 3 years ago that we'd be trading at $110,000 with mainstream institutional adoption, and with the president of the United States personally setting aside a few yards' worth of fiat to go and lift Bitcoin, I would have thought we'd be in pure euphoria mode.

2. State Of The Market

CME basis at 30% positive. I would have assumed things would be at peak froth, but everybody just seems kind of chilled out. Altseason is back. I don't know. I want to get your take on this, Avi. I'm kind of amazed by how cool and collected everybody is, including that trader who put on a billion dollars' worth of notional with 20x leverage on—I believe it was likely Hyperliquid. A lot is going on.

Yeah, it's honestly amazing, and I think the broader mentality is, “Oh, wow, I should have made a lot more money.” I think that comes from the fact that returns are naturally going to come down in an industry that grows.

Basically every other time Bitcoin hit all-time highs, everyone had 5x'ed to 10x'ed their entire stack because alts just pulled ridiculous moves. If you go back and look at the moves in 2021, or even from the end of 2023 to April 2024, everything 5x'ed. It was insane. Sometimes things would 50x. In 2021, you had Luna do something like a 100x. It was like a 300x from lows to highs.

Now, the low-to-high move—the absolute low to the absolute high—on basically anything that exists is 10x. That's like one asset. It's one asset. It's like Hyperliquid, right? Hyperliquid starts at 3 and goes to 40. That's the only asset.

You had to be good to actually get those kinds of returns this cycle. And not only good—you had to be a little bit stupid, right? Nobody's going to take their entire net worth and put it into one asset. That just seems wrong.

I think people are reacting to the fact that, yeah, I made some money, but I didn't make insane money. To that I say: It's okay. You made some money. This is not really a get-rich-quick industry in the same way that it was in 2021.

It's still a get-rich-quicker industry than every other thing that exists on the planet, but it's obviously a lot bigger today. It's not going to be as easy to go from having $10,000 to $5 million as it was in 2021. Those days are very much behind us.

Yes, unless you somehow manage to pick the right memecoin right as it comes out and put a lot of money into it. Obviously, there are still ways, which I think is what attracts people. Every now and then, you hear about a coin that pulls a 200x, and you're like, “Oh, man, that's pretty fun.”

But they're rare. 4 years ago, they were much less rare. They were widespread. You didn't have to be smart; you just had to do something, and you could have hit a 10-bagger without trying too hard back in 2020. If you bought altcoins during COVID, you were rewarded handsomely for that.

The famous quote is that somebody asked Warren Buffett, “What's your secret?” And he said, “Nobody likes to get rich slowly.” That's what I've focused on. He's kind of right. It pays real dividends to invest in a career, invest in good things for the long run, and try to avoid the pitfalls of trying to 10x your money in a short period of time because that obviously works out badly for you most of the time.

You said it best—I can't remember whether it was 2 or 3 weeks ago—you said that crypto is in its post-dot-com-crash moment. Now we're in the early innings of what I think is a 25-year golden bull-run supercycle for crypto.

If you continue with the tech analogy, that golden 20-year bull run from whatever it was, 2002 or 2003, until basically now didn't offer you a lot of 1,000x-in-2-months opportunities. It was more just, “All right, I'm going to ride this megatrend. Just stand on my surfboard while this wave takes me wherever it's going to go.”

We're kind of there in crypto, right? We established that only the good businesses will survive. It's distracting to look at all of the random crap that's going up quickly right now, but I do believe that if you stick around in things that still are valued fairly on a P/E-ratio basis, like Hyperliquid and Maple, and even things that you can't value on a P/E basis, like Bitcoin, I think they'll probably 10x over the long run.

You just have to sit there, and I think our space is a little too degenerate and impatient for that. But if you compare it to anything else—equities, bonds—what else are you going to invest in right now? Nothing.

3. AI Mania Is Coming

I think there's an opportunity to just be a disciplined investor. Earn your money however you earn it, dollar-cost-average into crypto, into Bitcoin, and a couple of select altcoins that actually are real businesses with real products. Within those ecosystems, try to stack more of that token. I think you're good doing that. That's what I'm trying to do, anyway.

Some of the picks that we've been looking at have been doing very well. Obviously, we mention HYPE a lot, but Syrup is still crushing it. I'm very, very happy to see that. It's now at 43 cents.

We started talking about how we like it.

We have a disclaimer now.

We do have a disclaimer. Nothing here is financial advice.

One area where we're seeing a renaissance right now is AI coins. We're seeing a lot of AI coins do extremely well. Virtuals, specifically, is really crushing it. Avi, I don't know if you have a take there. What's going on with Virtuals?

We launched on Virtuals. We like Virtuals, but it's just not in a straight line.

My take on Virtuals is that I wish they had marketed themselves as a launchpad that gives trading fees to the creators who launch on their site. If it was just that simple—launch your token here and collect a fair fee from trading activity—I think Virtuals would be higher than it is today.

They marketed themselves as a no-code AI-agent ecosystem launchpad, and their no-code AI agents are just not good enough. They're not even close—not even 1% as good as they need to be to attract an audience.

In that sense, making that feature the key product was a mistake for them. But they may successfully pivot away from that. I do believe that AI mania is coming to crypto. I think we're just seeing the beginnings of it.

Asset allocation is something that I struggle with within the AI space in crypto. What I'm working on is trying to make our agent and our agents' ecosystem as good as it can be and have that be my exposure to it, because I don't know how to trade the rest of it as well.

We own our Ls on this podcast, and I've certainly screwed up some AI investing in crypto publicly here. You don't win them all. I don't really know what you call an AI coin. These aren't real businesses yet, but we know the mania is coming, so you're probably okay if you're exposed to some of it, right?

Are you supposed to buy likely Zerebro, Virtuals, likely AI16Z, or Fartcoin? I have no idea. I think you're probably just supposed to have some skin in all of those coins, and probably you end up hitting a 10-bagger somewhere. What do you think?

I think that's fair.

A lot of these things start with vaporware, and they trumpet and tell you about how amazing they are. But then you look at them and you're like, “Oh my God, there's literally nothing here. What the hell are you guys talking about?” And then suddenly, because they're comprised of smart people with a vision, they actually manage to deliver.

Yep.

And that's kind of what's slowly happening with TAO. TAO has definitely underperformed over the last 2 weeks. I think it's just because it had so much incredible outperformance.

Yeah, because it overperformed, and then I think it reached sort of fairish value for the developments that it's made. If you look at all the subnets, a huge portion of activity is still concentrated on the staking subnet. Most of the economic activity is concentrated there still. So you have to watch for it to grow its other subnets.

But at least that level of economic activity, and the promise that came with it—“Oh, these subnets are going live”—there are some interesting ones, even though they're not making a ton of money right now. It's like, “Okay, let's reprice this thing.”

I think you have to watch for this across the board. Basically, who is now actually delivering, even a little bit? You probably get 3 to 4 weeks of reasonable outperformance.

4. Is Bitcoin Upside Cheap?

And that's what I'm trying to screen for. You saw this with Maple as well, right? Once TVL starts going up in a straight line, the price follows. We see this with Pendle, too. My take right now is, “Hey, let me find who's just starting to deliver value that could potentially grow,” and try to make some bets.

One thing we haven't really talked about is broader markets. What do we think about Bitcoin? What do we think about Ethereum? To be completely honest, I don't have a day-to-day direction on these things. I don't know if tomorrow we're going to be at $115,000 or tomorrow we're going to be at $105,000.

But what I do know is that we now have some semblance of stability, which is going to give people the confidence to go bet on altcoins. Bitcoin has been above $100,000 for almost a month now, and $100,000 is still a pretty psychologically significant level. I think as long as it stays above that level, people are going to be willing to speculate in these types of alts.

Even if Bitcoin sells off from $109,000 by 5%, down to $104,000, it's still above $100,000, and I think it doesn't damage the confidence that people have in the market right now. Additionally, equity markets this morning shrugged off all the tariff nonsense. Trump once again delayed imposing tariffs: “Maybe we can negotiate.”

I think what the market is telling you right now is, “Hey, we're not so concerned with everything falling apart, and so therefore we can actually go speculate on things.”

Yeah.

And that's what we're seeing. I think we probably have another week or two of this before either it gets extended by Bitcoin going to $120,000, which would extend it, or it comes off.

But I do think Bitcoin probably makes a move in the next week or two. I think $110,000 is a very unstable price for Bitcoin. Let me check likely Deribit really quickly for IV. We'll see where it's trading. Basically, if I pull up the screen and it's trading anywhere below 55, I buy some straddles.

Pretty.

Yeah. Or maybe sell some Bitcoin and buy some calls, right? I also would never, ever suggest trading on likely Deribit again now that IBIT has calls.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, look at this. IV is at 50 for the $115,000 strike.

Oh, that's a 2-day, but still.

Yeah, IV is around 55. What's 1-month vol? That's what I'm pulling up right now.

Okay.

Oh, 1-month vol is really nice. 1-month is 46.5 for the $120,000 strike. Basically, for those of you who don't really think like options traders, which is most people, 46% vol—the unit of that is the annualized standard deviation of daily return. It basically tells you that a 1-standard-deviation annual move is going to be 46%.

And it feels like a 46% move over the next 12 months is kind of cheap to me. That's $46,000 a token. I think we'll probably get a bigger move than that—a bigger amplitude over the course of that year.

Another way to think about it, if you want to throw in a little bit of math, is you can take 46.5 and divide it by the square root of 365. Normally it's, what, 250-something—252 for a weekday asset, but 365 for crypto.

You divide it by the square root of 365 because crypto trades 365 days a year, and you get an implied daily move of 2.4%. I think that's actually very low, because I think we're going to see a 10% day. I would guess that we have a 5% to 10% day in the next week, because this is a very unstable price.

With a gun to my head, I think it's up. With a gun to my head, we're at $120,000 reasonably quickly. But I'm not in the business of punting Bitcoin short anymore. I'm stepping back from that game and focusing now on the investment side, because I think we're in an amazing environment for that over the next few months.

I agree that now is not the time to miss the forest for the trees and try to short Bitcoin to pick up an extra $3,000 a token on some sort of projected pullback. It feels like we're about to go parabolic. The setup is a 10 out of 10, but the hype and froth is a 3 out of 10, which is usually the kind of backdrop you want to see for a big rally.

We'll get to macro. Basically, you touched on a few things in your answer: altcoin speculation, macro, and options. So let's start with altcoin speculation. In the spirit of this podcast trying to offer concrete, actionable things you can do to attempt to make money for yourself, just once a day go to likely DeFiLlama.com, sort by 7-day revenue, and see which projects are in the top 20. Anything below $1 billion FDV on there that seems to be consistently earning money is worth watching.

I mentioned Launchcoin last time; that's dropped off a little bit. Now I see things like Bloom Trading Bot and Photon—things that I've never really paid attention to before. Likely DeFiLlama is just a good place to monitor altcoins that are starting to look like real businesses, right? We can all find tokens that do nothing, but finding tokens that earn money is very easy on this platform. You can go and suss those out.

If they're cheap, this is certainly a fertile environment to buy low-delta call options on crypto via these projects. Most of them won't pan out, but the ones that do, you could hit it pretty big here.

I think the next interesting opportunity in crypto is to think about, like you mentioned, macro, Avi. Again, the thesis that we discuss over and over on this podcast is that no politician has the mandate to crash the economy, and they're always going to pump it whenever things start to look shaky. Trump is behaving exactly according to that hypothesis.

The spending bill that just got passed enshrines exactly 0% of the DOGE cuts, right? So it's just becoming ever clearer that Congress has no incentive, mandate, or political will to implement austerity unless they're forced to. And the only thing that can force Congress to implement austerity is the market.

So, bonds are getting taken to the woodshed. Crypto, in this backdrop, is outperforming equities, which tells you something very important. It tells you that we’re going to be cutting taxes—basically cutting government revenues—increasing government spending, debasing our currency, printing more cash, and borrowing more money at higher rates. We’re just entering a debt spiral, and Bitcoin was literally invented in the white paper to protect your portfolio from this. It’s finally differentiating itself from equities because investors are realizing this.

As a macro portfolio hedge, Bitcoin has never looked better. That’s probably why you’re seeing serious—air quotes, serious—investors and companies start to accumulate bags. This is not going to stop. This is a demand-driven supercycle for Bitcoin that will sort of lead everything else.

And then, finally, just to touch on options: like we say, you don’t want to buy options unless you expect the market to move fast. I personally expect the market to move pretty quickly here. I think we could get a nice pop. One of the reasons why the market should move quickly at this point is because I’m trying to picture who would sell it here.

If you look at most of the on-chain metrics, like Coin Days Destroyed and likely MVRV-Z, at current prices, $110,000 sounds expensive relative to—if you’ve been in crypto for a while, or if you’re a middle-aged human like me—you remember when crypto was trading at $100 a token or $1,000 a token. $110,000 a token sounds expensive, but what really matters is where the average level is at which Bitcoin has been spent by the entire world, right?

It’s not like participants are in the money, but not so wildly in the money that they’re just going to be selling with both hands to try and change their lives. Even Michael Sailor’s average price is probably, what, $85,000 or $90,000 now? I don’t know off the top of my head, but he’s pretty indicative of the rest of the space. You can get these metrics for free if you hunt around on Google. People are up 20%ish, maybe 10%. It’s not a level where participants are going to start unloading to take profits. Maybe $150,000 is where that happens. I don’t know. What do you think?

It’s kind of tough to say, to be completely honest. What I’ll say is that there’s been so much activity around Bitcoin, and there’s been so much interest from people that we never thought in a million years would be interested in Bitcoin—people with extremely deep pockets—that I think Bitcoin could, once it sort of reprices to what I believe is fair-ish value, which is $150,000 to $200,000, maybe see some profit taking. But I think that what we actually see is volatility die down in Bitcoin as it becomes more of a stock-market-like asset that people are just allocating to over time.

I do think we’re kind of at a crossing-the-Rubicon moment. We tried to sell off. We tried to collapse with equities. It didn’t happen. Now we’re back above all-time highs, while equities have still not reclaimed their all-time highs. People are starting to realize that Trump is in power for 4 years, he has repeatedly done things that are good for Bitcoin, and maybe we should stop fighting that trend.

We can talk about profit taking, but I do think that, hopefully, market participants are smarter today than they were 3 years ago. Three years ago, what would consistently happen is that everyone would buy the top. All of retail would come in and FOMO-buy, destroying any semblance of normalcy in the market. Bitcoin would just double in the span of a month because everyone was FOMOing in, and then Bitcoin would collapse 50% because everyone would FOMO out at the same time.

The people that own Bitcoin today just don’t do that, right? These are more sophisticated. Yeah, these are maybe not smarter, maybe just less emotional. I don’t want to disparage anybody who was retail in 2017, but these are less emotional people. I think you can be very happy sitting in Bitcoin, just waiting, and you can get those allocations to come on.

Where I do think this dynamic still plays out is in the alt space. You have to be very careful. If your project triples and it hasn’t caught up in terms of actual fundamentals, then maybe it’s time to sell a little bit. I think you need to be a lot more aggressive selling altcoins than you do Bitcoin because none of these things are supported by the broader markets in the same way.

Yeah, just my 2 cents. I’m definitely becoming less of a trader of Bitcoin over time because I just want to play at the extremes, right? When things are really collapsing, I’ll buy. If we’re trading at $250,000 in 3 months, yeah, okay, I’ll take some off. But between that, I don’t really see much reason to move.

5. The Crypto Thesis

Yeah, me neither. Crypto is, if you think about what it is at its core, an engine for incentivizing communities to align toward a common goal. It’s basically a community engagement and incentivization engine. The way that works out is, at a very simple, stupid level, imagine some guys—or gals—start a crypto project and distribute some tokens to stakeholders. Then that particular stakeholder group and the founders will be aligned in attempting to do things that make the number go up.

At a macro level, Bitcoin does the exact same thing. It was created, and at first it was a bunch of dark web anarchists. But as the community grew, now you have Michael Sailor, the president of the United States, you, and me involved in that community. We all believe in this thing and in the role that it plays in the macroeconomy: keeping central banks honest, preserving wealth, and potentially facilitating larger global trade transactions.

All of us talk about that—you, me, Donald Trump, and the random guy on the street who owns Bitcoin. The people coming in now are not the retail degens who were FOMOing into the highs in 2017, for sure. They’re more like people who were probably pretty skeptical of Bitcoin over the last few cycles, and they’re starting to say, “Hey, the volatility has come down to a level where I’m comfortable with it.” That used to be a dealbreaker for me, and it’s no longer one because Bitcoin’s not a 200-vol asset anymore. It’s a 40-vol asset on a bad day, a 20-vol asset on a good day, and, okay, I’m not worried about the volatility anymore.

It does seem like a decent store of value. I understand the macro argument. These are the people that are coming in: somebody who’s got a lot of money and whose Morgan Stanley private wealth adviser recommends IBIT as 1% of their portfolio. That’s the new retail, right?

We could call them more sophisticated. We could call them less degenerate. Maybe the better way to describe them is that they’re a more sanguine investor class. They’re not going to FOMO-panic into Bitcoin at the highs. They’re more just going to dollar-cost average over time. I think it’s steadier, longer-term cash that’s coming in right now, and you’re seeing that in the numbers. You’re seeing that in the likely Farside ETF inflows.

I think it’s basically a safer group of people, a safer herd to be part of, as opposed to previous herds. Now, altcoins are still degen land. I just think that if you have real businesses buying back their own tokens with real revenues, that’s a herd you want to run with as well, especially if the FDV is low.

6. Ads (Kraken OTC, WalletConnect)

I think that if you manage not to get shaken out of those trades over the course of a cycle, this cycle will last another 10 years. By the end of this cycle, there will be ways to 1000x your net worth in crypto if you maintain the right balance of Bitcoin and cycle through altcoins that start off cheap, and then you sell them when degens FOMO into them.

7. Has ETH Bottomed?

Should we talk about ETH? ETH has been outperforming, and we've kind of just ignored it because both of us sort of hate it. What do— is there anything to say there?

I don't have a view right now. I mean, it's outperforming for sure, but really, the outperformance was 1 week, right? The outperformance was really 1 week, from May 5 to May 12. Ever since then, it's kind of just been chopping around against Bitcoin.

But what I will say is, look, as a trader, the chart looks good. It actually looks all right if you look at it. It's really bottomed out.

Which chart, ETH/BTC or just BTC?

For the first time in many, many months—basically, for the first time in 3 years. I'm just taking a look at the weekly chart, and it sort of recovered a level of previous breakdown. To me, that suggests people might think there's very good risk-reward here, and I don't think that's wrong.

I don't think it's necessarily a wrong view to say, “Okay, well, it's gone down so much that it might be extremely good risk-reward to punt it against Bitcoin.” There's an easy stop-out level. I may stop out 20% below, and I'm looking for it to rally 100% against BTC. It's just not a trade that I would take.

It's not a trade that I would take because I'm still seeing zero signs of ETH being able to deliver on anything. I mean, look, yeah, L2s are actually showing promise. Base is doing well. Just to go back to Virtuals for a second, they're doing very well on Base right now. They're generating activity and bringing money to Base because of this new Genesis launchpad that they've done.

They kind of leaned in exactly to what you said, Jonah. They said, “Okay, well, we're now focusing on being a launchpad, and if you launch with us, then you get access to all the other launches.” So, I've got to give the team credit: they do pivot well.

That's what I'm saying. They did a good job pivoting, which, by the way, we need to check, because apparently we have a substantial amount of points. We got a lot of points, and my Phantom wallet for things linked to Virtuals is unusable. It's just a gazillion coins.

I use MetaMask, but that's fair.

You use MetaMask. Who's the boomer now, Avi?

Yeah. But, yeah, we have a decent amount of these points. You should probably figure out what to do with them. If anyone on the Virtuals team is listening to this, let me know.

But back to the main point: ETH has held up, so people are kind of taking it as a trade, but they haven't solved any of the core issues. I'm still not really in short mode right now. I just don't think that's necessarily the right time to be in short mode, except for Worldcoin, which I got squeezed on a little bit.

Guys, it's going lower. I don't know what to tell you. This is going lower. Just don't get blown out on it, but I'm pretty confident.

Oh, but likely Sam Altman—he's so important. You're going to want to scan your eyeballs.

I don't buy it. It's going lower.

Yes, you may, in fact, want to scan your eyeballs.

You may, in fact, buy an Orb, and you may, in fact, do all of these things. But the issue is, if you go to Worldcoin and look at the fully diluted valuation of this thing, it's $14 billion. The market cap is currently $2 billion, and emissions are high. Do you really think there are billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars coming in to buy your Worldcoin bags?

I mean, it's good enough for a squeeze, but it's going to get sold to you. Anyway, I'm still not confident on ETH.

One thing that's been a bit of a disappointment has been likely Berachain. I haven't really seen much uptake there. As an investor, I'm not talking badly about it. I'm just saying it's been disappointing.

Are they going to start pivoting like Virtuals? Are they going to—

I don't know. I actually have to call them and get up to date on their latest plans. I actually don't know, but it has been sad. It's been a little disappointing to see.

Well, I mean, yeah, now's the time with these types of projects when either they start ducking and weaving and trying to come up with new use cases and product-market fit, or they do nothing, which is obviously a sell. Or they do kind of what Friend did, which is points, airdrop—just running on fumes—and then they die.

So, let's see. Hopefully, likely Berachain looks for some value and redirects the heading a little bit toward that value.

Well, I don't know much about that ecosystem. I'm more focused on whatever is generating revenue on the likely DeFiLlama revenue dashboard, because that's the only objective framework that I can cling to right now for altcoin investing.

As far as what you said earlier about ETH being up but you not believing in it and not participating, I think that's a good reminder to everybody that in things like likely Berachain, TAO, and ETH, there may be money to be made, but it's okay if you aren't making it.

There's just too much to focus on in crypto. You kind of have to direct your attention toward something that makes sense.

8. Ads (Ledger)

Yeah, Jonah's spot-on. You just have to pick your battles. That's what it is at the end of the day. You have to focus on the things that really matter, which are the things that you have an edge in.

If you feel like you don't have an edge in a particular area, that's okay. You can try to generate it. Obviously, you can try to listen to this podcast, and hopefully we'll be able to give you some direction on how to look at specific things.

But, yeah, the goal is for you to focus on where you have an edge.

9. Focus On Trading Your Own Book

Yeah. We should talk about a couple of other things, too. Speaking of focusing on where you have an edge, I've noticed a lot of people focusing on this James Wynn guy and his extreme leverage. I think that it's interesting not because of the trade itself, but because crypto Twitter is so fixated on it.

Obviously, the fastest way to get followers, attention, and engagement is to post huge P&L screenshots, which is what he's been doing. But I think the interesting lesson here is how distracted I see the community getting with this guy's leverage bet.

Countless examples in my trading career have shown me—and everybody else—that we're just humans succumbing to human nature and getting fixated on some other person's losses or gains. “Oh my God, did you hear about this guy? He's up $1 billion this year. What's he going to get? Oh my God, he's going to get paid $160 million. He lives in Dubai. Wow.”

You just get focused on other people's P&L. “What did he make it on—gas, oil, diesel?” You get focused on other people's P&L. “Oh, did you hear that this guy who used to be my first-year analyst bought a $17 million mansion in Coral Gables?”

The community is always talking about somebody else's profits. What I've noticed is that when you get focused on other people's money—counting other people's money—you lose sight of the ball. The ball being where the market is going and what actually matters.

One of the few worrisome signs that I see right now is everybody being completely obsessed with one dude's hyper-degen, clearly zero-process approach to trading. He's probably a good trader. He's probably got a good gut feel for things, but I'm not throwing any shade here. I'm just saying that whoever's watching what he's doing and trying to replicate it to earn money for themselves is going to lose all of their money.

You can't copy-trade somebody like that, and you can't focus on somebody's P&L, because then your attention is not being directed toward the opportunity.

I don't think I could have said it any better than you, Jonah. Pocket-watching has always been a thing in crypto because there are people who make absurd amounts of money extremely quickly.

And you know, it’s a natural human feeling to get jealous and say, “Oh man, I could have done that. This guy’s not smarter than me. I could figure this out, too.” But it’s really corrosive to both your P&L and your mentality, short term and especially very much so long term, because what it forces your brain to do is look for quick opportunities to make money. Everyone wants to catch up; everyone wants to be that guy, catch up, and brag to their friends. Just don’t let that happen.

Focus on beating yourself. Don’t focus on beating other people in this market or watching their pockets, because I do think that level of jealousy, or “Oh man, what’s going on?” can be very harmful to most people. Obviously, there are some people out there—like a lot of the top hedge fund guys I know—who can’t stand it if somebody else makes more money than them that year, and it does drive them. So there are some people who can handle it, but you’re likely not one of them.

Yeah, I’m not. I mean, you’re probably not. Look, competition is good, right? Wanting to win is good in a general sense. But being upset about somebody else’s returns? Where I’ve seen it work is in actual business, right? Ken Griffin is notorious for this. He’ll get enraged that his physical gas team is underperforming Trafigura’s physical gas team, and so he will poach people from Trafigura and try to develop either parallel or superior intellectual property within his organization. He is motivated by the fact that he underperformed a group in an asset class where he believes there’s opportunity.

So, if you’re Ken Griffin and you’re trading people and trading IP, you can certainly notice where pockets of money are and attempt to gravitate toward it. But if we’re all just in this—I don’t know whether you call it player versus player or player versus environment—mode in crypto, where you’re individually investing or institutionally investing in crypto, unless it’s, “Okay, my mid-frequency strategy is underperforming what Tower just did last year, so I need to do better and figure out what they’re doing,” unless it’s a directed effort like that, I think it’s the road to ruin.

For example, if I’m saying, “Oh, wow, this James Wynn guy went 20x, levered a billion dollars’ worth of Bitcoin at $100K, took profit at $106K, and made a lot of money. Maybe I should have done that, too.” That’s not going to work, is my point.

Don’t let other people outwork you, to quote our boy likely Ansem. Work harder than people, but work harder on what matters—not by focusing on P&L screenshots and trying to get in and out at the same level as somebody you don’t even know. You never know how much they’re making, right? You never do. I guess you’re on mute. So: don’t let people outwork you. But, yeah, focus on your own work at the end of the day.

10. Is Coinbase Cooked?

There was one thing also that I wanted to talk about, kind of unrelated. I know I’m jumping around here, Avi, but on previous episodes, we didn’t have a chance to talk about the Coinbase hack. I don’t think I would touch Coinbase anymore. They gate your money. They lose your details. Am I freaking out too much? Is Coinbase still a legitimate platform in crypto? Is its stock price overvalued now? I’m really skeptical of a platform that will just make it so hard for you. It’s supposed to be a gateway, basically, and I guess an exchange. But as a retail investor, is Coinbase worth touching now? I’ve heard a million stories of people losing their funds and now losing their personal data, getting doxxed. What are we doing about this? I don’t want to touch it.

You know what? It’s hard to say, because there are 2 potential things happening right now. One, Coinbase is really horrible, and Coinbase really messed up and built a really bad product, and nobody should use them. Or 2, they’re just the first ones to come out and admit this, and everyone has had these issues, because crypto is really hard. Crypto is very hard.

What I do think is true is that Coinbase has historically tried to do too much, spread itself very thin, and gotten bloated in a way. Kraken, I think, has done a good job being focused and not bloating itself up too much, and I think Coinbase is a victim of its own success in some capacity.

Also, I don’t want to go too hard on Coinbase, because a lot of this was social engineering and phishing, and that is very difficult to protect against. That’s basically your first line of defense: the user of the platform. If they’re stupid, nobody’s hiring 125-IQ customer-support people or 130-IQ customer-support people. If you’re dealing with a career criminal who has an IQ of 130 and knows exactly what to say to trick people, can I really blame the customer-support people, or should I blame the person who didn’t secure their account properly?

There’s a little bit of that. What I didn’t like was their response, and basically how it all came out and how they sort of knew this was going on. It just doesn’t really leave a good taste in my mouth. That’s why, as safe as any exchange could be, you always have to hold some Bitcoin on a Ledger, just offline. You need offline Bitcoin. I think that’s number 1.

Number 2: Robinhood’s looking pretty damn good. Robinhood’s probably sitting there going, “Okay, this is nice. This is good for us.”

That’s a good take. I mean, it’s bullish Robinhood, bullish Kraken, bullish Hyperliquid. If this stuff can happen to Coinbase, it can happen to anybody. So I actually think it’s a decent argument for Hyperliquid—for just going all self-custody and decentralized. Yeah, you could get hacked, but Coinbase can get hacked, too. What’s the advantage of using Coinbase? At least Hyperliquid won’t gate your funds. Their customer service is probably just as terrible. Whatever.

I think your point about maintaining Bitcoin on a Ledger or another cold wallet is really worth underlining. That is something I think is of increasing importance in this increasingly volatile, online, dangerous world. It makes it harder to trade actively when you have to click buttons and plug USB sticks into computers or laptops, or Bluetooth your way in and out of crypto. That’s probably a good thing at this phase. It’s probably good to enforce some discipline, avoid overtrading, and air-gap your assets, just in case the next exchange hacker or rogue AI fucking Skynet thing decides to start appropriating everybody’s value.

As this weird tail risk emerges, I think the value of an air gap goes parabolic. So, yeah, keep your dough offline, in a physical safe somewhere. I think that’s a good horror note to end on.

Jonah, don’t let him get you. Don’t let the AI get you. Keep yourself safe.

Stay safe out there, everybody. Great seeing you, man. Talking to you as always.

Likewise.

All right. Until next week. See you.