Return Of The Bull Market | 1000x

The market structure has shifted, and people are clearly still allocating to Bitcoin. There’s clearly still a lot of cash on the sidelines, and then you have, as I’ve said many times, rate cuts coming, in my opinion, in the next 3 to 4 months. You have the halving coming, you have the ETF coming, and now this is what’s at the forefront of everyone’s mind.

Our first episode since interviewing Anatoly, which was, by the way, a phenomenal episode. I learned a ton, and I think most of the points that Jonah brought up against Anatoly and Solana, and his abuse of the Solana ecosystem, Anatoly did a very good job dispelling all of those horrific lies that Jonah decided to tell. I definitely enjoyed it. I think the listeners seemed to enjoy it. Jonah, what did you think?

Yeah, we got to debrief on that. We didn’t really debrief in the previous episode. We spent an hour and a half with Anatoly just learning about Solana.

Here’s what I learned that kind of changed my mind about that chain. I had previously thought about crypto as an institutional settlement solution, like a database for big, important trades, and Ethereum does just fine there. There’s a lot of TVL on Ethereum and everything.

Anatoly made me realize that centralized solutions for microtransactions, like payments or a few other types of smaller transactions—whatever’s running Render, Hivemapper, and Helium—are probably better off in a decentralized world as well. I just didn’t factor that into my thinking before.

Why should all of that run on Ethereum, too? I’m not a maximalist. I don’t have any religion when it comes to trading. I guess he convinced me that Solana is as good as any solution for lower-value transactions that need to be fast and not require tons of gas fees.

That’s a massive use case, and if Solana can pull that off, it’s going to be even more valuable than it has become recently. Where I was less convinced, or where I felt like maybe I missed something or didn’t understand it as well, was when he was explaining some of the Firedancer stuff.

I understand that it’s good to have a validator client that’s laser-fast, but I’m still a little bit uncomfortable with the fact that it’s developed by one centralized trading company. Decentralization matters in crypto. If everyone’s running validator clients built by Jump, there’s got to be something in it for them other than altruism to build a happier, more equitable marketplace.

I’m a little bit nervous about that, and he didn’t really explain it. But he crushed every other argument I had against Solana, and he really changed my mind on it.

Yeah, I kind of agree with you. I want to dig into that point a little bit. I don’t know how much it matters that Jump is building Firedancer, because here are the facts: It’s going to be open-source software. Once it’s live, once it’s out there, once it’s known, everybody’s going to know how it works.

Jump is probably building it because they have some sort of good relationship with Solana. They might even be getting paid on the back end. I don’t know. I don’t think it matters, as long as Jump can’t co-opt the system because they built the framework.

It’s just a large company contributing to open-source software, which happens all the time in Web2. You have large companies that contribute to open-source software as just part of doing business. You have engineers at Facebook, Google, and Apple who continuously contribute to open-source software, not necessarily because they derive any immediate, direct benefit from contributing to that software, but because they use it, find it useful and good, and want to improve it.

They want to make it better because there are certain things they need out of their systems that they’re not currently getting, and they view the best way of getting those needs met as building it themselves.

Yeah, like Meta building Llama. That’s a good example.

Right. It becomes a public good. As long as it’s open source, I don’t necessarily view that as a negative. I view it as potentially a positive, because Jump can bring in other people.

While I agree there’s probably something going on behind the scenes, I don’t really care to find out. What I care about is whether it actually improves the experience of validating Solana, whether it delivers all of the benefits that Anatoly said it will deliver. I think the answer is very likely to be yes.

Now you finally have a monolithic L1 that is useful, that doesn’t go down, that is fast, and that has this embedded system where you can basically build whatever you want and your application will run smoothly. Having that effective database underlying what could be the whole internet in the future is pretty bullish.

With all of that said, one thing that stood out to me was that he didn’t really have an answer for what the value of Solana should be in the future. Let’s say Solana is the one crypto platform that survives in 20 years—the only thing that people touch is Solana. If there’s no mechanism to deliver value back to the Solana token itself, does that token deserve a high valuation?

Especially if we keep outpacing innovation on the scalability side, let’s say you moved every single transaction that could have ever possibly occurred in the world onto Solana. Fees might still look quite low. In fact, they should still look low. You might have a broader base of transactions that are delivering revenue, but if scalability outpaces the growth of transactions, then you end up with a token that probably isn’t worth much in 10 or 15 years.

With all that said, we’re traders at the end of the day. You and I trade, and a lot of people in the market trade. Solana has been a phenomenal bet since you first said that it was garbage.

I see this over and over, especially in bear markets: The most hated assets actually do the best. The reason is that hated assets generate an emotional reaction.

Yeah. These guys, these developers, are pouring their livelihoods into this chain, even though it was kind of on its knees for a while earlier this year. They get upset when you tell them they’re pouring their livelihoods into a doomed vaporware product.

That came out when I tweeted against it. Maybe we should just shitpost against Polkadot, NEAR, and Tezos and see what happens. I don’t think people would care. Cardano is different. I think even the Cardano people have given up at this point.

That’s the difference. Solana generates that reaction. It reminds me a lot of Ethereum in 2019 and 2020.

I think Solana was a lot of people’s first amazing trade in their lives. The only trade that Sam made that probably made money. Maybe a lot of people got into crypto because of that, and they’re still here. I think that’s accurate.

I also think—am I going to sell every last bit of Solana that I own if it hits $250? One hundred percent. No question.

Yeah, that’s just the way it works.

I view this as a phenomenal trade. I think the usage of Solana, and the cult of Solana, is only going to grow. I think real, interesting applications are going to be built on Solana.

But the reality is that this is crypto, and I think the application layer is where most of the value is going to end up occurring anyway.

One thing Anatoly said that actually stuck with me is that, when you look at Web2, the actual number of applications that have generated usage is smaller than the infrastructure layer—not in terms of market cap, but in terms of the number of different things that exist.

I viewed that as a very strong point. You think of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, which are all Meta. Google, Gmail, and a lot of these applications—there actually aren’t that many in the grand scheme of things.

You might see the same thing happen with crypto. His argument was that you would see a very similar thing happen with crypto: a few select groups of applications get extremely large, become extremely valuable, and drive most of the economic activity on crypto. That’s actually okay.

The question is which ones they’re going to be and what it’s going to look like in 5 or 10 years.

One slight difference is that almost everything in crypto is open source, so it’s a lot easier to compete with these products. You can just fork them, tweak them, improve them, and launch.

You see a lot of copy-pasting in Web2 as well. Snapchat became successful, and Instagram launched Stories or whatever the hell it was. I don’t know—I’m not on either of those apps. I’m too old.

I think you bring up a really good point about the applications that cause home runs. This also ties back into Solana and my original thinking on Solana.

Look at the applications on Solana—this was about 9 or 10 months ago. You had STEPN, a walking app that crashed the entire chain. Then you had a bunch of Ethereum DeFi ecosystem clones and NFT projects.

You had the pixelated seagull things that looked kind of like pixelated CryptoPunks, but were knockoffs. I was just like, “Okay, this chain is filled with applications that are not that useful, and the one innovative application, the walking app, kind of took down the whole thing.”

Solana had not fulfilled its promise. It was vaporware. I was too quick to write it off.

What I should have realized at the time, especially when it was trading at $8 a token—to my own credit, I didn’t sell there, but I should have been buying—was that I was looking at this thing and saying, “It’s broken. It’s not fulfilling its promise. There’s no reason to pay attention to it.”

Chains can turn it around. This is a good lesson for traders out there. Just because something is getting beaten up doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to zero. Trends can reverse.

These developers who are super committed to one ecosystem or another can turn it around. Anatoly talked to us last week about how he fixed the flaw that caused STEPN to take down the chain, and they’re attracting new applications now.

Fine, maybe Ethereum has more TVL in DeFi because it’s a settlement layer for high-value transactions. But applications like Helium and Hivemapper are flocking to Solana, and those are the next apps.

So the big question for crypto traders is: What’s next? Solana started the year at $8 and ripped up to $42. That’s insane—the returns were huge. What’s going to pop next?

We mentioned Near, Polkadot, and Cardano earlier. Are any of those things coming out of the gutter? What do you think, Avi?

Here’s one thing that’s happened with Solana that extends to how I’m thinking about the market and positioning right now.

There were many people who actually had a very bullish view on Solana but weren’t positioned for it because they saw the supply issue from Galaxy selling a bunch of Solana from the FTX estate. They knew they wanted to buy, but they weren’t exactly sure when to buy.

They knew they had a 2- to 3-year thesis on it, but they wanted to wait for a better price. Then the market ripped, and it turned out that the supply was being absorbed really nicely. There were actually a lot of other buyers in the market that these people were going to be competing with.

Something in the market has shifted, Jonah. We’re seeing, for the first time, supply actually go the opposite way: The amount of supply there is to sell, even if it’s telegraphed, is less than the amount waiting on the sidelines that wants to buy.

This has created a psychological shift in the market. People are now looking at good products that are delivering a good experience but may have been written off. People who were waiting on the sidelines for the market to get hot again are now coming back in and saying, “Wait a second. Maybe I should be buying this stuff.”

A few examples of this: Blur is a great example. It’s a great product, and it’s used. It was hated by the NFT community for, in my opinion, fugazi reasons.

Oh yeah, it’s tanking the NFT price floor.

It’s not tanking the NFT price floor. If people wanted to buy it at that price, they can go buy it at that price.

It’s causing efficiency.

Yes, it’s causing efficiency. You can get paid to list assets below the floor to trade, but if people wanted to buy them at that price, they can go buy them at that price.

I wish Blur would tank the floor so I could buy some.

What am I seeing? Blur is now up a ton since the lows because people realized it’s a good product. If you like NFTs and you like the direction of the market over the next 5 years, 3 years, or 1 year, then you should probably own some.

A lot of people didn’t because of the airdrop that’s coming and because of the supply issues. I think people are starting to realize, “I can’t just wait. I have to buy at a good value, at a good valuation, that I think is going to trade far above this at some point in the next year or 2.”

We’re seeing the beginning of the same thing happen with CryptoPunks. There are a lot of people who told themselves, “When the new cycle comes, I’m going to buy CryptoPunks because CryptoPunks are going to rip really hard.” You’re starting to see people position for that now, and people are going to get really worried that it’s going to get away from them.

The psychological shift in the market is: “I need to go buy my cycle bags now, otherwise I’ll be screwed. If Bitcoin goes to $50,000, I’m not going to get in.”

On the flip side, it makes people a little more comfortable buying them because they think, “Maybe it goes down 20%, maybe it goes down 30%, but at this stage in the market I’m playing for a 3x, a 5x, or a 10x.”

You don’t blow your whole load immediately, but you start allocating to the things that you like long term.

Bitcoin is doing the same thing. Why do I think Bitcoin rallied so hard over the last month? I think there’s actually one specific reason.

When we got really bullish, we didn’t bottom-tick it. We didn’t buy $25,000 or $26,000 with size. We did buy $28,000 with size. Why did we buy $28,000 with size?

Take a step back. The thing that rocketed Bitcoin up was the fake Cointelegraph headline about an ETF being launched. We’d both been talking on this podcast for so long about how that ETF was the catalyst. The hard part was answering the question, “When does that catalyst start to kick in?”

The moment the fake ETF headline came out, we traded $30,000, then retraced down to $28,000. You had to buy. Why did you have to buy? Everybody in the market looked at that and said, “Oh my God, if the ETF drops tomorrow—and we think there’s a 90% chance it drops by Q1 of next year—I’m so out of position. I’m going to miss the whole thing. I have to start allocating now.”

It flipped. Sometimes you need a catalyst to get people to position, to break them out of the mentality of sitting on the sidelines. That tweet, funny enough, even though it was completely fake, was the catalyst.

What you’re looking for when you’re trading a market like this is to understand the drivers behind allocation and what could lead those people to allocate if you have a positive view on this asset class.

The moment that happens, you say to yourself, “That was our catalyst, so now we probably get the ETF rally a little bit sooner than expected.” I wasn’t expecting it at $25,000. I wasn’t expecting it at $26,000.

At $25,000, it was easy to sit there and say, “It’s going to stay here forever,” because there was no catalyst. The way I always frame things is that, with Bitcoin, you have 2 things that get people to allocate: momentum and value.

At $25,000, it didn’t really feel like value to me. In hindsight, I think I was wrong on that. But you also very much had momentum to the downside.

Once that tweet came out, once the ETF tweet came out, and Bitcoin traded to $30,000 and retraced down to $28,000, you had momentum on your side and a catalyst to start allocating.

Now we’re just in an uptrend. We’re trading at $35,000 right now. We keep adding. We’re wading it in anytime we get a dip because we did take off a bit the first time we hit $35,000. Anytime we trade below it, we say, “Okay, let’s wade it in.”

Why? Because the market structure has shifted, people are clearly still allocating to Bitcoin, and there’s clearly still a lot of cash on the sidelines. Then you have rate cuts coming, in my opinion, in the next 3 to 4 months. You have the halving coming, and you have the ETF coming.

Now this is what’s at the forefront of everyone’s mind: The risk to buying Bitcoin is pretty limited here. I just don’t think you can lose that much money buying Bitcoin at these levels.

I hate you saying that so much.

Why?

Because I’m always wrong.

No, that’s not it. Here’s the setup. You have, like you said, the halving. I think interest rates have peaked. You have an idiosyncratic, once-every-4-years fundamental catalyst, meaning less supply and less miner selling. You can’t fight the flows.

Behind all of that, you have an institutional unlock coming. There are plenty of companies and people who just can’t touch spot Bitcoin but can touch an ETF. All of that caps your downside, to me, over the long run.

You talk about whether you wait for a dip to buy Bitcoin or just dollar-cost average in at current levels. I have a framework for this that I want to share.

At Goldman, on the commodities trading floor, before computers took over, there was a lot of shouting. I was market-making all day, screaming. I’d go home every day with a hoarse voice from shouting out quotes on options and futures.

One thing that sometimes happened on the trading floor was that I’d quote a tight market, and a client would come in and ask for a penny better on the bid or a penny better on the offer, and then they’d trade. The joke on the floor was, “So-and-so’s being a dick for a tick.”

There’s a big trading truism: Don’t be a dick for a tick. Don’t try to ask for that extra basis point or penny if it doesn’t really matter to you in the long run, given your trading horizon and your P&L projection.

If that’s the difference between you buying and not buying, you probably aren’t in this to try to make a lot of money. You’re probably just being a dick for a tick, trying to scrape pennies here and there.

There’s some truth to it, but if you just overpay for everything, you’ll bleed out. You have to develop a real framework for when you cross the spread or get in at levels that are well off the lows, and when you hold off and wait for a better price.

The framework I developed is what I like to call the bad-risk, good-risk framework. Basically, if you’re looking at your portfolio, you have to assess whether you’re holding toxic waste or pure gold. You have to be a little bit black and white about it.

Not holding something can be toxic risk as well. If you’re passionate about crypto and think Bitcoin is going to trade at $1 million a token in your lifetime, and you’re flat Bitcoin, that flatness is toxic risk in your portfolio.

When it comes to toxic risk, you need to get the hell out of it. If you’re long something you think is going to zero, don’t be a dick for a tick. Just sell it.

If you’re effectively short or flat something you think is going to rip, don’t be a dick for a tick. Go and buy, even if it’s trading at $35,000 and you wish you could have gotten it at $25,000. It may never trade there again.

However, in the meantime, especially with range-bound things where you’re trying to assess or tweak exposures that aren’t necessarily toxic, I think it does pay to be a little patient and not just get excited about things at the same time as everybody else is getting excited.

I’ll just tell you my view on Bitcoin, and then I’ll stop rambling. I think that, over our lifetimes, Avi, this is one of the most obvious trades in the history of finance.

There is an asset that has been accepted as a store of value, a means of exchange, and basically a global reserve asset. The genie is out of the bottle, and it’s not going back in.

The supply is constrained. The stock-to-flow dynamics are such that only 21 million of these things will ever be minted. Given that’s the case, you can’t do an oil or crude-oil thing and go mine more of it.

I think this thing is going to go parabolic throughout our lifetimes. I’m still buying Bitcoin here for myself. I think it’s going up a lot, and I don’t really care.

Solana, I’m less sure of, so I would not be adding at current levels after it just did a 5x to 6x off the lows.

That’s the most bullish thing you’ve ever said.

That’s a big statement.

I mean, I agree. Maybe I’m just more tempered. I’m not holding this for $1 million a token.

I didn’t say that was my view.

But if you said it, you wouldn’t be laughed out of a room. People would listen to your opinion and debate you. It’s not like they’d say, “This guy’s full of shit.”

Even $100,000 a token.

Peter Thiel has this amazing framework. Let’s not forget that crypto is tradable technology; it’s software. He says people overestimate the probability of a broken thing working and underestimate the probability of a thing that’s already working going up.

That’s the arbitrage. Pick Series C companies and buy them. Yes, they’ve ripped a lot. They’re up 100x from the seed round, but they work. They’re proven, and they’re going to go up a lot more.

If something is struggling along at the seed or Series A level, don’t touch it with a 10-foot pole. I think now might be a time to lean into the stuff that’s actually working, and Solana might be one of those things if you see apps flocking to it.

Paul Tudor Jones said something basically identical in concept: Losers average losers, and winners average winners.

That’s a good one.

That’s why, when I look at the market right now, I’m buying the winners.

The other thing I wanted to point out is that the way the market is trading right now is kind of nice from a technical perspective. If you want to technically trade BTC, go on Coinalyze. Pull up 3 things: open interest, CVD on spot instruments, and CVD on futures instruments.

When you see shorting in the market, it’s been a really good short-term trade over and over. For example, we just did a trade where Bitcoin was heavily shorted. It sold off to $34,600, we bought $34,600, and now it’s at $35,400.

A portion of that trade will come off, but you saw so many shorts come in—around 9,000 BTC worth of shorts—and those guys have tended to get squeezed at the bottom of what I call an up-accumulation range.

That’s been an interesting short-term trade that you can take. It’s happened pretty frequently—actually, 4 times in the last 2 weeks.

I used to not believe in technicals, but after spending more time reviewing that thesis, I found that technicals are pretty much all there is to trade systematically with a time horizon of under an hour.

If you have a computer trading for you, technicals are all you’ve got. But on longer-term things, I still don’t believe you can make money trading investment views based on technicals.

However, I do believe you can apply technical analysis to what, in crypto, we’ll call fundamental indicators. In crypto, that means things like Glassnode’s MVRV metric or CDD metrics.

When those things start to show momentum, you can use that as an input to trade the underlying asset, whether that’s Bitcoin or Ethereum. That actually does work.

I would 100% agree with that.

There are some really interesting charts coming through recently. You’re starting to see the decline in stablecoins level out over the last 2 or 3 weeks, so I think money is actually coming into the system.

You’re also seeing froth come back to the altcoin market, which is sometimes bad. But back in 2021, we had extended periods of high funding for a long time.

I wouldn’t necessarily call this extended yet, but there are a lot of altcoins that have had positive funding for 2 or 3 weeks now and haven’t really pulled back. It’s not egregiously positive funding; it’s just reasonably positive, and open-interest growth is reasonably good.

That’s an indication that there’s new money coming into the system, especially because Bitcoin is holding the highs. That’s the key.

The danger zone is when Bitcoin is trading at $34,000, altcoins are ripping, and funding is ripping. That means capital is recycling from Bitcoin into altcoins.

What you have now is Bitcoin at the highs, with altcoins sustaining high funding. That’s not necessarily as dangerous. A lot of people on Crypto Twitter were pointing to it as a dangerous thing, but it’s more dangerous when Bitcoin isn’t trading well.

When Bitcoin is trading well, that dynamic can persist, and it indicates that new money is coming in.

The way I view this market right now is that I’m looking for $40,000 to $45,000 in the next month. At that point, I’ll probably take my exposure down substantially and rotate into altcoins that I think are prone for a catch-up.

Hopefully ETH/BTC gets crushed at that point, and you can rotate into ETH for the ETH/BTC catch-up trade. Then you start filtering down. You can buy things like Optimism, Arbitrum, and Lido. Once you get the ETF approval, you can say goodbye to the trade for the time being.

I’m too much of a chicken to rotate out of BTC if it trades at $45,000. I’m adding here. I’ve been adding, very slowly admittedly, for a long time since $25,000. I’m still adding now, and I’ve been adding through GBTC because I think there’s convexity there.

I think Bitcoin will trade at $70,000 a token before the end of Q3 next year. Given that view, I’m too scared to sell any BTC to rotate into anything else.

Sure, there might be more reward in Lido, but there’s so much more risk that it doesn’t justify that reward. I’d rather stick with BTC and keep it chunky.

That’s okay. You can stay poor. Is “NGMI” dead after the last cycle?

I’m a trader. I look for these types of catch-up trades. If you can accurately move—

One thing that’s still true is that there aren’t that many people playing the market aggressively right now, so you’re seeing a lot of lag across the market.

The ETH/BTC trade is an example of that. Very rarely, even if ETH/BTC looks really bad, do you get such a rip from Bitcoin with no move from ETH. I think it just took people a little while to acclimate to that, even though, theoretically, ETH should be the second-most-watched asset.

I think you’re going to see the same thing downstream.

Overall, we’re extremely bullish on the market. There are a lot of really interesting ways to play this. What I’d advocate is that you start paying attention to patterns, because pattern-matching is going to be really important right now.

There are going to be a lot of interesting ways to make money as the market heats up just by noticing how the market reacts and trades in certain scenarios, where money flows, and which correlated tokens might be lagging that you can trade for catch-ups.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff to do in the markets right now. Maybe on the next podcast I can detail exactly how to do some of that. That might be fun for our listeners.

I agree. I wrote a Twitter thread about how to use Twitter as a trading tool, and this guy responded with what was probably the best trolling ever.

He wrote, “How to draw an owl.” The first step was “Draw 2 circles,” and the second step was “Draw the rest of the fucking owl.” Then there was a beautifully drawn owl.

I think what you just said deserves a bit of trolling. It’s like, “Yeah, just do some pattern analysis. It’ll come.”

Fine. I’ll be more concrete for the listeners.

Download a series of price data across the top 50 coins that you can trade on perpetual futures. Calculate the rolling correlations over a 30-day time period, and then calculate the z-score of those correlations.

What you want to do is calculate the predicted correlations. Then take all the assets and compare their prices against each other, and find divergences in those correlations.

For example, 2 assets might historically have a correlation of 0.3, but over the last 1 or 3 days they’ve diverged significantly in price, and the correlation is much lower than you would expect.

One could potentially outperform the other. Then you bet on the ones with the highest divergences—in other words, you play the catch-up trade.

So if Aave and Compound have a very high price correlation historically, and they diverge because Aave rips while Compound lags, you’re supposed to buy Compound, sell Aave, or do both and play the pair trade?

Exactly.

Okay, smart. There’s something concrete, so it’s not just “draw the rest of the fucking owl.”

You can go do that very simply.

I love it. What other fun things can you do in this market environment?

You could just buy Bitcoin and wait. I think you could buy CryptoPunks. I’m getting bullish.

If you look on The Block, they have a great NFT volume tracker. NFTs are just ultra-levered crypto. Punks and Apes are still near the lows. That could be an amazing catch-up trade.

You could buy a floor Punk, or PartyDAO your way into a floor Punk, or something like that.

The fact that volumes are picking up in NFTs means it’s a sentiment indicator. It means that people who have been hibernating in this crypto winter are starting to feel a little less terrified, and that’s pretty good.

I don’t usually like looking at the Fear and Greed Index that gets published occasionally, because I think it’s too binary. It’s either maximum panic or maximum greed, so it doesn’t give you longer-term signals.

I don’t use it, but I think NFT volumes are a real thing to pay attention to. We’re picking up off some pretty drastic lows, too. It’s getting interesting quickly. That could be a good one.

I feel bold right now. I don’t think there’s a lot of risk. There’s just too much tailwind going on.

What could really smoke crypto? I’m trying to think of things that could take it out. Some sort of crazy government-default scenario or a massive recession.

But another reason why I feel confident around those geopolitical and macroeconomic risks is that the last 3 or 4 times we’ve had serious risk—2008 and COVID were the 2 big ones, and then a couple of other ones, like the 2018 taper tantrum—the government just turns on the fire hose of money.

Crypto is literally purpose-built to hedge your portfolio against those scenarios. I almost think, “Bring on the crisis.” That’s a dip to buy because of the anticipated response.

I think that’s very accurate.

All I’ll say is that I’m hopeful this continues trending in our direction. I think this is a really good time for Bitcoin because it’s also become much less correlated with the broader markets.

You have a lot of strength in BTC when other things are doing poorly. If people are searching for return, especially on the macro-trading side, Bitcoin starts to look a lot more interesting here.

It’s crazy. I talk to my friends outside the crypto market, and they look at me like I’m diseased, like I’ve been wading through nuclear waste for the last 2 years of my life.

Meanwhile, if you just look at the board—look at Bitcoin—it was down a lot in 2022, but if you didn’t invest in it this year, you’re just making excuses for your underperformance at this point. It’s been stellar.

This isn’t something that most people can’t touch. Since January 1, we’ve been telling people to buy GBTC. How much is GBTC up on the year?

I think 230%. ETH is up 200%, by the way. It’s still a great trade.

And you can throw this stuff in your Schwab or Fidelity account. It’s not like you need to set up cold storage and have people guarding it with guns. It’s accessible.

I think what you’re trying to say is that if you listen to everything we say, you make money.

Easy. Just draw the fucking owl.

Actually, it’s funny because I view this podcast as a chance for us to explain how we think about things. But the reality is that we change our opinions every 30 seconds.

I don’t think we’ve changed our opinion on being bullish on crypto throughout this entire period.

No, we were tactically bearish for a bit.

I got some calls wrong. In aggregate, we’ve had a very good year, and I think most of the calls have been pretty good.

But you have to adjust your opinion when the information changes. You just have to. That’s a great lesson for the listeners.

It’s not just that you should change your view when the information changes. You should also put your views out there. We’re podcasting right now. Six hundred thousand people looked at this tweet, and half of them came after me and called me a clown.

That’s good, because then I learn something. If you aren’t putting your opinions out there on the table and laying it all out in the open on a podcast or on Twitter, you’re never going to solicit any feedback. You’re just going to live in your echo chamber, miss things, and get things wrong.

That’s what trading floors used to be so good for when they were open-outcry places. You were constantly absorbing information and debating things. Now a lot of that has migrated online, whether it’s on Twitter, X, Spotify, or here at 1000x.

If you think we’re wrong, if you think we’re missing something, or if you think the GBTC discount is going to widen to 90%, talk to us. Let’s figure this out together.

Maybe we should be rotating out of GBTC and into spot. Maybe we should sell it outright and wait for a dip to buy. Maybe we should be adding and not being a dick for a tick because this thing is going to double or more.

We want to talk about this stuff. Talking is how you adapt and improve your process as a trader.

I agree. That’s a good note to end on, Jonah, with this little nugget of knowledge that you’ve given to everybody. As always, I love chatting with you.

Likewise. This has been a fun podcast. It’s great. We’ll have to find somebody even crazier than Anatoly to come on to give us a schooling next time. Maybe this time I’ll do the drunk tweet and we’ll see.

Wasn’t that drunk. Just had a couple of wine.

But it’s such a good story. It’s just such a good story, dude. Great to see you as always.

Let’s try to find some guests. If anybody wants to be on the 1000x pod, DMs are open. We want to talk.

Yes. All right, take care everyone. Later. Till next time.