What A U.S Strategic Reserve Means For Crypto?

There are 2 different paths that we need to take in order to go higher. Unless on Friday, at the Crypto Summit, it's announced that the U.S. is allocating tens of billions of dollars to Bitcoin, I don't think we go higher.

I agree. That's kind of the bar. Are we getting more details over the next 7 days that the U.S. is going to be allocating tens of billions of dollars? If the crypto strategic reserve turns out to be $500 million, we're back in the $80,000s pretty quickly.

1. The Strategic Reserve Impact

All right, guys, welcome back to another 1000x. This has been a freaking whirlwind. My God, Jonah, the Bitcoin chart is just—like, the weekly chart is insanity right now. Whipsaw—the total whipsaw. Basically, 4 straight days of down, then a pause, and then a 5th day where it nukes 10% in a day. Now we're up 15%—I guess from the low to where we are here, 18% or 19% from the low to where we are.

This is just nuts, and we're still at $93,000. We haven't even gotten back into the previous range, so nobody can say, "Oh, man, the chart looks really amazing right now." This is just madness. What is going on here, our fearless leader?

I was saying on the pod last week that it's very rare to see Bitcoin go sideways and not break down at the highs. I think I've said that 150 times in 150 different ways: Bitcoin doesn't go sideways at the highs and then not have a sell-off. What I wasn't necessarily expecting was a sell-off that was 20% straight down for 4 days. I was expecting it to be a little bit choppier, so that was interesting.

I got bullish in the mid-to-low $80,000s, and then we got that 1 final flush down to $78,000, which I think was actually very good for Bitcoin. It got a lot of the weak hands out. There were a ton of people waiting for that sub-$80,000 level to step in and buy, and you got a tremendous amount of volume into that level. Then it reversed so quickly that basically, sellers there were selling to passive bids, but nobody who was actively waiting for that level had time to get in.

All of these sellers are very likely guys who just panicked and still want to own Bitcoin. They're saying, "I don't want to hold this thing if it goes down to the $60,000s. I don't want to lose any more money. I've lost so much money." I actually think we've set ourselves up really nicely, even just from a technical perspective. That's not even talking about the news that just came out, this crypto strategic reserve that our president has announced. What's going on there, our fearless leader?

A couple of points on what you just said. I haven't touched my book throughout the entirety of this sell-off. I'm just sitting on the sidelines, tweeting less, panicking a little bit, but not really, because I don't expect this thing to break down.

None of this was in my bingo card, Avi. I was expecting the market to keep steadily grinding higher as you get more and more passive buying, because the regulatory picture looks better. This wasn't really something that I wanted to trade into. At one point, I was fully allocated to crypto, but now I have dry powder. I'm not going to sell this, obviously. I'm more just sitting and waiting for when I should buy, and I don't like catching falling knives.

I don't think this crypto news is really going to herald the beginning of a new bull market where we just go up-only for another 6 months. I think this is probably going to get sold into for a bit, then it'll probably bottom out, and then I think we keep rallying.

There is a Crypto Summit coming on March 7. What day is that? March 7 is going to be—I'm of the opinion that this Crypto Summit is similar to all of the other catalysts around Trump. When he went on to talk at the Bitcoin conference, we had a big rally into that and then a sell-off after.

A lot of people are very excited about the idea of this strategic reserve, and it's really big news for Solana, XRP, and Cardano, because those were directly mentioned by Trump. Cardano being mentioned is insane.

Well, it's not that insane. Here's my hot take: Crypto Twitter has its hair on fire over this Cardano thing, but if you just go to CoinGecko and look at the top non-stablecoins, you've got Bitcoin, check; Ethereum, check; XRP, love it or hate it, vaporware or not, a coin worth almost $300 billion, so check. Then you've got stablecoin Tether, and you have BNB, which you can't include because it's the China coin and Trump doesn't like China.

Then you've got Solana, check; USDC; and Cardano at $50 billion, check. After that, it's Dogecoin, Lido Staked Ether, Tron, and a bunch of other garbage. Honestly, what am I missing? I don't think you're necessarily missing anything.

If the government is going to be buying crypto, it should probably concentrate on the things that are actually useful and have actual potential. This is a weird argument for me to be having, because just take a step back for a second: Why would the government want to buy useless vaporware assets that don't have any real users, real future, or real value behind them? Did they do zero homework?

I obviously agree with you, Avi. I think I was trying to steelman the other side. Cardano is everything that would make both of us want to leave crypto if that's what crypto becomes.

The logic effectively is: If you buy the top 5 cryptos, all of these things are basically the same. They're all shit, they're all scams, and there's zero differentiation between them. There's no way to pick what's good and what's bad, so let's just go for the top 5.

I mean, look, if Trump wanted to message this properly, he could say, "We're going to create a strategic crypto reserve. It's going to be mostly Bitcoin. We'll put a bit of ETH and Solana in there because they have traction, and then we'll include XRP and Cardano because their market caps are high and they've survived a couple of cycles."

If he wanted to message it to Crypto Twitter or to the American public, he could just leave the names out and say, "We're going to create a strategic crypto reserve because this asset class is around to stay. Rather than pretending we can make it go away, or pretending it's going to go away by itself, we may as well have some skin in the game and participate if it continues to proliferate."

Whoever's running Trump's crypto PR campaign feels like it's David Sacks. I listen to the All-In Podcast from time to time, and David Sacks is a smart guy. It feels like he's not nearly stupid enough to be messaging this. It feels like it's Barron Trump in charge. Somebody who is a C-minus nepo baby is doing this shit.

This is not smart, the way that they're talking about it, and it's obviously pissing off crypto people. Brian Armstrong tweeted that it would be better just to have Bitcoin in the strategic crypto reserve. What's the point of having any of this other stuff in there?

I agree with him. If you're trying to save taxpayer dollars by cutting USAID, cutting NIH funding, and all this other stuff because we're supposedly going bankrupt—which, generally, I agree with the DOGE efficiency thing—then it's hard to come out in the same week and say we're going to use taxpayer dollars to buy Cardano.

Obviously, that argument has been beaten to death on Twitter. Everybody knows this is stupid. But going back to what it means for crypto, we're basically back at the bottom of the range we've been in since the election. Since the election, price action has basically been $90,000 bid at $105,000, and we're trading at $92,500 on Bitcoin.

I'm really watching closely to see if we just drift back up to the center of the range. I don't think that's going to happen. I think we probably leak back below, because this is almost bearish for crypto in a way. You know what's really leaked back below, by the way? ETH is just cooked. ETH at $2,430 is disgusting.

2. ETH Is Cooked

I think I'm not going to be back in ETH for a while, Avi. At this point, maybe ever. I took a few stabs. One of my theses was to get long altcoins and short BTC, and that actually worked reasonably well. A lot of these alts bottomed out against Bitcoin, especially some of the AI coins. I was heavy on ARC, Virtuals, ai16z, and AIXBT. These things actually bottomed out really nicely against Bitcoin over the last week.

I took a decent-sized position in SOL as well against BTC, and then part of the book was ETH/BTC, which I had to cut. Basically, ETH/BTC is a random-number generator. What is going on? I kept every other position, but I cut that one 24 hours after I put the trade on, because even on the bounce it just could not do anything.

It's amazing how few people there are left to go buy this thing. I really thought sellers had run out, and I might have been right, but what I was completely wrong about is that there are zero buyers for this asset anymore.

There are sellers, and major sellers in ETH. The Ethereum Foundation is one. Everybody who got into crypto in 2021 and hasn't really checked their portfolio until now is selling ETH. It's offered all the time. It trades so heavily.

One point I'll make on Cardano is that it's actually held by the most random people. Maybe what they're trying to approximate is your average person. They want to make the average person who owns crypto rich. A lot of Americans own Cardano.

3. BTC: Value vs Momentum

Today, I was talking to somebody who said, "You're into this crypto thing, right? I have some Bitcoin and Cardano that I've held for 4 years now. What do you think I should do with it?" I told him he should definitely sell the Cardano and move it somewhere else, because today is a great day to sell your Cardano. But the guy did own Cardano. He's just a random guy, basically.

To me, this is just so—well, okay, let's talk about 2 things. First, let's talk about stabilizing Bitcoin at the top of the range and then selling off—your technical call—and then let's talk about what this means for crypto.

I've said many times on the podcast that Bitcoin rarely stabilizes at the highs and then sells off. I'd go so far as to say it never does. The framework that I always work off of is the value-and-momentum framework. I've mentioned this a lot, so I don't want to bore people with the details, but basically, we needed people to find value in Bitcoin again.

I think we found it. People view sub-$80,000 as extreme value on Bitcoin, which is why we didn't spend any time really below $80,000. That small, tiny range we were trading in—$95,000 to $98,000—is not value for people, and there was zero momentum. There was no reason to buy it, which allowed sellers to gain the advantage.

There isn't a lot of new money that's going to come in and bid it in that particular area, because it's not sexy from a value perspective. When you're going sideways, there's definitionally no momentum. Once Bitcoin goes into wait-and-see mode, what matters more is whether people are overinvested or underinvested.

For a long time, we traded sideways, but people were radically underinvested in the asset, so it went higher. Now people were in wait-and-see mode, but they were radically overinvested in the asset. We're at the highs. That's where I want to humbly push back on you.

People like us were overinvested, but new money wasn't coming in. That's why we sold off. I definitely thought that while people like us were overallocated, a new trillion-dollar—or $10 trillion—wallet was underinvested.

In hindsight, it seems so, but at the time you wouldn't have known that. I was making this argument at the time. Think of the framework: There was no momentum and there was no value. Therefore, no momentum.

You deserve credit where credit is due. Maybe we're just talking about different time frames here, because I've been pretty bullish since late 2022. But I definitely thought that while people like us were overallocated, a new trillion-dollar or $10 trillion wallet was underinvested.

If they were interested in buying before the announcement of an official U.S. strategic crypto reserve, they're going to be even more interested after. If Uncle Sam is doing it, they aren't going to get sued for doing it.

What I'm trying to say is that, currently, there is nobody interested in buying Bitcoin above $95,000. People just aren't interested in buying it at that price outside of news. I bet that if Bitcoin traded up to $125,000 on momentum, there would be buyers coming out of the woodwork because of the momentum.

Sure, but that's not really an argument. If it goes to $125,000, then by definition there have already been a ton of buyers buying it in the market. What we're trying to talk about is where this is going to go.

What you're saying is that we need a catalyst to push us through to the next momentum level that brings out the momentum buyers. Is that accurate?

There are 2 things I'm trying to articulate here, and there are 2 different paths that we need to take in order to go higher, ceteris paribus. Unless on Friday, at the Crypto Summit, it's announced that the U.S. is allocating tens of billions of dollars to Bitcoin, I don't think we go higher.

I agree. That's kind of the bar. Are we announcing on Friday, or are we getting more details over the next 7 days, that the U.S. is going to be allocating tens of billions of dollars? If the crypto strategic reserve turns out to be $500 million, we're back in the $80,000s pretty quickly.

They'd be so dumb to announce that, because then they'd worsen their fill price by a lot. "We're going to buy a ton of stuff tomorrow. Go out there and buy all you want tonight." It would be so crazy. I wonder if they're that stupid.

The messaging has been so bad that the answer could be yes. Indeed, they are that dumb. Or worse, they're so corrupt that they're not trying to make money.

Are you sure? They're not trying to make the U.S. government money with this crypto move. Trump is trying to make Trump money and make his supporters money. That's my personal take.

Whether the U.S. government makes money or loses money on crypto is probably irrelevant to him. It's kind of like he has this piggy bank, this tool called the U.S. government, that he can use to move crypto prices. He's going to benefit a lot from it, and his constituents are going to benefit a lot from it. They're going to love him if he manages to send crypto higher.

Whether the U.S. government ends up making or losing money is probably irrelevant.

I want to finish my thought here on the paths that we need to take. I've said this before: Momentum and value. Momentum is generated through news. Right now, it's going to be generated through Trump coming out and saying, "We're buying a ton," or whatever.

The other path is that we have to find value. How do you generate value? You don't trade at a level for a significant period of time. Right now, $85,000 doesn't feel like tremendous value because we just traded there.

If we trade above $90,000 for 1 or 2 months and then trade down to $85,000, suddenly it's on sale. That's a lot more attractive. You need people to normalize to prices before you can start assigning value.

Right now, what's clear value is below $80,000. Buy below $80,000 all you want, and I think you'll be happy in a year. That also means you're probably not going to get it.

I think that, outside of news that directly sends us higher, we end up ping-ponging between $85,000 and $95,000 for at least a month. That's my take.

I like that take. There are a couple of other parts of your take in the past that I disagree with, so let me try to articulate it very cleanly and concisely.

I agree that participants anchor themselves to the prices that any asset, particularly crypto, establishes when it trades sideways for a while. If we trade roughly at $100,000 for 3 months, that's where participants anchor themselves. Then if you're trading at $80,000, that looks cheap, and if you're trading at $120,000, you see some profit-taking. I agree that participants anchor to ranges that are well established.

The part that I disagreed with is that you said it's rare for crypto to range or trade sideways at the highs and then not have a sell-off. To me, while I agree with that statement and think it's true, it's a bit misleading. Basically, what you're saying is crypto goes up, crypto stops going up, and it's either going to go up or down. If it doesn't go up, then it's going to go down.

4. Trading BTC Ranges

If you trade up and then plateau, of course it's going to go down unless it keeps going up. That's sort of what it means to me, but maybe I'm just not understanding it.

No, because it helps you try to understand what's going to happen next. Before the sell-off, when we were trading at $95,000, the big question everyone had was where it was going next. Was it more likely that we went to $105,000 from $95,000, or was it more likely that we went to $85,000? How do I make my bets? That was a very debated question.

My answer, using that framework, was that we'd basically gone sideways in a range from November 21 to February 23. That's 3 months of sideways action, so it probably goes down. I was betting that there was an 80% chance we were going down and a 20% chance we were going up, and that we'd get a pretty substantial sell-off from the highs.

5. Buy The Dip Or Sell The Rip?

It's more of a statement that if you do have a range for a substantial period of time, you probably should not be buying that range. In fact, you can probably make money shorting in that range.

You've proven right this last time, but I'm looking at the course of this Bitcoin bull market. Bitcoin took a few breathers and then kept rallying—not on the election with a clear catalyst, but in 2023, for example. I don't want to belabor the point. It's something where I'm not fully on board necessarily, but I do agree that there's a lot of anchoring that goes on.

Your point about how people anchor to recent ranges is super salient. I guess that leads us nicely into the next topic: Where does crypto go from here, and what does this stupid Cardano reserve mean for our space?

I'm with you on the selling. What I will say is that I remember when we talked about the Trump effect on Bitcoin. It was going to be like the Elon effect on Dogecoin. In the beginning, everyone bought Dogecoin because Elon might say something about Dogecoin on Twitter and it might go up.

After Trump adopted Bitcoin as his pet project, it became, "There are all these amazing things Trump can say about Bitcoin. Maybe he'll send it up." That has played out really nicely. Now that brings me to the next stage of the decay: Every time he mentions crypto, there will be some level of decay to it. He needs to shit or get off the pot at this point.

I'm pissed at myself that I didn't think about this, but you can kind of predict the future with these things. We knew on February 28 that there was a 1st-ever White House Crypto Summit coming up the next week, and we also knew that crypto was in the middle of a shit meltdown.

At $80,000 or $85,000, I wish I had thought, "There's a pretty high chance that Trump does something to make this summit not look like a total failure," and gotten even more bullish. It's probably worthwhile to look at the White House calendar.

Every time you take out a trade on anything now, look at the White House calendar and ask yourself whether there's any incentive for Trump to help out that trade or not.

6. Trading Trump 2.0

You bring up a good point. Elon did move Dogecoin for a little while, but there's a big difference between Trump and Elon when it comes to moving markets. I have PTSD from trading through Trump's first term.

I know his first presidency. You do not fade Trump's tweets or Trump's statements about things. Maybe if it looks like he's getting off the pot, people start to fade it, but Trump will shit. Mark my words: He will take the dump.

So why are you so bearish for the first time ever?

No, I'm not bearish for the first time ever. I'm saying I'm not going to sell a dime's worth of crypto. Let me make that clear. What I'm saying is, let's start with what Trump did to markets last time, and then we'll talk about what he's going to do this time.

During COVID, when oil was low, he caused the price of oil to spike literally 40% or 30% in 1 day. It was around $10 a barrel when it was trading at $20 a barrel, by saying that he was going to force OPEC to cut supply. That was the most face-ripping move that commodity will get, period. That was a crazy move for a non-shitcoin, for the world's global energy supply.

When prices were high, he was shitting on OPEC every day, telling them that they had to stop the cuts and that he was going to put pressure on them. Then he did. He tweeted like he wanted oil in a range, so he would tweet bearish at the top of the range and giga-bullish at the bottom of the range.

On the stock market, he would tweet it up every single chance he got: record high, it's going higher, we're going to do more Trump tax cuts, Trump bump. Trump tweets markets in the direction that they end up going. He's always done that, right?

You saw this face-ripping crypto rally after he tweeted the Strategic Crypto Reserve. All I'm saying is that move has happened. I don't see him tweeting some brand-new giga-bullish catalyst on Friday that takes us another $10,000 higher. I think the tweet was the tweet, and it came out today.

I do think crypto is going higher. I do think we trade $150,000 easily before the end of the year, maybe $200,000. I'm still very bullish. If I were a short-term trader, I would probably be selling Bitcoin here to buy it back at around $87,000, but that's just not how I behave. I don't like to do that because I think it's too tempting over time to chop myself up. I'm better at doing longer-term trades.

I do think that if you're looking to reduce exposure now, my least favorite coin of the moment is WIF. WIF ripped on this. There's not going to be a Strategic WIF Reserve, right? Short that one if you're looking to cut notional. That's my point. Does that make sense to you, my general thesis on this?

Yeah, I get you. It remains to be seen what happens on Friday. I wish I had read the tea leaves better on that particular point, but it remains to be seen what happens at the summit. Maybe he has another trick up his sleeve, but I'm fairly certain it's going to require congressional approval to start buying a ton of Bitcoin, so we all have to wait for that.

One of the worst things that could happen—and this is why every single person in crypto, if you're actively trading or you own Bitcoin and you want to be proactive about this, has to pay very close attention to what happens on Friday—is if there's language that says, "We're really excited to start working on this reserve bill," and David Sacks gets up there and says, "We're really excited to start working on this reserve bill and push it through Congress." You kind of have to sell a reasonable amount of what you have.

This is more of a bipartisan issue than it was, though, to be completely fair. That Stand With Crypto lobby—whatever Brian Armstrong's crypto lobby is called—there are Democrats that are into this as well.

There are, and I do think Democrats have started to have a come-to-Jesus moment with respect to crypto. At least 2 of the people I know in the Democratic apparatus have approached me about potentially writing an op-ed about how Democrats messed up crypto, because both of them realize that crypto came out of the Occupy Wall Street movement in a big way. That was a movement that was solidly Democrat.

The idea of hating the big banks, if you go back 15 years, was a solidly Democrat ideal. It was purely in the realm of Democrats to have that mentality around things: You can't trust the financial institutions. That was all Democrat back then.

They have a real opportunity. If you look back at the origin of Ethereum, a lot of the major players in the Ethereum network, even today, are still Democrats. I think Bitcoin always had a little bit more of a libertarian lean, but the Democrats could have done well on crypto if they had just played ball instead of trying to kill it.

I think they've started to realize that now. I do think they will soften their stance because it's just not a winning issue for them. It's really not.

I love that you brought this up. I'm going to do a very short tangent and then come back to your point, which I agree with.

In 2008, when the Democrats were all against the banksters, and Barney Frank and the Volcker Rule and all this stuff was cooking in Washington to rein in the banks' reckless risk-taking, I had just lost my job on Wall Street at one of the big banks, Lehman Brothers—the only one these guys allowed to fail. I remember being unemployed, wandering around downtown one day. I passed Zuccotti Park and saw these people protesting bankers, and I was thinking, "I hate you. I just lost my job, and you're mad at me. My company went bankrupt. Screw you, and screw everybody else who wants to demonize me."

It's funny. I actually haven't felt that annoyed at irrational policymaking until Biden and Gary Gensler went ham on crypto for no reason. When it's something as partisan as abortion or gun control, you do get these big party-line votes. But with crypto, I think a lot of people are looking at Operation Choke Point 2.0 and Elizabeth Warren's Anti-Crypto Army, and it's like, who's going to die on that hill? Who wants to be part of the Anti-Crypto Army?

Maybe there are a couple of retirees who are pissed off that they missed the Bitcoin trade, sitting on the golf course, shitting on Bitcoin—just no-coiners. But not enough people on the anti-crypto side care. To them, it's just a total nothingburger, whatever. On the pro-crypto side, it's 50 million American bagholders or more.

It seems so irrational to think of being a Washington elected representative or policymaker against crypto. You've got nothing to gain and everything to lose. Trump literally just painted that on the wall during the last election and proved it to everybody.

To me, I'm a little less worried about things that need to go through Congress than perhaps most people. However, I do think that if what they submit to Congress is, "We need to spend $100 million on Cardano," I think it's going to be stillborn.

Maybe what we should be looking for on Friday is how much they've rethought the plan since the Sunday Truth Social post. Are they really going to lean into this and double down, or not? If they're saying, "It's mostly Bitcoin. Don't worry, we're going to have a couple of these tokens because they're top 10 and they're made in America, and we want to incentivize people to make great blockchains in America, so we'll put them in there," maybe that's okay. I don't think we get a big up.

7. Funding & OI

Well, yeah, one thing's for sure: We're going to have to pay attention. One point that's actually kind of nice is that there's been basically 0 uptick in OI on this move. If you look at futures, one of the highest-hit-rate reversal signs is that you just get a ton of people slamming in on leverage.

This move looks like it was spot-driven, actually. It looks like people were deploying cash into this move, and it's not just a bunch of monkeys buying it on leverage, which is a very good sign for Bitcoin.

I'm torn between thinking, hey, this is definitely a fade because I don't think we're getting more good news after this, versus, all right, now we're just back in the range and maybe we'll just go trade $100,000.

There's another interpretation: Yes, it could be cash, and that could explain the lack of an OI increase. Another possibility is that shorts closed. Or it could just be tons and tons of market-maker-on-market-maker violence with no real position-taking—just HFT washing back and forth because of volatility.

That's what they do. They trade big volumes when things get volatile because there are all these little games you can play: arbitraging exchanges against each other, arbitraging equities versus crypto, and using mid-frequency signals telling you what's going to happen in 5 to 60 seconds, trading that, then getting out.

Big volumes will go through when markets get volatile without a lot of risk getting exchanged sometimes. Maybe. I honestly don't know, Avi. I think it could be a lot of really healthy spot buying. It could be liquidations.

It also could be—actually, looking at funding, it does look like a decent amount of shorts came in on Saturday. One of the biggest hacks in life is just paying attention during the weekends. I think it's very easy to clock out, especially if you're looking at this stuff during the week, and then just not pay attention over the weekends.

But there are so many things that, if you look at them over the weekend and do that consistently, you gain a huge edge. So many things in this market over the last year have happened on the weekend.

I think a lot of people are gambling at their day jobs. They're on a Zoom call, or they're supposed to be doing something professional, and they're just logged in somewhere—Binance, Coinbase, or Kraken—and messing around all week. The weekend is their break. It's not like this is a nights-and-weekends game for most retail degens.

Yeah, I wonder how many federal workers were selling crypto during their workdays.

Oh, my God. Responding to Musk's email, "What did you get done this week?" "Well, I punted on XRP. Bought some, too."

Got it. If I had to write an email saying, "What did I get done this week?"—oh, my God, I changed a lot of diapers. That's what I got done. I raised children.

8. Alt/BTC Relative Strength

Can I tell you something horrible, Jonah? Honestly, WIF actually looks really good. I think a lot of people started using it as a short leg, and I think you could actually see a short squeeze from WIF. It's kind of interesting. Do you have your OI dashboard up?

I don't.

Yeah, I got my OI and funding dashboard up, and it started to outperform BTC. Are you still using Velo Data?

Yeah, I do. I do love Velo, but I just love charting alts against Bitcoin because it really gives you an idea of the relative strength of the asset. There are so many alts that look really good against Bitcoin, even now after today's move.

That's what I'm looking for. I do like those types of trades because they're so much easier to manage. Getting long those AI assets and shorting Bitcoin against them, I did that when Bitcoin was at something like $85,000 or $86,000. Then it went down, and they were all actually outperforming or slightly underperforming BTC, but BTC went down 10% in that time span.

I can guarantee you I wouldn't have stayed in those trades if I had done them outright. Even though after Bitcoin bounced they were all up anywhere from 8% to 20% versus Bitcoin, I would have made more money if I had obviously punted them outright, but I would never in a million years have held that position. It really helps you manage the volatility.

Yeah, I agree. I'm out of my WIF short now. I actually covered most of it during a podcast where you convinced me to do so. It was that one in early February when the market nuked in the middle while we were recording. That was a fun one. I was thinking of putting it back on, but not yet.

Do it at around $1. If you can get it at $0.90 to $1, that would be a great short. I think shorting it here, after it's bounced and looks pretty strong—and actually, it's up in the last 5 days, basically up every day—you probably want to avoid shorting it.

Yeah, which tells you that if it's doing that when Bitcoin's going down, you probably want to avoid shorting it. The thing is, it's flat with BTC over the last, call it, 18 hours. Over the last 7 days, it's up pretty solidly. I don't know. You're right. You probably don't want to short into a rally like this.

I think, honestly, this market is just going to be chaos for a while. I do not think that this is a good trading market for click traders with a 2-to-7-day horizon.

I'm feeling as unconvicted in the short term as I could possibly be, as convicted in the long term as I could possibly be, and in the medium term—let's call it a 6-to-8-out-of-10 conviction—that we're probably higher 6 months from here.

Aside from some tactical opportunities, like when news comes out and coins just haven't moved yet, or slower, less relevant on-chain assets, I don't think this is a market where you want to start really churning a lot of volume. I think it's bad for that.

I think we'll be in a much healthier environment for that once we get a bit more clarity on what these guys have planned for crypto. But the implications haven't really been priced into some of the long-tail assets.

Maybe we need to do another emergency pod. We'll do another pod on Friday to talk about this. Maybe we can figure out a livestream.

You know what? How about this: Let's just make a rule that if it's an emergency pod, we can do a livestream. If something crazy happens, we could do a livestream during the crypto conference. Maybe we'll do that.

Maybe we need to apply for a White House press pass. I know they're letting in all sorts of scammy news organizations and kicking out ABC and CBS. We could say, "We're the 1000x podcast. We're crypto news."

I think probably all we have to do is spend the next 4 episodes saying really nice things about Donald Trump. He's awesome. We could probably get a press pass. I love Donald Trump.

Are your parents' house near the White House? Could I crash there if we do a D.C. trip?

It actually is. It's a 15-minute walk from the White House.

Great. Sure. I would have suggested staying at a nice hotel, but with Bitcoin down here, no, no, no—just crash in my parents' basement. We'll walk over to the White House and sleep in the laundry room. Who cares?

All right, Avi. Good. This was good. I'll see you on Friday.

See you on Friday. This is a fun one.