Interviews at Origin Seoul 2026

Hey guys, we're here at Origin Seoul. I'm here with Gabriele Vernetti from Stratum V2. He's a maintainer on the project. So, Gabriel, give us a quick update where are things at on Stratum V2?

we're at a good stage. adoption is finally growing. We've been waiting for this moment for quite a long time, actually. I'm working on the project since, 2023. So it's been three years of hard work, internally, especially. And we would say

most of your Focus on like the software of it or wh-where, what's your main focus?

Yeah, I mean, I'm one of the maintainers, so my main focus is on reviewing PRs and, you know, defining milestones and, dealing with the new releases monthly that we do. but yeah, especially in the last, year, let's say, I've been focusing a lot on improving the user experience of running the SV2 stack. So yeah, I'm, I, I want to, clearly this, out that I'm one of the maintainer of sri, which is the reference implementation, so we are the open source project, the open source reference implementation of Stratum v2. And recently, yeah, we've been working a lot on, a new project which is called s v2 UI. So now you can just go on Amber Store, for example, and you can pick and download the application that we built. So we have a new user, a user interface, and everything is like embedded, all the complexity, you know, for example, the- The translator proxy to allow s one firmware machines to communicate with an sBTC pool, it's everything embedded and the user doesn't know anything about it, of course. So it's very UX, wise, improvements that we made. And then, since January, we started the working group initiative, which is an initiative where we brought all the major pool and mining, companies in the world involved. So

now, actually, it's share of the hash rate, right? Like it's a, it's a, if you think about the mining pools who have signed up to be a part of your working group, it's actually it's like seventy

percent, seventy-five percent, something like that. Yeah, something like that. It's actually something more than that, probably. we got Antpool, we got F2Pool, we got SpiderPool, we got Foundry, who else? We have D-Mant, D-M-D of course, which mined the first blocks, the listeners can Check out my interview And they were supporting SB2 of course, yeah. And then on the mining side, we have Marathon as well, they're involved as well. Yeah. And now recently, two new companies joined, Mempool.Space. They are trying to help us, and help all the other, group members to standardize a new format, let's say, with regards to how the- Pool signatures and the miner signature, in the case the miner is building the block template of course, are displayed on mempool. space. So if you go, like, Check the new block from DMD, you can see that in that case, the miner built the block template, and so on mempool. space, they're shown their name, so the miner company name, the underline miner, not just the pool like exactly. So they show, they, they put the priority on the miner name, on the miner. Tag, and then of course, you can see that the pool was DMD, so they mined on DMD pool. So they joined, the working group recently, to, you know, help accelerate this process of standardization as well with regards that. And then, two fifty-six Foundation also joined. they are pushing a lot on their end, we're pretty proud of having them in the working group, and especially they are working hard on the Mujina firmware, so they are integrating SB2 in the firmware as well, and they're- The intention is to do it also at the server level, so they have HydraPool, right, which is an open source, pool that everyone can run. They are imple- They're gonna implement SV2 there as well. And, so this is, going pretty well. We have monthly calls with all the members, and everyone is, implementing the protocol internally. So, and then when they wanna implement, how

much of that is they're having to implement things on their own side, like internally versus like things that are just open source anyway?

Yeah, so their, it depends of course on their stack. some of them are using directly, for example, the libraries we provide with, as, as, as, as SRI has libraries and they use those as part of their, their own, management software. Exactly. So our code base is mainly Rust, so there are many companies involved which are also, you know, using Rust, especially for them. So it's easier for them, but we have language bindings for other languages as well, so other companies are using language bindings. Other companies, have their own implementation, let's say. so yeah, we've been also now thinking about creating an interoperability tool because, we can see that of course, there are companies and people in general who might be just going from the specs, so the protocol specification and code to implement their own implementation without using anything on a, of our code base. So it's very important that we keep interoperability between the- It's like you're having cross compatibility between different implementations of SV2. One of the main goals of SV2 since the beginning was to create a real standard, right? Because Stratum V1 is the s-- became the standard de facto, but there was no clear specification of the protocol. And different pool, different servers, they implemented in a very, slightly different way between each other. So, yeah, that's what SSV we are, you know, and doing always. And I understand. In terms

of what the main- Pitch or appeal was, because there's different aspects of it, because my understanding is you're doing, binary encryption, and then you also have the ability for, you know, the block template construction, There's, encryption to stop hash rate hijacking. Which, which of these main benefits did you find were really appealing? Because maybe some mining pools care about something but don't care about something else. What was the main appeal?

The main appeal, which is, you know, shared by everyone, is security. In particular,

are they worried about hash

hash rate hijacking, as an example? I mean, we are in twenty twenty-six, every communication of us is encrypted, we just don't know it, but every communication over the internet is encrypted because, yeah. We've been, you know, working on this stuff since many, many years and, encryption is the standard, so it's quite surprising that the mining protocol isn't, isn't, isn't encrypted because this is from like the early days. Exactly. Okay. And so that's the main, the main point which, you know, convinced, let's say, everyone involved in the working group to, you know, adopt it. and then about the block template construction, that's optional, so, you know, everyone can decide if implementing or not. Or not, I would say it depends on, the clients. So, the pool involved in that, which are implementing that, it's because their clients asked to the pool to do it. I see. So there was like

a bit of a bottom-up push there, that some underlying miners were like, "Hey, we wanna do-- " Exactly. "We wanna create our own template, " and then the- Mining pools have been driven by that to also think about, okay, can we make that as an option? Exactly. My understanding is some different pools have do it different ways. So as an example, Demand Pool, Alejandro said, "You can do your own, or you can just use our default one." Yeah. And so that's, I guess that's the option most pools will offer, right? They'll try to offer both

sides. I think so. definitely also because maybe there are some miners who are running their facilities in, you know, poor internet, places, and For them, it's harder to run a Bitcoin node because maybe the Bitcoin node isn't gonna be so well connected. I see. So maybe for them, it's more convenient to, you know, let the pool build the block template so that whenever a new block is found, for example, the pool is gonna look, is gonna create a new, the low, lowest latency, right? That's very important for the miners. That's the point. So you don't, you don't want to, you know, lose too much time while switching to the new block when a new block is found by someone

Checks that are done, let's say somebody tries to use s b two to propose the, like a, a, a bad block or an incompatible block, where is that getting caught? Is that getting caught, like? You know, at the pool level, because they have to Check before they broadcast that and say, "Hey, we-- this is the new

block." How does it work? That's a good question, very good question. So without going too technical, the answer is that if you, you're the miner and you're using SRI stack, of course we are, we have a lot of guardrails, you know, to make sure you don't do anything. To make sure that, yeah, we, we, we create a valid block, a consensus valid block. Yes. But of course, Or in the future to create their own, whether accidental or malicious, they could try to send you something that's not consensus compatible. So in the SB2 protocol, this process is called job declaration, right? And it got, three, four, five messages. So we have specific messages just to deal for this kind of things. So the miner, when it declares the template to the pool, it sends to the pool enough information for the pool to Check that the The block which is building, the miner is consensus valid. Yeah. So in a way, the guardrails, are embedded in the protocol. I see. So like, whenever the miner constructs a block template and it starts hashing on it right away, in the meantime, the miner sends the en- the enough information to the pool so that the pool can Check that the miner is mining on a valid, it's doing a consensus valid block. Now,

maybe another concern, what about in the case where it's consensus valid but- What if that under- this individual miner didn't include fees that he could have or should have? And then could there be users on that pool who are concerned, or hey, what if some other user on the pool chooses like a non-optimal block and we all lose out on getting less fees because of that?

Yeah, that's- How do you think about that? No, that's another very, very point, and I saw this on Twitter a lot actually, these questions, and, I guess that in the end, it all depends on the reward mechanism. mechanism that the pool is gonna use. So like what I was proposing to some of them is something, along the lines of DMD, so their payout system includes the amount of fees that the miner is including in the block template which is working on. They have an incentive to include more fees. Exactly. So if you, if you, in, in the formula, right, that you use for your payout as a pool, it includes a portion of that based On the amount of fees, you can, you know, make the incentives aligned so that the miner is incentivized to include the highest fees, probably because due to that, the pool is gonna reward the miner more. Gotcha. And so, yeah, I think in the end, yeah, it's not like an SV2 thing because SV2 is just a communication protocol and it can be used with FEPs, PPLNS like payout methods or whatever, maybe future payout methods that are gonna- Can be, you know, shipped by someone else. But yeah,

yeah. So you could use SV2 and not have job declaration at all, just using it exactly only for the encryption benefit or these other components. Okay. other question, custom input, right? This landed in, I believe, Core v31. Yep. And I guess the idea is that miners and pools can hopefully, more appropriately see if a transaction with the chain of your children is valid to include inside the block. Are you seeing a benefit or any, any? Any interaction there on

with SV2 or no? I don't have benchmarks, to be honest. I would like to have the time to spend to do that, because, you know, I find it very interesting. I'm not that deep into this cluster man pool to be honest, so, from my point of view, it's just like kind of a way to make things more efficient. So if you're using Bitcoin Core from v31, you are just gonna build a block template, which is gonna be more efficient by definition, because this cluster mempool just makes the process of creating a new block template more efficient in a way. So, yeah. And what I'm

saying is there are some people out there using it, like I believe Wasabi wallet is already using cluster mempool, so maybe people who are already using, miners who are using Core v31, maybe they can more easily make a, a valid block, or maybe have better fees or things like this. Yeah. and maybe it helps L2 protocols. Anyway, we'll see what happens with Closing thoughts on, SV2, what, what you're looking, what people should look for, look out to see.

I think that, you know, if you're a miner, you should try to ask your own pool to offer job decoration, and you show-- you should try it out, like you can go to stratumprotocol.org and find all, you know, the documentation, the guides or whatever. You can just download the app that I was mentioning at the beginning, and you just try things out. And, yeah, I think that with regards Declaration, it's, it matters a lot if you are demanding it to your pool. So, with regards that we've been running benchmarks in the past, we have a use case, study in our website as well, if you want to read it, and we are showing the benefits of running job declarations, so of creating your own block template, which means for the miner less stale shares. So, of course, most of the pools they pay Per share, right? So if you, if you lower the stale shares, right, you're gonna be rewarded more, off and right, right? This is the exactly, right? Because, if you're running, a, a Bitcoin node locally in your site, in your mining site, and you create the block templates there, you are gonna be faster than, the pool doing that for you somewhere else, y- in, in the network, and sending you that information. So you have already all the information ready. Your Bitcoin node. So if your Bitcoin node is running right next to the machines, for example, you're gonna see the new block found on the network and you're gonna switch to the new jobs like locally without having to wait for a message then to do so. I see. It's like one less round trip from the internet. Yeah, exactly. So that means that you're gonna start hashing on the newer job, which is the correct one, the new block, and so you're gonna send less stale shares to the pool because you're gonna be mining on the-- So then the latest

result of What you're saying then is more efficiency or less lost shares, which translates to more, a better bottom line for

the miners and the pool, right? Exactly. I mean, every pool pays per share, so if you, you know, save some stale shares, you're gonna see more money coming from the pool for you. So, yeah, that's, I think the main thing for miners. And that's a great way to finish up.

So listeners go and Check it out, stratumprotocol dot org, you mentioned. this is Gabriel, maintainer of SV Back at Origin Seoul in Korea, I'm joined right now by Jimmy Kostro from Bitcoin Learning Hub in, Chang-- Bitcoin Chiang Mai.

Yes, Bitcoin Learning Center. Oh, sorry, Bitcoin Learning Center. Yep, same under the Bitcoin Chiang Mai umbrella.

Yeah, great. And I know you're doing some interesting stuff around, you know, reaching out to Thai people and doing media education. Give us a quick overview on what you're doing and how you find it working.

Sure. So we have a regional hub in Chiang Mai, which is only a hundred kilometers from me Our border. and so we, we, the Lao people, the southern Chinese and Myanmar are our neighbors, so the, they can't really organize like that, so it's became a very regional hub there. And Chiang Mai is also an expat destination, sort of like a Bali or something like this, that, that attracts-- Right, regional

nomads and things like this.

Correct. So there's a lot of like developers that live there. so this naturally, like when we started building the hub, we didn't recognize how much of a need there was for it really it was if we just look at what we were doing before that, we started helping hill tribes with just basic as bitcoiners, helping like build water wells, Wi-Fi in villages, dormitories, scholarships, providing teachers, helping build kitchens, and then we re- we recognized these children were actually quite small, 'cause they were five hours away, in the middle of the jungle, on top of the mountain like those, like, very, very, close to the border. So how can we help them? why don't we build a solar system? So we built a ten kilowatt solar system. For these children, a hundred children, so they could have, so they could have energy for a freezer, so we could freeze vegetable, freeze fruit, and freeze protein. Yeah. So they don't gotta go down all the way to the city and up. But they ended up only using like fifty percent of the energy. Right. So as a bitcoiner, we told Bob Space Pick a load of guys in Bangkok. Yeah, yeah. He's like, "How much extra energy?" So up came the old miners, you know? We plugged it in, and it was more of a-- and it was only a couple bucks, maybe ten bucks pre-having a month if it was running. When we connected the Bitcoin miners to the children's home, five hours away, in the middle of the jungle, on top of the mountain, on the Myanmar border, it sent a signal internationally, and we got more donations to the address of the Bitcoin miner in one day than we would have gotten mining for twenty-four hours a day for, for, for one full year.

Yeah.

So this, this really put us on the map, and then that had us like, we had to get like a microphone, a little video camera, and by the-- for our hub. And so more people were interested in that story. Yeah. And so when the Thai team-- so there's five hundred of us, five hundred members, there's two hundred and fifty international and two hundred and fifty, Thai. When the Thai, when we get together, it's like, we'll have Thai Day, International Day, Burmese Day. There's too many people for the building. So they got together one big meetup and they're like, "You've got like equipment, you wanna do a podcast?" The podcast turned into weekly podcast plus Bit Health, like doctor and physician led Bitcoiner we turned into a weekly news, which is tonight, Wednesday, we'll be doing the news. There's seven of us that work there, full time. and we also do like BLC, book reviews, which is like reviewing books. and that's done really well for us too. And we do like BitDev's online, and we do events, and now we have two major running events again this year.

Oh, that's fascinating. I mean, there's so many like aspects of that, and I guess you're trying to hit all kinds of levels there because you've got like the developer level, like really in the technical weeds, and then of course the Normal, normal person, right? Because we want, obviously, we want Bitcoin to be for normal people too. So talk to us a bit about how you address it when you're trying to educate for the normal person.

Yeah. So we work very closely with the three major universities in Northern Thailand, and we work with local government. How we got into this was, we ran out of local people to educate, so we decided to put on this half marathon for three thousand people to generate awareness and exposure to Bitcoin in a very basic touch point way. But that required road closures and permits, and so the city was like, "Well, what is Bitcoin?" We're like, "Hold the chair." And they actually gave us open access to tell their whole massive, departments. They said, "Whenever you can." So we, we got our strongest and best and brightest in their niche and helped put them in the front to all the different departments to help them. Just establish a relationship. Yeah. But what we're really doing is working on the basics, and when we talk with universities, weekly, w-weekly, we're in universities. I know on the nineteenth, we have a big one, again, a big seminar. We bring our biggest and the best there, but we say modern finance, we call it basic savings. Bitcoin safety class, which is like self-custody. We sometimes have to, you know, synthesize the words so it's very relatable in their, in their, in their lingo. financial inclusion, you know, freedom, Bitcoin as money is a real thing because our brothers and sisters on the border are experiencing thirty percent inflation every year for the past four years. So they come to us and they're like, "Can I send value across the border?" Like- Can I, you know, can I use this without permission? You know, can I actually send this to my mom? How do I do it? So we have like real use cases. We really try to do the basics, and I tell everybody, you know, our job is to be a touch point in people's journey. We're not trying to plug you in and tell you ten or fifteen years of Bitcoin in one, one week or one month, just to be a touch point.

Yeah, gotcha. Okay, great. And so you've got like meetups, education, you have The more technical focused people, what kind of, events or things you're doing there?

Sure. So on a meetup wise, like I always, meetups are maybe like less than one percent of what we do, and we do plenty of meetups.

Yeah.

In fact, having three to five people that come through a day, you, we could have a meetup today. Like BitShallow was just there yesterday, seven people, all were there just having, just like a normal day. But, a structured meetups will be quarterly, like for international community, we'll have For our, for our international BitDev's, which we do with Bobspace, at least every quarter, which we've now done for eleven consecutive quarters, that's on the international side. So we team up with Bobspace, they come up, and we do that together. And then there's, we do BitDevs online. So basically, we're reaching twelve hundred people come through, a thousand people from fifty countries come through our doors every year. That is healthy, but if you really wanna reach people, we have to have media like we s-s-spoke about. And now, through that media, in Thai only, we've reached twenty-six million views since we started doing the media in sixteen, sixteen months ago.

Yeah. So talk to us a bit about the media, like what, what's the, what are the main pieces you have on

the media side? Sure. So our ma- Thai and the Filipinos, they're, they dominate Facebook. That's like where they really live. You won't see them as much on, So, are meeting them where they're at. Meeting them where they're at. And we established the running brand. So the running brand has been ten million of that. six millions from TikTok, a millions from YouTube. And then the other ten millions from, Facebook Bitcoin Shanghai.

Interesting. Yeah. So

this is like, we gotta go where they are? we've been to platform three times, so we had to start over and over and over, and now we're back up to thirty-five thou-- or thirty-three thousand followers on Facebook. so we just don't give up, it's just consistent applied effort over time that's compounding

for us. Yeah. And then in terms of the media content that you've found, like, let's maybe these are lessons that other people in other Is it interview podcasts, is it educational like talking head video, like what are the main formats you're using? You

know, I think, I think first you need to find the, the, the team that is close to you within your network that like doing it, 'cause that like naturally comes across. The enthusiasm

bleeds through, yeah.

It sure does, and that becomes infectious, and then the rest of the team wants to team up. Like our BitHealth team, is Ian, Dr. Mato, and Golf, and they like love to get together, and like you could just see

Casual, and of course, there's different, like, obviously my show is kind of known for being more technical and whatever, but there's different, there's room for different formats and whatever, you know? So be it.

You know, we get, and the, the technical, like, there's people that want to go technical too. We make sure we have a team and- Giving people the freedom to do that, like at first when I heard about the news, I was like, "Guys, we can't do weekly news on top of all of this every day." But that became a pillar. So you can't have like founder level approval, let the team go with where they feel right. So sort of

they experiment different formats, different types, and you just try to-- and not all of it is, let's say, Bitcoin content per se. It's kind of normal lifestyle content, but you kind of inserts some Bitcoin in there here and

there. Is that, is One of our very successful, BLC library, Bitcoin Learning Center library book reviews was Economics in One Lesson. So like, people wanna learn, and, and as we'll see in an hour, in two hours, or an hour and a half, my, my keynote, I'll mention how we never lead with Bitcoin. Over many years. Right. And I, I believe personally that the next Bitcoin communities that will thrive the most will be the ones that talk about Bitcoin the least.

Yeah, interesting. And I think that's one of the challenges is, I mean, I'm with you, like, we are probably past-- and I've been saying this, I think we're probably past the point of ideologically scaling, right? Even though many of us might have libertarian or sci-fi punk leanings. You know, ninety-nine percent of the world doesn't, and let's be honest about that. And so you have to reach them somehow, but then people can get confused about things if they don't understand enough of the technicals or the economics on things, too. So that's kind of a challenge, isn't it? Right? Especially around like how people got misled on the whole Bit One Ten thing, right, as an example.

You know, I will, I will couldn't agree more. I think one thing that really gives credence or validation or credibility is having a physical hub, right, where, where authorities could come and find out Bitcoin's not a scam. Or like last week, we had three PhDs from three different regional universities come discuss how they could create a digital asset policy group, and they're Bitcoiners, but they know the wording and the framework. They're coming to us. We had a large charity, ask us to help create a native Bitcoin standard endowment, which I just posted on GitHub for anybody to, a couple, a couple weeks ago. So like having this physical place, like, to answer that question is like, people could actually come and ask, "Whoa, like, is Bitcoin like gonna go away? Bitcoin ten, is it gonna fork?" And like, you have very people that are just smiling like it's a normal day, no, no need to worry. When the, when the authorities could come to your physical location, then it just really drops the guard, and they see the work and the effort you put into things, that, and they know that our co-founders, a professor in the university part time as well. So this has really been like- A huge thing for just physically being somewhere that is held accountable.

Yeah, great. I guess lastly, how do you keep it sustainable? Like from a, like, do you sell products? Do you have merchandise? Do you sell workshops? Like, how do you profitably keep it sustainable?

It's actually one of the most common questions, is, is, first of all, the question is, why do you do it? That is like, wha- I don't, I don't get it. What, what do you get out of this? That's what most-- and actually it's not just not Bitcoiners, it's Bitcoiners, it's experienced Bitcoiners, what do you get out of it? And over the time, I've learned like, I always try to say like, "Well, what do you get out of like..." Opening the door for someone, or like, what do you get out of like making a, a child smile? Or what do you get out of like returning lost items? So I try to like relate it in a way of, of that, like, that's what I get out of it. Like, I think this is the best use of our Bitcoin. And if w-- all the, all of the knowledge we have, if Bitcoin's gonna do what we believe it's gonna do, I think that I can help. We're reaching millions of people. I think it's the-- I think this is the best thing that we could do with our Bitcoin. So we use our Bitcoin to sustain. Now there's seven people that work here. There's a co-founder, director and CEO, international manager, domestic manager, events coordinator, and three editors, full time. How do you sustain that? Well, in Thailand, you know, these are like eight hundred dollar full time positions per month, so maybe seventy five thousand dollars per year, you have a team of seven working every day, hardcore on Bitcoin education with local government, major events, universities, everything, meetups, different workshops, we do tons of workshops like that's prob-- like we are really optimizing the best use of money by having highly- Qualified people running the hub, working six days a week for seventy-five thousand dollars, the best use of our money.

That's amazing. And I, I think hopefully an inspirational story for other people out there, whether you are, you know, in some other country in the world, maybe there's something you can copy from, Jimmy's model. So, let's leave it there, Jimmy Kostro from Bitcoin Chang Mai, thanks for joining me. Thank you. Hey guys, we're back at Origin Seoul. I'm with my friend. Checkmate, aka James Check, and, you might recall we did one of these like a year ago, and everyone's talking about our height difference. but anyway, it's good to see you again. I know you've been doing some, great analysis on, you know, the bear market. I guess that's the big question. Is the bear market over?

I think so. I mean, you know, we've seen all the signs you want to see for a bear market end. You've seen multiple capitulations, you've seen the price down, you've And then you've got hodlers. Hodlers own eighty percent of the wealth in the system. That's the ratio we typically see at the bottom of bears. So like from all my perspectives, we never know the future, but it looks pretty-- It looks like previous bear market floors. And there's a lot of people who don't believe it. And I love that part too, I think it's important.

Right. The, the disbelief, the wall of worry as we climb, that's like the, the typical meme, right? The wall of worry. But I mean, that's kind You know, going forward as things, you know, progress. Yeah.

So basically what we want to see, if you think about what a bull market is, people can lock in profit and the market can absorb it. profit taking is one of these interesting metrics where you've got to think about in two ways. One person taking profit means they bought low, sold high. That means that the same coin has changed hands for more capital. Someone's gotta come in with more capital to buy the same thing at a higher price. Bull markets are that process, but too much of a good thing. So profit taking is capital inflow. Too much profit taking will oversaturate demand. Now, this occurs on multiple time frames. You get short term stuff where, you know, price rallies, we go to eighty K, you get a little bit of profit taking, the market doesn't drop in a straight line, a small pullback

versus like a sustained consolidation and those

sorts of things. You've, I reckon you got too much selling. So I'm looking for right now that clear transition into a profit-dominated regime. Generally speaking, bears, bears, the recovery is quite slow. You've still got this, the low attention span, people, sentiment shifted, but you're not seeing like the influx of, of new buyers. So you need that kind of slow, sustained buildup and then eventually things start to ramp up. So really looking for that transition into a healthy bull. Okay. Yeah. And then

in terms of like- Specific metrics or, I, I mean, I know there's like a thousand of them, right? But I guess what would you-- what would be kind of the key, like a few key ones that you really pay attention to? For

sure. I think at this phase, there's three metrics that really matter. The realized cap, which is just the aggregate value in Bitcoin, we want that to start inflecting higher and basically moving into an uptrend, just grinding higher, that's capital inflow, so that's step one. Step two is you wanna see metrics like short-term SOPA, so SOPA stands for spent output profit ratio. Short story is you've got people who recently bought It describes, are they locking in a profit or a loss? Yeah. Now what we wanna see is them take profit, which they've just done. The market consolidate or correct. The people who FOMO into that local high, you wanna see them sell low. So you actually want SoPe to go down and hit the negative level, which is they're taking a loss. The local top buyers at eighty K have to take a loss, but then the dip buyers come in and we bounce. So in a bear market, people lock in losses all the time. SoPe's below It has short dipped above one. We want that to flip. We want it to mostly be profitable with short dips below one. You need that local fear that gets bought.

Okay. So it's sort of like, almost like a little bit of a healthy reset before we can take another leg up. You still

need a bit of fear, the wall of worry. You need people to always have this PTSD that the bear's back. Every lower high is just the market rolling over again. They panic sell 'cause they bought too much late, and then they get bored again. They go, "What am I doing In Sober in the early days.

Fascinating. So yeah, there's just all these like different ways to look at it, and I guess, I think there were different views, like if you went back a few months ago, you would have seen, let's say, Alex Thorn from Galaxy, they were putting out some stuff saying, "Oh, it's not, maybe it's not over yet. MVRV hadn't gone quite to the level that they wanted it to, or some of these things." Do you think like now it's kind of conclusive that it's

like, "No Price of this bear, because that's been my view for a long time. The default view is we have to go below the realized price, which means MVRV is below one. The problem with realized price is it includes lost coins with huge unrealized profits. This is

your point about the Satoshi coin thing, correct? Gotcha. And

as Bitcoin gets bigger, those unrealized profits get bigger, but they never get released. They're offsetting the losses that people hold who bought the top. But what do people who bought the top do? They do release them, they sell in a panic. So one side of the equation breaks down, the other one doesn't. So therefore, to get to break even, you shouldn't stop getting to break even over time. So the realized price, we really shouldn't be going back down to it. Doesn't mean we can't, but mathematically, as Bitcoin grows, the probability we go down to it is lower. So if you are an analyst and you're trying to run some I recommend not using the realized price and MVRV in their default format. You do have to understand the inputs to it. Okay. Do you have like an adjusted form? So, this is some of the work that Dave Pugh and I did with CoinTime Economics. The true market mean is the better level to use. Okay. and that was trading around seventy-six K, eighty K when we broke below it. What happened when we went below eighty K? Capitulation. It is that pain threshold. So, in my opinion, my thesis was true market mean is where we see capitulation kick in. We went below it, capitulation, the market to me is starting to say that's the correct framework, and then we didn't get a realized price, maybe that's the correct framework. So my thesis was both of those things. Thus far it's played out, we'll see if it holds, but I think the industry should learn something from that component.

I also found it really funny that, I mean, we were joking back in the twenty-one cycle about fifty-eight K gang, right? Like it was kind of a meme. We did our memes about it, and then it kind of came back, and we were kind of joking that, like, isn't it funny that the fifty-eight K may have just been the bottom of this bear cycle too?

To the wick. Yeah, no, I, I, I love We just, the market couldn't get below sixty. Yeah. Right? We hit sixty, I mean, it was fifty-nine on a wick in February, it traded down to sixty, then went to fifty-eight, but the market simply couldn't push it down. Then we had Coldcard, which I thought was gonna send the market much lower, didn't go lower. We had a failed soft fork, didn't go lower. We had Michael Saylor selling, we had ETFs capitulating, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, and yet the market was just-- They couldn't go

lower In one of your analysis, I believe you were pointing out that it's kind of funny that, yes, we are in our little online Bitcoin maxi echo chamber or whatever you wanna call us, despite all of that and all of us talking about Coldcard, it didn't actually impact the price that much. Remarkably so, yeah. So it's kind of like- The number of people or the number of coins secured by Coldcard was maybe not that much as a percentage of the overall supply, yeah, and that's why it didn't impact the price that much. Is that how you read it? Yeah, so I think my

general view is we were already at seller exhaustion, so from a market-based perspective, you could throw any kind of negative sentiment, right, the people who were gonna hit the red button had already done so, had already done it. But then I, I do believe there's a component of the market realized if this was a Ledger or a Trez Knows they're as small as they were. Yeah. So, you know, I think there's a lot of components there.

Yeah, gotcha. yeah, so I think the, the other interesting factor is Are we seeing like just as kind of Bitcoin is growing, there's diminishing returns over time and maybe diminishing volatility over time? So I guess the other corollary is, are we going to see kind of Less deep bear cycles over time. Yeah, what do you think of that?

Yeah, so I, I think this bear took a lot of people by surprise. It didn't go as long as I expected nor as deep as I expected. and I'm a big advocate for when the market tells me that the bottom's in or the top's in, then I'll look at the calendar and Check the price. So I try to let the market tell me and the, the data tell me what looks like a bottom rather than having a predisposed opinion as to when it needs to or how it needs to I still think we can have major blow-offs tops, because, and honestly, take a step back, look at what silver did. Silver's about the same size asset as Bitcoin, and it went parabolic. Why? Because there was retail lining up outside bullion dealers. Yeah. Is there a point in time where Bitcoin's gonna have a run where people just go, "Oh, wow, this thing didn't die," and I think the next all-time highs will be very interesting? Couple of reasons. One, in previous bear cycles, it's taken us about a year and a half to get back to all time high, but that's off, off a seventy-five or eighty-five percent down. It only took three, four months to go back to all time high to go to a two X. FTX bottomed at fifteen, we went to thirty. And then we chopped around at thirty, but that's an all-time high for us. So if we're gonna follow a cycle, so to speak, do we follow the-- when do we go up two X? Because that's like the next three months. Or do we go-- when do we break all-time high, which is a year and a half? Hard to tell. The next all time high, you can't blame it on ICOs and just like manic, you can't blame it on stimulus checks, you can't blame it on Trump, you can't blame it on the ETFs, it's just people wanna buy this thing. So I think the next all time high If you, kinda don't get Bitcoin, you're kinda just wrong. So all you Peter Shiffs of the world, like, you're, you're running out of ammo here. You know what I mean? So I think the next all-time high is gonna be really fun.

Yeah, and I guess to your point, like, it, yes, we have seen this kind of diminishing drawdown trend, at least comparing to past bear markets, but we don't know what the future holds. Maybe there is still this diminishing returns idea in Bitcoin, like if you zoom out, but

we're probably We're only down where you can hit all time high with a doubling, which Bitcoin does at the bottom of bear on a consistent basis. So, yeah, I, I don't think anchor yourself to what can or can't happen, because then when something that you don't expect happens, you're gonna be confused.

Yeah.

So don't assume anything about the future, temper your expectations, don't go in for a hundred x, but I think Bitcoin can really, really put some massive returns in.

Yeah. Right. And so I guess- I guess, and to your point about like if it kind of really pumped hard in the bull, then of course it could have a bigger drawdown, right? Oh, absolutely. So if we went to like some ridiculous number, like, you know, if you get an Omega

candle, you're gonna get an Omega bear, right? Kind of the way to think about it, right? They're unsustainable. slow stair-stepping price action, you know, people kind of- It was, chop consolidation was painful at the time in twenty twenty-four, but it built the base, you know, it built the base above a trillion dollar market cap, which is fifty K. my thesis was that was the most likely place for us to bottom in that twenty twenty-four zone Looks like we might have bottomed in that zone. We build support on the way up. You get a parabola, I mean, look at silver, silver fell off more than Bitcoin did in this, in its correction.

Yeah.

Right? Because it just went absolutely vertical, there's no support up there, there's tons of people who bought, and then it just collapses all the way down. Yeah.

So, I guess on top consolidation, do you foresee more of that again? And like, let's say we are going into a bull, could we see another round of top

consolidation? I think But really stable. It's when things start to go parabolic and

that's when you get worried about a big drop. Then it,

then it starts to get unsustainable, you're not building the support, so that's what a parabola is. It starts nice and stable, and you generally don't visit the bottom of the parabola again, but you will retrace the vertical part of it. So, yeah, I think chop-solidation is a good and healthy part. With options as well, just as options proliferate, you'll get more call walls, put walls, volatility selling, but Volatility for so long before vol returns and it will blow people out. So yeah, there's this process.

Okay, yeah. Alright, well, let's leave it there. Quick update from our friend. Make sure you subscribe to Check on Chain. I'm a subscriber, unpaid, endorsement guy, so Check it out. James, thanks for joining me. Pleasure.