{ "episodeId": "SLP648", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "checkmate": { "name": "Checkmate", "role": "guest", "tag": "CHECKMATE" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:12", "start": 11.71, "text": "Hi everyone, welcome back to Stephan Livera podcast, brought to you by Bold. For American listeners, go and buy Bitcoin over at getbold.io. Now, rejoining me on the show today is James Check, aka Checkmate, and you might, listeners might know James from his, Substack, Check on Chain, and, Some really great analytics. I, I'm actually a subscriber myself, so I enjoy, checking out, some of the work there. welcome back to the show, James." }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "00:38", "start": 38.27, "text": "G'day mate, it's good to see you again." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:40", "start": 40.13, "text": "Yeah, so, look, there's been a lot of different things happening. Obviously, you know, we're, we're kind of going through a bit of a down bit in Bitcoin right now, and I saw some really interesting comments you had, which is, and I think it's reflecting a, a sentiment we're starting Yeah, what does it mean if there is no cycle?" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "01:03", "start": 62.82, "text": "Yeah, I look, I, I think the best way to think about this, first things first, the market's gonna change, things are gonna evolve, Bitcoin's gonna evolve, clearly we're in a very different analog now. So, I kind of, I've been observing just the way that Bitcoin trades, and a couple of things started to, to, I, I guess, kind of prick my ears, and as I'm looking at all these different metrics, there was three very distinct regimes I started to notice. If you go to 2017 peak, I would describe that as very organic, very grassroots, very human being. People were just using their instinct, oh, it feels like it's run too far or, oh, this feels like a good time to buy or, a-and there was like a very, people weren't using charts, they weren't doing complex TA, they were going off pure gut feel and Bitcoin was being adopted. What is this weird internet money thing? I guess I should buy some. So that up to twenty seventeen was very much just a pure grassroots adoption phase. The twenty eighteen to the twenty twenty two, basically till FTX blew up, that period was high amplitude, high octane, straight up, straight down, lots of bull markets, lots of bear markets, lots of leverage, just a different animal And it was very high amplitude. a-and if people wanna actually go and visualize what I'm talking about here, look at the MAO multiple, just a ratio between price and the two hundred day, that twenty eighteen to twenty two period was just straight up, straight down, straight up, straight down. And people got blown up there, right? There was a-- I called it Schrodinger's Bitcoin, 'cause it was both alive and de-alive and dead. You know, the, the critics are telling us we're not gonna make it, the believers are like, \"Now this thing" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "02:47", "start": 167.14, "text": "It's much more stable, much slower. A twenty percent correction is a big correction these days, and we're doing it from a two trillion dollar asset. Yeah, again, if you go back to the MA multiple, the amplitude is much smaller, but it also oscillates differently. It doesn't have the same-- it's the same spot-driven dynamics as twenty sixteen, seventeen, but at the same time, it's, it's just, it's different. Doesn't have the same swings to the upside and the downside. It's a lot more controlled. So when I start talking about like there is no" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "03:17", "start": 197.2, "text": "And of markets are just information. It's just information. The only thing we as people, investors, hodlers, analysts, the only thing we can control is our decisions. So what I'm trying to get across with that message is actually to stop thinking so much in, it must do this because it did this in the past. Let those kind of anchors go and just allow the market to evolve around you. Like things are going to be different, and that's okay. what it means is that using past cycle top indicators, for example, You might have to actually take a step back and go, \"Well, why was that a top? Did that actually make sense? Does it make sense for that to be a topping signal in this current cycle?\" And almost bringing it back to like first principles, what am I looking for to establish these dynamics? So it's almost just letting go of those past biases. And to really, if I was to summarize it all in one thing, the twenty seventeen run was the world reacting to Bitcoin for the first time. What is this thing? That middle period was a transitional phase where we learnt about what Bitcoin is. And here we are in twenty twenty three onwards, we know what Bitcoin is, and rather than us responding to it, it's responding to the world. It's a reflection of macro dynamics and liquidity and market sentiment and tariffs and all this other stuff. So in a way, Bitcoin's kind of evolved to being that macro index, which is a fascinating concept to itself." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:36", "start": 276.47, "text": "Yeah, interesting. So, yeah, a few things I wanna react to there. So, I think it was historically kind of true, and especially for me coming in in 2013, it was like a wild, wild time. Like the, the moves were so much bigger than they are nowadays, percent-wise at least. Dollar-wise, obviously much bigger now. But, that's a topic to itself, too, by the way. You know, I think historically- You know, people kind of got attached to this idea of, you know, three green, one red, right? This idea that we're gonna have three up years and one down year. And so most of us, most people have just kind of been in the back of our minds, we've been sort of looking at it, thinking, \"Oh, okay, this must be the up year, and next year is a down year.\"" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "05:16", "start": 315.59, "text": "All time high, December eighteenth," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:20", "start": 320.25, "text": "twenty twenty-five. Right. Yeah. So that's kind of like, that's what many of us are kind of patterning, Let me, let me give a one small counterargument that, you know, a lot of people say this time is different, right? Or even in the twenty-one, twenty-two cycle, there was, you know, Su-Suzu saying, \"up only,\" or there were people like, I don't know, like a Dan Held or others who were saying \"super cycle,\" and the, you know, this idea that maybe we would only have small drawdowns and we're gonna just keep pumping, but then actually we did have a big drawdown. So how do People who are saying this time is different?" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "06:01", "start": 361.35, "text": "Totally. No, the four most dangerous words in finance. And, and this is the thing, right? I come in every day when I go to analyze the market and go, \"I know things will be different. Every cycle is different. The world changes, so things are different.\" But also, don't-- you have to hold both competing views at the same time. What if it's not different? So then I try to, like, you know, again, we have to use pattern recognition because that's really all you have. You, you can't They're very similar to the twenty sixteen, seventeen cycle, both in terms of performance since the bottom, and that alone is amazing. The fact that as a multi-trillion dollar asset, Bitcoin still moves like it did back when it was a couple hundred billion less than, is incredible. So that's the first thing. I also think it's very spot driven. The ETFs have no doubt brought in a true spot bid, and if you go back to twenty seventeen, we didn't have futures, we barely had stablecoins. It's basically Bitcoin and, you know, shitcoins around it, that So we have that in, in similar. We do have derivatives now, but they're being used in a very different way. If you go back to twenty twenty-one, it was buy Bitcoin, put Bitcoin on exchange, lever up that Bitcoin, go long Bitcoin, and then when the price goes down, not only does your futures position get wiped out, but your collateral falls in value too. Now, if you look at the derivatives market, options are now as big as futures. Options were nothing back in twenty twenty-one, they're now as big. Options are a more sophisticated instrument. You're not gonna have Retail guys in there trading them at this point in time, there'll be some, but for the most part, it's more sophisticated actors. the leverage is, but all the margin is either stable coins, fiat, or, very little of it is coin now, which is good, and a lot of it's in, in the CME. The CME is now bigger than Binance, and again, these guys are professionals, so it's professionalized, probably the right way to frame it. So we've got little bits and pieces from all these different market cycles, and in many" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "07:59", "start": 478.82, "text": "And, and I say this all the time, what top? Which top? Because there's been so many tops. The top is the one that matters for you. A lot of people think about these sickly cool tops, which of course happen, but if you think about the kind of tops we've had so far, they've been miniature blow-offs. We had all the excitement from the ETFs, and then we just exhausted demand, and we chopped around for seven months. And then we had Trump coming into power, we had this, you know, enormous boost, and then we pulled back. But if" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "08:29", "start": 508.7, "text": "Probably in a correction in twenty seventeen. Ironically enough, it looks just the same. So, you know, the idea of a super cycle, the world does move cyclically, but if Bitcoin's no longer moving in its own like four year kind of pattern, then it's probably gonna move more like the world, which is typically like an eight year or a twelve year, and even that's changed because when was the last major recession? Right, two thousand eight. That's kind of how far back you've gotta go. I mean, there's areas where you could argue, but it's kind of semantics, Is also in a somewhat different place. Fiscal dominance, that is a, a shift. So I think that's probably the way to think about things. Don't look at things in terms of past must repeat. It'll rhyme, but it's gonna have tunes from all different parts of the market depending on where we are at." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:15", "start": 555.15, "text": "Yeah, I think that's a great way to put it. I agree with that. And w- let me summarize it this way. It's almost like you have to understand structural shifts in the market, as you said. Yes. So as you said, we've now got this thing, ETFs, right? Whether we like them or not, of course, we as, let's say, if we're ideologically kind of Bitcoiners, we want as many people to hold their own keys and, you know, get your cold card and all, all that sort of thing. But we know there's also a lot of these new people who are coming in through ETFs and through the micro strategies of the world or strategy now, the Bitcoin treasury companies of the world, the Metaplanets, the Semblar Scientifics of the world, that there's a lot of I, whatever, Ibeard or Fidelity or Bitwise or whatever their investment" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "10:02", "start": 601.89, "text": "manager just sticks one percent, half a percent, just like sticks that in their portfolio 'cause that's the model, right? The, these are also dynamics. They don't even really care, they don't know that they own it, they just, they're happy that they've got something in the portfolio and it's being managed by someone else." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "10:15", "start": 615.38, "text": "Yeah, exactly right. And so then I've heard people make the parallel with when the gold ETF came out and kind of look at what happened the decade after that and" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "10:27", "start": 626.56, "text": "so on Zoom out, right? Because, you know, what would happen? And sometimes many of us, if we're kind of getting asked by, let's say, news or radio to kind of come on, as an example here in Dubai, every now and again, the Dubai Eye, radio channel, whenever there's a big move in Bitcoin price, they, they, they ping me and be like, \"Hey, Steph, come on the show and explain to us what's going on.\" And then I'm often there, basically rewording the, the two words, \"Zoom out,\" right? Moon tomorrow. Well, no, that's just not how it works. It's more like something structural has shifted. You've gotta zoom out, and you've gotta understand that we're now in this kind of broader uptrend." }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "11:09", "start": 668.95, "text": "Totally. And that's the thing, like if you, if we really take a step back and look at the current market structure, it's up sideways, up sideways, up sideways, right? Now, some people will argue it's not really sideways, it's down. It's like, okay, curve your box a little bit, now everything's inside, right? So it At the end of the day, what is a correction? If you really zoom out and you look at on a monthly chart, it's literally a bunch of candles next to each other. Yes, it sells off on the daily timeframe, and this is another thing where a lot of people get stuck. Our emotions live on the daily chart because we live our lives day to day. So a lot of people will check the daily price, they'll see the daily sell off, they'll see the next red candle, and that's where their emotional state is. But if you go and look at the monthly price chart, Four months ago. So you just kind of think about it from that lens. Bear markets are when we start making lows, and it just keeps going lower and gets, and keeps getting worse. So, you know, it's one of these dynamics, you're right, you've got to refactor the word of zoom out, just helps people take a step back and, to kind of close out that previous point, I think a lot of these tools that we use, whether it's on chain, whether it's derivatives, what, whatever it is, coming at things from a first principles perspective, I think" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "12:29", "start": 748.72, "text": "Past doesn't mean it has to hit that level again, doesn't mean it won't hit that level again. We have to think about what got it there, what was the dynamics, right? In twenty nineteen, we had the plus token Ponzi, in twenty twenty one, we had GBTC hoovering up six hundred thousand Bitcoin. There's all the, they've got FTX and fraud and all sorts of stuff. Every market cycle, if you actually didn't have a halving, you could just as easily explain it from all sorts of other factors, and all of them play a role, and That are having a role in our current environment, it was obviously the ETFs in the first part of last year, and I'd say most of last year, and then this year we've seen, if you look at the who's buying those ETFs, the thirteen F filings, they're serious institutions. There's a lot of hedge funds, there's a lot of fast money and arbitrage companies, but a lot of them are actually just buying like point o one percent, and that's millions of dollars, right? Point o one percent of their portfolio, they're not gonna care what's, Comfortable winding up to point two percent, point one percent, half a percent. Suddenly you're talking about serious money." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "13:36", "start": 816.21, "text": "Yeah, exactly. and so I think one way to understand some of what you're saying there is, i-is really understanding what are the big drivers, and then maybe diali-- understanding has that kind of dialed up or dialed down. So I'll give an example. In the early years of Bitcoin, the halvings mattered so much, right? That was a big, big driver. Nowadays, it- It'll be fair to argue we should dial that down in terms of how much weighting are we giving, okay, halving is maybe not as important now. What's more important is some of these other factors, right? ETFs, the kind of the, the, the, the Bitcoin treasury companies, just kind of, more, let's say, the Fidelities of the world and the, the Black Rocks of the world saying, telling people, \"Here, you have my blessing, it's okay to buy some Bitcoin in your insurance or in your pension portfolio,\" this kind Matter a lot more now than, let's say, the halving." }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "14:32", "start": 871.61, "text": "Absolutely, and I think as Bitcoin gets bigger, I think it's easy to get lost in the trees. You forget how big it is. So Bitcoin, the way I've been describing it, it's the biggest fish in its pond, and it, it just has no equal, right? I've been using some of these stats recently. If you took the remaining Bitcoin to be mined and gave it a market cap, it's the fifth biggest coin. It's after Tether, right? So it just shows how small everything else It's, it's like forty percent of Ethereum. These things are just irrelevant by comparison. So Bitcoin is now so large for its pool, but it's only just swum out into the biggest ocean, which is just macro markets. So in a way, it's just kind of left the world that it's come from behind, and it's now in a world that's just so much larger. So a fifty percent move, and you mentioned dollars and percents, this is another thing that's getting quite interesting, I'm still trying to get my head around it, something I've noticed this cycle, maybe On Twitter, a lot of people, particularly when the market's down, they're saying, \"Oh, it's down thirty thousand dollars,\" or \"It's down another twenty thousand dollars.\" I've actually, I don't recall people talking about it being down in dollars as like a dominant narrative. Usually it's down fifteen percent, twenty percent, thirty percent. And I've been trying to work out why this is To go from a hundred K to a hundred and fifty, that's a fifty percent move. Most people who've been around in Bitcoin, you've seen a handful of fifty percent moves, probably in both directions. It kinda feels somewhat normal and expected. That's a trillion dollar market cap. That's a trillion dollars to the market cap now. It's a absolutely massive number. So in terms of the dollar move, it's gonna take a lot of energy to get there, right? My, my estimate probably needs the ETFs to, I don't know, add another fifty percent to their size. They've had forty billion, probably needs another to sixty or something, seventy billion before we can get up to that, hundred and fifty K mark. I think it'll happen, but it's gonna take some time. So there's that kind of dynamic People looking at their portfolio, and if you've been in Bitcoin for a little while, the market pulling back ten percent could be a year's salary of yours back in the day, right? So now the dollar sign for the individual who's been around for a while is so much larger, they're actually not worried about percentages anymore because they're looking at the actual number moving around, their net worth, and that is now more significant to them than the percentages, which I find a really interesting dynamic. I'm still working on that idea, but it's a, it's a new trend that I've seen. About dollars down, not percent down as much." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:59", "start": 1019.15, "text": "Yeah, that could also be a function of just newer people, right? Like if someone's a bit more of a noob, they're not comfortable with a twenty or thirty percent drawdown because they're coming from like the world where they're holding S&P and, five percent down is a huge day for the S&P, but for Bitcoin, it's like, it's a Tuesday, you know? It's whatever. Totally. But let's be real, like I, I do" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "17:18", "start": 1038.17, "text": "wonder how many people buy Bitcoin and are surprised that it's volatile Like not even close. We're a third of what we had in twenty seventeen. It amazes me that people, and I see this commentary all the time from TradFi bros, they're like, \"All the ETF guys, they're just flaky, you know, they're flaky hodlers and they'll sell the moment that it gets volatile.\" It's like, dude, no one's buying a Bitcoin ETF. They've been hammered for years in the media that it's dangerous, volatile, and speculative. Now they've gone and bought some, and it's volatile, I would be shocked if" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "17:56", "start": 1076.49, "text": "Almost the media's done the exact right thing, conditioned people to say it's volatile. So when they come in and it goes down twenty percent, they're like, \"Hey, that's actually not as bad as I thought it was.\" And suddenly they've actually been conditioned without even holding it to be ready for what's actually coming, and now it is trading down twenty percent. People are terrified. I mean, I" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "18:14", "start": 1094.4, "text": "partially agree, but let me, let me put, there are some, let's say, anecdotal but probably useful examples. Like, there are people I talk to, and some of them Neurbs, they bought maybe close to a hundred, maybe a little over a hundred, and so maybe once, once it kinda-- 'cause it went up to like a hundred and eight, hundred and nine thousand, something like that, and then when it got to kind of about a hundred, maybe they were okay, but once it got down to kind of into the nineties, into the eighties, some of these guys were really scared because, you know, their entry point was well above that, and for them, if you're a Neurb, and here's the thing, risk Now, I'm gonna distinguish here, if there are people who just kind of, they don't even know they have Bitcoin exposure, okay, yeah, obviously, they, they won't even know. But people who actively chose, you know, Bitcoin strategic reserve or whatever, some news, I'm gonna buy some, and then now because they're, because they're new, they haven't actually gone through these eighty percent drawdowns, so they're not used to that, so it's a big deal for them. So maybe some of those people, they're the ones selling, and I think" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:26", "start": 1166.43, "text": "holders doing, and that's where you can sort of, you know, look at some metrics and understand which cohorts are selling at this point." }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "19:35", "start": 1174.72, "text": "And that's the thing, right? The, the, this is what I love about on-chain data. First of all, it's all of us. And what do human beings have? We have a hundred thousand year old hardware in our brains, emotional hardware that is ill-equipped, totally, perfectly ill-equipped to deal with markets. The way that our brain is designed, I don't know why it is, just is the case, the natural- Behavior that we want to do is generally the exact wrong thing to do. People always buy when it feels the best, and when does it feel the best? When everyone in your mate is cheering, going, \"Yes, this thing's got no ceiling, let's go! \" And then if you look at the behavior patterns of what the smart money, people who have mastered the skills, are going, \"This is what my ape brain wants to do, but what should I actually do? \" Probably the exact opposite. So at the time when it feels the best, usually funding rates are really high 'cause there many of our metrics showing profit taking are at all time highs, long term hold of sell side is maximum. If you look at all these conditions, it doesn't mean it's gonna be the top, but the probability that you're buying high is much higher. So the, the guy you were just describing who kind of bought his first Bitcoin at a hundred and ten thousand, it felt great at the time, probably feels pretty shit now. And it's just about, that's what I use on-chain data for, it's just to look at what everyone else is doing, what's the smart Doing? When the fast money buy, buys high and then sells low, now I'm interested. Now we're talking about the environment where the dude who is panic selling, he's probably gonna panic sell the bottom. Why? 'Cause that's exactly what I did back in twenty eighteen. I panic sold every bottom and I panic bought in FOMO on every rally, and I was wrong, perfectly wrong every time. If you can take your emotion out of it by just looking at what everyone else is doing, be like, \"Oh, I'm gonna do the opp- opposite of that guy. I'm" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:25", "start": 1284.76, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. This show brought to you by CoinKite dot com, the creators of the best Bitcoin hardware security devices such as the Coldcard Mark IV and the new Coldcard Q. Now, we use Bitcoin hardware security devices to keep our keys offline, our private keys offline. Now, the way these work is you can do that setup, write down your twelve or twenty-four words on the seed word cards and keep that secure. Now, you can use this device to interact with the Bitcoin network Network using software such as Sparrow Wallet, Electrum, or Bextra Desktop or Nunchuk as a few examples. Now, you have a range of security features that you can use with these devices such as passphrase, you can use seed x or my favorite is multi-signature. Now, if you're starting in a basic way, just start with the device and the USB-C cable, plug it directly to the computer and use it that way, and then later improve your setup. But I believe these devices are great at helping secure your coins Especially as you start to migrate up into multi-signature security. But don't be disheartened or don't be, scared away. They are accessible, and I think you actually do learn about Bitcoin in the process. So to get yours, go to coinkite dot com, use code livera to get a discount on your cold card. This episode brought to you by Galloy. They are building banking software for the Bitcoin age. So if you are with a bank, a fintech, or a startup looking to offer some kind of Bitcoin product, whether that is a Bitcoin collateralized loan Deposit accounts or payments, Galloy can help you. Their latest product is called Lana. It is a loans management platform, and you can use this to come to market quickly and offer a loans or Bitcoin collateralized lending product for your customers. Now, Galloy have a lot of experience in the space. They started with Blink Wallet in twenty twenty, and they've since grown this to become a community favorite over time, and so they have a lot of experience making things work in a secure, reliable, and scalable way. So if you need assistance coming- to market quickly with a Bitcoin banking product such as lending or deposits or payments, talk to the team at Galloy. You can email them, the email is biz at galloy dot io, or go to the website galloy dot io. And now back to the show. Yeah, I think you, you, it's so right there, the point about dealing with our emotions and the psychology of it, and that's why I think that's probably-- I'm not a trader myself, but I think if, if you wanna be a good trader, you really have to separate from the emotion and the psychology and not getting caught up with like the herd, because the herd comes and the herd is often wrong, in some, in some ways, right? but that said, the broad-- you know, if you zoom out and you're looking at the broad long cycle Correct, right? People are coming into Bitcoin, that's what we expect. Now, one other point I wanna bring up with you before we get into some of the on-chain metric stuff, I find some of the power law stuff interesting in that it's like, it's talking about diminishing returns, diminishing volatility, and that's what we've seen, like just statistically, objectively, we've seen this diminishing returns, diminishing returns, diminishing volatility over time. Now, I know maybe you're not like a, a fan of it per se, but I, I'm curious your reaction on the, you know, Just it, as this thing grows, we're gonna see this diminishing returns. And do you agree with that? Do you think that's the way you should view it?" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "24:51", "start": 1491.07, "text": "Yeah, it's a good question. So actually, I, I don't dislike the power law model, I dislike the way it's been sold and pitched, by the, by the originator. But that's a different type, it, it just, that's a, that's a plan B problem in my view. Right. Because the" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "25:04", "start": 1504.28, "text": "concept is different from the, the person. Concept" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "25:07", "start": 1506.58, "text": "is, yeah, separate The model. It makes perfect sense because if what people I think don't quite intuitively recognize, it's a log-log of price and time, which means in order to go up an order of magnitude of time, you need an order of magnitude more-- oh, sorry, an order of magnitude in price, you need an order of magnitude more time. It's going to be slower, it's going to get increasingly slow if that model has any kind of validity. So I think it's interesting as a trajectory. I generally don't use models, and this is just my personal preference, the model can Fantastic. But the, the problem with it is that I don't believe it's baked in anything. It's really assuming a network effect, which could p-completely be true. But there's no way to verify until you live that world. So what I prefer to do when I look at a lot of the models I have, I care about what are investors doing. So it's more about looking at how investors are responding. Are people stacking and hodling, or are they starting to distribute, which is increasing the chance we hit some kind of ceiling? So the way I look at things, the power law I mean, I wouldn't hold Bitcoin if the power law pointing up into the sky in log scale wasn't true. That would make perfect sense. Do I use it in my analysis? Not really, because to me, what's the-- for me as an analyst, what's the output? It's going up forever, Laura. Okay, I'm gonna use that as my background, and now I'm gonna look at everything that's going on in the in-between phase. and you mentioned before, like the difference between hodlers and traders. A lot of people actually get this wrong. I don't What do you classify yourself? Trader, hodler? You know, how would you-- ninety-six percent of people say they're hodlers, and I write for hodlers, because at the end of the day, understanding why the market does what it does, it actually helps you navigate what's going on, because we're all subject to the same emotions. And, you know, for a lot of people, Bitcoin is their life savings. It's my life savings. So in that regard, doesn't it make sense to have that like anchor for, \"All right, this is what the crowd's doing." }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "27:11", "start": 1631.04, "text": "I just never wanna be surprised. I don't care that it's down, I just wanna be ready and go, okay, I was kinda expecting it to be down, now I can make decisions along the way." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:21", "start": 1640.54, "text": "Yeah. Okay, yeah, I mean, I mostly agree. I think one slight disagreement I would have is more just like maybe the characterization of the power law stuff, right? Like, I don't, at least the way I look at it, I see it like it is a useful guide in terms of What is a decent benchmark, right? Because I'll give you an example. There were people in, even in twenty twenty-one cycle, there were people where if you said two hundred K, you were considered a bear, you were a, a loser, quote unquote, not being bullish. Two hundred K was, but if you looked at power law, it was kind of like, actually, yeah. Now I wasn't looking at, as, as much at the power law at that time. Now I'm sort of starting to see the logic of it and understand that even now, there are people who," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:06", "start": 1685.91, "text": "possibility. It's just not really-- If a hundred" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "28:08", "start": 1688.23, "text": "and fifty K is an additional trillion, then a million is, it's quite the sum." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:12", "start": 1692.08, "text": "Right, yeah. And it's, it's just insane. And then there are people who are like, \"Yeah, five hundred K this year and stuff.\" I mean, it's, okay, it's possible, but it's extremely, extremely unlikely. That's so unlikely that I just-- you just shouldn't, you know, if you're trying to be rational and look at kind of- You know, what is the proba- what are the probabilities here? It kind of gives you that g- a guide in that sense. And I think one other thing that I've found interesting is it seems to be, the price seems to be sort of it's almost like a magnet going back to kind of what the power law trend line is. Now, will that behavior continue? We don't know. Or maybe once we sort of really enter the, let's say, the hype phase when retail really shows up, maybe we'll, we'll kind of run away from that trend line for a little bit. But for me, I've just found it useful just to sort of, as you said, manage our emotions in a way to sort of understand this is a realistic trajectory, this isn't not kind of overly hyped and not overly bearish." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:11", "start": 1751.21, "text": "I certainly, I think it's useful, and that's why I'm a subscriber of your Substack as well, because y-you can also look kind of more, in a more detailed way, what's happening on chain, what are the short-term holders doing, what are the long-term holders doing, and look at some of these metrics. I think you were talking about, SOPA recently. So SOPA, spent output profit ratio, can you explain a little bit about that because you mentioned that it had a reset recently?" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "29:37", "start": 1777.15, "text": "Yeah, absolutely. So, and, Find the tools, find the analysts, find the people that help you. Everyone's got their own structure. Find the things that work for you to just ground yourself, keep yourself in the real world. If you stay in the real world, you'll be surprised to the upside more often than you're surprised to the downside. If you keep that grounded view It's just gonna help everybody get through, you know, what is a pretty chaotic asset in the best of times. now SOPA is a, it's basically the Swiss Army knife. There's two metrics that if you do wanna get into the world of on-chain data, you're actually gonna need to learn, learn three of them. Realized cap, which is basically the on-chain market cap, MVRV, which is the unrealized profit or loss multiple. So think about like an oscillator that tells you how in the money or out of the money the average guy is. And then SOPA It looks at realized, so where mVRV says, \"Show me how much profit the guy who hasn't spent, what's his profit? \" SOPA is on this particular day, what was the average profit or loss locked in by people who did spend? So it's one of these useful tools where you can say, \"Well, what's the incentive? Are people in a lot of profit with mVRV? \" And then when people take a lot of profit, I've now got confluence, right? It, it makes sense that we're gonna start to top out when people are really up" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "30:57", "start": 1856.75, "text": "Now, you're right, SOP has had a, a really healthy reset actually. So what we look for in a lot of on-chain data, particularly with short-term holders, I actually wanna see them buy high and then sell low, and particularly I want them to sell low and take a loss. And this isn't because I'm some kinda dude who wants to see people lose money, it's just the fact of the matter, this is what happens, and when it does happen, it's, it's usually a nice flush out, and it will generally come alongside like a washing out of futures markets, some Averaging. These things all tend to come in pairs. funding rates are actually just futures Sopha. It's basically, they're exactly the same chart, which I think is beautiful in its own right, but it's telling you a story of when you've kind of washed out the weak hands. So Sopha's recently been trading below one. And, and the reason we look at one is the breakeven level. If people were taking profit, it would be higher, and if people are taking heavy losses, it will be lower. So as it goes lower, and I want it to be short and sharp, it's like these little V-shaped undercuts. If it goes underneath one and stays there and stays at a really deep level, it's basically saying that every single day, people are just going, \"Get me out, I'm done. My, my sentiment is broken. I don't wanna hold this thing.\" I was wrong, I'm out. If you get these short sharp undercuts, it's more of like a, a, a washout. The people who were gonna sell, they panic, they exit, and then that's it, the dust is over. So you want these short sharp resets, and so far that appears to be what's going on. So a lot of these metrics, whether it's funding rates, Sopa, MVRVs, they've all reset to a nice healthy level. Like if you had asked me two years ago, check, I need you to sit down and tell me Bottom of a correction looks like. The current conditions that we have, and by the way, bottoms take time to hammer out, but the conditions we currently have are exactly what I've written down. So, yes, there is no doubt, there's a potential that this correction could deteriorate and become some kind of longer, you know, bear market, and that's a whole different topic. That could happen, yes. I don't personally deem it to be highly probable, and just given the set of evidence in front of me, it kind of looks like every other correction in every other bull- Full market. if I was to give it a grading, it's like ninety-five percent the same, what we call species as a normal correction, and there's like a five percent mutation that might look a little bit like a bear. So it's like, which one do I take? I can't go with the five percent, 'cause, you know, the father's probably a correction" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:31", "start": 2010.73, "text": "Yeah, I think, I think that it makes so much sense, even from just like a gut feel. Like if you're looking at the sentiment online, you know, people were crazy bullish at 1.09K, they were kind of like, \"Oh, we're going to the moon tomorrow,\" da da da, this strategic reserve, this, that, whatever, whatever other, you know, hype thing. And there's kind of all these kind of hope, hopium narratives that people sometimes, talk about, and then when we were at like- 80K or just under 80K, people are like, \"Oh, it's all over, the cycle is over, guys, pack it up, see you in four years.\" This is the kind of rhetoric or the talk we were seeing online. whereas like, let's say the, the real long-term holders who kind of knew what was up, I think most of them were kind of like, \"What do you mean? This is just a normal bull market correction, right? Like, we've lived through many of these, just, just wait it out or keep stacking if you" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:26", "start": 2066.44, "text": "see that. So, I guess, for you then, you would see it like eighty K ish was like a value zone, right? And, and just for listeners, this is-- today is the 25th of March, price now is about eighty-six thousand dollars in USD terms, so, yeah, I guess, are you seeing it like, you know, we've kind of, you know, we went through a correction and now we're sort of coming on the way back up?" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "34:51", "start": 2090.8, "text": "Yeah, so it's a good question. So I think we've come off a high of like eighty-eight, and, the piece that I just released was just trying to get a bit of a gut feel, and something I've definitely found, I say this a lot, if I don't have a good read, and by the way, the current market conditions with like intraday tariffs and just like stuff changes every five minutes, it's chaos. The best analyst in the world can't work out what's going on. So if you're feeling a bit confused, you're not alone. The data. And I find on-chain data is so powerful for this, 'cause more often than not, if you've been around for a cycle or two, you've got your Bitcoin intuition. On-chain data actually helps me, like for me personally, it helps me go, \"My intuition's correct. This is how I feel, this is my gut feel. Like if, if I didn't have any data in front of me, I'd be looking at this correction and going...\" It's been far worse, right? I've dealt with worse. I, I don't feel like my bullish sentiment is shattered, I'm like, \"Oh, it's just part of the process.\" so when I look at the on-chain data, by and large, that seems to be how people who've been around for a while, we're seeing them take less profit, old hands have stopped selling. Generally speaking, it looks like we're getting some top buyers capitulating. If hodlers aren't selling, I would hazard a guess that seven out of ten of them have probably moved back into" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "36:11", "start": 2170.92, "text": "From my perspective, you're right, a hundred and ten was complete chaos, right? It, everyone was singing there is no ceiling, it's gonna go up forever. That's usually, you know, Trump's just launched his token, it's a circus. Once, once we got back down to a hundred, that zone between about ninety and a hundred K, it's a crazy stat, fifty-two percent of all the dollars, if we value all the UTXOs based on when they moved on chain, fifty-two percent of all the wealth stored in Bitcoin had a price above ninety K. A, a simply incredible statistic. That represents about twenty-five percent of the Bitcoin, but remember, if you got one Bitcoin at a hundred K, it's worth ten times more than a Bitcoin that last moved at ten K. So that's how you get those kind of disparities. Now, when we started to sell off, I was talking about this air pocket, it's between seventy-three and eighty-six, and the reality is we just didn't have that many coins transact there. And for whatever reason, like a CME gap, the market just seems to wanna go there and find out how much demand is there. So because we didn't get many transactions in that point, the market just, it seeks out pain. It just looked to me like a really obvious target. every trader in the world would have seen it on the volume profile, they could have seen it in on It's an obvious place to go. We're in the process of backfilling that as we speak. But my, my general mind map for where we are at the moment, the twenty twenty-four chop range? The amount of coins that transacted there is incredible. I would be amazed if we spent much time in or below that zone. To me, I feel like we belong above a trillion dollars, that's fifty K. I think we deserve a premium to a trillion dollars. I think we get down to one point four, anyone who's done any work on Bitcoin is gonna be just emptying their wallets, finding ways to just buy as much as they can. So to me, between like here and seventy-five is basically a value zone. Anything below that I'm selling chairs, man. I'm, I'm like finding anything I can get rid of because it, it just makes no sense to go below that level in my, in my view." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:12", "start": 2291.96, "text": "Yeah, interesting. And so, yeah, I guess one way to sort of think of it is there's like a, as Bitcoin grows over time, there's almost like a fair value, quote unquote, and when we're kind of over that, people are selling, and when we're under that, people are buying, as in the, the smart money, let's say it this way, the smart money As you said, like when we're down at like seventy-five K, that's like a extremely good value. Thank you very much," }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "38:40", "start": 2319.54, "text": "I'll take" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:40", "start": 2320.1, "text": "it. Yeah, people are like, \"Yeah, let me...\" If they've got some investment property, maybe they're thinking, \"Okay, how can I sell this and put that in-- put that fiat into Bitcoin because this is a great value time, right?\" So I think that's kind of the mindset, or at least that's one way to think about it. it's interesting you mentioned the kind of, you know, air pockets and" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:04", "start": 2343.8, "text": "Air gap thing, and at this point, I'm too afraid to ask, you know, or, or the CME futures, right? Because people have been talking about CME futures, I've never really understood it. So what, what is this CME futures? I've been too afraid to ask. What's your perspective on that?" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "39:17", "start": 2357.31, "text": "Yeah, it's, it's a funny thing. So it's, it's a bit of a hangover. So I, I read a book way back in the day, it was called Insider Buy Super Stocks. It was kind of like the first trading book" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "39:34", "start": 2373.78, "text": "Happen. You, you, you can find a thousand one explanations for it, but they're just things that markets do. And one of them was gaps. The probability that-- because basically what happens with a gap, because markets, traditional markets obviously trade nine to five and they close over weekends, if something happens on a Sunday and the, I don't know, the oil market has some kind of blowup or something happens. Oil stocks might open gapped higher or gapped lower. So it's basically like they closed at twenty bucks a share, but something really good happened, and suddenly they should be worth twenty-five bucks a share. That gap, tr-traders now have, I think the right saying for this, \"In a sea of sand, a single flag becomes a target.\" If you're out there in the desert and all you can see is one flag in the distance, where do you reckon everyone's gonna walk? It's like a shelling point. I'm gonna walk towards that flag because where the hell else There's this thing that everyone can see, and they're like, \"Mmm, that feels like we should go there, \"because I don't know where else to go. So that's one of the dynamics. There's also an element of, testing demand. So I view markets as a bit of a confidence machine. If you think about what price is, we spent seven, eight months chopping sideways between fifty and seventy. The market proved that we belong there, right? Because we actually tried that twice in twenty twenty-one. We got to one point two trillion in April and we got fifty percented, and then we got there again in November and we had the twenty twenty-two bear market. Now we got up there in, whatever it was, March, and then we stayed above one point two trillion. Every time it went below fifty-sixty K, the market came in and bid it, pushed it higher again. The market said, \"We belong up here,\" and then we sprung up to two trillion. We've pulled back from two trillion, but we haven't gone back to one trillion. So the market's proven the confidence that we belong above that zone. But it doesn't know about that gap. No one traded coins between seventy-three and eighty-six. Well, now we're starting to backfill, and the bulls are now proving how much do-- if you loved it at a hundred K, how much do you love it at eighty-five and eighty-six and seventy-eight? And if you prove that you actually wanna buy this thing here, now we'll go back and test a hundred and see if all those guys who are still hodling from up there, and if they don't do anything, now we're going a hundred and twenty, and then we're gonna find So you kinda think about it as a confidence machine. We've proven we belong there, tried the next level, not enough, come back down a little bit, alright, now we're good to go. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:01", "start": 2520.62, "text": "Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Now, one other thing that's probably interesting just to get your perspective as, you know, you're looking at on-chain, but also what's happening in the macro world. ETF buyers who aren't necessarily going to show up on chain. Now, I guess it's fair to say, let's say BlackRock, their ETF buys Bitcoin and then it goes to their broker and their custodian, and actually in the background, yeah, maybe it's held at Coinbase custody, but I guess it's just a different-- it's gonna show up in a different way on chain, isn't it?" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "42:29", "start": 2548.8, "text": "Totally. And, and this is one of the other things, right? The data will also shift and evolve and change. so at a very mechanical level, what are the Exactly the same as finance. Coins go in, there's like a net flow in and out as people buy and withdraw, or there's a net flow in and out of the ETFs, and then other people just trade around coins on the inside. They trade the shares, and unless there's a net change, there's no delta. But I mentioned before, a lot of the metrics we look at only counts if the coins are spent. So yes, the ETFs will show up in things like the Hodl Waves, there'll probably be a big chunk of iBit, for example, that doesn't move But that's just gonna look, it's gonna look exactly the same as Binance does in the hodl ways. But if you look at spending mechanics, the vast, vast majority, like eighty percent plus of all coins spent every day are either deposited or withdrawn from a spot exchange. So even if you've got point one percent or one percent that's the ETFs doing a transaction, one transaction per day The exchanges just dominate, so we can still pull that information from there. But what we can also do is we can say, \"Well, look, we've also got ETF trade volume, we've got inflows and outflows, we've got ETF prices, we've got all these metrics now associated with the ETFs.\" And whilst, yes, my specialization is on-chain, I look at futures, I look at options, I look at ETFs, spot, on-chain, and more often than not, all these different market sectors give us a very similar picture across the board. So it's a really The world of Bitcoin, that the data is so freely available, for anyone who's doing any kind of analysis, it doesn't take long if you're in the tradfi world, you start hitting roadblocks where it's just really hard to get data. You can get it, but you gotta put a, you know, you gotta get a Bloomberg terminal or it's all behind very heavy paywalls. Bitcoin, we've got all the data almost for free. Pretty much everything you can get for Bitcoin is free, which is an incredible advantage. Honestly, when I look at stocks and gold and other things" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "44:31", "start": 2670.64, "text": "I have for Bitcoin, which to me is just incredible. Right, yeah, there's no Sober" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:34", "start": 2674.2, "text": "for gold, there's no-- My bet," }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "44:36", "start": 2676.34, "text": "MVRV for stocks, right? My bet is that one day, one day, the Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange will work this out, and they will eventually, 'cause they're the ones that can see all these cospecies, they can see this stuff, they can see the UTXOs, so to speak, of, all these stocks. One day they're gonna work this out, and they're gonna build Sober and" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:01", "start": 2701.12, "text": "Yeah, that's totally, it totally makes sense. now I want you to, you know, I know this is something probably you and I agree on. There's been some kind of false hopeum narratives that kind of go around, you know, things like, I'd like to get your response on some of these. So, let's start with Mr. 100." }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "45:18", "start": 2718.29, "text": "Oh no. Yes, so Mr. 100, I'm gonna give massive credit to, to Sanni, who's done an enormous amount of work just labeling U Mr. 100 is an exchange, folks. So every time-- and this, this is what I say with whale, I say, \"Don't whale watch, kids,\" and it's very simply why. If you don't know at a UTXO level whether you're tracking an exchange or a whale Then your data could be perfectly wrong, which means your analysis could be perfectly wrong, and if you don't know if it's perfectly wrong, then it's useless. So if Mr. One Hundred is buying a hundred coins a day, that could actually be a hundred coins of deposits, which means that that's actually selling. So you could have it perfectly backwards, but unless you know the answer to that And most people don't. You shouldn't be using whale data. The, the noise to signal ratio is through the roof. Don't use whale data unless you're really in the weeds, and basically no one is. I'm not. I choose not to use it 'cause I don't think there's any signal." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:21", "start": 2780.79, "text": "Yeah, excellently explained. And just shout out there, as you mentioned, at Sunny EXP. So he's the guy who did, Time Chain Index, and he was kind of categorizing on chain, \"Oh, this looks like a this output and that out, Binance or whatever, whatever large exchanges.\" I don't know where he gets the" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "46:35", "start": 2794.84, "text": "time to do it, and I think he'd have the same opinion. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:37", "start": 2797.46, "text": "I think he might have recently stepped a little bit back from that, but anyway, nevertheless, yeah, next one, supply shock" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "46:45", "start": 2804.9, "text": "Yes. So supply shock, the, the reality is supply shocks happen, but I think the way people think about it is that they think about it as like this monumental event. But the reality is, if, you know, in order for us to go from seventy-three K to a hundred K, in my opinion, you needed eight months of reaccumulation. If we didn't have that eight months of reaccumulation, you can't springboard up to two, two trillion dollars in a, a short moment. So the other way to think about it, the supply shock, that was the process of going Three to a hundred was actually that whole thing, right? That whole year-long experience. That's the process. So yes, supply shocks can happen, but looking at things on like just the green candle, you're missing the precursor. Without the chop, you don't get the green candle. So, and the other thing is that when you rally, if there was a genuine supply shock, there wouldn't be, it would just keep going. But what happens is price goes up and people go, \"Ooh, that's my price. I'm gonna take some chips off the table.\" Coins come- Back to market, right? Every single price, by definition, has a buyer and a seller. Price goes up, you can generate, gonna generate more sellers by definition. So the concept of a supply shock, it's, it's a cute narrative. I personally think it clouds people's judgment 'cause it's, it's just not precise enough in my view." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:04", "start": 2883.61, "text": "The lead sponsor of this show is Bold, the best place to buy, sell, and save Bitcoin. 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Right, and related and kind of a similar concept, people talk about, \"Oh, coins on exchanges, right?\" And so I guess this is the marriage of the two, right? Because it's whale watching and, this supply shock concept. Because people would-- and this is like a big thing in the twenty-one, twenty-two cycle, I think, we've all learned, we've moved on and understood that this isn't a good way to think about it, but basically people would show these charts of, \"Oh, this is what we believe the coins on exchanges are,\" and once" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "49:30", "start": 2969.86, "text": "And I mean, how many times have you heard there's only two point three million coins? For whatever reason, it's always two point three million. It's been two point three million since I've been in this industry for like seven years, and then you're just like, \"Well, hang on a second, if it's always declining, why is it always two point three million?\" And look, there's a whole lot of reasons for this. First things first, managing the labels of exchanges is a full-time job for a full team of professional data scientists. It is not an easy job." }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "50:00", "start": 2999.92, "text": "Has their own heuristics, their own labels. They're never gonna be the same, right? Glass nodes are gonna be the same as CryptoQuant, not gonna be same as CoinGlass. They've all got some are better maintained than others, right? I've worked at Glass, so I know that their exchange labels are very well maintained. I can't speak for anyone else 'cause I haven't worked there. But maintaining these labels is a serious job, and quite often what happens, how do we stay at two point three million? It's usually because they're always finding new exchanges to implement. If So you may have found it yesterday, but it's been around for two and a half years. So then you've got to backdate all of your history, so all the rest of the history has to adjust, and it's, it's just really, really hard. Like, unless you-- the way I look at it, unless you're a professional and you are using algorithmic trading and looking at coins actually moving in and out of exchanges as part of your risk model or your trading model, unless you're doing that, looking at a balance of exchange chart probably isn't gonna give you the edge you think That simple." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "51:01", "start": 3061.33, "text": "Yeah. another one, another common, kind of bull hype, hope, hype, number is, the multiplier. The multiplier effect. What's the multiplier effect?" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "51:13", "start": 3073.29, "text": "So the multiplier effect lives in the same family as supply squeeze, and I actually wrote a piece on this to, I mean, as, as a, my background's civil engineering, so I solve a lot of stuff on the back of an envelope, right? Give me a quick spreadsheet, I'll find out a rough ballpark. And the number that everyone threw around was a hundred x multiplier Summarize what that means. If you put a dollar into the market, you buy a dollar worth of Bitcoin, the implication is that you're actually gonna create a hundred dollar change on the market cap. If you sell a dollar worth of Bitcoin, it's gonna go down by a hundred dollars. So there's this like, because not all the coins are available, there's like a multiplied effect because of liquidity. That does exist in, in everything, not just Bitcoin, in all assets, because not every asset trades at every price. However, a hundred X is insane. So I was like, okay, let, let's just like break this myth as, as far as I can. First thing I did is, this was back in, oh, I don't know, would've been March, April or something like that, probably May actually, last year. And I looked at the ETFs, and by that point in time, the ETFs probably had like ten billion in inflows. And I looked at, for ten billion of inflows, let's imagine the ETFs are the only buyer, which I think everyone would agree is, is bullshit, because what about the fifteen years of other markets that existed pre-ETFs that didn't just evaporate? So a very conservative assumption, the ETFs are the only buyer, ten billion dollars, whatever it is, and it's created X amount of price change. And when you do just that simple sum, I got a multiplier of thirty X, so we know that that's wrong. So," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:43", "start": 3163.24, "text": "yeah," }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "52:44", "start": 3163.54, "text": "please somebody explain to me how you got a hundred X. I, I can't, I can't get to thirty and justify it. So anyway, when I fully run the numbers, I come out with a number, it's typically about three to five X. So to kind of pair everything back, suddenly three to five X, that's kind of-- I think most people listening are like, \"Yeah, probably, that's probably about right.\" There's been like One day where it hit eight X, that's like the highest it's ever been by my calc. It's, you know, it's part of the supply shock thing, but it's, it exists, but it's not at the hundred X multiplier, so that's just nonsense." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:19", "start": 3198.68, "text": "Right. Yeah, yeah. any other, pet peeves or, false narratives that you wanna dispel?" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "53:26", "start": 3206.35, "text": "Well, one that I find very interesting is, and it particularly comes from, I was talking to Knut the other day about this. It comes from," }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "53:37", "start": 3217.1, "text": "There's a crew of folks who've been around Bitcoin for a long time, and they seem to think that on-chain data is voodoo. To which, okay, that's fine. But what I would just challenge is go, \"Guys, the UTXO set is Bitcoin. It is the ledger. Like...\" That data is what makes Bitcoin so beautiful. It's a ledger full of Bitcoiners making decisions at the end of the day. Now, some of those Bitcoiners were fast money people who just came and speculated and lost everything. Some of them have been around for many, many years and they sometimes take chips off the table to improve their life. Right? That's what a lot of hodlers do. You've been around for long enough, go and improve your life. That's what it's for. It's your savings. So at the end of the day, I find it very interesting that there's folks And yet we'll look at on-chain data and be like, \"There's nothing here. \" It's like, \"But of course there's something here. \" What I think a lot of people mix up is they go, \"Well, there's been some not-so-great analysis in previous cycles, it proved wrong, therefore whole discipline wrong. \" Well, not quite, right? That's like saying that, you know, the under twelves aren't very good at football, so therefore, football is a shit sport. It's, it's kind of the same magnitude. There's gonna be people who do better work. There's gonna be people who spend the time and do the proof of work to get good at any skill, doesn't matter what it is. Just because one dude can't cut wood, doesn't mean that carpentry is a shit skill. So that's the way I would think about it, but in this case, we have every Happens in how Bitcoiners behave, and funnily enough, we all seem to behave the same way, cycle after cycle. Can we pull information out of that? Yes, we can." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:16", "start": 3315.5, "text": "Yeah, and I think the way I would-- I, I agree with you, I'm not disagreeing. I would say in the Earlier years of chain analysis, in this sense, I would say there was a lot of just kind of fluff and talk, and maybe in, let's say, the twenty-one cycle, there would be people who just kind of-- Because again, we live in this kind of attention economy, people want engagement, and there were people who would just sort of do the very lazy, you know, \"posting this, therefore bullish, therefore give me some likes and retweets and follow me because I'm gonna tell you what you wanna hear.\" So I think there was that, and I think that This is what drove that kind of reaction of, \"Hey, this is kind of snake oil kind of stuff.\" Whereas now, I think, at least the way I'm seeing it is there can be legitimate, let's say, practitioners of, you know, looking at what's happening on chain, so long as they are actually You know, bullish when it's right to be bullish and bearish when it's right to be bearish, then it actually can make sense and it actually-- Absolutely. You know, it's like a poker player who probabilistically, you know, goes in with pocket aces, and he'll still lose sometimes, but- Probable, you know, playing the odds, playing the expected value, he was making the right decision. It's a similar thing here that maybe using some of these tools, you can tip the odds in your favor. It's not, it's not a perfect science, it's not a perfect kind of predictive thing, but it tips the odds in your favor. I think that's how I'm seeing it. And the way that I" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "56:40", "start": 3399.62, "text": "look at it, yeah, no, exactly. And, and again, I think, some people can trade with it, and certainly I, I talk to a Been around. We all come into this market, you buy a bunch of Bitcoin, most of us have tried our hand at trading, you probably found it's a kind of a, it's a difficult thing to do, right? It's not, it's not overly fun. You probably lose a bunch of money, it takes a lot of time and energy, it's a full time job. So you realize I'm actually not a trader, I'm a hodler. But you still want to understand why the market does what it does, and when you understand why in anything, it just makes it so much easier. So yeah, I like the, I use the analogy of the poker table quite a bit. I view it as you're sitting at the table, I can't see what cards are about to come out in terms of Texas Hold'em, I can't tell the future, but what I can do is I can see one of everyone else's card, right? It's better than just looking at my hand, because then I'm just stuck in my own world Okay? Like, he's got a decent hand, but, you know, you can't see everything. But the world is full of incomplete information. If you've just got more information, you can make a decision. Alright, all the guys who I wanna be, who've held their coins for five years, right now they're selling a stack of coin. And the way I would look at that, and I use two personas, for Check the Analyst, if you're a retiree, right? And you need the next three years of runway, and Bitcoin is a huge part of your portfolio, guys are cashing a bunch out, it might be the right time for you to just buy that three years of runway, give yourself the thing that's more important to you, which is your life. If you're a hodler like me, I'm probably just not gonna stack as many sats when that happens. I'm just gonna take a step back and I'm gonna wait for all the guys who do buy high to sell at a lower price, because they always do, and that's where I'm gonna step in and now I can be more aggressive and get five, ten, fifteen, twenty percent It's not trading, it's just being more strategic using your Bitcoin intuition to make better decisions about Bitcoin." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "58:46", "start": 3525.97, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "58:47", "start": 3526.61, "text": "And I" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "58:47", "start": 3526.91, "text": "think, zooming out As, as you said, it's not that we are bearish or whatever, it's, it's more about, I think dispelling, let's say, false narratives in a way so that people can be more realistic and more, be more, feel more solid in their long-term bullishness, right? Because you and I obviously are super bullish. Like, I think, both of us believe, you know, at least most kind of hardcore Bitcoiners, we believe it's gonna be the money of the world someday, maybe not tomorrow, it might be, you know, This is kind of how to analyze it, so any, you know, as we, we've spoken about, kind of our theme has been there is no cycle. So do you wanna just kind of summarize and wrap things up?" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "59:31", "start": 3571.15, "text": "Yeah, so I, I think at the end of the day, markets are just information, and the only thing you can control is your decisions. That's it, that's the only thing you have control over. The market's like the tide, it's just gonna go in and out, and you can't stop the moon, you can't stop the water, you can't swim against it 'cause you'll drown. The only thing you can do is make better decisions on your front. And look, I, I think at the end of the day, every Bitcoiner develops your own intuition. Trust it, right? For the most part, if you've seen these markets play out before, your instinct is gonna be better than most, most people's analysis. What I think Ontchain data is really useful for is just having that extra anchor to be like, \"This is what I, my gut feel tells me. Hey, look, I can see it happening over here. I can see myself in the data. Now I can be even more confident that my gut feeling is right. Or if you see something where you're feeling like, \"Hey, it's really overheated here,\" but then you go Maybe, maybe it's actually unfounded. Maybe I should go and like review why my emotions are in a certain position. So that's the way I think about it. I think there, it is Bitcoin. Bitcoin's telling you about Bitcoiners. Use that information to guide your gut feeling. And the best thing about all this stuff is that all these charts and data are free. You can access the hundred, the whole world of on-chain data and all this, everything is free. It's just about upskilling and like, you know, go and use the tools that help you survive in these People and, you know, enjoy it," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:00:58", "start": 3658.0, "text": "enjoy" }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "01:00:58", "start": 3658.24, "text": "the" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:00:58", "start": 3658.3, "text": "ride. Fantastic. Well, listeners go and check it out, as I mentioned, I'm a subscriber myself, I think it's a great, product, not a paid endorsement. so yeah, check out Checkmatee. So the, for people following on X, it's underscore checkmatee underscore, and then the website is checkonchain dot com. So, Check, thanks for joining me." }, { "speaker": "checkmate", "time": "01:01:16", "start": 3676.59, "text": "Good on you, mate. Thanks a lot. It was a bit of pleasure." } ] }