{ "episodeId": "SLP731", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "james_van_straten": { "name": "James Van Straten", "role": "guest", "tag": "JAMES" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:00", "start": 0.12, "text": "It's mad to think how fearful the market is, and we could just be fearful, and it's that, it's that theory of just climbing the wall of worry, and that's why Bitcoin could just keep going higher as more and more people are sidelined." }, { "speaker": "james_van_straten", "time": "00:14", "start": 14.32, "text": "Hi everyone and welcome back to Stephan Livera podcast. Joining me on the show today is James Van Straten. James is a senior analyst at Coindesk. I've known James around the space for a couple years. James is well known for writing and speaking about Bitcoin and, yeah, wanted to get him on the show to chat about his views about, about this bear market. Is it over? Is it still ongoing? Where are we at? So yeah, first off, welcome to the show, James, and, yeah, give us a bit of a, bit of an overall" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:44", "start": 43.92, "text": "Cheers. Thank you for having me on, Stefan. Yeah, this bear market is, well, this is my third bear market, and I think each bear market is very different. When I got in in 2017, or I got in December of 2017, that 2018, 2019 for me was just so Wild West. It was like, my money's kind of gone, but because that was the foundation of learning about everything, it was just more of a, that was, you know, the, the phrase like bear Markets are for building, that, that kind of mentality. Like my head was so in the weeds then, it was like the price was so irrelevant, it was just understanding everything. The, the twenty twenty two bear market was It was actually really bad, not, it was bad because all the assets were going down, so it was TradFi that was getting hit, Bitcoin, everything was getting hit, and there was just no let up anywhere. You also had the fraud and the contagion within crypto as well, and that for me as well was like, I've worked so hard to get into this industry and like be in it, and then it was like, there's so much bad- Actors in this space, it's like, I don't even know if I wanna be in this space anymore, that it was just, it was repulsive. And now I think we're in this bear market now where it's like, we had the October 10th crash We can have speculation on what happened there, but mainly most of it wasn't-- there was nothing to do with the contagion really, it was just market makers and liquidity that was kind of getting pulled. and if you look at TradFi now, it's held up extremely well. So Every bear market has been different, but again, this bear market has had really like positive sentiment towards it, and yeah, it's fascinating to see how every four years these bear markets change, even though the price is down, sentiment's different or there's just so many nuances with each bear market, so, each one has, is, is its own really." }, { "speaker": "james_van_straten", "time": "02:44", "start": 163.89, "text": "Well, let's get your take on the four-year cycle because there, there are still debates raging about this. Do you believe in the four-year cycle? Yes or no? And where are you at there?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "02:53", "start": 173.38, "text": "No, I've never believed in it. again, coming in 2017, I never, I don't believe I ever heard the phrase four-year cycle. That's, that's the, the first thing. The first time I ever came across the four-year cycle was kind of like in, I think it was like 2021 when it kind of just then happened, in November. I never really heard of it in 2017. It was definitely not a thing in 2013. But then if you look at the mathematics behind the actual Into Bitcoin and its market cap. I would imagine that even twenty twenty halving had very little impact, maybe the twenty sixteen, from a mathematical standpoint, did have some nuances of, of effect, but it's more psychological than anything. And if we really wanna be pedantic about the four year cycle, last year was the parabolic blow off top we were meant to have, and we never got that expansion. Expansion phase. So, and the year actually finished like twenty percent down, which was even better. The only, the thing that the four-year cycleers can now hold onto is we topped in October sixth, and that was pretty much on a, however many days from the cycle bottom, it happened to be that, but it kind of coincided with fifty billion dollars worth, sorry, five hundred billion dollars worth of spot sell-side pressure, from OJ and long-term holders for two Two years consecutively, as soon as the ETF launched, Bitcoin at a hundred K, there was just absolute vast amounts of spot sell side. So when people refer to Mike Strachey are buying or the ETFs are buying or anything like that, it's the, the spot selling dwarfs anything the any other narrative came in for the last few years. So Looking at the data, what's really interesting was in December 2025, over a 30-day period, one million Bitcoin were sold from long-term holders. One million Bitcoin. The biggest debate we have in Bitcoin right now is quantum on Satoshi, Satoshi's coins, a million Bitcoin, and I know there are, there are, Theories being worked around what we can do, we've discussed this in the past. I think Hourglass version two was one of them that, we've discussed in previously, but for me, in a way that we've proven to the market that, alright, the price goes down, but it, this, it can take a million Bitcoin to be sold over a thirty-day period, like it, it, it can hold it. So the quantum stuff for me, I know this is getting onto a side subject, but I'm just saying in that regard Guard that the market can handle a one million Bitcoin sell side pressure. But yeah, that, that was also part of, I think the four year cycle, I thought, I think the quantum narrative was getting louder, people were selling, and it just so happened that they were selling into that peak of four years. I think everyone was expecting one fifty circa, and because it wasn't really coming, it had three or four jumps of about a hundred and twenty K, never really made it, and I think people started to panic sell more and more, and then you get the self-fulfilling prophecy. You Tweets, tweets with Trump, and then the October tenth, and it was like, \"That's game over.\" So, I think most of it is a self-fulfilling prophecy." }, { "speaker": "james_van_straten", "time": "06:21", "start": 381.16, "text": "Interesting, yeah. So essentially, you don't believe in the four-year cycle, but you would say really the main, let's say, the recent point in their favor of the, if you're a four-year cycle guy, is that the timing of the top, let's say, October of twenty twenty-five-ish, roughly aligns with what a four-year cycle person might have believed. But other than Aligned, like we had an all-time high before the halving, yeah, like that was unusual, and even, you know, it, it remains to be seen, like what happens if we got an all- an all-time high this year? Does that also kind of like wreck the, the four-year cycle sort of thing? Like, because if you're a four-year cycle guy, you might expect, oh, we're gonna have like a typical- Sixty to eighty percent drawdown over the course of this year, and then towards the end of this year, if you're just looking at the calendar, right? If you're not thinking about the institutional or the other factors that are going on, you would just be thinking, \"Okay, end of the year, you're gonna buy, rebuy the bottom at PK or whatever, right?\" That would be if you're a theoretically four-year cycle, I guess. But there are, let's say, reasons to believe that that may not play out, right? How do you see that?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:29", "start": 449.41, "text": "I've got some charts. Let, let's go into some charts. Sure, let's go. This is one of the things that I'm trying to understand currently of where we are. The bear's argument is we're in a midterm year, that's statistically a very weak year. Let me share my screen window. Yeah. Let me know when you can see it. Yep. So, yeah, I've got a couple of slides. We can just go up and down and, and just go through them. So, the argument is The, the, the actual argument is we're following the twenty twenty-two cycle. That, that's what the argument is. And, and the two main, support lines for Bitcoin are the realized price and the two hundred-week moving average. The realized price being the average price of all coins in circulation, is like fifty-four thousand realized price and fifty-eight thousand is the two hundred-week moving average. this is only goes back from to twenty- 2021. But if you actually have, I actually should have done, like, if I should have had, from twenty fourteen. But in just to, for the context, Bitcoin typically uses the two hundred-week moving average as support each bear market, and it tends to go below the realized price every cycle. But again, for purposes here, we're only interested in really in twenty twenty-two. And you can see I've highlighted in the blue box in twenty twenty-two that the realized price actually started going below the two hundred-week moving average in around June, July of twenty twenty-two. and the price went straight below both realized price and two hundred-week moving average, like it didn't even use it as support, as opposed to when we went down to sixty thousand in February, we used both as support, or we didn't actually-- yeah, we didn't hit either. the two hundred-week moving average was high And use it's support. so that's already structurally different, as the two main, indicators I was looking at. And it then, if you actually then kind of zoom out here The price kind of stayed flat, I think it was at twenty thousand that Bitcoin was from June all the way to October, and it only then took another leg lower because of the FTX collapse. and then it obviously rebounded back in January. So I think you can just, get rid of that FTX collapse bottom. We had Lunar in May, which was the first contagion point, and I've always said I said October the 10th, well, not October 10th specifically, but around October when we were starting to go down, I was like, \"Okay, that October 10th is such a big point that this could have systematic blow up similar to 2022.\" So I said, \"Alright, six months is the window of opportunity that I'm giving the market of, 'We are now going to make a bottom around here.'\" Because it took six months for the FTX collapse to happen after Luna, from May to November. We're now at March 16th, that's over five months now since October 10th. So I still said, I will give another three, three weeks, three and a bit weeks till we make a new low, because there is going to have to be contagion, there's gonna have to be, forced selling, all of that kind of stuff, and we only really got Blockfils, who no one's ever heard of really. like there's some other entities that we have heard, but again, it- It's no real contagion." }, { "speaker": "james_van_straten", "time": "11:14", "start": 673.61, "text": "Right. Like the rumor in the October thing was like \"winter mute,\" that was the rumor going around. Yeah, that's like- Comparing back to 2022, as you said, there were so many, right? It was Terra Luna blew up, Three Arrows Capital blew up. Satoshi, Volt, Blockfi, Celsius, like, and then finally, kind of, FTX was like the big, you know, the final, the piece de resistance or whatever, the big final one. And FTX was just" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:36", "start": 695.88, "text": "selling Bitcoin, on top of that as well to, to fund everything," }, { "speaker": "james_van_straten", "time": "11:41", "start": 700.64, "text": "right? Yeah. And whereas this time, it doesn't seem like-- I mean, it's possible, maybe, like, but at this time, at this point, it would have to be something mass-- massive, like, I don't know, some huge hack at Coinbase or" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:56", "start": 715.51, "text": "Yeah. So, I, I, I said I'll give it another three or so weeks and then, then the October tenth is behind us. The, how Bitcoin was trading was irregular after October the tenth. So, you know, you get those, those bar patterns, so it goes up, it goes sideways and then goes straight down, that a lot of market makers did have to pull, pull out and the liquidity started to evaporate and Bitcoin just wasn't trading how it should. Statistically, since the ETF launch, Bitcoin tends to make a low on the first ten calendar days of the month. It was just, there was no observing how Bitcoin trades, there was just no regularity with how it was moving. I just couldn't put a thing on it, but now the last, since really February, it's actually becoming, it is trading more normally. Like we made a low on February the sixth, so it's starting to pick up again, you can see more- Copy makers, coming back in, so I, I am happy with how it's trading, the volume and the liquidity. ETF inflows are starting to come back in, so US institutions are starting to trust it more, which is great. but if I go to some other charts, I think, this is the supply and profit and loss chart. Oh, yes," }, { "speaker": "james_van_straten", "time": "13:17", "start": 796.84, "text": "you were talking about this. How they, when they meet, that's like to be the bottom." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "13:20", "start": 799.92, "text": "Yeah. Because we, we need to understand. So again, for me, drawdowns from the all-time high, have-- it's all been high or low, so you had like eighty-five, ninety percent in twenty, fourteen, twenty eighteen was like eighty percent, twenty twenty-two is like seventy-five percent. So on a full retail cycle with no institutional adoption, this cycle I would have said Seventy percent, give or take. But because we have had institutional adoption this cycle, I would have said maybe fifty percent to seventy percent would be fair, for that, for that drawdown, because of the ETFs, because of Saylor, because of, and you can see these other thirteen filings with the institutions like Harvard and stuff like that. and also like the option strategies are so much bigger now, which compresses volatility. So that, that's a fair assumption, I would say. but yeah, when you look at supply and profit and loss, every time they converge with one another, that's a bear market bottom. You don't know how long, obviously, it lasts for. and they did the same thing again in beginning of February. and obviously, when Bitcoin hit sixty K, and it pumped to seventy, people bought obviously at seventy thousand, and a bit above. And then obviously, if Bitcoin goes below, that's even more Supply and loss. So we had the twenty millionth Bitcoin, mined last week, so that was ten million in profit, ten million in loss, and to me that is just a huge amount of demand destruction. Most of the USD-denominated wealth has come in above like eighty, ninety thousand, so you have got huge amounts of, Unrealized losses. So for me, I am happy for that in terms of we have seen enough capital destruction. I don't think we've seen enough time-based, destruction. Okay. Like" }, { "speaker": "james_van_straten", "time": "15:27", "start": 927.03, "text": "the checkmates kind of price pain versus time pain, and there's a bit more time pain to go, kind of concept." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:33", "start": 932.51, "text": "Yeah, and I don't know about w-what you think, but like Maybe this is, it has been a lot easier this cycle, this, this bear market, which it makes me a bit skeptical maybe there is another leg lower." }, { "speaker": "james_van_straten", "time": "15:47", "start": 947.37, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:48", "start": 947.69, "text": "Because That we did have that huge capitulation wick, at sixty thousand, and it's like, is that, was that really it? But again, the day of that, February sixth, was Mike Strachey's earnings. And Institutions were fully de-risking into that event because that's when quantum computing was the loudest I have ever heard it. Mike Strachey going bust was the h-h-h-um loudest I heard it. He was sitting on like 10 billion of unrealized losses, even though it makes absolutely no difference. and then he had his earnings call and Saylor addressed the quantum threat, and then the price went up. so it was like that was the fear going into Mike Strachey, because Mike Strachey Anything happens to that entity, that sets Bitcoin back just optically as well. so I think that's where the full risk was. and, yeah. I think, obviously, it's all so overblown, but when the price is dropping from seventy to sixty in one day, yeah, that, that is gonna be warranted." }, { "speaker": "james_van_straten", "time": "17:00", "start": 1020.26, "text": "Yeah. I mean, from the subjective feel perspective, it felt like that was, like, that was a good candidate to be the bottom, like, that's, that's, that's definitely a decent candidate that sixty K was the bottom for this bear setup. Yeah. Of course, we could go lower, but, you know, I, I think, it's, we've probably-- there's probably been enough pain, so we'll see. Yeah. What else have you got here?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:22", "start": 1042.0, "text": "It's just, it's just seeing how, the, the, the holder dynamics have changed. So you can see how I've highlighted in red is the long-term holders, and they have huge wicks up and huge spikes down, because it was such a retail asset, and then in green is since 2024, the ETFs and the long-term holder base. Base is, you're getting up and downs, in much shorter durations now instead of these cycles becoming so much longer. so to me, it's just the holder base has changed so much, and we're already s-starting to see the long-term holder supply starting to tick up again, which is reminiscent of, the pre- right, that's like a" }, { "speaker": "james_van_straten", "time": "18:07", "start": 1087.07, "text": "constructive sign, right? You would say?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "18:09", "start": 1089.33, "text": "Yeah, because if you think a long-term holder is six months or more, that's pretty- Much the whole drawdown that we've, that we face. So they've bought in October and they're holding through this. so to hold through a fifty percent drawdown is, you're not gonna be- Yeah. You've earned your stripes, you know? Yeah, you've, you've earned your stripes essentially. but again, supply and profit, I find TA borderline, useful on long-term time frames, anything short is, is just, astrology. But again, it makes high lows, so, I, I think, again, that's a fair, a fair assumption. that's the supply and profit. This is more of the, time pain. The eighty percent of all holders, when you have eighty percent of all holders that have held Bitcoin for longer than six months is usually a bottom, and we're still below this red line, so that could be another three months until, we have enough holders, that have held, for longer than six months. and then this one was really interesting, and I find this, this entity adjusted, URPD metric fascinating. What, what's, is it unrealized? What is that? It, I don't know what U-- I can't remember what URPD du-stands for. it's about price distribution, but it's to do with price buckets on when UTXO's last moved, so they can find out the supply clusters at each price br-bracket. And this chart actually is marked March fifteenth twenty twenty-two, and why I have March fifteenth twenty twenty-two is because, again, if we're looking at the twenty twenty-two four-year cycle mythology, Bitcoin went from ten to sixty at the end of twenty twenty to, to the beginning of twenty twenty-one, like in three, three, four months, and there was no support, there was no, there was no testing, it just went up ten to sixty because of the, the, the COVID stimulus and everything like that. When we hit 69 in November 2021, and then in 2022 we went straight down, to the FTX collapse bottom, which was 15,000. So we pretty much filled in the entire gap. But in 2024, we had that whole year of chop-solidation. which is where we are now. We're, we're still testing it. So we're now seventy-three thousand was the March twenty twenty-four all-time high. So we're now at that level, and we've used it as support. But this, for me, was March-- so this is March fifteenth, twenty twenty-two, and you can see how little supply there is standing here." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:02", "start": 1261.94, "text": "and that's why the-- when Bitcoin started to fall down in twenty twenty-two, it was so easy, and you had those liquid- Foundation cascades because there was just no support, because no one actually bought any Bitcoin between twenty and thirty thousand, or even twenty to thirty-five thousand, no one bought anything I don't ha- I can get the chart after, but the stat is over six hundred thousand Bitcoin have been purchased on this drawdown between sixty and seventy thousand dollars." }, { "speaker": "james_van_straten", "time": "21:32", "start": 1292.37, "text": "I see the point you're making. So basically, it's kind of, again, so w- in a way, a lot of the themes I'm getting out of this are really, there's hope yet for Bitcoin, right? That, y- the fact that there were a lot of people stepping in to buy coins in this range of sixty to seventy K is kind of a constructive sign. Compared to historically where maybe there wasn't that, you know, mass of people like running in to buy some coin when we saw these big drops in past cycles. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:01", "start": 1320.91, "text": "I, I think it got to a level where, alright, you have, you have people-- I can make an argument why Bitcoin goes to forty thousand doesn't mean it goes there. I just think enough people and enough people with size said Okay, sixty thousand is cheap. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "james_van_straten", "time": "22:21", "start": 1340.62, "text": "I think that's right, and I think you would find probably you would find a lot of supply moved around that, around that point, right?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:27", "start": 1346.99, "text": "Yes, I think it's around seven percent of the supply now sits between sixty and seventy thousand." }, { "speaker": "james_van_straten", "time": "22:33", "start": 1352.96, "text": "Yeah, yeah, yeah. And just to listen, just to clarify that URPD stands for UTXO realized price distribution, just, if anyone's okay, yeah, UTXO, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, yeah, I mean, i-it sounds to me pretty positive, like, I, you know, I just think the main-- obviously, I'm not a, I'm not, I don't hold myself out as some cycle timing chart guy, whatever, like Would be make sure you're DCAing through the bear cycle, right? Like it's such an important time to have your DCA on. You know, you're not gonna catch the exact bottom, but just make sure you're, you know, you're buying a little bit. Ideally, just buy a little bit every day, if you can just do that. I think you, you know, you're not gonna time the exact bottom, but you'll, you'll catch enough of it that you'll, you know, you'll feel good about that in a few years to come. Is" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:20", "start": 1400.09, "text": "No, you're exactly right. You're never gonna get the bottom. Anyone says that they get the bottom is a liar. You just buy the entire bottom. Just buy it and, yeah, you're never gonna catch the bottom. In hindsight, that, even though, we don't know that the Feb 6th was the bottom, but that candle just looked so appetizing. So, Yeah, you do look back on moments where the FTX collapsed, COVID, that those certain days do, do show it. You never get those V-shaped recoveries, that is literally only COVID because of the stimulus. you usually get a retest of the lows, and you get a retest of the lows with the implied volatility actually coming down as well. So I did a chart which I can try and find whilst talking, but looking at, the volatility of Bitcoin is also really important because that- That Feb sixth day showed there was so much panic and fear in the market, and then once you get rid of that fear, you can actually get the people buying it, and then once that comes, you retest the lows, but you don't want fear to pick up, you just want normal buyers to step in, and they're like, \"Yes, now we're calm, we're buying the lows.\" Yeah. And then it can come back in again." }, { "speaker": "james_van_straten", "time": "24:33", "start": 1472.94, "text": "I mean, just if I had to briefly explore the kind of the bear case, maybe something like, obviously this whole Iran war is, you big thing of the last two weeks or so, you know, possible, like if something happens there, straight of Hormuz, something there, like maybe something there does it to kind of get us that final bottom, but Yeah, that's, that's probably, you know, that could be a scenario, but otherwise, I think it's people gonna be stacking and just DC'ing up." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "25:00", "start": 1500.46, "text": "I think it's also important to observe what Bitcoin's done during the Iran War or the Middle East conflict and what everything else has done since then. So the war started on February 28th and Bitcoin was, let me get the right price, but it was, yeah, it was about sixty-seven thousand, but going into that The sentiment was shocking, even I was like, \"Fifty-five thousand is nailed on, like I will put serious money on that we're going straight to that realized price when the war started.\" The lowest we went Was like sixty-three, and we haven't looked back since. I think Bitcoin's up fifteen percent since the war started. Gold is down five, six percent. Silver's down twelve or so. The, the US equities are flat to negative, and even software stocks that have some correlation towards Bitcoin for some reason, even they bottomed and are slightly up as well. So it's like I- I think you could get to a point where there is as much of it, 'cause markets will cause as much destruction as possible. And I'm definitely not saying Max Payne is higher, but I could have made a very good argument and a better argument for a fifty-five K than seventy-three K right now. And I think so many people were sidelined, even the options market for the last expiry in February, forty thousand dollar was like the most popular per option. Meaning everyone is hedged to the downside. I think even traditional finance, like that, the, the, the put hedging was just enormous. It was like the biggest ever, and that's why, equities just haven't done that badly, like everyone was expecting Black Monday, Black Tuesday, Black Wednesday. There's gonna be one of these days is that the bottom's gonna fall out and it hasn't. And then if you look at the VIX, the volatility index. It spiked to thirty-five or so last Monday, which is a one-year high, but because the market's been in fear for like months, it's just been, just been edging high and edging higher, and then it actually gets to the day where It was the week after the, the Monday of the war, and obviously going into a week Friday, so Fridays are typically bad because of a weekend, you have high fear, you don't know what's gonna happen, and then Mondays, oh my god, it's gonna be Armageddon. So the market was always hedged, and then as soon as Monday happened, VIX at thirty-five, and typically when VIX is high, Bitcoin bottoms. But the interesting thing was in Liberation Day of twenty twenty-five, the VIX Was at like, I don't know, seventy. It was like double the fear, and it was like, \"Why was that so much worse than this?\" It's because the market is just fearful. Like Bitcoin has been in extreme fear now for like sixty days, fear or extreme fear, actually mainly just extreme fear, and we're at seventy-three thousand. Like, it's absolutely insane. Even the stock market's like in fear, and it's like a few percentage points off the all-time high. yeah, it's mad to think how fearful The market is, and we could just be fearful, and it's that, it's that theory of just climbing the wall of worry, and that's why Bitcoin could just keep going higher, as more and more people are sidelined, because you do look at, okay, now what are the options for Bitcoin to go lower? You've got a hundred dollars Brent oil, Brent crude oil, and you're like, which hit one twenty And you're like, okay, there's probably gonna be a slowdown in the economy. Well, I was a huge proponent for reacceleration in the economy. I think they would have to have hiked rate, that the US economy was so hot, you had manufacturing and services in expansion. So you're sitting there being like, okay, and then oil is probably gonna cause a, a growth scare to the economy. But other than a potential now recession, which should see rate cuts, but rate cuts aren't even- Priced into the market yet? What takes Bitcoin lower? Yeah, maybe an extension of this war. I, I, I'm hearing from weeks, months, but I don't see how that is-- I don't think that implicates Bitcoin. I think it's liquidity now, and I think liquidity is, is trending higher. We can see the balance sheet increasing, and the midterms are getting nearer every day, which is- Going to have to be pro liquidity. Yeah, I think we've got one more month. They have to take Bitcoin lower in the next thirty days, in my opinion." }, { "speaker": "james_van_straten", "time": "29:46", "start": 1786.25, "text": "Yeah. And then, other than that, after that, it's gonna be mostly an upwards sort of, let's say, sideways and then upwards kind of. The other kind of interesting thing, like just recently, we were just, you know, mentioned Strategy and Michael Saylor, they recently came out, did a massive buy, and they had, I think, over one billion dollars of volume on Stretch, which is, I mean, Very remarkable, like to have at this time in a bear cycle for them to be raising, you know, this level of money on stretch. I think we're starting to see, you know, some real signs of demand and real growth there. So do you have any reactions on that and what does that portend for Bitcoin?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:25", "start": 1825.04, "text": "Yeah, I think, firstly for context, again, f-from a cycle perspective, MikeStrategy's gone down eighty-two percent, and the previous cycle it went down eighty-five percent, so that's a higher low. So I would say the lows are in for MikeStrategy. Well, Strate-- Your-- And then he came out today with a twenty-two thousand Bitcoin purchase for one point six billion. Which is the fifth biggest purchase ever since he started his strategy, which is incredible. His sixth biggest purchase was also in January, so like he has proved to the market that he can raise well over a billion in a depressed bear market. So then you had stretch at one point one eight billion and the common stock at three four hundred, million. And I think the, the thing that was so surprising was, the, the common wasn't hit as hard, and I didn't think it was that surprising because I think we're now getting to a point where He's got to now prove that Stretch is going to be the Bitcoin accumulator, because he can't just rely on the Common. And I think moving forward, the Stretch will be his primary Bitcoin accumulator, and the Common will be used at More, more opportunistic times when M-MNAV is well above one, where maybe he needs to use it in the U- for the USD reserve or those kind of moments, but because Strach won't affect the common stock share price, it is way more accretive, and that's the focus We had the ex dividend day, on Thursday. It lost par on Friday, it's still below par today. I would expect it probably to creep back up next couple of days. But I think maybe that dividend will have to go probably to twelve percent. but it's hilarious in a way thinking that twelve percent is 12% would be a very high cost of capital for a company, but because he's raising 1.18 billion from Stretch, and then you do a, a, an 11.5% dividend on 1.18 billion, he can self-fund that Stretch mechanism through him raising through Stretch. So the appetite Will only be-- the appetite gets greater the higher the yield. He's not gonna reduce that yield, but because he can raise so much capital, there is no issue with him with these dividend obligations. The total di-dividend obligations just crossed over one billion, but he's literally just raised one point one eight billion in one week on one preferred." }, { "speaker": "james_van_straten", "time": "33:17", "start": 1997.43, "text": "So it's, it's just mind-blowing the kind of numbers, right? Because as you said He is able to raise so much that he can just pay back, you know, and I understand, like, obviously the criticism, which I disagree with obviously, but some of the, the fiat investor side of seeing it as like, \"Oh, this is like a Ponzi, or it's Ponzi adjacent,\" or, \"Yeah,\" like they're just not understanding what this is, like, 'cause this is built on Bitcoin, and it un-obviously, like, and openly, for all of us, you have to be bullish on Bitcoin itself, right? You have to think Bitcoin is gonna grow" }, { "speaker": "james_van_straten", "time": "33:52", "start": 2032.29, "text": "Per year over the next, let's say, ten years-ish, and, you know, similarly high rates. And also, people need to understand, like, you, you've got to put this into context Strech is otherwise competing with yield-seeking capital that these pools of capital are like trillions of dollars, and Strech today is in the ballpark of five billion. Yeah. So that's how small it is now versus how big it could get. Now, of course, Strech isn't the only one. There's Sater from, Strive, and, you know, MetaPlanet is gonna do their own one, and I'm sure, you know, other people will do their own versions of it. But nevertheless, it just shows you just like how early this is as Opportunity, and it's just a matter of more and more people waking up to this opportunity and understanding what's going on." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:39", "start": 2078.89, "text": "Yeah, I fully agree, and every week the Stuff comes out with this company is more and more incredible. I've been a shareholder pretty much since day one because of being in the UK, you have, honestly, the SIP thing" }, { "speaker": "james_van_straten", "time": "34:54", "start": 2093.93, "text": "that you got, you guys in the UK, you can't buy Bitcoin ETFs in that, so people were buying MSJR and so on." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:00", "start": 2099.79, "text": "Yeah, we-- there were no Bitcoin ETFs, or we got banned from Bitcoin ETNs, so MicroStrategy was the only play, and I'm actually hit-- apparently in April they're reversing, the ET-- the, the ETF. ETS again, so we're kind of banned from ETS or it's just impossible to buy them. So I imagine there is such a huge pool of capital in the, in London and in the UK for Bitcoin that that's gonna go straight back into Mike's strategy, which will raise its premium again. And that was one of the main reasons why it kind of contracted from July onwards, 'cause the UK's got their ETS in August, a bit similar to Metaplanet, I think, with their, with Japan getting an ETF or the announcement added to the contraction. But yeah, th We'll get to a million Bitcoin by the end of the year. I averaged it had to buy six thousand Bitcoin a week or so, absolutely nothing if he's doing these levels in these market conditions. but it's also for me looking at the convertible notes, that the first one converts in twenty-eight, I think, just before the halving, and even though the stock was down eighty-five percent, the conversion premiums at a hundred and eighty-three dollars, the stock's at a hundred and fifty now, just below a hundred and fifty now. The The bond's still trading above par because the embedd- the investors still value the stock volatility and the equity option. So yeah, th-this company is, is just-" }, { "speaker": "james_van_straten", "time": "36:27", "start": 2186.88, "text": "It's gonna be a monster, like it's just absolutely gonna be massive. Yeah. And then don't forget, as Bitcoin price rises, just, you know, everything changes again. Like, you know, right now, yeah, people are feeling down, they feel like it's a bear cycle and whatever. But imagine once Bitcoin gets back above a hundred K and then it gets to like, you know, one thirty, one forty, one fifty, like it's just, there's just gonna be so much excitement and attention and all these Bitcoin treasury companies who are doing this and attacking this multi-trillion dollar It's just massive." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:58", "start": 2218.29, "text": "Yeah, I don't mean to say attacking, I think we, we have to be a bit more conservative against the fiat system, we'll say." }, { "speaker": "james_van_straten", "time": "37:05", "start": 2224.84, "text": "Yeah, I mean, look, some people like to use the speculative attack term like Pierre Rochard, and others just say, \"Look, we're just...\" You know, we're just borrowing at this price, and we're getting, we're buying Bitcoin, which is growing at that price, right? Or that rate, let's say. but yeah, I mean, look, the broad point is just these-- there are these big markets, right? The US high-yield corporate bond market, the, US money market funds, that's, and short-duration cash equivalents is like seven or eight trillion, I'm looking at these numbers, and the broader US corporate bond universe, which is about eleven trillion dollars. And so for all these people," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:40", "start": 2259.6, "text": "And what's really, really interesting is the, it's like a tax deferred structure in" }, { "speaker": "james_van_straten", "time": "37:44", "start": 2264.13, "text": "America. Right. The ROIC thing, yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:46", "start": 2266.13, "text": "Yeah. So that adds a couple of percentage points on top because of it's not, it's tax efficient. But in the UK again, Twenty One Shares have come out with their product on Strath, and because you'd have to pay income tax and capital gains tax on Strath, but if you bought it via Twenty One Shares in their wrapper, you only have to pay capital gains. So that's incredible, and you're gonna get all All these products that are getting built on top of Stretch, and you're like, okay, where could this go? 'Cause you've got, you've got all the, the, the two x, three x volatility plays on the common stock, and then MSTY, MSTX, MSTU, and then all these products are gonna come up on Stretch. So it's like, it has its own universe within it as well. So the, the, the optionality on all these things are just endless. So, yeah, it's just incredible to see. No one's talking about Are reporting on it, they're, they're just absolutely bewildered by what's even going on here. But what, what I take such huge comfort in is that the company's done a four year cycle. Like any crypto company that has survived four years is, is almost bulletproof. Like the, yeah, FTX didn't survive four years, so you do have to be put on a pedestal, pedestal if you have survived four years as a company in this industry." }, { "speaker": "james_van_straten", "time": "39:03", "start": 2342.92, "text": "Yeah. And I mean, I think typically people sort of say like, after you've been through your own, like, even Held through multiple bear cycles, you've, quote unquote, earned your stripes, and you-- It's about surviving, right? It's about making sure that you're still around to experience the gains of Bitcoin longer term, because yes, it can be volatile, absolutely, everyone knows that, in the short term, but once you've been around for multiple cycles, and, you know, whether you call them four-year cycles or not, whatever, but once you've been through a few bear cycles, you know, you've been through enough, and I think that's why it's, I Shares of Bitcoin will look at one point in time versus another point in time, and they, and they won't understand that, or they either don't understand or they understand but they mislead you, is they will ignore the- The gain that you would have got just by DCA'ing, right? Like if you were doing DCA, DCA, DCA all the way down, and then by the time Bitcoin gets back up to its all-time high, now you're up on all those buys that were in the bear cycle. And so, paradoxically, it's like the time people come to you interested in buying Bitcoin and doing DCA is in the bull cycle, but it's actually really crucial that you do it during the bear cycle." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:15", "start": 2414.67, "text": "Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The, the bear cycle is way more" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:21", "start": 2420.84, "text": "important Why when you buy gold or the S&P 500, it's like the returns are, are terrible because there's no vault. And that's the issue. It's the volatility that actually gives you those returns, and it doesn't make any sense until you actually buy it through a bear market, you look at your returns, you're like, \"Ah, now that really does make sense.\" Yeah, because" }, { "speaker": "james_van_straten", "time": "40:43", "start": 2443.13, "text": "look, naively people can just look back and say, \"Oh, look, you Bitcoin bulls, you're a bunch of fools,\" because look, the price right now is seventy-three thousand 69k, so you're barely even up, right? But it, it just ignores that in that time we went down to 15k, we went, you know, like we had all these moves in the price that if you were buying consistently, you're laughing. So I think that's an important message to take away. But yeah, I think those are the key points I wanted to hit. Any closing thoughts that you wanna touch on?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:12", "start": 2472.01, "text": "Yeah, well, like the hash rate actually is going down about seven, eight percent in the next difficulty adjustment. So, I don't know if that's Iran based. I know Luxa came out with a, report saying eight to ten percent of the global Bitcoin computing power is located in the electricity markets in the Gulf States, so that could be it. It has held up extremely well, so maybe it's starting to, be priced that this war is going on and people are taking stuff off the network." }, { "speaker": "james_van_straten", "time": "41:43", "start": 2503.35, "text": "Yeah, so I think that's probably the key, things. like I said, I don't, I don't have a lot to add on the, the mining side of that, but, I think the broad takeaway for me is really that there are some green shoots here. You know, there is hope that there is, you know, people are stacking and we, you know, yes, we've taken Ahead of us, but this is a great opportunity if you have income, if you have fiat, if you can be stacking every day, that's a great time to be doing it. So, lastly, where can people find you online if they wanna keep up with your analysis?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:16", "start": 2535.73, "text": "Yeah, I write, I work at CoinDesk, and then I'm also on Twitter at btcjvs." }, { "speaker": "james_van_straten", "time": "42:22", "start": 2541.99, "text": "Fantastic, James, thanks for joining me today." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:24", "start": 2544.09, "text": "Cheers, Stefan." } ] }