It is so easy to get swept up in the emotions of each and every daily price candle.

Every bear market headline feels like impending doom.

We’re going so much lower, they say.

The latest green candle brings back just enough hope to make it feel like a recovery is on the table…with the next red candle dashing it, and making the bear feel like it will grind on forever.

Today’s post is all about the tools I use to get rid of these emotions, kick them out the door.

Instead, I focus on putting the accumulation odds in my favour, and ignore the rabble of price predictooors, because they don’t have a crystal ball either.

Become a Premium subscriber to access today’s Video Update (35 mins), Written Article and TL;DR Summary.

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We had a great call today, covering key slides from our latest Bitcoin Monthly Report. Big thanks to all the attendees and those who raised their hands to participate in the session, we highly value your input!

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Bitcoin bear markets tend to end on apathy, often with a painful last flush-out that I call the ‘time-pain capitulation’.

Whilst downside momentum tends to crescendo with the price-pain capitulation event, many more are shaken out by the endless barrage of bad headlines, and endlessly leaky prices. The frustration, boredom, and unwind of all remaining long-bias takes it’s toll…and it takes time to do so.

This month’s Orange report is titled The Time-Pain Capitulation, and is an exploration of the market setup through this period, and some of the key drivers (and perhaps future headlines) that may motivate it.

This report covers four main topics:

• My assessment of the market setup related to the time-pain chapter.

• Onchain, volume and sentiment analysis describing investor apathy.

• A deep dive into ETF outflows and their relation to derivatives markets.

• Risk vectors pertaining to Strategy, MSTR, preferred stocks, and debt.

Orange Members will find the report PDF, and details of our upcoming monthly conference call below.

Note: This monthly report & upcoming conference call is exclusive to Checkonchain Orange subscribers - which is our upper-tier plan within Substack.

If you would like to learn more about Orange, or access a single monthly report + conference call recording, please click the button below.

Learn More About Orange Plan

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After publishing Peak Apathy yesterday, we just had to get onto the podcast to discuss the absolutely dire state we see across Bitcoin sentiment metrics right now.

Bitcoiners are currently frustrated, annoyed, and disappointed with Mr Market, and Michael has done a tremendous amount of work to visualise just how bad it is.

For the HODLers out there, bad and boring sentiment is not what you tend to see at bull market tops…

The topics Michael and I cover in this conversation:

• Michael’s process of filtering social media sentiment data.

• The design of cohorts and visualisations of the data.

• How investor sentiment comes through in their language.

• Differences between retail sentiment, and that of large Bitcoin personas like Michael Saylor.

• The way thematic narratives permeate the discourse over time.

• Why Chess is a great analogy to understand Bitcoin.

• Michael’s journey writing his book Blood of the Bourgeoisie

Premium Members will find the full 1hr video podcast below. Consider upgrading to premium today to unlock the the content!

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Today I have a very special treat for readers (and for myself as well).

I have been following the recent work by who has been analysing the mood swings that Bitcoiners are experiencing based on the content and tone of social media posts.

The parallels to the behaviour patterns we see on-chain are striking.

The Bitcoin market is currently in a trough of absolute, and extreme apathy, with people giving up on it in droves.

This is exactly the kind of gutter-grade sentiment I see as a signal we’re within the period of maximum opportunity of this bear market.

I have often said that I love watching the prevailing narratives on Twitter NOT playing out in the underlying market data. In this instance, we can see how sentiment swings with every red and green candle, whilst the underlying market mechanics move in the opposite direction.

This article will leverage the sentiment work Michael has done, and I will then demonstrate how these mood swings compare to what’s actually happening under the market hood.

A huge thanks to Michael for providing a set of charts, and his interpretation of them, which I have then built my analysis ontop of.

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This morning I had the great pleasure of recording our third conversation with from , and this one was a real eye-opener for me.

We didn’t open a single chart, and dived straight into the action, discussing AI, and largest CAPEX boom the world has ever seen that supports it.

This builds on my most recent write up on The Biggest, Baddest Bear Market, and Nik delivers a tremendous amount of insight into the potential impact this CAPEX cycle is having on soverign debt, and FX markets.

There are a tonne of narratives out there trying to explain why the stock market being at all-time-high is an error in market judgement.

What if…the price is right?

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The 2020’s decade often feels like a rolling series of crisis headlines, many of which produce counter-intuitive impacts on markets.

Few could have anticipated gold to sell-off, equities to moon, and oil to still be lower than the 2022 peak given the magnitude of the prevailing energy crisis and conflict.

In particular, the 2022 rate hiking cycle, and the subsequent bear market was a major inflection point for both the geopolitical landscape, and financial markets.

Coming off the back of unprecedented and egregious levels of stimulus and fiscal spending in 2020-21, headline inflation exploded higher, unleashing a genie that had been more or less contained for the preceding decade. Almost every asset took a nasty hit lower in 2022, and many sectors of the real economy have struggled to recover ever since.

The more I reflect on that 2022 period, and what has transpired since, the clearer it becomes that it was a historic inflection point across the biggest, baddest, and most important market sectors out there.

It has been a long while since I have compiled a piece focused on the macro landscape, and today I try to weave a bunch of ideas together.

I discuss gold, energy, commodities, bonds, and how Bitcoin ties into it all. My goal is to try and setup a more cohesive framework for what looks to be a very volatile period ahead.

Become a Premium subscriber to access today’s Video Update (52 mins), Written Article and TL;DR Summary.

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If you are fortunate enough to know an Australian Bitcoiner, and consider them a friend, I’d kindly ask you to sink a few tinnies in our honour, as we’ve all had a bit of a shit week.

The gubermint who runs the show in The Land Down Under just announced sweeping changes to the tax policy, pitched under the guise of giving young Australians a ‘fair go’, and making it easier for them to buy a home.

Ironically, and totally unsurprisingly, the proposed changes look set to make it considerably harder for young people to save for a house, ensuring much higher tax rates are applied anytime, and everytime you make a return on your capital.

To their credit, I can certainly make the case that these changes will go a long way towards the government’s intended result of making the system fairer for everyone…

…by making each and every Australian poorer through higher taxation, we will indeed become more equal…just in the wrong direction.

Today’s post is partially a cathartic exercise for myself, a eulogy for our collective future tax returns, and hopefully an interesting tale that non-Aussies can learn from.

I want to run the numbers, and demonstrate why this latest government rug-pull will only make the situation for young people saving for a home worse, and not better.

Disclaimer: This article is general in nature, and is for informational, and entertainment purposes only, and it shall not be relied upon for any investment or financial decisions.

TL;DR Summary

• Today’s post is a little different, but was something I had to get off my mind, as it was blocking my analytical process. This is a study demonstrating why the new tax policy proposed by the Australian Labor party, hinders, not helps young Australians who want to buy a home.

• By abolishing the 50% capital gains tax discount on shares, ETFs and Bitcoin, and replacing with CPI indexation of the cost basis, they effectively kick out the rungs of the asset-ladder which must be climbed just to get onto the first rung of the housing ladder.

• The higher the growth of the asset someone buys, the more this new system trends towards a doubling of their effective capital gains tax. It adds several years to the savings sentence for a house deposit, and extracts multiple years of expensive school fees from our children.

• The indexation method only benefits investors who buy poor performing assets which don‘t grow at all…like government bonds. In that small sliver of poor performing assets, yes, the new indexation method is better.

• For anyone on the lower to middle end on the income spectrum, the new tax policy has outsized impacts on your balance sheet. It doesn’t tax the rich, nor does it help young Australians, it literally targets them, and keeps them lower on the socioeconomic scale.

• All is not lost however, and the more political backlash we generate, the more likely some portion of these changes will be in retreat. The Australian Bitcoin Industry Body even has a tool to send emails to your policymakers.

I prepared this piece because it feels like the right thing to do, both personally, professionally, and as a proud Australian. I’m young, I’m an Aussie, and I have an infant son and family in hand.

This budget is a disaster for our finances, and even more so for future generations who receive no benefit from the existing 50% CGT discount.

It’s a scam, it’s a betrayal, and its 100% un-fucking-Australian.

Watch The Video Version

Why You Should Care

We live in an age where sovereign nations are bankrupt, and political polarisation is trending higher, not lower.

We also live in an age where the average attention span is shorter than a TikTok video, and far too many people believe the headlines they read, and can’t, won’t or don’t know how to parse reality from the propaganda.

One reason I am writing this piece, is because it has been bugging me all week, and it was becoming a blocker for my analysis process.

The other reason is because Australia is not the first, nor the last place that taxes will be raised in such an environment. As many Bitcoiners know, governments tend to levy taxes in sly and roundabout ways, with inflation being one of their preferred mechanisms as it is difficult for the average person to reason about.

If I was to give the Australian government one piece of deserved credit, at least they had the balls to levy a straight up tax hike, and break more than a few election promises to do so (even if they dressed it in a ‘woe is thee’ narrative).

They hid it amongst a bunch of fluff about housing affordability, but at least they’re running the political gauntlet.

That’s where my praises for them end.

I’ve spent countless hours thinking about this Fourth Turning decade. I have pondered what higher inflation would feel like, considered deeply how I will try and protect myself financially, and puzzled over what it means for the wider world moving forward.

It’s one thing to think about, and another when you get punched in the face by it.

For non-Australians, I certainly hope this saga offers you a light into what could be in the pipe for many of us in the years ahead. Higher taxes, whether directly, or indirectly via inflation are going to be a very regular character throughout this chapter of world history.

OK, So What’s The Problem?

The Government!

No Check…What’s The Tax Problem?

Right, sorry…

The short story is that Australians currently get a 50% tax discount on any capital gains which are held for at least one year. If I was to buy 1 BTC for $50k AUD in 2024, and sell it today for $110k, I would have made a nominal gain of $60k.

Since I held it for more than one year, the taxable portion of that is halved to $30k, which is added to my overall annual income, and taxed at my marginal tax rate.

This system creates incentives for people to save in assets, hold them for longer periods of time (which lowers our time preference), build wealth slowly and steadily, and also provides capital to support the growth of businesses and the economy.

The latest budget handed down by the Labor party on Tuesday night proposes to eliminate this 50% capital gains discount in favour of two components:

• Investors can raise their cost basis by the inflation rate each year such that they are only taxed on the real gains.

• Imposed a minimum capital gains tax rate of 30% to catch folks who may have small incomes, but live off selling down their asset portfolio.

They are also implementing a partial grandfathering system, where your gains up until 1-July-2027 receive the 50% CGT discount, but all gains after that are via the indexation method.

For my analysis, I will consider these three tax setups; the current 50% CGT discount as the baseline, a transitional system that kicks in July 2027, and the full indexation method which will affect any assets bought from now on.

Now, what is most sinister about all of this, is throughout all of the media coverage of these tax changes, the narrative focus was primarily on housing. The stated intention is to make property more affordable for young Aussies.

None of the media coverage I saw made any effort whatsoever to explain that this was sneakily being applied to ALL assets, including shares, ETFs, and Bitcoin.

I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice to say that this Labor government ran specifically on NOT changing the capital gains and tax treatment for property and assets.

Them breaking that promise barely a year after the election told me that their surveys now show Millenials and Gen Z to be their primary voter base, and outweigh asset rich older generations. They have then decided to use the cover of housing affordability to sneak in a tax hike across the board.

Why Bitcoiners Are Hit Hardest

There are many problems with this cost basis indexation method, but the big ticket ones as I see them are as follows:

• Your unrealised gains on 1-July-2027 are locked in at the 50% CGT discount. If Bitcoin has a bad month leading into that date, it can significantly increase our tax rate on the road ahead.

  • As a call to action, please help us Aussies out by buying as much Bitcoin as humanly possible over the next 12 months to moon the price.

• Given Bitcoin is a high growth asset, the 3% inflation rate they measure via CPI is insignificant relative to the price gains. The same logic is true for any high growth asset. As a result, the new tax system disincentivises investing in innovation and growth, and favours investing in poor performing assets that don’t grow at all (like government bonds).

• They can raise taxes by underestimating CPI. We all know CPI statistics are nonsense, and massaged lower. The nominal gains of your asset are unlikely to be indexed against the actual cost-of-living inflation rate, but some number cooked up by a bureaucrat trying to obfuscate their other hidden tax of currency debasement.

The chart below pretends my first ever Bitcoin buy, which was at the 2017 top, occurred today. I buy 1 BTC at $20k and HODL through all the price history that followed. Assume I have a $100k salary (~20% above national average of $82k). The traces show my net cash in hand, after-tax proceeds from selling the Bitcoin ~8yrs later under the three tax systems:

• ⚫ Spot Value: $79.3k.

• 🔵 Current 50% CGT System: $69.6k (12.2% taxed).

• 🔴 Partial Grandfathering: $61.7k (22.2% taxed).

• 🟠 Full Indexation System: $60.4k (23.8% taxed).

Bitcoin’s growth outstrips the 3% CPI indexation by so much, that your capital gains tax almost doubles under the new system (12.2% —> 23.8% tax).

Note: I will keep using these three tax systems consistently throughout this report, and consider the current 50% CGT (blue) as the baseline. Full indexation (yellow) is the new comparison given that is the system which will affect young Australians from here onwards.

The chart below is a sensitivity study demonstrating how the higher the growth of your asset, the less the CPI indexation method helps you.

Once an asset grows above 20% per year, the new tax system costs you between 87% to 100% more in net capital gains taxes upon sale.

I even watched a 3min clip from the ABC government propaganda arm. In it, they made the extraordinary claim that this might make safe, stable, low growth assets like infinitely printable government bonds more attractive!

I can’t think of anything which would make young Australians better off, than jamming their portfolios full of infinitely printable government debt paper…

Kicking Out The Rungs

When you really cut to the core of the problem, the average Australian property price is now over $1M AUD (~$700k USD), and in order to avoid hefty mortgage insurance, you will need a 20% deposit.

Few folks have a spare two hundred grand lying around, and that means you need to save capital in assets first in order to get a foot onto the housing ladder.

If you save in cash, and stick it in a high interest bank account, you might be lucky to get 4% to 5%. You also take the full brunt of both income tax and inflation. It will take the average young Aussie on a decent salary more than forty years to save just the deposit given historical house price growth rates.

Forty fucking years, to save for the deposit in cash.

The ONLY hope young people have is by saving in assets like shares, ETFs and Bitcoin, and that means you NEED to take risk, and are hopefully rewarded with an outsized return.

You need to climb the smaller ladder of an asset portfolio just to reach the first rung of the housing ladder.

My model below is for someone with a better than average Australian salary (mean is A$82k), who is investing $500/month, and chasing a housing market growing at CPI+1% (which is conservative).

If you’re lucky enough to buy a high growth asset which rips at a totally unsustainable 50% per year non stop…

• It still takes you almost a full decade of saving to get the deposit…

• …and the indexation method adds at least a year to your sentence because of how much the extra tax eats into your proceeds.

For the diligent saver, the new indexation system adds between one and five years to the saving timeline for a young Australian to reach their deposit.

If you lump sum $50k and allow that to appreciate in pursuit of a deposit, the problem is even worse, because capital growth does all of the lifting, not the regular $500 investment.

The new indexation method adds north of five of waiting time for an asset which is growing at 10%/yr, adds at least two years for 20%/yr, and still adds the best part of a year for high growth 50%/yr assets.

The government policy is pitched at improving housing affordability for young Australians.

What it actually does is taxes and kicks the rungs out of the preliminary asset ladder you MUST climb just to reach the first rung of the housing ladder.

Another tangible case, and one which really hits home for me, is saving money to send your kid to a good school.

Personally, I have allocated some of my BTC specifically for putting my little boy through the 6yrs of high school (secondary education). Fees routinely run at around $15k to $25k per year, and grow at 5% to 8% per year (in line with the actual debasement rate of the AUD).

I asked the question: if I bought 1 BTC today for $100k AUD specifically allocated for school fees, what price does it have to reach, such that I can sell a chunk each year and cover all six years?

The second question is, how much does the government’s new tax policy help hinder me in achieving this goal?

Bitcoin has to reach around $270k for me to do this for one child, which is well within reach and reason.

The governments new tax policy reduces my run-way by about 10-months of school fees, so the Bitcoin price will now have to reach $300k to cover it instead.

If I wanted to send two kids to a good school, I now need Bitcoin to 8x and reach $800k under the current 50% CGT discount scheme.

The new government tax policy strips away 2 full years of school fees (one per child) in tax relative to the current system, which I either have to fill the gap with more taxable income, or wait for BTC to reach $1 Million instead.

Thank. You. Very. Much.

Winner Winner, Chicken Dinner!

Young Australians are early in their careers, have low salaries, little savings, and are trying to enter a highly inflated housing AND asset market.

The new tax policy ensures that the ladder to get on the ladder is taxed at ~30% even if you’re earning what is a below median (A$74.7k) or mean (A$83.8k) salary.

You would otherwise see an effective capital gains tax rate below 12% under the current system.

For the folks who support this policy, because they want to ‘tax the rich’, just note that absolute tax applied under the new system (orange) on every dollar invested is considerably higher for lower income brackets, than for higher ones.

I can only assume the government has tried to target wealthy retirees, who are selling down portfolios rather than earning a salary income. What they are actually doing is ensuring the people who have the least savings are taxed at a considerably higher rate, and are thus forced to remain lower on the socioeconomic ladder.

The current 50% CGT discount compounds with the low marginal tax rate to help low income workers the most, delivering the lowest overall tax rate.

The new system successfully makes everyone poorer, and ensures the folks who are barely making ends meet…stay there.

I ran a sensitivity analysis based on the Australian tax brackets, relative to the appreciation rate of the asset purchased. The aim is to see which people and conditions benefit from the new capital gains tax under the indexation system.

The orange part of the heatmap is where the new system is strictly WORSE for an Australian investor.

The blue zones…if they existed…would show instances where we are better off.

To be very fair, if you buy government bonds which get rekt by inflation, you are actually better off under the new system. The scale of that benefit is just so low, it is indistinguishable from the zero line. That is primarily because you made no money on the asset, but perhaps that is the point of the policy.

Nobody actually wins under this new tax system except the government, lawyers, and accountants.

It Cannot Be Incompetence

There are usually two conclusions when it comes to bad government policies:

1. Incompetence.

2. Malice.

Whilst I know there is plenty of room for door number two, I generally give the benefit of the doubt, and ascribe a lot of it to door number one.

In this instance however, I cannot give them that pass.

It took me approximately 5-seconds of thought to intuitively realise something wasn’t right when I started hearing about this budget.

It took me 10-minutes of prompt engineering to get the bones of this analysis in place, and to satisfy myself that the numbers confirmed my suspicions.

It is impossible that the Labor government broke these widely publicised election promises, so blatantly, without being fully aware of what I have just written above.

They know housing affordability is great cover for disguised tax hikes.

They know young Australians are pissed at how expensive housing is.

They know the only hope they have is saving in assets.

They know taxing assets more heavily ensures less upwards mobility.

They’ve proposed these tax changes knowing full well it hits the poorer, harder.

They know this system makes everyone worse off, not better.

In this instance, I cannot give them a pass for being incompetent.

If they cannot get a staffer to spend 10-mins with a spreadsheet and an LLM to think through even this rudimentary analysis, then they have no place being in office.

If they can, and did, and know these results, then I’d argue we should be asking hard questions about who they work for, because they are certainly not working in our best interests.

Concluding Thoughts

I genuinely had to get this piece written and out of my mind. It’s currently 1am, and I am no night owl.

Whilst this event is nowhere near the size and scale of this comparison, I can only imagine what it feels like when an emerging market slashes their currency overnight. This tax change effectively robbed 20% to 30% of the value of every Australian investor’s future wealth, and changes the calculus on long-term goals significantly.

I am a young Australian, who is literally saving for a house, and school fees for my son. This budget has added years to my savings plans, and steals 20-30% of my savings wealth I have accumulated over a decade.

Thanks mate, what a true gift that is.

If you’re an Aussie reader, I have no doubt you probably feel just like I do, and it has been a pretty shit week to process.

It has been eye opening, and one of those events you can think about, and theorise about, but it just hits different when it actually comes to pass. It stings like betrayal, not because I trusted the politicians in the first place, but because a move like this one is just un-fucking-Australian.

So what on earth do we do?

• First things first, don’t panic, and certainly don’t do anything rash. There is still a long, and winding political road ahead before these changes become legislation.

• There will be backlash, and there will be re-negotiation, because it won’t take long for even the most devout ALP shills realise their kids’ futures are impacted.

• I am no tax accountant, but I do believe finding a good one will turn out to be an invaluable investment. A wise man once told me that whenever the politicians change the right side of the tax code, a whole world of unforeseen consequences (read: opportunities) opens up on the left side. Life always finds a way.

• I’m not one who usually cares about political action in any way shape or form. However there’s an army of Bitcoiners hard at work constructing tools to send emails to every politician with an inbox. In this instance, it might be worth spending 10-mins crafting an email to let them know you’re an unhappy camper.

  • One email is noise, but a thousand is a voter-base. Each email is indicative of 100 people who didn’t speak up, so the numbers can compound quickly.

  • Keep it concise, keep it human, tell a story that hits home, and try not to call them a dickhead too many times in the subject line (as true as it may be).

For readers who are not Australian, don’t assume they aren’t cooking up something similar in your neck of the woods. These scheming political thieves know how to hide a tax hike, and they always wrap it in something that pulls the heart-strings of the masses.

This article is my small way of pushing back, and I’ll tell you what, I feel just a little bit better now that I’ve got it out on paper.

Subject Line: Oi Dickhead…Read This Cobba!

Thanks for reading,

James

The truth is, nobody knows when THE ultimate bottom of a bear market is in, until many months down the road.

Investors and analysts are always looking over their shoulder, worried with PTSD that this rally is destined to fail, just like all the others which came before it.

Except at some stage, the rally will eventually stick the landing.

I have received a lot of messages in the last few weeks from folks who wish they had accumulated more aggressively below $70k, and are now wondering what to do. The higher we go, the more the pain of missing out can build.

Simultaneously, the higher we go, the more likely we are to hit a major resistance level, which motivates sellers to put in another high. This fires up the bears, and spooks the bulls who fear they have just bought another local top.

Given we cannot predict the future, my approach is to work backwards, and identify market thresholds where momentum and sentiment are likely to inflect higher.

Each of these thresholds we break and hold, adds more and more weight to the bull case, and puts the bears on the back-foot.

We’ve already taken the first line of defence at $78k, and Bitcoin is currently knocking on the door of the second, and most critical line in the sand for the bear case.

Today’s post will be my assessment of why this second line of defence is so important for the bears, and how likely it is that we take it.

Become a Premium subscriber to access today’s Video Update (35 mins) and TL;DR Summary.

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My thesis about the four-year cycle is that it was unlikely to break in the bull market, but was considerably more likely to break in the bear that followed.

The way smart money investors behave is very different to speculators, and the majority of retail. Institutional allocators, and folks who have been around markets for many years, know what capitulation events look and feel like, and it changes their behaviour.

Smart money starts to take on risk when the market narrative feels the most dire.

• They have been the one panic selling at the lows numerous times in the past, and learned from their mistakes.

• They know what it feels like to be sidelined when an asset they wanted to own starts running away from them.

• They recognise that there’s no prize for buying the bottom wick, and the winning strategy is to stack the odds in your favour over the long-term.

There are a lot of people who are in complete disbelief right now, because they were expecting much lower prices, have bids that were not filled, and currently feel like an under-allocated deer in the headlights.

The bulls are already running victory laps, and the bears are questioning what went wrong. For the folks who missed the lows, many are about to buy far too much at the next local high, and get smoked once again on the pullback. The bears will then add heavily to their shorts…at the exact point when they should be buying.

Today’s post will be an assessment of this Bitcoin rally into the mid $80ks. My aim is to help anyone feeling like a ‘deer in the headlights’ to set sensible thresholds for when the bear thesis is invalidated, and the bear is properly slain.

Become a Premium subscriber to access today’s Video Update (45 mins), Written Article and TL;DR Summary.

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Every man and his dog has been drawing the same lines on charts, sketching the same bear flag, and predicting the same bear market as every other bear.

In my experience, this point in the bear is the hardest.

• The bearish thesis is being tested right now, as price starts to invalidate the upper bound of the most obvious ‘bear flag’ ever drawn with crayons.

• The bulls are getting increasingly hyped, but this is the exact moment when they pour in all their remaining cash…and it turns out to be just another lower high.

• For the more cautious and moderate bulls among us, many are looking at the current $80k price, and wondering if they missed the bottom, but don’t want to get caught buying yet another local top.

This part of the bear market is the hardest, because it is the moment when everyone’s market thesis, and our conviction it gets tested.

In today’s post, I will share my thoughts on whether this bear flag structure is still valid, and how I approach the ‘investors-trilemma’ above. I’ll share my personal strategy, which is based on my experience buying not enough at past bottoms, as well as chasing rallies which I shouldn’t have chased.

Become a Premium subscriber to access today’s Video Update (46 mins) and TL;DR Summary.

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Thank you once again for another amazing batch of questions this month!

In this ~1hr Q&A session, we tackled a wide range of Bitcoin, macro, mining, AI, and market cycle questions, including:

• Does STRC introduce systemic risk to Bitcoin?

• Is MSTY still worth holding after the reverse split?

• Can BTC compete with AI for capital?

• The future of mining as miners pivot to AI

• What signals mark the end of the bear market?

• Diminishing returns and next cycle ATH targets

• How useful is the Bitcoin Power Law?

• What % of net worth should be in BTC?

• Taking profits next cycle with more conviction

• Has Bitcoin lost the digital gold narrative?

• BTC’s role in the AI agent era

• Does Bitcoin need a new narrative?

• Adding ETH to your portfolio - worth it?

We hope you enjoy the session,
James & Alec

Premium Members will find the full Q&A video below in this post (~1hr). Consider upgrading to premium today to unlock the content!

New Release Reminder: The Bitcoin Checkpoint Report #2

The Checkonchain team is proud to launch the 2nd edition of The Bitcoin Checkpoint report, in partnership with our friends over at Unchained.

In this 30+ page report, we breakdown of Bitcoin’s 2025–26 bear market, using a wide range of data-sets across spot, onchain, ETF, and derivatives markets.

Get The Report Here

Know someone who might like the report? Here’s the link to share: https://tinyurl.com/btc-checkpoint-2.

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We had a great call today, covering key slides from our latest Bitcoin Monthly Report. Big thanks to all the attendees and those who raised their hands to participate in the session, we highly value your input!

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G’day Folks,

The Checkonchain team is proud to release the 2nd edition of The Bitcoin Checkpoint report, in partnership with our friends at Unchained Capital.

In this 30+ page report, we analyse Bitcoin’s 2025–26 bear market through a wide range of data-sets from spot, onchain, ETF, and derivatives markets.

We use this to construct a data-based market thesis for this bear, and illustrate why many thresholds and mental models from prior bears now require a rethink.

The report is available for anyone to download via the button below.

Get The Report Here

At Checkonchain, we believe one of Bitcoin’s key advantages is the transparency of its data. Across onchain, spot, ETF, and derivatives markets, we’re able to observe investor behaviour in real time - with each dataset telling a different, but ultimately consistent story.

Rather than relying on narratives, we focus on what the market is actually doing: who is selling, who is buying, and at what price.

In this report, we assess:

• How the 2025 bull market topped, and the role of spot sell-side pressure.

• The mechanics of the drawdown, and what drove the move to $60k.

• The two major capitulation events that have shaped this bear.

• How over 2.0M BTC has rotated into a new cost basis range.

• Why models like the True Market Mean are increasingly relevant.

• Our base case thesis for where we believe this bear market bottoms out.

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If you missed the 1st edition of The Bitcoin Checkpoint, you can get it here.

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📅 Tuesday May 5th, 2026 at 3pm CST
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We hope you enjoy the report, and look forward to seeing you at the live event!

Cheers,
The Checkonchain Team

If the 4yr cycle advocates are correct, the next quarter is likely to be a rough one, and there is no shortage of bear flags being drawn to illustrate it.

Over the last few months, I have fleshed out my bear case thesis, and why I do not believe the classic 4yr cycle compass is going to be more of a hindrance than a help in this bear. However, I am not naive enough to pretend I can tell the future, so it’s important to challenge my own bias, and stress test my thesis against the consensus bear case.

This month’s Orange report is titled Challenging My Base Case, and is an exploration of the macro factors which may drive another leg down, and how it stacks up relative to prior bear cycles.

I discuss the consensus bear case which I see plastered across my news feed, and analyse how the metrics I track would respond given any sell-off event that takes Bitcoin under the prevailing $60k low.

Orange Members will find the report PDF, and details of our upcoming monthly conference call below.

Note: This monthly report & upcoming conference call is exclusive to Checkonchain Orange subscribers - which is our upper-tier plan within Substack.

If you would like to learn more about Orange, or access a single monthly report + conference call recording, please click the button below.

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Welcome to the April edition of our Q&A, where Premium subscribers can ask (and upvote) questions about the Bitcoin market, onchain analysis, and broader macro themes. We will record and publish the Q&A session later this week!

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The primary reason I always track where price is trading relative to onchain cost basis levels, is they provide a direct read on the centre of gravity for market sentiment.

Breaking above $79k would put both the average active investor, the average recent buyer, and almost put the average ETF investor back into a state of profit.

For the last few months, the default investor behaviour has been to nurse their losses, and sell into whatever liquidity price rips offer. This sell-the-rip behaviour is typical of downtrends, and naturally creates market resistance, and emboldens the bears.

However, there is a tipping point. At some stage, price has rallied enough to put enough people back into the money, and they start feeling more energised to buy-the-dip instead.

At the same time, the bears, many of which were bulls until just a few weeks ago, start leveraging up to make it all back in one trade, as Bitcoin goes to zero.

We’re at the critical juncture, where the bears are in disbelief, and are leveraging up heavily on the short side. At the same time, the bulls have not cracked the True Market Mean and STH cost basis threshold, moving us into buy-the-dip dominance.

Today’s post provides my breakdown of this setup, and how I expect these two competing forces to duke it out at this critical point in the recovery process.

Become a Premium subscriber to access today’s Video Update (39 mins) and TL;DR Summary.

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We’ve made this report freely available, adding our two sats to the ongoing Quantum Computing discourse for Bitcoin.

Please feel free to share, and we hope you find it a useful framework for thinking through the ‘freeze or not-to-freeze’ problem of Satoshi’s coins.

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G’day Folks,

The quantum debate pertaining to Bitcoin is in full swing, and in particular relating to the potential freezing of quantum vulnerable supply.

As I observe the debate, I have noticed one theme that just never seemed to match my intuition; that the hacking and sale of vulnerable coins would plunge Bitcoin prices into an impossibly deep, and possible fatal winter.

I’m calling bullshit on that claim.

A central theme of my analysis in late-2025 was the tremendously large spot sell-side pressure that the market absorbed last year. Folks leveled blame at market manipulation, Jane Street, and quantum fears, but I just saw billions of dollars a day of revived supply coming from HODLers.

Quantum bulls often quote the 6.9M vulnerable coins as being a sword of Damocles that threatens to kill Bitcoin should a CRQC ever come to market. As with most things, there is a tonne of lost nuance, and the devil is absolutely in the details.

As an engineer by trade, a big part of my process is breaking down complex problems into bite sized chunks. I also feel like I have a somewhat unique lens into the Bitcoin market given my years studying the UTXO set via onchain data.

In today’s piece, I am going to present a case for why the fear-factor pertaining to the sale of quantum vulnerable coins is unlikely to be anywhere near as severe as many claim.

I will also present an idea for further analysis of re-used addresses which is best picked up by data firms with comprehensive exchange, custodian, and entity labels.

This report builds upon my first QC write up One Day, Satoshi’s Coins Will Move, which will be a valuable primer for this one.

Disclaimer: This article is general in nature, and is for informational, and entertainment purposes only, and it shall not be relied upon for any investment or financial decisions.

TL;DR

• Today, I’m returning to the quantum computing debate, and this time focusing on quantifying how much of a risk the vulnerable coins are to the market.

• There are approximately 6.9M BTC which are technically vulnerable to a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC). 1.7M are Satoshi Era P2PK coins, 214k are modern Taproot coins, and ~5M are those held in re-used addresses.

• Specifically related to the re-used addresses, I am very confident we can heavily handicap this 5M BTC, as a great majority of these are managed by custodians and exchanges. These entities are highly likely to be aware of the QC risk, and will upgrade accordingly.

• The Taproot coins are modern, and thus the odds the owner is alive is very high. They are also disproportionately associated with inscriptions, and if a QC attacker wants to steal 10k sats and a monkey JPEG…good luck to them.

• The real risk are the 1.716M Satoshi Era P2PK coins, which many liken to a sunken galleon full of gold, there for the taking if the lock can be pried open.

• Assume the full 1.7M BTC is stolen and sold. When we compare this against a variety of sell-side metrics, such as revived supply, URPD supply changes, Exchange flows, and trade volumes, we get a very consistent result.

• The full 1.716M P2PK coins are equivalent to around 60-90-days of sell-side (and thus demand) we see in a Bitcoin bull market, but also in late stage bears around the capitulation event.

• In other words, HODLers routinely absorb this kind of sell-side, and especially when we remove the conservatism I build into this analysis, the picture becomes much less scary than the headline number.

• There is no doubt that a QC attacker selling all the P2PK coins would negatively impact the price. It probably creates a bear market. However, where will, I push back strongly, is it is nowhere near the ‘end-of-days’ fatal sell-side many quantum bulls in the debate seem to claim.

• I close with some thoughts on the Hourglass compromise, where miners can only include one P2PK coin per block. I find this to be a very fair middle ground, which respects the current spending frequency of P2PK coins, and has their migration timeline nearly identical to the rest of us at ~270-days.

In the conclusion, I also ask a more philosophical question; would the Satoshi entity really prefer to hoard their coins? Or would they rather them be distributed globally, and give people like you and I ownership instead.

If a group of physicists and VCs really want to spend tens of billions to market sell Satoshi’s coins, you will find me on the other side of that, staying humble, and stacking Satoshi’s sats.

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Setting the Scene

This piece is not intended to opine on the probability of a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) coming to market. I am also no physicist, and at this stage, the best I can do is read the research papers, and test them against various LLMs to better understand the problem and risk.

My general opinion on the subject is as follows:

• It is clear the theoretical capabilities and resource requirements for a CRQC which can run Shor’s algorithm are coming down. The ‘on-paper’ ability of QCs to crack Bitcoin’s elliptic curve based signature scheme suggests a shortening timeline.

• There is considerably less acceleration in scaling the physical hardware space. Different quantum labs are using a variety of architectures, and there is little evidence of scaling quantum computers in production which are remotely close to the capabilities of running Shor’s algorithm for an attack on Bitcoin.

• Nevertheless, there is sufficient evidence of progress in the quantum industry, and I am unable to handicap the probability of a CRQC enough, to not take the risk seriously.

• I am of the view Bitcoiners should be supportive of the debate, development, and preparation of a (set of) credible post-quantum solution(s).

Having a plan and not needing it, is a hell of a lot better than needing a plan and not having one.

Now, the specific topic I want to address in this piece is about the risk of sold supply.

The central reason I want to address this is I have seen claims in the debate which just feel extraordinarily hand-wavy to me, and I believe are based on incomplete premises. To paraphrase some of the claims I take issue with:

• ‘There are 6.9M BTC vulnerable coins that a quantum computer will steal!.

• ‘We simply must freeze vulnerable coins, because the sale of them will destroy the price, and then everyone will be rekt’.

• ‘BlackRock and Saylor will want to freeze the coins, and they have so many coins it would overwhelm the demand for the other side of any fork’.

Let me present a case for why these statements are all hyperbolic overestimates of the reality as I see it.

Breaking Down The Problem

We can generally break down quantum vulnerable supply into three main categories, based on WHY their public key is exposed:

• Vulnerable Script Types: This includes the Satoshi era P2PK, and Taproot P2TR address types, which expose the public key by default.

• Re-used Addresses: Irrespective of what address type is used, whenever you spend coins from it, the public key is necessarily exposed for verification purposes. Thus, any coins held in an address which has spent in the past, is QC vulnerable.

• Coins In Flight: The last two categories are long-range attacks, where the public key is exposed onchain, and a QC can take all the time they want to crack it. However, every coin is theoretically vulnerable whilst it is in the mempool waiting to be confirmed, called a short-range attack.

This report will only be evaluating the first, and second categories.

I have recommendations at the end for future work pertaining to the second category, which is best carried out by a data company with access to a comprehensive database of entity labels. The third category can only be solved by the development of post-quantum signing schemes, and is well outside my pay-grade.

Bitcoin Research Kit has recently rolled out a set of metrics which measure the total volume of supply which is deemed vulnerable to a CRQC. We can start to bound how many vulnerable coins we’re talking about:

• 🔴 Satoshi Era P2PK 1.716M BTC. These coins are assumed to be lost, and are mostly held in 50 BTC coinbase block reward transactions from the first epoch.

• 🟣 Taproot P2TR: 214k BTC. Taproot addresses are disproportionately used for inscriptions, and thus have a large address count (4.83M), but a relatively small supply balance (214k BTC).

• 🟠 Re-used addresses: 4.996M BTC. This is the largest supply honey-pot, however it also encompasses many large entities like exchanges, ETFs, and custodians.

In total, a whopping 6.934M BTC have an exposed public key, and are thus vulnerable to a long-range quantum attack.

However, there is nuance required to constrain this problem.

• I do not believe a quantum computer is being developed to steal monkey JPEGs held in a Taproot inscription, nor the 10k sats attached to them.

• Taproot is a relatively new protocol, and thus its owners are likely to be alive and capable of upgrading. BIP-360 even proposes to fix the default Taproot vulnerability.

• Re-using addresses is a very common practice for exchanges. Most readers will have deposited funds to the same Bitcoin address at Binance or Coinbase because the user experience is deemed better. Exchanges also often re-use addresses for their hot and cold wallet infrastructure.

• Given their business depends on NOT losing coins, I am quite confident that Binance and Coinbase are well aware of the quantum risk, and will have engineering teams already heads down developing solutions for it.

• For the remaining re-used addresses held by individuals, a great number of them will be alive, and thus capable of upgrading to any post-quantum scheme as it arises.

As a result, the scary headline number of 6.934M vulnerable coins is a theoretical upper bound, however any honest analysis should attempt to handicap it to a much lower one.

Exchanges and custodians have a duty to protect clients’ funds, living Bitcoiners don’t want to be rugged, and quantum computers are not going after 10k-sat inscriptions.

Further Re-used Address Analysis

As a quick aside, I’d like to present a call-to-action for any onchain data providers, especially those with a comprehensive database of labelled entities.

There is tremendous value in performing a deeper breakdown and risk assessment of the 4.996M BTC held in re-used addresses:

• How many are held by labelled entities? These are low risk coins, as the centralised owner is highly motivated and capable of upgrading to post-quantum when solutions are ready.

• Of the non-entity re-used address supply (assumed individuals), what is the ‘activity’ breakdown of those coins?

  • If they are routinely spending their coins, then the entity is alive, and likely to upgrade.

  • If they have been dormant for several years, they are likely at a higher risk of being lost, and thus quantum vulnerable.

• Of the re-used, non-entity AND dormant supply, what is the wallet size breakdown of this subset? It would be highly unlikely for an expensive quantum computer to go hunting for $100 slugs, let alone the legal issues if they steal coins from someone who was just unaware and HODLing them.

Based on my very crude estimate from One Day, Satoshi’s Coins Will Move, I found that just 2% of the top 1000 Bitcoin rich list supply was in this high risk ‘re-used and dormant’ category.

My expectation is that the amount we will handicap the headline vulnerable coin volume by will be quite substantial.

Selling Satoshi’s Coins

Based on my analysis reasoning to date, I am fairly convinced that the primary target supply for a CRQC is the pool of 1.716M Satoshi Era P2PK coins.

• They are highly likely to be lost coins, which some have likened to gold treasure held within a difficult to reach sunken Galleon.

• Given they are likely lost, the odds of a legal dispute in the event they actually steal a living person’s coins is much lower.

For the sake of discussion, let’s assume that the quantum critics are correct, and all 1.716M P2PK coins are stolen, and sold by the attacker.

The question is, how capable is the Bitcoin market of absorbing such an event?

Naturally, it also matters whether the P2PK coins are cracked one by one, or all at once. I have heard quantum bulls claim the latter, so let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and assume the first CRQC is so good, it can just crack them all sequentially over a short period of time.

Satoshi vs Revived Supply

One of my preferred metrics for mapping the sell-side supply for Bitcoin is via revived supply. This metric is the daily volume of coins that were held for at least 6-months, but are being spent and ‘revived’ that day.

There are many reasons supply is revived:

• Investors move to a new custody setup.

• Exchanges rotate hot and cold wallets.

• People send their coins to an exchange for sale.

We can see in the chart below that ~10k BTC per day is a very typical baseline value, even in the depths of a bear market, when HODLers are selling the least.

Assume this 10k/day baseline is all the day-to-day noise of non sales.

Notice how the spot price stops going up in a bull whenever revived supply spikes above 20k to 30k BTC/day? That’s because it directly maps to HODLers taking profit in a bull market.

If we assume the P2PK coins are stolen in (or discretely held until) a bull market offers favourable pricing, it would take somewhere between 60 and 90-days of typical bull market demand to absorb.

Now a fair analysis would assume these coins are sold ON TOP of all the other HODLers who are selling, but this gives us an idea of the demand profile required.

We should also note, that revived supply of 6mth old coins usually only accounts for around half of the estimated sell-side activity. The other half comes from Short-Term Holders who swing trade within that 6-month window.

In other words, in a proper bull market, Bitcoin routinely handles at least 10k to 20k BTC worth of profit taking from HODLers.

The next chart takes this ~90-day figure, and computes the 90-day sum of revived supply for different age bands. Think of these as the waves of quarterly sell-side, which are shown to occur both in bulls, and in late stage bears (capitulations).

When we compare Bitcoin’s quarterly supply absorption, in both good and bad times, we can see that market selling all 1.716M P2PK coins would be equivalent to one quarter of peak bull demand.

The capitulation events in 2018 and 2026 are also interesting, as they show how an equivalent volume of sell-side occurs out of fear, and not only greed.

For the critics who think Bitcoin would go to zero under the pressure of the P2PK coins being sold, I’d like to float the idea that similar sell-side isn’t all that uncommon, and Bitcoin hasn’t gone to zero under those loads so far.

Satoshi vs URPD

Another lens we can frame up how ‘large’ the P2PK coin haul would be, is to compare it to how many coins rotate to a new onchain cost basis day-to-day.

The chart below shows the supply difference over a 90-day period. red bars show how many coins have been spent from that onchain cost basis, and green bars are where they have been moved to.

For folks who are not regular subscribers, let me preface this chart with a few insights that I cover regularly:

• We’re currently in a bear market, and since late-Nov-2025, revived supply, and profit taking has dropped off a cliff. You can see this by how small the red bars are on the left third of the chart. Very few people holding coins with a cost basis below $60k have moved them over the last 90-days (despite all the bearish headlines and news flow).

• Over 86% of the coins which have moved, are those locking in large losses, concentrated around $85k and above $100k. This is a story we often see in bears, where top buyers are progressively washed out of their positions.

All of this is to setup the idea, that a majority of those red bars are from top buyers crystallising their losses. In turn, the green bars reflect the buyers, who are those crazy HODLers buying Bitcoin when it is down -50% from the ATH.

That green blob of demand sums to 2.24M BTC, and that is just over the last 90-days. The context of that green blob is top buyers selling to HODLers who were unshaken by the Iran war, quantum fears, and Jane Street selling at 10am.

Here is another lens showing the supply broken down into Short-Term (red) and Long-Term (blue) Holders.

Since the sell-off down to $60k on 5-Feb-2026, over 2.3M BTC have capitulated losses, and transferred to a new set of buyers between $60k and $80k.

In a bear market, 1.36x the P2PK haul has been absorbed by the market during the depths of a bear market.

Bitcoin can actually take quite the punch, it seems.

Let’s plot the size of that green blob over different time windows, and compare it to the 1.716M P2PK coins.

• 🔴 Every 7-days, ~400k BTC change cost basis onchain.

• 🟠 Every 30-days, ~1.4M BTC change cost basis onchain.

• 🟡 Every 90-days, ~2.3M BTC change cost basis onchain.

It is very true, that not every coin moving onchain is explicitly sold.

It is also true, that a lot of them are.

Handicap these numbers by a factor of 2x, or even 5x and we are still talking about a Bitcoin market that routinely sees hundreds of thousands to millions of coins changing hands on a quarterly basis.

Let’s compare the P2PK coins to actual exchange deposit volumes.

• 🔴 Every 30-days, ~850k BTC are deposited to exchanges.

• 🟠 Every 60-days, ~1.8M BTC are deposited to exchanges.

• 🟡 Every 90-days, ~2.7M BTC are deposited to exchanges.

Once again, we have an equivalent sell-pressure measured in 1-3 months, not years.

As a final sense check, let’s compare the P2PK coins to the daily trade volume Bitcoin markets experience. I know trade volume isn’t a perfect measure, since it reflects bi-directional buyers and sellers, whereas the quantum attacker is going to be a seller only. However, I think it can still provide a sanity check benchmark, and at least an appreciation of how deep and liquid Bitcoin markets actually are.

The equivalent of 1.716M BTC is traded over X-days in the following markets:

• Futures: every 2-3 days.

• Spot: every 10 to 20-days.

• Options: every 20 to 40-days.

• ETFs: every 25 to 60-days.

Across all of these relative metrics, we get a fairly consistent story, that the sale of every P2PK coin would be equivalent to around a full quarter of typical selling we see in a bull market (or during a bear market capitulation event).

There is no doubt that an additional 1.716M BTC market sold will have an appreciable and depressing force on the price.

However, I find it difficult to support any claim that such sell-side pressure is unprecedented, fatal, and so tremendously large that we MUST freeze the coins.

The Bitcoin market has, and arguably routinely does chew through as much supply as the P2PK coins hold. In reality, a quantum attacker is far more likely to hack and then sell them periodically, and even use derivatives to hedge their market risk.

Humble HODLers can, and routinely do provide more than this volume of demand support over relatively short periods of time, and it is measured in single digit months, not years.

The Hourglass Approach

As part of the BIP-360 discussion, it has been proposed that instead of freezing P2PK coins, we could install an ‘hourglass’ approach, where no more than one P2PK output could be mined per block.

There are approximately 38k P2PK outputs, which if mined once per block, would take approximately 264-days to fully exhaust.

As I covered in One Day, Satoshi’s Coins Will Move, this time-frame is approximately equivalent to the time it would optimistically take for the rest of the Bitcoin world to migrate their coins to a post-quantum secure system.

• We have seen only a few hundred P2PK coins moved since 2023. The hourglass does not disrupt their current spending behaviour at all.

• The time it would take to rotate all P2PK if they were not lost is no different to the time it will take you and I to rotate ours given network congestion. P2PK holders are not disadvantaged in any way on a block inclusion basis.

• The sell-side pressure of 50BTC per block will be handled by the market, in my opinion. I cannot see a world where this would be any different in impact to a classic bear market, none of which were fatal.

It is my opinion, that the hourglass approach is more than sufficient as a compromise between the ‘freeze’ and ‘law of the jungle’ camps in this debate.

Concluding Thoughts

I find the quantum debate fascinating, as it is a test of Bitcoin governance, and asks a deeper question of Bitcoin principles.

‘to freeze, or not to freeze’.

We have so much data available around how Bitcoin is held and spent onchain, and yet I see so few people building robust arguments around this evidence.

• Yes, re-used addresses are quantum vulnerable. So let’s quantify how many of them are exchanges, custodians, and active participants, and isolate the high risk portion of inactive supply.

• Yes, Taproot is quantum vulnerable. It is also new and mostly holds a few thousand sats. The owners will upgrade if they choose to, and if a quantum attacker wants to steal monkey JPEG inscriptions…have at it!

• Yes, the 1.716M BTC held in P2PK addresses are quantum vulnerable, and indeed the most likely targets. However, 1.716M BTC is not even close to a fatal volume of sell-side, especially once you factor in the reality that it is unlikely an attacker hacks them all in one go. It will take time, and the process is expensive to run.

To the folks who claim we MUST freeze the coins because of the sell-side, I’d encourage you to put some numbers to your claims.

Instead, the actual thrust of this debate is around the principles of what Bitcoin is.

• Do we protect Bitcoin’s upholding of property rights?

• Do we steal freeze the coins as we’re worried someone else will steal them?

• Do we assume the original owners of lost coins would rather them stay lost?

• Do we believe the Satoshi entity would rather hoard them, or distribute them?

I actually find that last question very intriguing.

I own Bitcoin because someone sold it to me.

I weathered bear markets, and that helped me appreciate what I own.

I’ve navigated several downturns, and each one helped me refine my thinking.

Bitcoin only works if it is widely distributed.

Would Satoshi rather hold 1.1M BTC so nobody else can?

Or would they rather more people own it, such that the Bitcoin project can flourish.

We are all Satoshi.

And if the physicists and VCs who want to spend tens of billions of dollars just to steal those coins choose to sell them, who is the actual loser of that transaction?

I’ll be staying humble, and stacking sats.

Thanks for reading,

James

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A few weeks ago ‘it was so over’.

Today, ‘we’re so back!’

What are the odds that next week, it will once again be so over?

The Strait of Hormuz is finally open closed again, oil prices have fallen to $79 ripped back towards $90, and the US-Iran ceasefire negotiations are going very well in a state of total disarray.

Everything is going perfectly to plan a complete shitshow, and nobody knows which way is up, and which way is down.

Thank you for your attention in this matter.

Subscribers will know that we have been constructive on Bitcoin since the $60k low set on 6-Feb, when we released Welcome to Deep Value. We see this Bitcoin bear differently to a majority of the bears out there, and to no surprise, we also don’t see the same setup as the moon-math bulls.

Bitcoin traded as high as $78k over the weekend, with many patting themselves on the back for ‘calling the bottom’. The bears are calling for yet another lower high, and noting that ‘it’s just a bear flag before the 6-Oct low bro’.

In today’s post, I will share my perspective on this rally, and why I am not counting my chickens just yet. There are plenty of reasons to be constructive on the corn, but these bear market woods are thick and dense.

Rarely is a recovery this easy.

Become a Premium subscriber to access today’s Video Update (40 mins), Written Article and TL;DR Summary.

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G’day Folks,

I’m excited to join Unchained Capital for a live presentation and Q&A on the 5th of May, supporting the next edition of The Bitcoin Checkpoint report - which will be released at the end of April (read the first edition here).

In this session, we’ll be breaking down:

• The road into the current bear market

• Analysing the capitulation phase of the bear

• How this cycle stacks up against prior bear markets

• Call-backs to key insights from the previous Checkpoint report

• The current market setup, and key metrics to watch moving forward

Session Details:

📅 Tuesday May 5, 3pm CDT / 8pm UTC
🎙️ Featuring James Check and Connor Dolan (Unchained)
💻 Register to attend below

Register Here

Hope to see you there, and we can’t wait to get the next Checkpoint report in your hands soon!

Cheers,
James