The Debt Trap: Why Gold Pumps First and Bitcoin Follows | Michael Terpin

Global markets are navigating a high stakes tug of war today. Following an address to the nation where President Trump signaled harder strikes against Iran, reports have surfaced that Iran and Oman are drafting a protocol to monitor traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. While oil prices have retreated from their session highs, the crypto sector remains under stress, with Bitcoin trading at $66-67K dollars.

Joining Jeremy Szafron to break down this volatility is Michael Terpin, founder and CEO of Transform Ventures and author of Bitcoin Supercycle. A digital asset pioneer since 2012, Terpin explains why he believes we are currently in the "Fall Phase" of the cycle, a period characterized by retail panic and a potential capitulation event coming this October.

In this deep dive, Terpin reveals his price targets for the current correction, the behavior of Satoshi era whales, and why Michael Saylor is on a path to owning 2.1 million Bitcoin. We also explore the macro "debasement trade" where gold typically leads the market before Bitcoin follows, and how the convergence of AI, robotics, and crypto will fundamentally change the global economy.

Recorded April 2 2026

Big thanks to our sponsor, Swan Bitcoin, your partner for generational wealth. If you are looking to build a long term position, you can learn more at swan.com/kitco.

Timestamps: 
00:00 Market Shock Overview: Trump, Iran, and the Oman protocol. 
00:57 Meet Michael Terpin: Intro to the founder of Transform Ventures. 
02:05 Bitcoin Seasons Framework: Understanding fear and greed in the market cycle. 
04:00 Buy Signals and Price Targets: Why Terpin is eyeing the 40,000 to 55,000 range. 
05:26 ETFs and Treasury Buyers: Analysis of retail outflows and Michael Saylor’s strategy. 
09:47 Sovereigns and Venture Sentiment: Strategic reserves and the age of the voter. 
11:24 Supply Shock and Next Bull Run: When to expect the "Rocket Ship" summer. 
12:50 Where Venture Is Heading: Stablecoin plays and the barbell investment strategy. 
15:38 Midterm Crashes and Deleveraging: How the Satoshi program impacts cycle timing. 
18:06 Quantum Computing Risk: Responding to Google’s latest AI cryptography reports. 
19:35 Debt Cycles and CBDCs: Why the debasement trade favors gold first. 
23:21 Stablecoins as Global Money: From liquidity tools to third world savings accounts. 
25:09 AI Disruption and Supercycle: A preview of Pandora’s Blocks and AI agent commerce. 
28:45 Final Advice and Wrap Up
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Disclaimer:  
The videos are not intended to provide trading advice, and the views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Kitco Metals Inc. Kitco News, its anchors, producers, and reporters are not responsible in any way for the performance or actions of any sponsor, advertiser or affiliate of Kitco News. In no event will Kitco and its employees be held liable for any indirect, special, incidental, or consequential damages arising out of the use of the content in this video.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

In focus with Jeremy Safron is brought to you by Swan, the real Bitcoin company.

SPEAKER_01 0:08

Welcome back. I'm Jeremy Safron. Global markets are navigating a high-stakes tug of war today following an address to the nation where President Trump signal harder strikes against Iran. We're now seeing reports that Iran and Oman are drafting a protocol to monitor traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Now, this news has caused oil prices to retreat from their session highs, and it's also helped stocks parse some of their earlier losses. But in the crypto sector, the stress seems to remain here. According to on-chain data, the largest uh Bitcoin holders have kind of turned into net sellers right now, and public companies like Riot platforms continue to reduce their holdings. But at the same time, legacy firms like Franklin Templin are pushing uh deeper into the space. So who's right? Are we looking at a capitulation in a broken market or a shakeout that sets up for the next major leg higher? Now, Michael Turpin has argued that Bitcoin is in the fall phase of its cycle, with more short-term pain possible, but that the long-term structural case remains intact. Joining me now to break down the volatility is Michael Turpin. Michael is a true pioneer in the digital asset space, having been a strategic investor and venture capitalist in the industry since 2012. Good timing. He currently serves as a founder and chief executive officer of Transform Ventures. And as the author of Bitcoin Supercycle, Michael has developed a four seasons kind of framework to track market patterns and institutional behavior. Now, Michael, you've seen every major boom and bust in this sector for over a decade. Welcome back to Kitco. Thank you. I bring it up because how does your cycle model account for these types of kind of rapid external shocks?

SPEAKER_02 2:05

So that's macro. And macro is less important than the supply and demand and the fear and greed that has repeated every single cycle. Soshi in the white paper and his suffixant uh uh writings said that as long as the amount of net buying of Bitcoin in any four-year period between halvings higher than the amount of new Bitcoin mined, the price has to go up. It's math. And so far that's been true. First halving was $12, second halving was $670, third halving was $8,700, and the most recent halving in 2024 was $64,000. All of the volatility that scares people off or brings them in is based on fear and greed. And I identified uh as far back as 2015, uh, my thesis on seasons of Bitcoin that is there are um behaviors that happen in the exact same order every cycle based on fear and greed. Bitcoin Spring happens the day of the halving. Miners all of us are wildly unprofitable because they have the same expenses and half of the rewards, but instead of it going down, it stays flat because for everyone selling, that's somebody wants to buy. Bitcoin summers, the day you reach a new all-time high and it goes up like a rocket ship. That's when the bubble pops about nine to eleven months later. And then when the bubble pops, that's Bitcoin fall, that's what we're in right now. And that's when retail in particular panics caught in at the top, they're panics selling at the bottom. And that gives the opportunity for people like me who understands the cycles to buy in at the bottom and then just ride it all the way up to new all-time highs, which has happened every single cycle. The longest period is Bitcoin winter. That is the 18 months or so that happened between the capitulation event that I believe is still coming in roughly October, uh, one year after the bubble popped, and uh the next halving, which is uh going roughly uh March of 2028.

SPEAKER_01 3:59

Yeah. Uh well what what kind of specific behavior are you are you watching right now that says sentiment is stretched enough to buy against?

SPEAKER_02 4:09

Well, um, you know, um I I also have on the Bitcoin supercycle fund, and we we've been buying anything below 60K, so we've only had uh one uh one uh one buy so far, but uh we've got things from 60 all the way back down to uh to 40. And uh I think it's gonna go down between 40 and 55. Um and again, the macro has not been that big of an effect. If you look at what the price of Bitcoin was the day before um the Iran war, it was 68,000 yesterday, 67,000. I think it's dipped to 66, it's been pretty flat. So that has not been as big of an effect as um you know the supply and demand and the fear and greed that happens in uh Bitcoin fall. You'd mentioned about uh selling. That was really immediately after um the several months after the um after the all-time high, and many of them just had planned on selling at the top of the bubble, like like me. Um, and um, you know, just the other day there was a uh Satoshi era whale wall that bought 12,000 Bitcoin. So um it's starting to happen that some of the ones are saying, low enough, I sold at 110, I'm gonna buy back at 65. And uh you repeat that a few cycles and you do quite well.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

So, I mean, the core part of that kind of ratchet effect in the thesis is where institutions take Bitcoin out of circulation, but but crypto quantities broader market selling is still kind of overwhelming that demand with Wales now distributing. Uh what tells you that the structure is kind of still intact?

SPEAKER_02 5:42

Yeah, those are not distributing anymore. They are not buying right now. Um happened at the top. And um, you know, there's two different forms, maybe three of institutions that weren't in here four years ago. Um, the biggest one is ETFs. Um, and the ETFs is really retail. I mean, it's not you know BlackRock buying for their own account, it's you know, retail that was afraid of opening up a Coinbase wallet four years ago or going on the MetaMask, and they're like saying, Oh, now that uh, you know, my financial advisor says I should five percent of my uh my overall assets um into um in into an ETF or either Bitcoin or Solana or whatever the thesis is. Obviously, we believe Bitcoin is the most important one to have most of your digital assets in uh for the risk reward. Um, you know, that that uh they tend to act like uh retail does every uh cycle, first generation retail. And you sure enough, you see that there's there's net outflows when the price is down and net inflows when the price is up. And that's the exact opposite of how you should be behaving. On the other hand, the DATs, particularly led by Michael Saylor, um, they've been basically uh structured as permanent capital, never selling. And so the more that you have there, I mean, Michael Saylor is certainly on track to have a million Bitcoin in the next year. I think his ultimate goal is to have maybe 2.1 million, which would be 10 small Bitcoin, and that's not going to move. He's not selling. He's got this amazing structure where he's got several different instruments totaling $42 billion now to buy.

SPEAKER_01 7:14

Yeah, well, you brought up uh ETFs there for a second. How exactly has it kind of changed? I remember when we first started covering it, there was a lot of excitement about these spot Bitcoin ETFs coming to market. Have they made Bitcoin structurally stronger or just more tied to kind of the broader macro flows and institutional positioning?

SPEAKER_02 7:33

I know. I think they made them more acceptable for retail that hasn't yet been in. So that increases the amount of uh net Bitcoin, whether it's you know abstracted through an ETF, it's still buying Bitcoin. Um but again, so far, um the ETF buyers are overwhelmed with the first generation um, you know, retail four years from now they won't be. They'll be second generation. Um, and maybe some new ones come in. But the new retail tends to act every single cycle um like scare the little puppy. They go in and they panic uh buy at the top because all their friends are making money, and then they panic sell as soon as it goes down. And that's the exact opposite of the, you know, this isn't unique to Bitcoin. I mean, Rothschild hundreds of years ago said you must buy when there's blood in the streets, you know, blood.

SPEAKER_01 8:23

The treasury thing has been interesting. I mean, we've talked about it a little bit. We're seeing those Bitcoin treasury sellers like Empori Digital, uh Genius Group, they're kind of they've they fully exited their positions. They're not small retail holders. Does that challenge the idea that this new class of owner is fundamentally more patient and strategic?

SPEAKER_02 8:43

Well, I think the new set of dats, and I'm working with right now that's looking uh at potentially launching one, um, make the mistake of immediately buying Bitcoin at the top. They thought, oh, it's going, we're acting like, you know, like like newbies. And um I think they just figure that, you know, hit while the while the iron's hot and raise a lot of money and immediately buy Bitcoin and keep buying Bitcoin forever. Um, and the problem is that the market is not as patient. I mean, you need to be as patient as a biotech investor if you're gonna wait through all the cycles as a public market uh investor who's used to quarter by quarter results. I think the mistake is that most dats should have raised when, like VCs do, raised when uh there's bullish sentiment, but then how long they had bought when there's bearish sentiment.

SPEAKER_01 9:30

Yeah. Do you think other treasury companies can realistically replicate that? Or or is strategy kind of in its own category?

SPEAKER_02 9:39

I do believe um dats are coming on board. I know of a couple of them. Yeah, interesting.

SPEAKER_01 9:45

Interesting. You got to give me a little insight here. I mean, it feels like you know, even the sovereigns are looking at Bitcoin a little bit on that strategic reserve side. We've seen it with gold, where there was a little bit of central bank selling, there was some forced illiquidity that needed to be covered. Is that kind of what's happening with the price sensitivity on the Bitcoin side too?

SPEAKER_02 10:05

Well, we're we're just at the tip of the the you know, the prospect of having um you know sovereigns uh uh have strategic reserves for Bitcoin. And a lot of it has to do with the um average age of the voter. Um, if you look in the United States, I saw a statistic that over 50% of the millennials have uh exposure to uh to Bitcoin and crypto, um, as opposed to a very small percentage of uh you know 60-year-olds.

SPEAKER_01 10:31

You know, you've got a lot of experience in this game. You're also in a lot of different rooms, boardrooms, you talked to a lot of people. What are you hearing from the venture side right now? Is Capital Kanye coming back into crypto in a serious way, as you mentioned, those big whales waking up again? Is this the the beginning of that stacking event?

SPEAKER_02 10:49

So the whales are different than the venture investors, right? The venture investors are looking for looking for new tokens. Um, and again, I'm a um uh general partner at uh uh Cuba Capital, which is a fund of funds for early stage smaller crypto VCs, as well as a GP at uh Sigma, which is um, you know, just had completed its bull market, and uh now they're looking for the price to fall to be able to get really good deals on tokens they believe in. And that's just, you know, again, same the same thesis of uh sell high, buy low. Uh that you but but on a venture perspective with a longer time frame. Uh I've noticed that with altcoins, unlike Bitcoin, Bitcoin has had a higher high every single cycle. It's been very predictable. And I expect that that's going to happen despite diminishing returns for at least the next 20 years, because we only have 4% of the world that has exposure to Bitcoin. It's about 7% or 8% for crypto overall. And yet we're 96% out of Bitcoin in terms of the amount that's been mined. It'll take 115 years to go and get the rest of it. And so at some point you're gonna have a supply shock, and that typically happens in Bitcoin summer. And when you have supply shock, that's when all of a sudden people really foam away. We had a little bit of supply shock in October of 2013 when literally Coinbase just was shut down every day with you know strategic or sorry, with uh um, you know, with uh going offline, and the rumor was that they just ran out of coins to sell. And I believe that, you know, with a fixed supply of Bitcoin and an all-time low right now of the last five years or so, a big market, so this is in a bear market, that when you get to the next bull market, there's almost no new coins coming on board that's uh you know 450 a day now. Next halving it goes to 225 a day. Well, Michael Saylor will buy that and plenty more himself.

SPEAKER_01 12:41

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, that's a pretty interesting chart, too, right? I mean, it should take that price to new highs almost like a squeeze. Hey, uh, as you look for new venture opportunities, which parts of the technology stack are kind of getting your your attention most right now? You mentioned it, but is the opportunity more in new tokens or is it in that underlying infrastructure being built around you know payments, AI, digital assets, that kind of thing?

SPEAKER_02 13:05

So I consider it to be sort of like a I'm a barbell investor, so I've got uh Bitcoin is the solid sort of uh you know, reliable um you know investment that always goes up over time. And if you uh you know go and sell at the top and buy back at the bottom, you you compound that. Um, and whereas your venture investments are obviously um, you know, a riskier uh bet, but with higher returns if you uh have the right manager or you or you pick the right uh entities. Uh yes, I think that um for pure equity plays, there's a huge move right now in capitalizing on stable coins. Um it's gonna it's it was up, you know, 800% in growth the year before the Genius Act that's moving in similar numbers now. You've got giant payment companies like uh uh you know, like Strike and PayPal having their own uh stablecoin plays. There's gonna be a real um we are just at the tip of the iceberg being used for um just global payments, remittances, uh corporate payments. And then you add in AI. Um decentralized AI, AI involving crypto, that's the biggest opportunity of the next uh four years. Um there have already I have a few investments in that space, uh Morpheus, um, and there's a few other ones that are just brand new that they have not really um you know gone out as public coins or or as um sort of um uh equity that's sold to anybody, but there will be uh consolidation in that space. And you just figure that when there's uh Obanklaw was a huge um um, you know, we're going vertical right now in the AI space. And it just doesn't make sense to me if there's gonna be tens of thousands of agents per company running around doing everything from payroll to purchasing to negotiating, that they're gonna go in and do that with PayPal. Um they're gonna have their own currency, and that currency will be stable coins and there'll be governance tokens that control how that's spent.

SPEAKER_01 15:03

So, I mean, if we got saw that little bit of the top of the market and we saw that sell-off event, you know, you you mentioned you were buying some Bitcoin under 60,000. In this market, are you shifting that barbell more towards Bitcoin? Or uh or are these falling valuations actually making the venture side much more attractive?

SPEAKER_02 15:22

Well, they're both they're both in the same uh lockstep. So um Bitcoin is uh heading towards its lows, and so is the venture market. So it's uh time to buy from both of them. Uh the time to sell and wait was uh was last year in the bull market.

SPEAKER_01 15:38

When you look at the rising debt stress, and and and now we're seeing these reports of redemption pressure in parts of private credit. Do you see that is the kind of environment that ultimately pushes more capital towards Bitcoin?

SPEAKER_02 15:51

Well, um, you still have centralized entities. I mean, when you had the the crash of 2022, and again, your crashes are in the midterm year every time. Um it was in 2014, 2018, 2022, and here we are in 2026. And I believe that Satoshi programmed it that way. Um, you know, the halving is always in the presidential year so far. We we're not exactly a four-year cycle. We're more like 46 and a half month cycle so far. The last the most recent ones have been 47 months. Because if it was a pure four-year cycle, then the halving would always be on uh of the Genesis block, January 3rd. Instead, it's 210,000 blocks, and that has to do with the uh the speed of um mining. The I have a whole chapter in my book about how the whole mining algorithms work to make it roughly every four years that you then uh go and cut the amount of Bitcoin uh distributed during that four-year period in half.

SPEAKER_01 16:45

You know, you you said that these mid-year crashes keep repeating, you know, in in these in these uh midterm kind of years that Satoshi may have designed the system that way. Uh are you saying that this this cycle behavior is kind of embedded in in Bitcoin's design or that the market has have simply learned to trade around it?

SPEAKER_02 17:03

I would say that's that's uh so far been the data.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

Yeah. Yeah, that's fascinating.

SPEAKER_02 17:08

And I I also have a thesis that uh it's not the bankruptcy that caused the crash, it's the popping of the bubble and all the um over-leveraging that takes about a year to sort of uh work its way through the system. And you know, we've been we have not had a good old uh giant bankruptcy yet. I mean, the two crashes that have happened since the bubble pop, the 1010 and then um the uh uh the February crash, you know, were you know sort of guessworkers in terms of how that happened that brought us down to 80K was supposed to be a deleveraged market maker from Binance that collateral and had five days of straight selling uh nine to five um New York time. And um in February, it was rumored to be a Hong Kong hedge fund that was not fighting, that was over-leveraged in uh in iBit. And uh so we have not had anything close to an FTX. Doesn't mean we have to, but uh, if it happens, it's usually going to happen like right around that one-year mark after the bubble.

SPEAKER_01 18:05

Interesting. Uh, I don't know if you saw these reports this morning. Google's quantum AI team has raised fresh concerns about how quickly quantum computing could challenge current cryptography. Uh, our audience owns a lot of physical gold and silver, right? I mean, they will say bullion can't be hacked. What do you say when these types of reports come? Uh, is there any validity to it?

SPEAKER_02 18:28

Well, it's a long ways away. Um, and I believe that the uh for Bitcoin particular and for other protocols as well, uh, go and um have solutions either on the wallet level or on the uh protocol level. I mean, Bitcoin has already had several upgrades. When the fees got too high and people thought it was going to double Bitcoin back in 2017 when you had the famous Bitcoin fork, um, they eventually uh got to uh having the programmers and the miners agree, which you know, in the code, they have to have 95% agreement of the miners, and then the and then the developers have to build it. So it takes a while, which is a good thing not to have rapid consensus. But uh the same will happen with uh quantum when it gets to be a problem. The other thing is who's actually going to hack uh Bitcoin if it's mainly Google and uh IBM that have the technology. I mean, you just can't go and steal a giant data center with restricted chips and have North Koreans run it. And if in some in if some way they were able to sort of reverse engineer the chips and the hardware and the data centers and the software, you think they go after Bitcoin before they went after JP Morgan? Because SHA 256 runs the entire banking system too.

SPEAKER_01 19:34

Yeah, yeah. You know, we have many guests on, uh, we've had Leon on many times, and we we talk about that US debt burden and the pressure it puts on monetary policy. Um, how does that translate into the next kind of spring-summer phase of your framework?

SPEAKER_02 19:50

Sure. So um, you know, it's interesting that um a lot of the debt cycles have sort of coincided with these cycles, uh, probably because of the presidential promises and the realities. Um and uh so uh it's it's it's it's been historical that typically when there's a debasement trade that gold gets you know sort of the pump first, which they obviously did last year, um, and then Bitcoin follows later. And um, it's happened a couple of times, and I think it's gonna probably happen again. You know, I I I like to say about the monetary investment, it's like what Hemingway said about bankruptcy, it happened slowly, then suddenly.

SPEAKER_01 20:29

Yeah, it's wild. I mean, did it surprise you that that price action on the the gold prices last year with all of the the central banks kind of picking it up? Uh obviously they haven't really touched Bitcoin yet. There's some conversation, there's some rumor around some of these sovereigns having, you know, maybe not central bank touching it, but something else touching it. Uh anything surprise you there?

SPEAKER_02 20:50

Um, I expected gold to go up. I actually had it in my book uh talking about what a supercycle is. And um, you know, the C had said that there were two supercycles in the last hundred years in the commodities markets. One was, of course, the 70s, when uh, you know, you had the cause being a five-year or longer um, you know, um trend that uh that uh the impacts the the value uh thesis. And that was when uh you know gold became legal for Americans to own and we went off the uh the gold standard, and that ended up you know being a four X increase in gold in the 70s. Uh was a broader-based commodity super cycle in the 90s because of China buying. Um CME in I think 23, uh and I quoted to the book and said, Too early to tell, but we think there may be a new super supercycle building based on monetary debate.

SPEAKER_01 21:39

Yep. That debasement trade was there. Um and you know, if governments push they're they've been really pushing hard towards C B D C's and and tighter kind of digital asset oversight, does that end up helping Bitcoin by validating the need for decentralization, or does it threaten the whole premise?

SPEAKER_02 22:00

United States are pushing that. Um Europe has been, you know, there's a there's there's sort of a pushback about why do you need a central bank digital currency? The government has enough control and they should people are afraid of uh you know sort of the way social credit scores are used in China, that you know, you're gonna basically have just the government stopping you buying things because they're like, yeah, you know what, we don't want you to buy something that's you know uh you know, like uh fast food or or uh or this type of car. And uh I think that C V D Cs are unnecessary because you have you have stable coins, and the stable coins are now, you know, I I like to say that Satoshi failed in his original vision. I mean, the white paper's title is uh electronic peer-to-peer cap. Um, but he he's he succeeded wildly in having it be uh the digital area. But without Bitcoin having succeeded um as digital gold, you would not have had and uh tether, you know, the I actually worked with the original Tether team in Santa Monica in 2014. So it was just wild watching it grow from this experimental, you know, uh use case to now being, you know, a $300 billion industry and growing very fast. I mean, Scott Bessett said he thought it'd be $7.5 billion by the end of the decade.

SPEAKER_01 23:17

Yeah, and I mean, you know, they they also have that huge gold reserve too. I mean, how important are stable coins and tether to your kind of broader Bitcoin thesis now? Are they becoming a real bridge in into the system or are they still mostly kind of that liquidity tool for crypto traders?

SPEAKER_02 23:33

No, it's definitely moved from liquidity uh tool for crypto traders to savings account for the third world. Um, because you know, years ago, one of the big um expansions of uh Bitcoin was um, you know, people in Nigeria or in the Philippines or whatever, um, you know, where wherever there was a high um, you know, uh higher inflation than the dollar, people wanted dollars. And the way they could get it was uh uh the closest thing would be Bitcoin. The Bitcoin, even though it was volatile, did better over, you know, a multi-year period than uh the arts of peso and things like that. Now that you have basically uh a dollar redeemable um you know um uh you know product called the stable coin, that's what most people who are just using it for their daily purchases. Um I I've I've I've said that basically in the future, all the global stuff will have basically two, um, they'll have a savings count in Bitcoin and they'll have a checking account uh in uh in in Tether or other stable coins.

SPEAKER_01 24:37

Wild. Yeah, so it won't be it's not creating a parallel system that kind of grows without needing Bitcoin at the center of it, I take it.

SPEAKER_02 24:44

It it helps and it hurts, right? So in other words, it hurts that people are buying stable coins instead of Bitcoin in the third world for day-to-day usage. But if people have wallets, they eventually discover that um, you know, if they all of a sudden have more than just that week's grocery money, they should put it in something that doesn't uh, you know, sort of uh inflate three or four percent a year, uh, but something that grows over time at a much higher level.

SPEAKER_01 25:09

You know, that that kind of brings us to you know liquidity and the money printing scenario. I mean, you've said AI-driven disruption could eventually force the biggest money printing in history. What would have to happen economically and politically for that scenario to kind of play out here?

SPEAKER_02 25:24

Well, um I'm I'm a little bit more of a techno optimist. I think that uh as certain jobs go away, I'm massive that it'll happen in the next five years. The next book I'm working on is called uh Pandora's Blocks, and it's talking about uh how crypto plus AI plus robotics is gonna fundamentally change the economy in the next five years and change society in the next 15. And um, you're gonna have, you know, you are gonna have human creativity. Everybody doesn't want to just sit around and get UBI. They will find ways of working with the technology to go and improve and innovate even faster, not just say, well, I can't be a lawyer anymore because uh, you know, Gemini or uh Grok does it better than me, they'll say, Oh, now that I have these tools, I can create these new products that will make it uh, you know, we're gonna create uh uh AI-driven uh court systems, we're gonna create AI small claims court, but somebody's got to build that. And it's not the agents uh building it, although they're gonna do the uh final build out.

SPEAKER_01 26:20

Yeah. So if if if AI turns out to be kind of more disflationary than inflationary, does that delay the timetable for the next lag of the supercycle?

SPEAKER_02 26:29

No, I think it's well, the super cycle is what happens when you hit supply shock because so far there's been diminishing returns. Um, you had a hundred X growth in the price of Bitcoin having the high in 2012-13, and then an 85% crash. And then four years later, you had 30x, which is still phenomenal. And then you had and you know, life changed, and then you had an 83% crash. Um, if you again you sold at the top and bought back at the bottom, you did unbelievably well. Um, the third time I was projecting uh 10x, but it ended up being 8x because of uh bad macro, Biden's war on crypto, and if a rapid raise of interest rates, but if interest rates were more important than they having, we'd still be around $8,000 Bitcoin. And uh this last time I was projecting 3x, because again, 133, and we only got 2x. And uh, you know, uh that was probably the biggest macro effect. A lot of people expected positive macro and tailwinds instead of headwinds because Trump being uh pro-crypto. But you know, we didn't crash the Clarity Act, and we did have all problem tariffs, and uh that was really at least uh if not the cause, at least the excuse for uh for the 1010 uh crash, which happened exactly uh on the cycle where it should have. It's uh um it may have been something where people are ready to uh sell whales and the institutions that are following the way in terms of uh thesis. Um, you know, just said here, if there's an opportunity to sell and cash out.

SPEAKER_01 27:59

Yeah, and you know, to your point, I mean we're we're now seeing, I saw today just a report, we're now seeing major players like Coinbase, Stripe, Cloudflare. Um, they're pushing further into that X402, which is a protocol designed to let AI agents and software make payments directly over the interview over the internet without human intervention, uh, just for the viewers. Uh, does that kind of machine-to-machine payment infrastructure accelerate your super cycle timeline?

SPEAKER_02 28:26

I don't think that accelerates it. It simply provides um, you know, more um uh uh rationale for people who were previously afraid of uh of digital assets to say, oh, it's like a whatever if you have a wallet, then it's not foreign for you to understand Bitcoin.

SPEAKER_01 28:45

Listen, that was fascinating. I I really appreciate you joining us today, walking us through your thesis during such a high stakes week for the markets. Uh, been interesting watching. Um, you said that this is gonna still hurt a little bit for people, and we get written back at home, you know, people that don't have a ton of liquidity and maybe they're leveraged, maybe they've learnt about leverage. Uh, what do you say to people that are kind of fearful right now in this market?

SPEAKER_02 29:09

Well, I mean, if you bought at the top, then the good news about Bitcoin is just hold it on for four years and you're gonna find a time that you're uh you're you know above uh water again. Uh the best thesis is if you bought at 110 and you can afford to buy some at 65, 55, you know, dollar cost average. The only time that the dollar cost averaging doesn't work is during uh Bitcoin fall. You don't want to be dollar cost averaging into lower lows, but the rest of the time it's fine.

SPEAKER_01 29:37

Yeah, yeah. Feels like it's found a little bit of footing here. All right, Michael, appreciate your time today. Thanks so much.

SPEAKER_02 29:43

My pleasure.

SPEAKER_01 29:44

All right, and a big thank you to our sponsor, Swan Bitcoin, your partner for generational wealth. If you're looking to build a long-term position, you can learn more at Swan.com slash KitCo. Now, on a personal note, I'm heading out for a little family vacation after this show with my wife and our son. I'll be back on the air and behind the desk as soon as we can. But while I'm away, the channel is in good hands. We have several of our regular technical analyst experts, including our favorite Gary Wagner, scheduled to steer us through these volatile markets and to keep you updated on the latest price action. Now, to our viewers, we want to hear from you. Is the current market set up a structural fracture or just a temporary shakeout? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. Make sure to hit the button to subscribe to KitCone News and turn on notifications so you never miss an update. We're almost at a million subscribers, so you need to help us get there. Tell your friends, appreciate you watching. I'm Jerry Saper. We'll see you soon.

SPEAKER_00 30:37

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