"This Is the BRUTAL Truth About the Bitcoin Bull Cycle" - Arthur Hayes

I saw these people posting on TikTok that they've got all this nice money because they bought Bitcoin. But how did they feel in 2013 when Bitcoin went from 250 to 70? How do they feel in 2014 when Bitcoin went from 1300 to 135 by 2015? Right? So everyone looks at, oh, these guys and girls make all this money back in the day. And to realize Bitcoin was like three or four times more volatile in these other periods than it is today. And so for you to say, oh, if I had just put in $10,000 of Bitcoin at $100, I would have so much money. No, you wouldn't. You would have sold it when it went to 200 or you would have sold it when it went to 99 because it didn't achieve your short-term expectations for the price performance. And so again, Bitcoin is not going to save your financial house immediately. It might do something over time.

Folks in the industry have lost sight of like why we're here in terms of like we're not here to ask permission from large financial institutions to like exist. Bitcoin got from zero to whatever 66,000, whatever the price is today with no government support, unclear regulations, hostile banking infrastructure and regulators. So why are we bending over backwards to try to gain acceptance from these folks who don't have our best interest at heart? I think we should continue to nurture, you know, the talent that wants to develop a new financial system for a new era in human civilization, not just to shoe ourselves into, oh, how do we get into, you know, retirement flows or the next ETF or, you know, the next iteration of a digital asset treasury. I mean, I'm not saying they shouldn't exist as owners of crypto, but we shouldn't tailor the ecosystem and our desires to what helps them. We should tailor it to what makes this a transformational piece of technology because if we do the former, then we're just another financial instrument. And why should I own that? I can just go on my brokerage account and just buy another stock. It's way easier. In some respects, it's safer. Why would I deal with this crypto thing if all it is is just, you know, another fintech tradey thing? I mean, my theory is that Bitcoin is a liquidity alarm and there's a massive deflationary ticking bomb under at least the United States in particular, just because of how flexible the labor market is based on AI disruption and Bitcoin is along with some other technology related stocks giving a forecast of there is a massive amount of credit destruction that's going to happen in a highly leveraged thick fractional reserve banking system if the highest wage earners who now, you know, a small percentage of the highest wage earners don't have a job anymore because they got fired for, you know, cost cutting reasons because AI could do whatever they were doing better, faster, cheaper. So I think that's what Bitcoin is telling us. There has not been enough dollar liquidity created against all the other uses for liquidity, especially when you talk about capex for hyperscalers and that's why Bitcoin has underperformed over the last call it 6 to 9 months. Like if you look at, you know, NASDAQ's pretty flat, Bitcoin's obviously down 50%, gold continues to rise. I don't think gold is on a debasement trade, it's more because if you're a sovereign nation and you hold dollar assets you've been, you know, repeatedly reminded that those are not your assets. You exist at the behest of Scott Bessent or whoever as the US Treasury Secretary and they're number one going to inflate away your debt by issuing a lot of bonds or they're going to steal your money by basically sanctioning you. And so why would you want to own that asset with your country's savings? You should own gold and that's why central banks have been buying gold in an increasing amount since 2008 and a stellar rating in 2022 when US and the EU stole Russia's money.