Welcome to BitBoy Crypto!
My name is Ben.
Today, we're going to be talking about something unique,
something we haven't talked about maybe ever on the channel.
We're going to talk about Bitcoin.
You guys like my sexy wallpaper?
I knew you'd like that.
It's supposed to be up there too, but it's not there yet.
Guys, here are the facts. Okay?
The facts are I hear so much whining and complaining in this space about
it's--
"But you don't understand. It's different this time."
Guys, it's not different.
Let's--
I want to talk about this on two fronts.
I want to talk about, No. 1,
I want to talk about
when it comes to this bear market being different because of inflation,
because of FTX.
We're going to talk about this stuff. Okay?
Look.
Bitcoin 4-year cycle, it just keeps marching on.
It keeps marching on.
And there is some evidence potentially
that not only are we seeing diminishing returns,
but we're also seeing diminishing drawdowns. Okay?
What you do when you're looking at these Bitcoin 4-year cycles
is you're looking for patterns. Okay?
You're looking for patterns.
These patterns tend to repeat themselves quite frequently.
Now,
let's talk first about inflation, Ukraine-Russia war, Fed rate hikes.
Yay!
"It's going to destroy Bitcoin!"
Meh!
No. Listen, guys.
That's so not true. It's not even funny. Okay?
Guys, I'm going to say something that you are going to believe is absolutely insane.
These Fed rate hikes?
They've been good for Bitcoin.
They've been great for Bitcoin.
Actually, this bear market so far has been greater to Bitcoin
than any bear market in history.
You hear this narrative that the macro environment,
the inflation, the war, the Fed rate hikes,
well, we've never seen this before for Bitcoin.
Oh, you know, we've never seen this before.
2014, we saw markets still recovering from 2008 financial crisis.
2018 bear market,
we saw a pretty strong market.
I mean, with Trump's economy, things were going pretty well at that time.
This isn't political.
I mean, the economy is better now than it is--
it was better than it is now.
Nobody would disagree with that.
And, you know, as a pre-pandemic world back then,
you know, things were going to be like tech was going to go up forever.
And now we are looking at a different macro environment,
but I would tell you that actually where everybody says this is bad for Bitcoin,
it's turned out to be good. How do we know?
85% drawdown is the average.
I think we've seen as high as 89% I think on one--
maybe it was the 2012, something like that.
But getting--
first Bitcoin cycle is a lit-- it was a little off.
But the point is,
is that, you know,
when it comes to drawdowns,
we have been expecting 85% drawdown.
That will put Bitcoin down at, at where?
At $10,366.
Bitcoin's only dropped 75%, guys.
It has not dropped 85%.
I'm starting to believe there's a good chance that we've bottomed.
50-50 chance
I know that y'all don't want to hear that.
I know you want to hear me come out and say, "I guarantee you it's over."
I'm not going to do that.
I believe now more than ever during this cycle
that it's potential that we have bottomed.
Why?
We're in the timeframe.
Anytime during this timeframe between now and the middle of December
I believe is going to turn out to be where the bottom is.
I'm not guaranteeing it.
We can see it next year. We can see it two years from now.
There's a nightmare scenario.
I'm going to kind of debunk that a little bit today,
but, you know, I think there are some things to look at here.
Now, how in the world, with the worst macro economic environment in history,
for Bitcoin,
have we seen Bitcoin be more resilient than it's ever been before in a bear market?
Well, the answer is simple, guys.
I call it the, you know.
It's the snowball, right?
You start out at the top of the hill.
Snowball starts falling.
As it gets down the hill,
it acquires more snow.
I have to yawn in this video.
It's 10 o'clock.
I'm going to yawn on every one of these 9 o'clock videos, guys.
Just face facts.
Or you just have to face it.
I'm sorry. Okay?
Y'all know I was up tweeting from 2:30 on last night.
And I didn't even have a dentist appointment!
That's a good joke. Y'all will get that later on.
But the fact is, is that with as bad as things got,
we only got 75% drawdown.
And why? Because this is a snowball.
With every cycle that happens,
or you can call it the three steps forward, two steps back,
we're picking up more and more people that believe in crypto.
Karate chop!
We're getting more and more people that believe in crypto.
And because we're getting more and more people believe in crypto in every cycle,
there's less people that will be selling them no matter how overhyped things get.
So it won't surprise me if we do--
it won't surprise me if we go down to $12,000.
I think, at this point, I'm starting-- I don't think I would be surprised.
Unless Genesis Trading files for bankruptcy, and we see like a total Armageddon.
I don't think we're going to see Bitcoin probably below $12,000,
but we certainly could.
Look. $10,366, that's the number we've been talking about the entire time.
That's the 85% drawdown number.
But keep in mind,
Bitcoin held remarkably resilient through this year in a bear market
until the contagion began.
Of course, the first move was Terra LUNA.
Then things fell off like a cliff.
So I would tell you,
where most people will tell you the macro has been bad for Bitcoin,
it hasn't.
We're the same bear market cycle,
except it's been a lighter bear market than we've ever seen before.
Now, the dollars are bigger because the market cap's always going to get bigger.
With every cycle, the dollar is bigger.
Now, let's talk about this.
Let's talk about the bear market.
"This bear market is different."
"We didn't have FTX in 2018."
I hear you out there, you little shawty-shawty.
Let me tell you what.
Ain't as bad as you think that it is.
Okay?
Guys, go back to 2014.
2014, Bitcoin tops out around $800,
or maybe $1,000, whatever, $1,100, sometime I think in January,
in between November and January, 2013, 2014.
Something happened in February.
I wake up.
I go look at my computer.
Boom! Mt. Gox is gone.
I get an email saying it's been hacked.
Mt Gox, 90% of all Bitcoin transactions occurred on that website.
Pretty much about 85% of all crypto transactions,
because there weren't really-- Litecoin was around.
Feathercoin, Beercoin, MaidSafeCoin, Namecoin, they were there.
Not much else. Okay?
So the fact is, is that
Mt. Gox had 90% of Bitcoin transactions.
And not only that, but BitInstant quickly went up in flames as well,
which is the way we were all getting our money out.
We were all getting our money out of Mt. Gox through BitInstant with Charlie Shrem.
He got arrested.
I think-- did he do time in prison?
I can't even remember anymore. It's been so long.
It's been, like, 10 years now, you know?
Or, you know, whatever it is.
13 or 11, 10 years, 9 years, 8 years, whatever it is,
it's been a long time.
And the fact is, is that that was as big of a disaster as you could possibly get,
combined with the fact the belief in Bitcoin was not there yet. Okay?
Let's fast forward to 2018.
2018, everything's going fine.
We're waiting for this ConsenSys pump.
We're waiting for tax day, Chinese New Year.
We're waiting for $33,000 by July.
If you were here, you remember all that stuff.
The ConsenSys pump in May, that was the last big run up we had.
Then it just started falling. It went sideways.
And we're like, "There's no way it's going to go to $6,000."
(yawns)
Two yawns, one show.
This is a very interesting story.
I don't know. They told me it's because I don't have air going into my brain.
But the fact is, is that, in 2018, we had the hash wars.
Now, the hash wars were between Craig Wright and Roger Ver
as Bitcoin Cash split from Bitcoin SV, or Bitcoin SV split from Bitcoin Cash.
Bitcoin SV wanted even bigger blocks than Bitcoin Cash,
which wanted bigger blocks than Bitcoin to make the transactions faster.
It was all, I mean, it was good stuff, I thought,
good reasoning for it,
but your Bitcoin peers, they just like Bitcoin,
so yada, yada, yada.
So they start going at each other.
And they start trying to drive each other's price down.
And they start trying to compete over the hashrate for mining.
We call this time the hash wars.
Now, what a lot of people don't remember during this time,
you remember hash wars,
you remember Craig Wright,
you remember Roger Ver,
but what about Jihan Wu?
What about Bitmain?
The biggest producer of Bitcoin miners at that time.
I think they're still around.
I don't think Jihan Wu has anything to do with it anymore.
I could be wrong.
Maybe somebody, I'm not big in the mining community,
drop me that down below in the comments if you know different.
But the fact is
Bitmain was involved in this gigantic war between these projects,
and they were talking about pulling their miner and power.
They were talking about,
if you remember, there was actually talk of these miners trying to combine
and do like a double-spend attack on Bitcoin, or something like that,
a hack on rollbacks and transactions, whatever.
I think that actually did happen to Bitcoin SV the next year.
So, yeah, there were empty threats
in terms of, obviously, you're not going to roll back Bitcoin transactions.
But people were starting to wonder, like,
"Whoa! Bitmain's in China. How much hashrate is over there?"
And people were very concerned during this time.
To me, obviously, out of the three bear markets we've had,
that is the weakest--
the weakest news story.
The weakest black swan, but it was still a black swan.
Nobody saw that coming.
And that is what dumped the price 50%.
It went down from $6,000 down to $3,200.
Approximately 50%.
And then a couple of months later, it bounced all the way back up
and then it never went below $6,000 again, I don't think?
Or it didn't go below $5,000 again until the pandemic crash,
and it bounced right back up.
So the point is, here we are in 2022.
We got FTX.
We got all these companies that are insolvent.
We got all this Bitcoin sitting around nobody can trade.
All this crypto sitting around nobody can trade.
We got political, you know, scandals here.
We have some crazy donat-- you know, contribution stuff.
We got a lot, Ukrainian money laundering.
We got a lot going on.
Is it worse than the hash wars?
Probably a little worse than hash wars.
Is it a black swan just like hash wars?
Well, it's--
yeah.
Is it a black swan just like Mt. Gox was?
Yeah.
Is this worse than Mt. Gox if any of this isn't going away?
No, not even close.
And we also have way more people believing in Bitcoin
than believed in it back then. Okay?
You have 2014, there was still a huge amount of people in crypto
that were strictly for the libertarian purposes.
They were there strictly because they wanted to buy stuff on Silk Road, dark web.
There was a lot more that crime was much higher in the crypto world back then.
And even that was not enough to send Bitcoin down to zero.
Nothing is.
And, guys, this market is not as bad as it looks right now.
And here's why.
We're cleaning up the space.
We're kicking out the bad actors.
This is all good stuff.
So, ultimately, once we catch the bottom,
which will be soon, if it hasn't already happened,
we're going to move up together, and things are going to be fine.
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving.
Be thankful.
Be thankful that you're in this space.
Some of you may be regretting it right now,
but if you stick around long enough,
I'm very confident that you'll get--
I want to make a turkey joke, but I just can't come up with one.
Y'all just watched me grasp for air on a dad joke.
That was the only time that's ever happened in the history of the channel.
That's all I got.
Be blessed.
BitBoy out.