Michael Terpin - Bitcoin Supercycle: How the Crypto Calendar Can Make You Rich

Full transcript: Michael Terpin on London Real

3:30 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Michael Terpin, the crypto pioneer, investor, author, and founder of Transform Group and BitAngels. You are called the godfather of crypto and you have advised and invested in hundreds of early stage blockchain projects including Ethereum, Tether, Augur, and Sheba Enu, and helped launch some of the industry’s most influential ventures. You founded the world’s first angel network for digital currency startups, built a multi-ity crypto investment ecosystem, and helped kickstart Puerto Rico’s blockchain movement.

4:02 Your new book, Bitcoin Super Cycle: How the Crypto Calendar Can Make You Rich, outlines a powerful four-season framework for understanding Bitcoin’s long-term price cycles and why you believe this bull run could take Bitcoin beyond $200,000. You’ve said this is not about hype, it’s about the timing, the waves of innovation. Michael, welcome to London Real.

4:24 Michael Terpin: Very happy to be here, Brian.

4:25 Brian Rose: Amazing to have you here.

4:27 I can’t wait to dive into this. In the past year alone, we’ve seen so many new Bitcoin investors. We’ve seen corporations, institutions, governments, but I believe that most of them are unaware of the concept of the Bitcoin cycle, let alone the super cycle that you describe. How do you start to explain this to kind of the newcomer to this space?

4:49 Michael Terpin: Well, in my book, I spend the first five chapters just saying why Bitcoin has been the best investment in history, which is, you know, unquestionable.

4:58 I mean, you went from a tenth of a penny to over $100,000. And you know why that was really built into the white paper. I have an entire chapter where I reprint the white paper and then annotate it and I explain it. Many people who sort of looked at the white paper, if they even did, a lot of people just simply discounted Bitcoin out of hand. Oh, it’s a Ponzi schemes.

5:19 And they never read the white paper. It’s hard to discount something you’ve never actually experienced or even read or even investigated at all. But in the white paper, you know, the beginning of it and the end of it are the most important parts. In the middle you have some formulas that are there to impress other cryptographers about why this is going to work. And some people look at and say, oh man, this is like I can’t understand this.

5:41 But really you can ignore the middle part. I mean, it basically is just proof that what he’s saying about, you know, how the one block is going to then get sealed and the other one you have to go and undo all the proof of work beforehand. It’s just like, you know, about a third of the paper is just sort of, you know, putting mathematical formulas to prove it to other cryptographers. But really the first couple paragraphs that talk about how to create a peer-to-peer form of money, really of value overall, and then summarizing at the end why this is going to work.

6:12 I mean, that was revolutionary. Satoshi didn’t vet all of the parts. He stood on the shoulders of giants and he credited a number of them in the white paper. You know, the people who invented public key and private key cryptography pairs and hashing, etc., etc., and you, my friend David Chaum, who invented the word cryptocurrency in the early 80s after getting his PhD in Berkeley. Basically he had come up with something called ecash that had about 90% of what Bitcoin had, but it did not have the decentralization.

6:45 He built it with IBM and when IBM decided it wasn’t for them anymore, it collapsed. And so really the decentralization part that came from the mining algorithms and the way that it basically cannot be stopped by anybody at a certain point as long as you have internet in the world. You know, was the point that if you understood this and you read the white paper and you bought in the early days, you know, you’re now one of the richest people in the world.

7:14 Brian Rose: Are you surprised when you look at the news in 2025 that you’ve got the BlackRock and the JP Morgans talking about it? You got the US with potentially a strategic reserve. You got other countries now confirming they’re amassing it. Does sometimes you have to pinch yourself, or did you really think this would happen by now?

7:32 Michael Terpin: I wasn’t sure which way it was going to go, but this is logical because, you know, a lot of times you’ll have the incumbents, you know, they have the innovator’s dilemma.

7:41 I’m sure and from what I’ve heard, I’ve been told that, you know, JP Morgan knew what was going on from early on. They’re like, “Oh, this is a threat to our credit card business, but it is something that could save us money in terms of getting away from the SWIFT system. What do we do? Why don’t we go and say it’s a scam and then backpedal and say, “Hey, why don’t you just only approve banks to do this?” Right?

8:03 And that’s kind of where it was for a while. I mean, you had the first ETF proposal in 2013 by the Winklevoss brothers. Had that been allowed, you would have had the average American who’s now allowed to go and buy in with their Charles Schwab account at $110,000. They could have bought it at $110. Yeah.

8:22 Brian Rose: Wow. And so we lost that opportunity to create great wealth for the middle class, which is quite frankly never where the interests of the most governments have been. It’s been where the interests of the wealthy, the powerful, the entrenched. And this is typically what happens when you’re trying to unseat someone who dominates that market. They’ll use all sorts of tactics.

8:41 So they’ll try to defame it, then they’ll try to overregulate it. We see this in AI a little bit too, with some regulatory capture. Right? And then at some point I guess they’re capitulating at this point.

8:51 Michael Terpin: Yes.

8:51 I mean, the old saying that was, you know, attributed although I’ve never seen anybody actually show the day that it was said to Gandhi, which is, you know, first they ignore you then they laugh at you. Well, I’m missing one of them. First they ignore you, then they laugh at you. Oh, yeah. Then they fight you, and then you win.

9:09 Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, we’re not quite at the fighting stage yet. I think that we’re… Well, we’re kind of moving from the, no, actually, I suppose you could argue that we’re sort of moving between the fighting and you win, or you could say laugh at you and you fight, and we haven’t had the final battle yet.

9:27 You know, there’s little things that people ignore. For example, everybody’s celebrating the stable coin act, right? And they’re celebrating the ETF. Well, the ETF had one little provision before they would pass it, which was it has to be settled in dollars, not in Bitcoin. Right?

9:41 And so that means first of all that you can’t sort of move Bitcoin and out of it. You have to go and cash settle it and then pay taxes on it. And the other thing is that in the GENIUS Act, you know, Libra, under, you know, the Democrats got laughed out of Congress, and they were like, “No, we’re not going to let someone bad, Facebook, go and control a currency and do payments, you know, bad, bad, bad.” Now all of a sudden they’re talking about doing a new version of it, right?

10:08 But they have to partner with the bank because that’s what the the new stable coin acts say that you, you know, you cannot go and issue a stable coin if you’re a tech company. If you’re a big tech company, you have to partner with a bank. And so that means at the end of the day it’s, you know, back to the incumbents. They will have control, or at least they will have a certain portion of control, but I think they’ll still, you know, go in and they’ll be an app.

10:32 I mean, look, Apple certainly partnered with banks already, and Apple Pay. So this way though that I see in the future that you’re going to have, you know, the mass adoption is going to come with stable coins. We’re already up 800%. Once you have a wallet for stable coin sitting in your iPhone, you know, it’s not that hard then to say, “Oh, do you want some Bitcoin as well?” Yeah.

10:53 Do you want some Dogecoin? Right. So, but it’s going to start with right now I can go anywhere in the world and be in a restaurant and they bring me the bill on an iPad. I double click on my iPhone, and it’s linked to my, you know, JP Morgan Chase credit card and it pays. All they have to do is once show grandma how to go and upload, you know, a few thousand in stable coins or perhaps have their bank go, do you want to transfer this into stable coins?

11:25 Arthur Hayes actually did a very insightful blog post this week where he effectively said that he’s long on Bitcoin and long on the big banks, and the reason why he’s long on the big banks is he said that by them adopting stable coins, they will issue their own stable coins, and you know JPMD is already a thing in the planning, and so once you have JP Morgan issue their own stable coins and compete against Tether. A, they’ll be regulated out in certain places. Tether is no longer legal, I guess, in the EU.

12:01 Whereas JP Morgan’s going to have no problem. J and Deutsche Bank will do theirs, etc., etc. A, they’re able to go and mint their own dollars, right? So they can go and create a big treasury, you know, 20 to 1. And B, the easiest onboarding is to say, oh, you know, this money you have sitting there in, you know, 0.03% interest.

12:22 Move it over to stable coins and we will give you a bonus, and when it’s allowed by law, we’ll give you interest. They’ll go in DeFi, stake it, get 10%, and give you three, and you’ll be happy for it. Yeah. And I see that as the future. And Arthur had pointed out something that I hadn’t thought about, which is once you encourage everybody to move their cash deposits that they just see as like something on their on their computer screen, into stable coins, which they also see as something on their computer screen.

12:51 All of a sudden, all you have to do is KYC that account once, and if it’s being kept by the bank, they already know what it is. And now, all of a sudden, you’re sending to other addresses that are also KYC automatically. Your compliance costs go from $20 billion a year, as Arthur pointed out, to near zero. And that savings alone can double the price of the big banks.

13:11 Brian Rose: Wow.

13:11 And that dumps massive liquidity into the crypto ecosystem. And we’ve been waiting, correct, for that instrument that would onboard the non-crypto liquidity.

13:20 Michael Terpin: People always joke that, you know, crypto is just a small group of players moving their money between each other. But this will take grandma’s amount in the savings account and all this money that really sits there fairly idle and all of a sudden pump it into liquidity. I sort of see this moment as similar to 1995 with the internet.

13:39 I remember there was an article in 1995, maybe was a little bit later even, but it was laughing at Amazon. It basically said this whole concept of e-commerce is a joke and the internet is a joke. Amazon.combomb. Well, they basically this before it went up and collapsed. It was basically saying that you know the entire sales of Amazon are less than an average shopping mall in Pittsburgh, right?

14:03 And so how are they going to become a dominant player? Well, add internet adoption. Back in 95 there’s only two million people on the internet. Now there’s like five billion or something. And, you know, add a little bit of, you know, time and brilliant execution and market dominance and now they’re bigger than anybody.

14:21 And so I think that the same thing happens with, you know, I haven’t heard people use the honey badger meme in a while, but, you know, Bitcoin is the honey badger of money. It just keeps on eating up everything in front of it. And, you know, I mean, if you, I mean, Michael Saylor, of course, who didn’t even get into Bitcoin until the end of 2020 you know has now become its biggest public advocate, and he’s sort of shown with the performance of Micro Strategy that going long and somewhat leveraged on Bitcoin has outperformed Nvidia which is phenomenal, and I think it’s a good example of the power of getting into Bitcoin even when it was too late by many people in 2020.

15:02 And you know, I’m here to say it’s not too late and that’s a big part of what the book is about.

15:07 Brian Rose: Yeah. Well, let’s hit that point right away and then I’d love to get into the seasons and talk about the cycle, but you tell people it’s not too late now, but a lot of people look at it 100,000 and they feel like it’s too late. So how do you explain to people?

15:20 Michael Terpin: I thought it was too late when I got it at 100, because I had been offered it initially at $4 a year ago and I didn’t do enough research.

15:27 Say a year ago, meaning not last year, but 2012 versus 2013. But I finally got it and you know did my deep dive in early 2013. That’s when I went all in. And my first friends in the industry are people who got in, like, 2011, 2012. And I was like, “Oh man, most of my friends got in like under a dollar.

15:47 I mean, I’m way too late at $100 and now it’s $100,000.” Right? And so it depends on your time perspective and what you’re comparing it to. If it’s only going from a 100,000 to a million in the next 8 to 12 years, how does that compare? It doesn’t compare well between what you could have done in the last 10 years, but that’s time gone.

16:07 That’s past, right? You have to look at what’s going forward. I don’t think that during the time that it’s going to take for Bitcoin to go from 100,000 to a million, 10x, that gold is more likely to go to 35,000 an ounce, or that, you know, NASDAQ is more likely to 10x. Right. Right.

16:24 So, it’s still an incredible investment. And if you talk to Michael Saylor, he’s calling for $13 million Bitcoin. I think it’s by maybe same time frame, 10. Well, no, it’s 21 years. He, 21 years.

16:35 He basically has a very cute narrative which is a little too cute for my taking. It’s 21% over the the next 21 years. Okay. And, you know, it’s a little bit in this 21 million bitcoin. And there’s no rationale for it being 21% other than, hey, it’s been 60% over the last, you know, 10 years or whatever.

16:52 And it was even bigger than that. If you looked, you know, back to when it was a penny or whatever, it was ridiculous multiple. And even the last few years, it’s been like 30 to 40%. So, you know, it’s not impossible to be 20%, but I think that’s high. I think that it’ll certainly be that for the next, well, let’s see how many 20% years do you need to get to a million to 10x?

17:14 So, I think it could be 20% for like the next 8 to 12 years. Yeah. To get to a million. But then after that, I don’t see it. I mean, you do have this fact of diminishing returns as the market gets larger.

17:25 The Bitcoin super cycle is based on the fact that there will be a period of time which I think will be about two to three cycles where you temporarily reverse the diminishing returns because of the S-curve of adoption. Okay, every technology has had an S-curve of adoption. And when the internet took, like, you know, from 1969 until, let’s see, when did it start going parabolic? You know, maybe in the late 90s. It took almost 30 years to be able to get from like 0% user base to like 78%.

17:56 And then all of a sudden now you’ve got, you know, 70% of the world has got some form of internet. Mobile phones, it’s technically over 100%, because number of people have multiple phones, right, but there’s very few people in the world without a phone, and the majority, the vast majority, have the internet, and, you know, 25 to 30 years ago they did not. And so what happened during that time? What happened during that time was a lot of companies who were providing infrastructure got rich?

18:22 Microsoft, Cisco, etc. Who’s going to get rich when the price of Bitcoin goes up 10x and there’s no more Bitcoin left practically? The statistic that people need to understand is we are 95% out of Bitcoin. Now there’s 95% has been mined out of the whole 140ome year period because it started with 10 million in the first four years and then 5 million in the next four years. So literally by the first 12 years we were 17 and a half million mined.

18:51 Now we’re at almost 20 million minded and yet we’re only at 5% of the world that has any Bitcoin and only 1 million people have a whole Bitcoin. Okay. Right. Yet, if you figure that we’re ultimately going to go to, let’s be conservative and say 50% adoption in the next 20 years, that’s a 10x increase in the amount of Bitcoin needed. Where’s it coming from?

19:12 Has to come from price appreciation. Right? And that S-curve, you just see almost little adoption for a while, and then it just starts going up and there’s massive amounts, and then it tapers off. My favorite picture to identify this was about cars, right? Automobiles between 1903 and 1913 went through that kind of adoption curve.

19:28 And there’s a picture 10 years apart of New York City, Times Square in, I think it was 1903, with all horses and one experimental car. And then 10 years later, in 1913, it was all cars and maybe one horse, or maybe not. Maybe one horse. Yeah. Yeah.

19:42 Brian Rose: I think London went through that training transformation. This city used to have 15 to 1 horses to people, and you still see a lot of traces of it if you open your eyes. It was like a major catastrophe, having all that horses and all that waste and all of that stuff.

19:55 Michael Terpin: People forget how quickly. So same S-curve applies here and we’re just at the very beginning.

20:00 We’re down here at this 5%. Yep. Right. Okay.

20:19 Brian Rose: Michael, I remember in 2021, we had just gone kind of full-time into this space and we were watching Bitcoin go up and up and up.

21:12 It hit 69,000, I think, at our 10-year anniversary in October 21, and everyone thought it was going to 100K by the end of the year. And we saw it top out there and then obviously go down to 16 the following year. Correct. And I guess I’ve been through like one full cycle. We’re here almost four years later.

21:30 Not completely. Tell me about this four-year cycle. Tell me about the four seasons of Bitcoin.

21:36 Michael Terpin: So I, you know, started investigating Bitcoin during the pre-halving cycle 2012 and then I started buying in, you know, the very start of the first halving after the first halving in early 2013 and so you really couldn’t tell there were cycles until probably after the second halving, things started to repeat because the pre-halving cycle even though it did have, well, the first year there were no Bitcoin sold, right?

22:04 2009 there were just people mining and not knowing what to do with it. And then the very first sale of Bitcoin was by Satoshi’s intern, Martti Malmi. He was a Finnish college student who basically read the white paper. Anybody with internet and nowhere to look could have found the white paper. He said, “Hey, I like what you’re doing.

22:20 I’m a college kid. I’m 19 years old. Can I help you build a website?” And he’s like, “Yes, you can. And I also have a chat thing called Bitcoin Talk you can help me with, but more than anything, can you go and start mining because I want to make sure there’s at least two of us mining at all times.”

22:34 Mhm. And so that’s how early it was, right? And so he accumulated 55,000 Bitcoin. Okay. And he sold 5,000 of them for $5 on PayPal.

22:44 Brian Rose: Wow. That was the very first sale of Bitcoin. That’s that tenth of a penny you refer to.

22:49 Michael Terpin: Tenth of a penny. Yes.

22:50 Wow. And it was a single sale and somebody else tried to sell for a little bit more later and they didn’t get any bids. So I mean it was still very early. And then of course, the famed pizza, that was Laszlo Hanyecz who was the first person I mentioned all these things in the book in the under the historical aspects before I get into these things with the seasons and he had over 100,000 Bitcoin, and the reason he did was because he was the first person to figure out how to go and get more Bitcoin or get it faster and more assuredly by using GPUs instead of CPUs.

23:26 Okay. And he was a gamer. He’s a 19-year-old gamer. And so when he had, you know, when he spent the 10,000 on pizza, he had like 100,000. Okay.

23:36 And allegedly now he has zero. Okay. Cuz he ended up buying a few more pizzas and then he ended up buying a computer with his remaining Bitcoin when it hit the crazy price of a dollar.

23:47 Brian Rose: Pizza days, 2011. Is that when he, 2010?

23:49 Michael Terpin: 10 when he did that. And the one before the five bucks on PayPal was 2009. It was also, that was also 2019. Also 10 as well. Yeah.

23:55 29 nothing happened other than about 2 million Bitcoin being mined. Okay. Wow. By less than 100 people. Okay.

24:01 Brian Rose: And the pizza price was what per Bitcoin?

24:03 Michael Terpin: About 2 and a half cents. Okay. All right. Interesting.

24:06 Brian Rose: All right. So, those were two pretty notable.

24:08 Michael Terpin: Well, there are three holidays I like to say in Bitcoin. There’s October 31st, which is the day the white paper was written in 2008. There’s January 3rd, arguably the most important date because that’s when he actually built something because there’s a lot of papers out there that never got built.

24:24 And he did build it because he was encouraged to build it, and Genesis block, you know, January 3rd of 2009, and then Bitcoin pizza day, which is March 22nd I think it is. Okay. 2010, right? 2010. Yes.

24:37 Brian Rose: Okay. So those were the early days. Then we start seeing something that you might call a season start to come.

24:44 Michael Terpin: Yes. So basically Satoshi in the white paper said that you know, his whole halving structure was to distribute Bitcoin fairly and it’s the earliest people who got the best rewards because they took the most chance, right, because they had to turn on a computer and spend electricity, even though it was very minimal amounts, with the belief that someday this would be worth something.

25:08 And so they had, I can compare it to, like, you know, being early at like, you know, Mary Kay or Amway’s, you know, the top of the pyramid. Naval Ravikant actually here in London at a conference I spoke at in 2015 said that Bitcoin was the most brilliant pyramid scheme. He got booed. He said no, no, not Ponzi pyramid. The people who go get in early do the best.

25:29 And that’s absolutely true. And without that you might not have had adoption. If you had nobody mining then the project dies. Right? And so you got people to read the white paper, believe what he said.

25:39 And what he said in there turned out to be true. And he was like, as long as more people, are buying Bitcoin every four-year cycle than the cycle before, and that exceeds the amount of new Bitcoin that’s issued, the price has to go up. And my corollary on that is yes, but not in a straight line. So if you look at the halving price, which so far has been the closest to fair market price every cycle. If you look in the rear view mirror and you look and you see when are things clearly overvalued, because it then crashes afterwards, and when are things clearly undervalued.

26:12 This is what forms the seasons within each cycle. So every four-year cycle, which to date has actually been closer to 46 months. It’s actually based on 210,000 blocks. Okay. And with perfect timing of about 10 minutes per block, it should be 48 months, but we’ve had slightly quicker blocks.

26:31 And so that’s meant that it’s 46. The main reason why it was 46 was because, for the 2016 halving it got sped up quite a bit because of the Chinese mining ban and you had a lot of disruption in the mining space and so you had to kind of speed it up to make up for not as many people mining and the hash rate, and just some technical things, but for the most part the algorithm is built in forever to keep through, you know, roughly 2140 to basically equalize that. If there’s more people mining, the difficulty goes up higher, and if there’s fewer people, it goes lower, and they readjust the difficulty every two weeks.

27:10 Two weeks used to be a long time because I remember when, like, after a halving it might have gone down 20% in just one halving, and if you had a machine that was like, you were killing it. You were getting a lot of the blocks. Now this time because the difficulty took a year and a half to go from level one to level two, and that happened roughly around the same time as Laszlo started GPU mining, and that was around summer of 2010. So it went, I think it was August or something.

27:36 It went from like level one difficulty to double to level two, and then a month later it was three times as hard, and then a month after that it was five times as hard, and a month after that it was eight times as hard. Any guess to what how much harder it is today?

27:50 Brian Rose: I can’t guess. A lot.

27:52 Michael Terpin: 100 trillion times harder.

27:53 Times harder. The difficulty level, which is how much harder is it to get one Bitcoin than it was in, you know, most of 2009 and the first half of 2010. 100 trillion times harder.

28:05 Brian Rose: Wow. And they do this algorithmically.

28:07 Michael Terpin: So in other words, they will set up a math problem that your processor has to answer. In the beginning of time, it was something along the lines of like what’s the square root of nine? Now it’s like what’s the square root of 9,417,742, right? So you need a much, and the genius of that was it basically protected the network because you wanted to always make sure that the hash power protecting the network is bigger than the ability of somebody to go in and brute force it.

28:33 Okay. And is there more money in the network? There’s more incentive to brute force, right? And this is the beauty of that. This is the beauty of the math behind it.

28:40 Yes. Math behind it. Okay. And so, yeah, I mean, now the other thing is you now only get 1/16th of the reward because you used to, for difficulty level one, you would get 50 bitcoins distributed to somebody every 10 minutes. Mark Karpelès, who I got a chance to interview, the founder of Mt. Gox, he’s mentioned a few times in the book book, had gotten into Bitcoin mining before he bought the exchange, and he got in there randomly because he was a French gentleman living in Japan.

29:10 And he was working with a payment processing company, and he got a call from another French person living in South America who wanted to know, can you convert a bitcoin into euros? And he’s like, what’s a bitcoin? Found out what it was, found out where he was able to go and, you know, find somebody to buy Bitcoin for euros and he did it and said, “Oh, I’m technical. Why don’t know why do I not know about this Bitcoin stuff?” Read the white paper, set up a computer to mine, and within minutes got 50 bitcoins.

29:38 He said, “Well, I guess it can’t be worth very much if it’s this easy.” But then he said, “But somebody’s willing to pay for it, so I guess I should set up more computers.” He had a hosting company on the side, and he basically did the mining software on about 30 to 40 machines, and within two months he had 200,000 Bitcoin. Wow. And then the difficulty went up and he said that’s enough.

29:58 And allegedly, according to him, I interviewed him last year at Korea Blockchain Week, he now has zero because he put them all into Mt. Gox, because he thought it was a safer place to store them and obviously it wasn’t. Wow.

30:10 Brian Rose: And that’s again, maybe we talk about that at some point. A great case study in self-custody. Not your keys, not your coins.

30:16 Michael Terpin: Right. Yes. So, if we quickly go to that, people were holding their Bitcoin on this exchange that was the place of choice and the probably the only way to transact or one of the many liquid places. It was one of the earliest places. It had about 90% for quite a while.

30:30 And then, you know, Coinbase came out in 2012. Bitstamp actually I think was 2011. Okay. And so there’s other early stage and again, obviously issues with some of them because they could get hacked. Obviously you can get hacked if you’re not careful with, you know, there’s so many, you know, I mean, even the wallets behind the treasury movement at a giant exchange like Bybit recently got hacked for a billion and a half dollars.

30:56 Now, of course, they shouldn’t have had a billion and a half in one wallet, but they had like, you know, six different officers, five or six different officers had to sign off on it, but a North Korean gang was able to go and infiltrate it with something that spoofed and it looked like the other people were sending them the right code and ended up being, you know, the one that went to the hacker.

31:15 Brian Rose: Right. That old human, human way of getting through hacking.

31:18 Michael Terpin: Social engineering. Yeah. And look, I have a crypto and DeFi academy. I’ve taught a couple thousand students and I always warn them that, you know, you can hide your crypto from yourself, you know, where you can’t find your keys, or you can try to put it somewhere, and then, you know, your cleaner will find the keys, and you know, it’s there’s. Well, there are, you know, sort of intermediary solutions that are coming up and I think that have been around for a while.

31:42 Someone like Casa, you know, who will basically be like, you hold the custody, but, you know, we’ll have like, you know, an extra key in case, you know, your instructions, that your lawyer is going to hold one of the keys upon your death, blah blah, blah. But we can’t go rogue because, you know, I mean, those are always the, you know, interesting areas, is how do you go and, you know, protect yourself against theft, against the loss, against, as they call it, the $5 wrench attack. You know, beating you over the head with a wrench.

32:10 As opposed to saying, “Hey, it’s all stored like, you know, underneath a mountain in Switzerland.”

32:15 Brian Rose: Yeah, I want to get to that at the end because these things are happening all the time. Back to the four seasons. Yes. Tell me more about this kind of cycle.

32:24 And again, the halving you continue to refer to refers to the fact that the block rewards go in half every four years or every 46 months. And so you just get less Bitcoin every 210,000 blocks, which is supposed to be roughly four years, has been a little bit less.

32:38 Michael Terpin: Yeah. So what happens is Satoshi had said that the price has to go up as long as the amount of nude bitcoin that is being you know used or sold or bought is higher than the amount of new bitcoin distributed.

32:49 So in the first, you know, in the first four years it was, you know, 10 million were mined and then it was 7,200 bitcoin a day. We’re now down to 450 a day. Now at 450 a day during this fifth cycle after the fourth halving, for the first time we’ve now become scarcer than gold. So gold has historically been about one and a half to 2% new supply coming on the market. And if the price goes up, then the amount of new gold can go up because you now have more incentive to go after a gold mining operation that was not profitable at, say, $1,000 gold, and will be profitable say $4,000 gold.

33:28 Brian Rose: Yeah. And so, but that’s not the case with Bitcoin. Bitcoin could go to a million dollars, you’re still only going to get 450 Bitcoin per day. And Michael Saylor right now is buying more than that. Right?

33:38 Just him alone. Him alone. 5,000 last week. Right? And there’s another 120 or 130 Bitcoin treasury companies, not to mention the governments, not to mention the retail.

33:47 Michael Terpin: That’s correct. And so that is the new beginning of what could be a supply shock. Okay. And so yes, so basically, if you take the fair market price of Bitcoin that has been, at the halving, roughly and you look at his thesis that Bitcoin has to go up every time that there’s more demand than new Bitcoin, it’s been true. First halving was $12, second halving was $670.

34:12 Third halving was $8,700. And this most recent halving was 64,000. That’s a pretty good investment if you just figure that at any two arcs in time with a 4-year period. I can’t think of anything that’s done better. And that’s even getting a 12, not getting it a penny or anything.

34:26 And so, but my corollary to that is it doesn’t go up in a straight line. Every cycle has had fear and greed intra inter in intracycles that basically have been very consistent. So I name after the four seasons. So Bitcoin spring is the day of the halving, that is when the seed of the new cycle is planted. New rules.

34:48 And so those new rules are, hey, miners, you were making 20% profit. Now you’re 30% loss. What are you going to do? Many of them turn it off and go and use that as an opportunity to go and buy new machines, install them without having to worry about the Bitcoin they’re losing out on because they aren’t. And then they perhaps relocate to a place with, you know, better tax incentives.

35:11 You know, they go to renewables that will be lower cost. If they have free electricity, like they’re stealing it, they don’t turn it off. So there’s always somebody mining during this period, but as the amount of miners drops, that also lowers the difficulty. But it only lowered about 10% this time, which is I think the lowest ever. And before it started going back up, and now it’s all-time highs again.

35:31 And so the counterbalancing effect, so that Bitcoin spring is not a period that goes down. It’s flat. And the reason it’s flat is as the price dips from selling of miners, there’s somebody to scoop it up because they see the history and they say, “Oh, if it was 60,000, you know, on the day of the halving, 64,000 and it drops down into the 50s, I’m going to buy.” And it goes right up. But then if it goes up higher, you then have the miners selling, and it’s literally 6 months after the halving, which was a rough, 63,900.

36:02 6 months after the price was still 64,000. It had not gone up much higher than 70, and it had not gone lower than a little blip. It had actually dropped down to 49 during the yen carry crisis that they had when people were just selling everything and Germany also was selling a lot of their Bitcoin at like ridiculously low prices that if they just waited 6 months they would have been double. And what’s crazy is they’re selling it for fiat currency. I mean, I think it was Michael Saylor that said the first government that prints fiat to buy Bitcoin wins.

36:32 And so far nobody’s really done that. Germany did the opposite. They did the opposite, and they just did stuff that they could print anyway and got for their 50,000, you know, Bitcoin that they had seized. The US government has about 200,000, I believe, and they said they’re never going to sell them. Or at least not until it’s sufficient enough to pay off the debt.

36:50 Right? And of course, who knows, the next administration could do something else. Okay. So, we’ve got this, 6 months afterwards. We spring is when you plant the seeds, when the halving starts.

36:59 So, what happens is it eventually breaks into Bitcoin summer. The day that you pass the prior cycle’s high. And again, the scarcity eventually, you know, gets to the point that it does that. It usually does that earlier than people think. It’s the shortest season so far.

37:15 Okay. The first Bitcoin spring only took four months to get to summer, to pass the prior high from the pre-halving cycle, which was $30. Went from tenth of a penny all the way up to $30 and then down to a buck, and then crept up to $12 at the halving. So, you’d think it would take a lot longer to triple in price, almost, but it didn’t. And it was only four months.

37:31 They hit $30. Soon as they hit $30, there’s FOMO and all of a sudden it’s like, oh, all the headlines, Bitcoin all-time high. How could this have happened again? And, what happens is that’s when you go off like a rocket ship. Every single time that you hit the prior cycle’s all-time high, it keeps going up.

37:48 So when it hit $30, it was $250 within a few weeks. And then it had a, it was a double bubble year. It ended up going soft in the summer and then ended up over $1,200, 100x from the halving. And so that cycle, or that part of the cycle, Bitcoin summer has been nine to 11 months. No shorter than nine, no more than 11.

38:09 And, like, spring, it’s been creeping up a little bit. The only one that’s been sort of, you know, kind of falling back a little bit is the longest season, which is winter. Winter’s from capitulation to the next halving, and that’s been around 18 months. So you’ve got about, you know, six months on average. This time it was seven for spring.

38:29 And then summer has been 9 to 11 months. I could see it being up to 12 months this time. So in other words, from the day of the price beating the prior all-time high, which is 73,850, which was not the bubble high of 21. It was the blip that you had a month before the halving that was 73,850 because of the ETFs and it came down afterwards. So you can see that that was not the beginning of summer.

38:56 It came down to the mean. That was just a blip. And that was people got confused by, they said, “Oh, the cycles are broken. We had an all-time high before the halving.” No, you can’t have an all-time high of this cycle before the halving.

39:07 That’s last cycle. That became the new standard for what the high was last cycle. And sure enough, it didn’t go parabolic when you beat 68,000. It went parabolic when you beat 738. Okay?

39:17 And that was on election day. And so that within three weeks was 100,000. So we’ve been four for four now. Of the day that you hit the all-time high from the prior cycle, it goes off like a rocket ship. And so far, it’s been nine to 11 months.

39:31 So, we should be looking at the bubble popping sometime in like October, November of this year. We’re in, and that’s fall, which is what we’re in. We are in summer right now. We’re in summer right now. We’re in summer because again, we hit the all-time high in November.

39:46 Right? And we’re still going up and we’re not we’re not a year after yet. So, the we are still in summer. Summer is when you get the blowoff top. That’s when the bubble pops and that’s the first day of fall.

39:58 Brian Rose: Okay. Not winter, but fall. Then that’s when Bitcoin falls. Okay. Gotcha.

40:01 All right. So, we’re still in summer.

40:29 Michael Terpin: Still in summer. About maybe halfway through. And but Wow.

41:11 Brian Rose: And… Not much time left. It’s July. Not much time left.

41:14 Michael Terpin: Well, I think we’re going to be, well, we certainly did not, we did not have a double bubble.

41:19 I thought we were poised to have a double bubble, but the macro news of the tariffs and all the, you know, chaos that, you know, a lot of the reaction to some of Trump’s policies had on the global markets, which they have recovered, right? I mean, the stock market crashed every, like, oh my god, Trump is gonna stop you, bring us back to the 1800 stock market prices and now we’re at an all-time high again. Right. Yeah. So the, you know, a lot of like, you know, thunder and lightning and noise around, around, you know, 400% tariffs and things like that.

41:51 And now, you know, it seems like it’s going to be something more reasonable. They negotiated 10% with the UK. They, you know, in the process of negotiating some other things and, you know, he’s definitely a dealmaker, right? And so far, he’s been true to his word to sort of do that. And so, and the World War III with Israel and Iran seems to have been just a 12.

42:11 They were unless something else happens. And so neutral macro we should be at about a 193, 3x the halving, because again we had 100x and then 30x should have been 10x but we had bad macro in the third cycle after the third halving, and I think with neutral macro we’ll be about 3x which puts about 193 and that would be, you know, again about 11 to 12 months after. So I think because we did not have a double bubble like we did in both 2013 and in 2021 that we’re going to look more like 2017.

42:44 2017 it was sort of a slow rise until mid July right where we are now. We’re not even at mid July yet but July 15th of, so they started the year in 2017 we were still trying to get back over $1,000 which we hadn’t been since 2013. So, it’s four years since we were over $1,000 and it was like, “Oh, are we ever going to see $1,000 again?” And everybody was hoping that it would hit by the end of 16. Did not.

43:11 It was 900 and change. But in the first couple weeks of 2017, we had $1,000. By the time that we got to middle of July, we were still only not even double. We were at like about 1980, I think it was. 6 months later, we’re 19,800.

43:27 So, we did a 10x between July and December. Okay. Okay. Now, I’m not saying we’re going to do a 10x between there because we didn’t do a 10x. We didn’t do a 2x between the start of the year and now.

43:37 But if you just figure that most of the action should be in the last half of the year, I mean, all we need to do to hit 200,000 is to do 10% gains for July, August, and September, and then 20% gains for October and November will be over 200.

43:51 Brian Rose: Okay. All right. That’s strong price appreciation. Yes.

43:54 Thanksgiving is about five months and change away. It’s the end of, it’s the end of November. Right? End of November. So that’s like four and change.

44:02 It’s July 7th now. Yes. All right. So that’s about 4 and a half months away. Previously, it was 193, but that would include the double bubble since we didn’t get.

44:10 Michael Terpin: No, no, no. Did not include the double bubble. Double bubble is just about the natural appreciation of having FOMO happen twice and then get tempered down during the summer when typically prices are a little softer. Okay. And historically the two most bullish months have always been October and November, particularly during the years after the halving.

44:29 So what’s interesting is that every halving so far the high has been within a very narrow range of dates. The first all-time high after the first halving was December 4th, the year after the halving. Four years later the high was December 17th, the year after the halving. Four years later was November 10th, the year after the halving. That’s only a 37-day spread out of 1,300 and something days in the four-year cycle.

44:53 Brian Rose: And it’s going to happen again this year, you believe?

44:55 Michael Terpin: I believe so. I mean, we might be a little bit earlier. We’ll probably expand the 37 days. It’ll probably be earlier than November 10th, but it could be later really.

45:02 I just think it’s going to be sometime in the fourth quarter again.

45:06 Brian Rose: And you like 193 still as a target?

45:09 Michael Terpin: I like that as a neutral macro target. I think we could very easily go above it. If we have, like, you know, continuing drama that collapses the stock market for tariffs or any other reason.

45:21 It could be below, I don’t think it’s going to be much. I don’t think it’ll be as as much of a discount as we had during the Biden era. So I don’t think, I think our worst case for a high is going to be 175ish or so. Okay. And I think our best case depends on whether the super cycle begins because typically you have a plus or minus macro about 20%.

45:41 So that means we could go up to like a little shy of 240 and still be within just sort of like, hey, good macro 3x plus 20%. Right. Right. So, but if all of a sudden, you know, we end up having a big supply shock because a lot of people, you know, going short on Bitcoin, and then all of a sudden Saylor and 120,300, 400 other companies, my god, it’s like one every other day starting up. And again, you know, when people see other people making money, retail starts jumping in.

46:13 And they may not be jumping into Bitcoin, but they may jump into Bitcoin stocks, you know, and now anybody, you know, not just the credit investors, not just people with wallets, can go and buy MicroStrategy. They can buy MetaPlanet. Well, in Japan at least, they can buy, you know, their cousin tells them that they went and bought some little micro cap Bitcoin stock at a dollar and now it’s $20. Is they’re going to go and buy it at 20. Right.

46:38 And my worry, of course, is that if all of these companies are buying at 1x and going out at 5x on average, what happens to those who buy at 5x hoping it goes to 10x NAV, and then all of a sudden, because the bear market part of the cycle, which will logically happen 2026, so the bubble, if it pops, where I think it will, fourth quarter of this year, it’s been one year almost to the date of how long it takes for it to go from crazy bull to capitulated bear. It’s amazing. It goes from euphoria to despair in one year.

47:17 This last time, and a lot of people don’t talk about this, I just did the math and read the calendar. November 10th, 2021 was the all-time high of that cycle until the end of it. And one year later to the day was FTX. That was 15,440 or whatever. That was November 10th.

47:36 Brian Rose: One year later, I was at the Token2049 conference in London when that news came out and it was a really quiet day at the conference, right? So that’s one year later. And you’re predicting the same thing with this cycle.

47:48 Michael Terpin: Yeah. And the reason why you always end up having capitulation after the bubble is first of all, I didn’t understand this thoroughly until the last cycle, which is the market demands capitulation because the whales are not going to buy back in until there’s no more buyers.

48:04 Okay. And because they’re hodlers, they still have their big, biggest chunk. They’ll play around the edges. And you can see this on chain. You actually see some of the larger wallets selling Bitcoin about four to six weeks before the high.

48:17 And you see them buying back about four to six weeks after the low. Because in many cases, they didn’t even think, a lot of, you know, old school whales that I know thought it was going to go lower. They’re like, “Okay, that’s pretty bad.” You know, we knew that Terra Luna was going to go beyond that because there’s still people. You have to get all hope out of the system.

48:36 You have to basically have that no one really rock bottom. Right? Nobody who’s not a long-term holder has not sold yet. If you didn’t sell after Terra Luna and you didn’t sell after Celsius and you didn’t sell after FTX, you basically weren’t selling. Right.

48:52 And so when a few weeks later, Genesis lending declared bankruptcy, and that was a giant bankruptcy too. Price didn’t move. There was no sellers left. Yeah. At that point it was safe to buy.

49:05 Brian Rose: That’s fascinating because I know Dan Tapiro who runs a big fund and when he saw that same thing happen, he thought he had 100 million bucks in his one fund and he deployed all of it after he saw it not go lower after that FTX event, and then he said, “Okay, I’m buying all the stuff I love in the digital asset ecosystem.” He bought equities for pennies on the dollar.

49:25 Michael Terpin: Well, he should have been buying Bitcoin because then he would have been up, that 100 million would be over a billion by the end of the cycle.

49:32 Brian Rose: I think he bought Circle shares and did okay.

49:35 Michael Terpin: Yeah, that’s 600%. Yeah.

49:37 Brian Rose: Wow. Okay, this is happening very soon, Michael.

49:40 Michael Terpin: Yes. Now, very soon.

49:42 Brian Rose: Okay. What could stop this from happening? And what is a super cycle?

49:48 Because this is something everyone’s been talking about for a few years and a lot of people are willing the super cycle, but you’re a guy by the numbers. So, what is it and do we think it’s going to happen?

50:00 Michael Terpin: So, the super cycle has been talked about for a while. It was originally, I think, 2018. One of the, you know, kind of, people on crypto Twitter called it the Bitcoin and Litecoin super cycle that they thought was happening in 2018.

50:13 That didn’t happen. My friend Dan Held did a number of podcasts talking about a Bitcoin super cycle that would happen because of COVID and he thought it was going to go up to, I think, $800,000, and that didn’t happen. Okay. So to me the super cycle is because of the math of the S-curve of adoption. So if you’ve got a diminishing amount of Bitcoin left, again there’s only 5% remaining that can ever be mined, and that’s going to take, you know, over 100 years.

50:44 So we’re, but, you know, we’re 95% distributed and a couple more halvings, we’re going to be 99% distributed and yet adoption is going up, and so that Bitcoin has to come from somewhere, and typically the supply squeeze is going to happen during the time of most demand, which is during the summer. We’re in summer now. If it doesn’t happen now where we have this parabolic runup beyond the normal expectation. So, the normal expectation is we could go to 200 to maybe 250,000.

51:11 If there’s more demand than that and at 250 the bubble doesn’t pop, but it keeps going, we could easily go to 300,350, 400, maybe even short of 500,000 and still be kind of like within rationality. Now, of course, it’ll crash then, and typically with your diminishing losses, you’ve got, you know, you went up 100x and then down 85%. Then you went up 30x and then down 83%. So, the losses have been, you know, kind of moving slower than the gains. The diminishing returns have been dropping exponentially, but the diminishing losses have only been going arithmetically.

51:52 So, 85, 83, 75. I think we’re going to drop about two-thirds this time. So, if we go up to 200,000, we’ll drop down below 70 by capitulation. Okay. Less, way less than it is now.

52:03 Wow. And again, blood in the streets. Oh my god. Investigations. If the Republicans lose the midterm elections, they’ll call for investigations and get these fraudsters out and like, you know, regulate Bitcoin and all this stuff.

52:19 Brian Rose: Will they rescind the stable coin act?

52:21 Michael Terpin: They can do all that depending on what the votes are. I mean, Trump will still be president, right? Of course, if they win, the last two years will be nothing but impeachment hearings. Right?

52:30 And so nothing will get done. But, ideally, you know, they maintain the house and we have another two years of good crypto policy. But regardless, what happens is human nature during the bubble, people get, you know, they get irresponsible with leverage, right? It happened last time with, like, you know, everybody, like going into Celsius and then FTX, you know, basically playing with other people’s money and doing Alameda bets, you know, where they were using other people’s money to do it.

53:02 You know, Three Arrows Capital, with always long, right? It’s up and you know, the bubble popped. I mean, I quote, you know, Warren Buffett, who is not a crypto fan but I quote him several times in the book because he was definitely someone who understood finance, and in his, I think, 1994 address to his shareholders that he does in Omaha every year, he said that you can only tell when, no, you can only tell who’s swimming naked when the tide goes out, and that’s what happens.

53:28 The third year of the cycle you have this massive amount of liquidity that people go, you know, oh, how can I leverage this? If I give 2x without leverage, I can go up 6x with leverage, right? And then it’s like, oh, but if I even go further, I can go up 10x and I’ll be like fabulously rich. My investor will be happy, and then I’ll be out before it crashes. And they never judge, quite frankly, or they think it’s always going to keep going up because they’re high on their own supply.

53:55 Yeah. Yeah. And so, it’ll happen again, but in a different area, right? In the first, you know kind of after the first halving it was Mt. Gox. People were just going in on Mt. Gox and like buying more, more, more, and they had a single point of failure which failed.

54:13 You know, four years later they were all going into, you know, throwing money at whatever ICO was out there regardless of fundamentals and you had too much supply and it failed and leverage on that supply, and then the regulators came in and said we don’t even like this category. Get out of here. We’re shutting you all down as many as we can. And then four years later, you ended up having what we all saw with FTX and with, you know, the leverage, where that was the first time that TradFi kind of came in a little bit and was partially responsible.

54:41 I mean, 3 Arrows Capital was a traditional finance instrument. Sam Bankman-Fried was a traditional finance guy. This was not like, you know, 2012 era dens doing things. It wasn’t whale tricks. It was, it was dr people, right?

54:57 And this time I think that your bubble that is going to be in, you know, the driver of the bubble popping and then dropping is going to be these Bitcoin treasury companies.

55:08 Brian Rose: Really? Okay. We’ve already seen the predictions on Twitter of people saying.

55:13 Michael Terpin: And I don’t think it’s going to be Saylor, though.

55:16 I think Saylor has got enough, you know, strong believers in the stock, and he has also enough of a business model that only someone with his kind of market cap and expertise and track record can pull off, which is the three different ways that he’s doing you know, loans that are, you know, they’re nonrecourse, right? Whereas, like, somebody who’s just starting up a $20 million Bitcoin treasury on leverage is not going to have that capability. And so you will have some high flyers that outperform on a percentage basis MicroStrategy.

55:56 People are going to jump into them and then all of a sudden they’re going to get margin calls because they can, or they’re going to go and have, you know, because I look at the history of the original Bitcoin treasury company. Do you remember GBTC?

56:10 Brian Rose: Yeah, I think I know this company.

56:12 Michael Terpin: Yes. They become the, they became the whale, the Grayscale ETF, but they were, they were a Bitcoin treasury company effectively, right?

56:20 They started out as a trust where accredited investors, this is in 2013 when Bitcoin was $100, could go and put money into, I think they raised about 80 million or something for this, or not raised, they had about 80 million invested in the trust. And the idea was you would put it in at a dollar-to-dollar value, and when it went public it would have ideally a multiple, and had a multiple of about 30%. So you would put a $100,000 in as Bitcoin, and you could then sell the stock for $130,000 and then you could go and put more in and you’d sell it again.

56:51 And it was a really nice way of making 30% on your money. And that worked until it didn’t work. And when it didn’t work was when all of a sudden you had a down market. You had people suing them because, you know, whatever. You know, just shareholder lawsuits or class action lawsuits are really easy to do.

57:08 You had people saying, “Oh, you know, we need to go and get the Bitcoin out and they’re going to be sued and they’re going to have operational expenses eat up the Bitcoin. We need to go.” You had activist shareholders go in and, and, whatever, say. And so all of a sudden, it went from a 30% premium to, believe it or not, it was trading at a 50% discount to Bitcoin. Wow.

57:29 Because the consensus was, and I’m going like, “No, no, no. You want a good buy in Bitcoin, buy the stock. There’s, there’s the risk that it could get unwound, but it never did, right? They could not force them to go and unwind the company and sell the Bitcoin. And they did get the ETF, and guess what?

57:45 After the ETF, the Bitcoin holders, you know, if you bought in at 50% discount, you doubled your money in Bitcoin terms. How great of investment was that? But you have to take risk, like anything else. And so I think the similar thing is going to happen here where treasury companies, perhaps not including MicroStrategy but as a whole, are going to go from trading at a some of them at 5x premiums now, the smaller ones, but let’s even say a 2 to 3x premium, that’s unsustainable right?

58:14 If all you’re doing is buying Bitcoin, and you buy Bitcoin at 1x, and you’re selling the stock at 2 3, 5x, that’s going to shrink as there’s more and more of them, and it’s going to go away when all of a sudden the price of Bitcoin drops by 2/3 in a year. And so you will probably find it’s trading at a discount, and the shareholder lawsuits come out, and you know, the man, and that causes, that’s the seed of the next Bitcoin fall.

58:39 Brian Rose: Okay. And if there is no super cycle that’s going to happen at the end of next year.

58:44 Michael Terpin: Oh, that could, there could be a super cycle and that happens, and that happens. Okay. So what happens, the super cycle just means that the highs get higher.

58:51 Brian Rose: Okay. And that means the four-year gets extended.

58:53 Michael Terpin: Nope. Oh, it doesn’t. Price goes higher. Price goes higher during summer. Okay.

58:57 Because, but the timing stays the same. Timing stays the same, and the percentages should stay the same. If, let’s just say that you had a crazy demand for Bitcoin treasury stocks, that meant that, you know, they all had to go and buy Bitcoin at whatever price because they’re getting a double markup, right? They have no problem buying at 300,000,400,000,500,000 as long as, just like in the dot-com era, you know, VCs would go and put money into the craziest companies because they knew as soon as it went IPO, it would go up 10x.

59:29 When that stopped, the rug pull. Yeah. The VCs took money out, the investment takers took money out, and the dot category with the exception of like a few like Amazon that only dropped 95%, dropped 99%, then went bankrupt.

59:42 Brian Rose: Yeah, I was there in New York City. You remember this, this is not a new trend, right?

59:47 And so, all right. So, then, will Michael Terpin be selling his Bitcoin in December of

1:00:06 Michael Terpin: So there’s two ways to do it. You either sell the Bitcoin or you hold the Bitcoin. Depends on your tax benefits, right? Yeah, if you are in a high tax jurisdiction, you hold the Bitcoin forever, but you go and you take enough of your capital that you would not be buying at the top, and you buy options at the bottom.

1:01:13 So, when it’s 250,000, you can probably get some pretty decent options to buy at 100,000. Okay? Right? And so, that’s the way that you collar your gains in by seeing this near the top. If you’re in a zero tax jurisdiction like Dubai, or I live in Puerto Rico, you can take the choice of just simply selling it, holding on to the cash for a year, and then buying back three times as much at the bottom.

1:01:39 Brian Rose: All right. And is that what you plan to do?

1:01:41 Michael Terpin: That’s what I plan to do.

1:01:43 Brian Rose: Wow. And it’s a timing thing for you?

1:01:45 Michael Terpin: It’s a timing thing. And, you know, I also recently started a fund called the Bitcoin Supercycle Fund, and it’s a credit investors only. This is not a solicitation. And, but basically, you know, it’s I’m offering to people that I know. And, you know, it’s, be 21 million, like that number, like Saylor does.

1:02:05 I’m putting the first million in. And basically you know, we’re going to be, you know, buying Bitcoin and then selling Bitcoin and, you know, and/or doing covered calls, and shorting on the way down, and sort of doing the things that a hedge fund should do. Right, based on the cycle, based on your, based on the cycle, and then putting that into algorithmics. So I I I’ve partnered with Trader Labs, which I’m an investor in, which is an algo developer. And so you know, they’ve shown the ability to consistently beat the price of Bitcoin just in a normal cycle before putting in my you know, sort of algorithmics about when to sell and when to buy back, right?

1:02:48 Brian Rose: So there’s no human decision involved.

1:02:50 Michael Terpin: Yeah. I mean, there still is. You still want to go and look at it and see, does this make sense? But an algo will always do better.

1:02:55 Brian Rose: Okay. Wow. All right. That’s a bold statement. Now, let me ask you, Michael,

1:02:58 Michael Terpin: well, I mean, here’s the whole thing.

1:02:59 Yeah. Well, if you look at the best returning funds from last year, they were pretty much crypto funds, right? They beat the heck out of the stock market, hedge funds, but they were doing 50, 60%, you know, Galaxy, Panta, etc. They still did not beat holding Bitcoin in your wallet. And so, for it to make sense as a Bitcoin fund, you have to beat the price of Bitcoin in your wallet after fees.

1:03:22 And so I believe my strategy is you know, the most, you know, sure way of doing that.

1:03:27 Brian Rose: All right. Now I can hear people out there. I can hear him say, “But Michael, this time it’s different.” And Michael, we’ve got Trump in office, and he’s throwing every mean name in the book at the Fed Chairman Powell.

1:03:40 And they haven’t cut rates yet. And it looks like a lot of these cuts are going to happen right around this date that you’re talking about, maybe October, November. We got a new Fed chair definitely coming in May, and he’ll drop rates 200,300 basis points probably from there maybe, and this will make this one different. What do you say to people who say you’re just thinking about a time cycle and not thinking about all the macros, especially a rate cut, which we mostly all agree will flood the system with liquidity and drive asset prices up.

1:04:11 Michael Terpin: Sure. So, a lot of rate cuts happening during the bear market could temper it. But if you’re having an overpriced, wildly overpriced asset class in terms of, like, fear and greed of historic proportions, you know, it’s not going to keep going up. It’s still going to go and go down to capitulation price. It could simply make that capitulation price, not as bad.

1:04:36 But if you’re at, say, $450,000, we’ll take like the highest I think it’s going to get. It’s not crazy to think it’s going to go down to 150, and that would be the 2/3 that I’m looking at. Whereas if it only goes up to 180, then it would probably go down to about 60. And so, you know, maybe it tampers a little bit, maybe it only goes down 50%, but I don’t see any scenario where all of a sudden we go up to like 250,000 and the worst we get in capitulation is 20% drop.

1:05:06 Okay? So, the rate cuts might help it capitulate less, but it’s not going to keep that human fear and greed accumulation. And I’ve been on panels with people who said, “Oh, I think interest rates are more important than halving.” And if that was the case, we’d still be around $10,000 Bitcoin.

1:05:27 Brian Rose: What if Bitcoin hits 250,000 at Thanksgiving and starts coming down, and then in March of next year it goes to 350.

1:05:35 Michael Terpin: That’s always a possibility. But that is not what cycle behavior says. It would change the rules a bit. It could be an anomaly, and you know, part of the super cycle. So that’s why I never sell all of it.

1:05:49 I save a moon bag. Because again, just hodling alone has been a good strategy. It just hasn’t been as good as, you know, selling high and then buying back low. Okay. All right.

1:06:02 Brian Rose: So, you’re very firm in these convictions. Yep. And even though, because it’s interesting, when you go into the, you know, crypto Twitter, everybody always is like, it’s different this time, because now you’ve got institutions buying. You’ve got the Fed rate cutting later. You got all these things that are going to make this time.

1:06:18 Michael Terpin: Crypto Twitter has had people calling the top election day, and we’re going to go down to 30,000 now. And I think they’ve been proven wrong so far.

1:06:25 Brian Rose: All right. Gotcha. So you’re sticking to your guns.

1:06:28 This is the cycle and this is what happens in. This is the cycle that…

1:06:33 Michael Terpin: Well, no. I don’t believe that it’s necessarily the cycle for the super cycle to happen. It’s probably the most likely so far of anything that we’ll hit, because again, if you have adoption by the X factors, governments, right?

1:06:48 So if somebody actually does, some nation actually does what has been recommended, first nation to print fiat to buy Bitcoin wins. I mean, you know, let’s say Japan, let’s say Japan decided to go. They saw how big of a pump that, you know, Metaplanet got going from 14 million market cap of a small OTC travel company stock to, like, you know, what, 7,000% increase or something like that. You know, by buying Bitcoin and then taking advantage of some of the vagaries of the tax structure there.

1:07:25 If all of a sudden Japan decided they were going to go and you know, print a couple billion dollars and buy Bitcoin with it, that would raise the price of Bitcoin quite a bit. And you might have, like, a race then of other, oh, Korea’s going to do it. Oh you know, Hong Kong’s just like, you go, and you maybe, this effect of all of a sudden you know, if governments decided they needed to go and have as much Bitcoin as gold, you have a million dollar Bitcoin this cycle.

1:07:54 I don’t know if that’s going to happen this soon, but I think it’s inevitable that as more millennials get into power and sort of say, why are we holding gold as our primary asset to kind of back our currency when we could have had Bitcoin? Okay. These are all things that are, these is there’s still some unknowns here, right? But I think that the thing that is you know, I don’t think an unknown anymore is that we have to have a reversal of the downward trend for at least a couple cycles to be able to make up for the difference between supply and demand.

1:08:28 Brian Rose: Okay, speaking of supply and demand, we, what we seem to have, massive amounts of demand right now, and yet the price of Bitcoin has been hovering around this 100 grand range for months and months and months when we know that Saylor alone is buying, mining supply and the ETF is popular and all these other things. What do you attribute this lack of price action to the upside based on what we hear is all this demand?

1:08:52 Michael Terpin: Sure. So, Tradios has its tricks, right?

1:08:54 And, you know, the price of gold and silver has, you know, arguably been manipulated for years. There was obviously, you know, a big what is it, the Lee scandal with London, and yeah, and, and you had the, you had the Hunt brothers cornering the market on silver many decades ago. So, you know, there’s been a fear for many years about what paper Bitcoin is going to do to real Bitcoin, right? Because if you look at the gold ETFs, you know, there’s a lot more gold ETFs sold than are actually backed by gold.

1:09:27 They just figure they can go buy it on the market. But if you end up having a similar thing happening with Bitcoin, whereas with treasury companies, they’re arguably safer because you can see they bought the Bitcoin, right? But with ETFs, if you’re having kind of these IOUs of paper bitcoins, and there’s a global financial crisis, you may end up owing an IOU from a Bitcoin instead of a Bitcoin when the price of Bitcoin skyrockets. Right? And that’s the biggest problem with ETFs.

1:09:56 They’re not necessarily buying Bitcoin. Well, they are. They have to, but the point is, if it unwinds somehow, do you get your Bitcoin back? That you only cash out of cash. That’s in the rules, right?

1:10:08 Okay. And also when you’re buying a treasury company, you don’t get your Bitcoin back. So, the safest thing is still to buy Bitcoin, but TradFi typically is, often times, buying a web of like options and derivatives so that they lock in a price, and they’re using paper Bitcoin to basically it can be used rather to tamper down the price appreciation because they’re still trying to accumulate, right? And so if they’re able to accumulate at, you know, 100,000 when perhaps the fair market value may be a little bit higher.

1:10:45 But that goes away when, you know, there’s no more OTC market to speak of, right? If you end up having, you right now have the lowest amount of Bitcoin on exchanges in many years, and so you know who is selling the OTC if you have to settle in real Bitcoin. Okay. At the end of the day, even if you’re, you know, playing with the prices with derivatives and futures and options and things like that, at some point someone has to go and buy real Bitcoin and store it at Coinbase.

1:11:14 Brian Rose: All right, so you think it’s tradi playing games that hasn’t actually caused a shock in the supply of the Bitcoin itself.

1:11:20 Michael Terpin: Right? And when it happens, some people say it’s people who own Bitcoin that are swapping it out into the ETF, but I don’t really buy that area. No, I think some of them are swapping it out into Bitcoin treasury companies. I’ve certainly seen that, right?

1:11:33 And there they’re looking at short-term, right? They’re looking at like, hey, I’ll give you some Bitcoin, but can I get it back in three months? They can actually transfer it in and get shares back, correct?

1:11:42 Brian Rose: Right. But then they have to be able to sell the shares.

1:11:44 Michael Terpin: Yeah. And so that again, that’s when the crash happens, when all of a sudden you have this high liquidity on the way up and then the price of Bitcoin drops and then nobody wants Bitcoin treasury shares when they’re going from, like, you know, 3 to 5x NAV to, like, you know, 0.8 and a half.

1:12:00 Brian Rose: Okay. Yeah. I just got offered an opportunity to transfer in soul to a sole treasury company and then at 6 months, if it doesn’t appreciate by X, you get your soul back, and like all these things.

1:12:10 So, and I’m sure this is happening on the top 20 coins, and this is going to get a little crazy. This will be, I agree, the thing that will break next year. Max Kaiser’s on the wall there. He was on my show in 2013. I bought my first Bitcoin for 100 bucks, I guess, around maybe when you did.

1:12:30 Max is squirming right now when you’re talking about selling your Bitcoin, because Max, like a lot of Maxis and a lot of people in the space are huddle, huddle, huddle. Hold it, hold it, hold it no matter what. And you got Michael Terpin saying, “No, I’m gonna sell the highs and buy the lows.”

1:12:46 Michael Terpin: Well, I think if, at the end of the day, and I wasn’t buying it in a nickel like Max, so he, or he has, yeah, he has no worries about, you know, what what price it goes up to and making a little bit of extra.

1:12:57 But if at the end of the day your goal is to have more Bitcoin, I think it’s a provable strategy that selling at least some of it at the high so you can then hold that cash to buy back at the low is an excellent strategy and it’s not for everybody. Those who are religious about it will go and hold forever and give it to their grandchildren and you know, maybe take some loans against it online and blah blah blah on chain. But, yeah, I mean, look, if you were to go and buy a thousand Bitcoin at the end of 2012 at the first halving and hodling it, never did anything, it’s now worth about $109 million.

1:13:32 Pretty good investment. But if you theoretically, you know, went and sold it at the end of 2013 at around, you’re never going to hit the exact high and the exact low, but you could have dollar cost averaged when it went to 1,200. You could have dollar cost averaged out around a,000. All of a sudden, your $12,000 investment is worth a million. You then held that for a little over a year.

1:13:52 It went down 171. You probably wouldn’t have hit that, but you had several months to get back in around 250. So now all of a sudden, you take that million, you buy Bitcoin at 250. Now you have 4,000 Bitcoin. You hold that for three years.

1:14:04 Went up to 19,800. You probably weren’t going to hit that, but you could have dollar cost averaged out around 16,000. And then a year later bought in as low as 3,200, but you could have dollar cost averaged in at 4,000. Now you’ve got 16,000 Bitcoin. And you had one more cycle where you could have done that.

1:14:21 Although I was projecting that the 20% would have given you not 64,000 Bitcoin but about 60,000 Bitcoin. 60,000 Bitcoin versus 1,000 Bitcoin is 60x the return. Right. Right. So instead of turning $12,000 into 109 million, you’d be, you close to 6.5 billion.

1:14:38 And arguably if it doubles between now and the end of the year, you would have turned 12,000 to 12 billion.

1:14:44 Brian Rose: Right. Okay. That makes pretty good sense. Speaking of religion, you know, you rub elbows with a lot of people that we would call Bitcoin maximalists in the space.

1:14:52 And I’ve had a plenty of them on my show, from Robert Breedlove to Saylor.

1:14:56 Michael Terpin: I wouldn’t say Saylor is actually a maximalist to. He is a maximalist. He is. But when you ask him about the crypto markets, he used to talk a little trash about non-Bitcoin crypto, but now he would say that they’re healthy for the capital markets, because they allow companies not to raise money who don’t have to go through the entire system of being public.

1:15:15 So, officially, and he also says stable coins have a place.

1:15:17 Brian Rose: That’s true. That’s true. Whereas Max, I don’t think would say that. And Max, I love you and Stacy, I love you even though you won’t come on my show because I talk about other things besides Bitcoin.

1:15:25 But what do you say to the maxis who say, “How dare you ever utter the words anything but Bitcoin, who seem to not believe, who think everything else is a scam, I think, including stable coins.” Yeah. How do you navigate that? And what do you say as Michael?

1:15:43 Michael Terpin: They’re welcome to their opinion.

1:15:45 I see this as being an asset class, not a religion. And, you know, I mean, look, some of the leading maxis, we won’t name here, but we know who some of them are. Were pedalling their own altcoins several years ago. So I call those people born again maxis. I consider myself to be a Bitcoin preferentialist, which is I recognize and tell people that the most stable and predictable and, in the end of the day, valuable cryptocurrency is Bitcoin.

1:16:18 If you have no cryptocurrency, do not go out and buy Dogecoin on a yolo. You know, maybe if you’re 20 years old and you really love the community there and you’re going to watch it every day, you can devote a certain percentage of your portfolio because again, if you’re 20 years old, you got a long time to make mistakes, and you get, if you hit one, like 100x with Bitcoin, it’s not going to go to 100x in a short period of time. It will over time, but it’s only to 10 million.

1:16:44 So if you’re 20 years old by the time you retire, I think you can safely guess that it’ll be in the 10 million plus range. So that’s 100x over a long time. And that’s much more assured than Doge ever going 100x. It could go 100x in one cycle, but, you know, it’s something that is much more of a high-risk, high-reward. If you’re going to go and do high-risk, high-reward, I still tell people you should have at least 60% of your portfolio in Bitcoin.

1:17:10 Nice thing about Bitcoin is you can basically do no work. You can basically just set it and forget it and look at it in 10 years. You want to do no work. If you want to do work two days or two or three days out of every four years, you can go and set it, wait until, you know, you get to the fourth quarter this year and then start looking and seeing, you know, when does it look like it’s overvalued, and then take out whatever percentage that you think is reasonable for your circumstances, or do hedging around it if you are in a high tax situation and then a year later, execute on those options and buy more Bitcoin at the bottom, because it should be around a third at the bottom where it is at the top, and you do that every four years.

1:17:51 That’s not much work, and you will outperform the price of Bitcoin, which alone should be, you know, 10x in the next 8 to 12 years, and, you know, arguably it won’t keep going up at the same rate. It’ll probably slow down, but you know certainly, you know, in 21 years where Saylor sees it at being 13 million, I see it about me being 2 to 3 million, but if you do my strategy, you could get to the equivalent of 13 million by basically, or higher by basically selling or hedging some at the top and buying more at the bottom. All right.

1:18:20 Brian Rose: Average out and average in the best strategy there. Around a three-month period, something like that.

1:18:26 Michael Terpin: Yeah. It’s historically been less than a three-month period at the high and about a three-month period at the low a year later. Okay.

1:18:33 One month at the high, maybe, maybe less, weeks perhaps.

1:18:37 Brian Rose: How do you feel about Ethereum, Solana, XRP, you know, all these other rare ones that we hear about?

1:18:43 Michael Terpin: So, I think that they’ve been good for the ecosystem overall. I don’t think that we would be at $100,000 Bitcoin if we only had Bitcoin in the ecosystem. I think that they have been viable pathways to develop new technology that later can be incorporated into Bitcoin.

1:19:00 So, if you have Bitcoin DeFi that does everything that Ethereum DeFi does, you know, it’s a safer asset to hold your long-term wealth on. So, people will gravitate toward that. We’re not there yet. But Ethereum, I mean, the old saying from a few years ago was Bitcoin is digital gold and Ethereum is digital oil. And again, I met Vitalik in 2013.

1:19:24 He had me come down and speak to his university about Bitcoin. And I worked with him and his, and the Anthony Di Iorio and the team, on the initial launch of Ethereum. We actually announced it at CES a week before the white paper, and then I did the PR around, you know, the whole launch at the M Bitcoin Miami show. Wow. And, you know, and then I spun off a fund for BitAngels with David Johnston, and that fund bought a million dollars worth of Ethereum at 30 cents.

1:19:56 And so, you know, I mean, I’ve definitely done well over the years from Ethereum. Ethereum in certain periods has outperformed Bitcoin, but I still would say it’s not as safe an investment, because again it still has, you know, more a coup or something like that? There is no leader in Bitcoin, right? It’s just basically, you know, a slow change of necessary processes that involve the miners and the core devs, and it took almost two years for them to agree on SegWit, right?

1:21:20 So it’s a… It’s… It’s very slow-moving, which is good for something that should be, you know, considered as a, I mean, you don’t see nations going out and saying, you know, we’re going to go and back, you know, Ecuador with Solana or Ethereum. You know, they all talk about Bitcoin because it is digital gold. Right.

1:21:37 Brian Rose: Remember Michael Saylor, in one of my conversations with him, he said, he said, Brian, I like Bitcoin because it has low aspirations. That’s what he said. You know, he keeps it real simple, and that’s one of the things he likes about it. Do you think that this stable coin revolution we’re seeing here or mass adoption is gonna, you know, bring Ethereum itself into TradFi and make it blow up on the back of that, or do you think now, since many of these stable coins are on other chains, it won’t necessarily favor just Ethereum, or do you think they’re going to have their own rails in the inside, and it might not make any difference to some of the L1s?

1:22:10 Michael Terpin: Could be any and all the above. I mean, a lot of these stable coins are not on Ethereum. They’re on EVM clones, right? I mean, right now, as you probably are aware, you go anywhere in the Middle East, everybody’s offering you stable coins on Tron. And so, it’s because of the low fees.

1:22:32 Yeah. Ethereum fees are lower than they used to be at their height, but they’re still way higher than, you know, Tron, Sonic, Arbitrum, you know, Base, you name it. And I think that, you know, Justin Sun had actually said if he was running the, the Ethereum Foundation, he would immediately go put a tax on layer 2s, and that would basically be good for Ethereum, be, it would be, you know, it hurt the layer twos. And I think it’s actually a wise thing to do.

1:22:59 We’ll see if they do it. Because you know the Ethereum holders are conflicted because, you know, they want fees to be high enough to pay them more interest if they’re staking. And yet the higher the fees go, the more people go and, you know, do transactions on other chains. So I think that, you know, I think the banks will be heavily involved in stable coins. The recent stable coin act basically says that, like, you know, the big tech folks, like, you know, Facebook and Apple and Amazon they can’t issue their own stable coin without either banking or fintech involved.

1:23:40 And so Arthur Hayes just did a blog post this week, talking about how he’s bullish on the too big to fail banks, because they will probably become the biggest players in stable coins, and they’re incentivized to, because if they end up converting all of their, you know, kind of like cash accounts, which are very expensive to hold and run and do compliance for, into stable coin, they’ll save a lot of compliance costs, as much as 20 billion dollars in aggregate, and that will go right to their bottom line, and they’ll be able to go DeFi on top of that, which is a lot higher interest rates than they can get from just, you know, arbitraging T-bills, and they’ll share a part of it with their retail audience and keep the rest of his profits. So, I think that you’re going to see 5 years from now that, you know, the big banks are probably as big as Tether and maybe larger, and stable coins grew 800% last year, and I think they’re poised to probably do something similar in the next year.

1:24:47 They’re already bigger in terms of transactions than Visa and PayPal combined. It’s incredible. They’re chasing a and they’ll get there.

1:24:54 Brian Rose: I mean, Michael, you’ve been in the space for a long time, and this space was always kind of for the rebels, for those that didn’t trust centralized institutions, for those that wanted to hold their assets and not have big brother looking over their backs with this massive adoption of stable coins by these tradies. Is all that ending in the next year or two where it is ironic.

1:25:14 Michael Terpin: It is ironic because I’m in, you know, a bunch of OG chat groups, and they’re like, “Hey, we did not go. Satoshi did not write the white paper so that people could go and buy ETFs from BlackRock and, you know, get their stable coins from JP Morgan.” But, you know, I mean, if you look at the internet, the internet was originally a bunch of rebels, right? And I remember the Electronic Frontier Foundation, they had a t-shirt that said the internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it.

1:25:44 It was all about freedom of expression and freedom of transactions and freedom, freedom, freedom. And now pretty much you can’t actually go on the internet very long without being on a stack. You basically transact through Google, through, you know, Microsoft, through Facebook, through Amazon. And they set the rules, not the open internet and you know that happens when ecosystems evolve and, you know, kind of calcify and, you know, you still are free to go and just hold your own bitcoin.

1:26:20 You don’t have to change what you do, but, you know, typically to go and get mass adoption of anything you have to make it easy to use. And, you know, if you’ve read, you know, Crossing the Chasm, the great book by Geoffrey Moore years ago, he talked about how most technologies never make it from the early adopters, who have a different set of expectations and desires to the early mainstream. So, in crypto, in Bitcoin, the early adopters were, like, you know, like you know, crypto anarchy, and, like, you know, freedom of money and this and that, and the early adopters are, like, is this safe?

1:26:55 Is this legal? Will my bank kick me out, or will my bank adopt it? And so the mainstream wants bank adoption. They want a one-stop solution, and they trust their bank. Yeah, they may not trust them completely, but they tend to, they all have bank accounts, and they’re like, “Oh, great.

1:27:11 I can go and transfer my stable coins and pay my bills with it.” And it’s less fees. So, that’s where you get your retail level of adoption that, you know, that’s the primary way that you’re going to get to, you know, a billion, two billion, four billion users. But in other jurisdictions, I mean, Africa, etc., where, you know, the banking you know, ecosystem does not serve the majority of the people in the country, you know, you may end up having just fintech provide that market, or, like, you know, Bitcoin ecosystem and, you know, so far, the Bitcoin ecosystem, what are they giving us?

1:27:49 Lightning. I mean, you know, they haven’t quite been very fast to innovate. I think that’s changing. I mean, there’s a lot of Bitcoin ecosystem you know, innovation going on right now since the dawn of Taproot and, you know, it’s going to be very exciting next couple years. I’ve got, you know, a couple of bitcoin, you know, layer 2 companies in my portfolio and yeah, I’m excited to see how Bitcoin can…

1:28:17 I’m rooting for Bitcoin to catch up, but I’m not betting the farm on it.

1:28:22 Brian Rose: Yeah, we have a few of those as well, and I’m hoping the same thing. You mentioned what Satoshi would have wanted. Who is Satoshi? We may never know, or we may.

1:28:32 Michael Terpin: You know, if you look at some of the recent letters that came out from Martti Malmi, his intern, it certainly sounds like unless he’s like trying to throw shade and disguise his identity, it looks like it’s one person. You know, he actually said to his intern that, you know, the most important thing you can do is just start mining so there’s at least two of us online at all time, right? Yeah. And so if it was a group of three or four people, he wouldn’t have said that.

1:28:58 Again, unless he was trying to, like, throw off the scent of the, you know, the original theory was that it was, you know, the Tulip Trust of Craig Wright. This is propounded by Craig, of course, Craig Wright, Dave Kleiman, Hal Finney, and Nick Szabo. And, you know, two of them are no longer with us. And, you know, Nick is widely suspected as perhaps being it because of his past, you know, ecosystem work. And he said no.

1:29:28 It’s interesting that he shares a birthday, April 5th, with Satoshi. And April 5th, of course, is considered to be an Easter egg. So maybe that isn’t his real birthday. He just threw the Easter egg as well. It’s an Easter egg because that is when franklin Delano Roosevelt started seizing gold.

1:29:45 Brian Rose: Okay, got it. We also saw British spellings in the white paper, right?

1:29:50 Michael Terpin: Yeah. And that would tend to point to a Brit, unless that’s also a throwing it off. Throwing it off.

1:29:57 But that would be. There’s very few Brits that are suspected of this. Although I think there’s someone from New Zealand that was suspected of possibly being a Satoshi.

1:30:07 Brian Rose: Okay. We recently saw some Satoshi era wallets move big chunks of Bitcoin.

1:30:12 First of all, do you think we’ll ever see the Satoshi block move? And what do you make of that happening? There’s rumors it might be Roger Ver. Roger’s been on the show before. We don’t know if that’s true, but what do you make of that?

1:30:24 Michael Terpin: Well, I mean, it looks like OPSEC to me. It’s not like it just started moving to exchanges immediately. It could just be moving it from a wallet that they wanted to move to another wallet. Upgrading wallet. Upgrading wallet.

1:30:36 I mean, it looked, if you’re on a, you know, if you’re on a 2011 era wallet, you know, you’re paying higher fees. Not that you’re selling anything, but, you know, I mean, there have been other folks to move smaller amounts to, you know, the newest Taproot or, you know, whatever. And so, no, it’s actually refreshing how few of the early, you know, wallets have moved anything or have sold anything. Yeah. It’s pretty remarkable.

1:31:03 But I think if you’ve held from a penny to $100,000, you know, it’s going to be a million. You know, you might sell a little bit just for living expenses, but otherwise, you know, I’ve known people who, you know, just refuse to sell any Bitcoin. They make their income in other ways. Or they’ve already got some wealth from other things, and they’re like, why would I want to sell? I mean, one friend of mine who actually to satisfy his wife sold 10% of his Bitcoin and I think it was around $200 because he had an average cost in of about, you know, a dollar or something like that.

1:31:37 And she was just like, “Oh, you know, you need to cash some of it out now. What if it goes back to a dollar, etc., etc.” And I remember him telling me, this was in the fall of 2013, he said, “I know I’m right and she’s wrong, but happy wife, happy life.” And you know, I’m still keeping 90% of it. And, you know, but if she’s right, then at least we’ve cashed out a chunk.

1:32:00 I think he might have cashed out, you know, three or 4 thousand Bitcoin at, like, you know, $200. And, you know, and obviously he was right and she was wrong. I hope he’s still married. He is actually, in fact, I’ve quoted him. He was synonymously known as Shertoshi.

1:32:17 He was selling t-shirts for Bitcoin at some of the conferences. So you could have bought a $15 t-shirt for, like, you know, $100 Bitcoin back then. And obviously he gave me some shirts so I didn’t have to pay Bitcoin for it. But I liked his quote. I’ve used it in presentations before.

1:32:34 Why would you want to exchange the currency of the future for the currency of the past?

1:32:40 Brian Rose: So well said. So well said. When you think about that, what comments do you have on our current fiat system? You know, we’ve just passed the big beautiful bill.

1:32:50 We’ve raised the debt ceiling even higher. People are saying the US debt could go to 40 trillion very quickly. You see governments around the world, including the British government, printing money left and right, and did, obviously, during lockdown. What do you make of that? How do you try to explain that fiat concept to most people?

1:33:05 Michael Terpin: Well, I mean, they’re hoping this time is different, but you know, there’s never been a fiat currency that lasts much more than 50 years. And that’s about where we’re at right now from when we went off the gold standard. And, you know, governments love fiat currency because they get to, like, you know, wash away all their sins with new money that devalues. It hurts the poor because it devalues you know, sort of like the savings of the poor. But it blows up asset prices of the rich.

1:33:33 So it’s a perfect system for, like, keeping the rich rich and the poor poor. And the poor are at least you know, sort of incentivized to keep working, because at least they feel like they’re getting raises based on maybe merit and inflation, but it’s barely keeping up with inflation, whereas the stock market is well above inflation, and obviously Bitcoin has been way above inflation.

1:33:54 Brian Rose: Yeah. So true. And the beautiful thing about Bitcoin is it’s like this parallel universe, like in the old Star Treks, where maybe for the first time ever a normal person can look at it and see the flaws of fiat.

1:34:05 One of the greater teaching techniques in that.

1:34:08 Michael Terpin: Well, and again, those who saw it early, you know, are quite wealthy now. I mean, I heard the story, and I don’t know where, happened to a bartender that basically put their entire life savings of $50,000 into Bitcoin when it was about a dollar. Obviously, if they held on, they’re billionaire now. Yeah.

1:34:25 Brian Rose: So many great stories like that. Michael, we’re about to go to one of your BitAngels events in London. We’re co-hosting. Tell me about BitAngels, and what is it? I know it’s in cities all over the world.

1:34:36 And then also, how can people get involved?

1:34:39 Michael Terpin: Sure. So, BitAngels stems back to the first Bitcoin Foundation conference in early 2013. That’s where I met the iconic David Johnston, who, you know, was just an early Bitcoin buyer. He was like buying it at $5, and back then you had to go to, like, you know, Bit Instant or ZipZap, and, you know, come up with $50, and you’d give it to the clerk, and they would send it to Mt. Gox, and you hope you then got your Bitcoin.

1:35:06 But he’s definitely a longstanding bitcoin, I wouldn’t say maximalist, but a maximalist of, not, you know, I ended up, like, you know, getting married to somebody who was a real estate maximalist. We’re no longer married. But we bought a lot of real estate, and, you know, the Bitcoin, it would have been worth a lot more. So you know, diversification is something they recommend, which I did. But, you know, Michael Saylor, I think, had a great quote, which is, like, you know, he’s very anti-diversification.

1:35:39 He’s like, why would you want to sell the best asset to buy something that’s not the best? Yeah. And, obviously, the person I’m with now believes that. So no more buying of excessive real estate. So, which, you know, is does have more holding costs.

1:35:56 I did buy the Mike Tyson mansion, though, from The Hangover. And so that’s actually a productive asset and then it’s fun to live in. We rent it out for events. Las Vegas. It’s in Las Vegas.

1:36:07 18,000 square feet on two acres, and it’s where he kept his tigers. Tigers. So it’s a lot of fun. But, you know, I bought it with $10,000 Bitcoin. So.

1:36:15 Brian Rose: Amazing. I’m going to come visit. And so what should we expect to happen at the BitAngels piece? Is it investors and? Yeah.

1:36:21 Michael Terpin: So, BitAngels, the whole vision when I started with David was I looked at the very first conference Bitcoin Foundation conference, and they had announced the Aelevel they announced a $5 million funding round for Coinbase at a 20 million valuation, and that was led by, I think, it was Union Square Ventures, and Ripple raised 2 million from, I think it was Andreessen Horowitz, and I was like, wow those are well-known VC names, yet I’m not seeing any angels, and so I asked David why there are no angels. He goes, well, they’re around, they just sort of, like, you know, just kind of, like, are in chat groups or Reddit or whatever, and there’s no group, and he goes, and he said, why don’t we start one? And so I was like, okay and I came up with the name BitAngels on the fly.

1:37:02 He set up the website. We put a note out on Reddit to say we’re having an organizing meeting. We were hoping six or seven people would show up. We had 30 people show up, including Roger Ver, including Vinnie Lingam, including, you know, Jared Kenna, including Charles Kesaro, who’s now the head of IT bit. So a lot of, like, early iconic people, and Matt Rosak, and we ended up just you know, going and, like, you know, starting city chapters.

1:37:26 Matt Rosac was the original Chicago city leader, Brock Pierce for Los Angeles. And originally we really didn’t do physical meetings. We just went on Skype every other week and just would have the city leaders go and if they said they’re in Los Angeles, you’d knock on the door and see if they actually were there. Get to meet them in person. I decided a few years later that we needed to actually have physical meetings.

1:37:47 And so I started the Coin Agenda conferences, on top of the BitAngels breakfast that we would have at different people’s conferences. It’s now called tokenized tokenizedconference.com. And we do that. We have two big conferences a year. One in Vegas right after the Bitcoin conference, and one in Puerto Rico during Puerto Rico Blockchain Week, which we’re going into our ninth year.

1:38:08 And then I have two smaller one-day events this year. They’re concurrent with San Francisco and, Los Angeles Tech Weeks in October. And we’ve done international events. We’ve done them in Dubai and Monaco, etc. But BitAngels is really a more efficient way of distributing a global footprint.

1:38:26 So I can’t be in London that many times a year. I live in Puerto Rico. But you and Toby can. And so basically, thank you for, you know, sort of helping us reboot the London chapter. We had one prior to the pandemic and you know, people’s focus has changed, but we’ve had other people running their chapters for several years.

1:38:45 Our Austin chapter has been under the same people running it. Matt McKibben and I’m basing it on the other person’s name, but again, you know, sort of OG people, and, you know, we’ve had New York, and we’re in a little over 30 cities right now. The idea is that you’re able to go in, and if you’re a startup, you can go and meet local investors, and then we do about a hundred events a year. It’s free to present. You can present, you know, once per city per round per year, so you’re not seeing the same companies over and over again, and it’s free, and then, you know, we basically are funded through global sponsorships, where, you know, the big, you know, sort of protocols, etc.

1:39:32 We’ve had Polygon sponsor some things, and ICP and Unit Networks. So they’ll go and sponsor things as global sponsors. So about 20 events a year are global events. For example, you know, we have a Denver chapter, and they do three or four events a year but only one of them is ETH Denver, right? So the local events might get 50 people, ETH Denver will get 500 people.

1:39:58 And so we come in and provide some more support. You know, we typically tend to show up at these events because they’re the places that I’m usually at anyway. And yeah, and so we’re just trying to grow it to, ultimately, I want to get to about a hundred cities. My sort of guide for how to do this is Startup Grind, which started out with one guy in a garage in Mountain View, and now I think they’re in 3,000 cities. Yeah.

1:40:21 Big. And yeah. And so it should be that if you’re in a city that has founders and investors, they should be able to get together a few times a year.

1:40:30 Brian Rose: Love it. Love it.

1:40:31 Michael, let me get your final thoughts and then also tell us what’s the best way that we can get a copy of the Bitcoin Super Cycle.

1:40:38 Michael Terpin: Sure. So, it’s published by Skyhorse and distributed by Simon and Schuster. And if it’s not in your local bookstore, very easy to get on Amazon. So, just look up Bitcoin Supercycle, Michael Terpin, and available worldwide.

1:40:50 I’m also in the process of putting together an AI version, which will be translated into, you know, 37 languages. So, I’ll be reading in Japanese and Chinese and everything else. And that should be out in a couple of weeks.

1:41:04 Brian Rose: Love it. And yeah, what’s the one message you want to get out there about the super cycle, about Bitcoin in general?

1:41:11 If you could get someone in someone’s head for a minute, what would you want to tell them?

1:41:16 Michael Terpin: Well, if you’re an investor in any other asset class, which is what this was written for, it’s not Bitcoin for dummies. It’s Bitcoin for uneducated investors, that you have missed out by saying no for the last decade on much better returns than you’ve gotten in any other category. And it’s still not too late. There’s only 1 million people in the world that have at least one Bitcoin.

1:41:36 If you’re an investor of any substance in any other asset class, you should be one of those. You should make sure that you have at least one Bitcoin. You should understand why. And so this presents the case for Bitcoin and also shows the four seasons about when to invest in Bitcoin to maximize your return, and explains the super cycle, that, you know, we will be going to a million dollars in the next 8 to 12 years. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.

1:42:03 Brian Rose: And what a powerful time we’re sitting down with this, literally, you know, four to five months away. It’s exciting, and I think it’ll make a lot of people lean into this as well, and start to educate themselves.

1:42:14 Michael Terpin: It’s interesting, all of my students read the Bitcoin white paper. And when I created my course crypto and DeFi four years ago, I thought, you know what, even though you get lost a little in page three and four and five when all the, you know, quadratic equations come out, even though my MIT degree is rusty, and I was like, okay.

1:42:31 Brian Rose: Like you said, I would rather people read it so they can get it in their heads, what it is. And I guess you said the beginning and the end. And it’s great that you break it down, you know, page by page in the book,

1:42:41 Michael Terpin: but I think it’s important that people feel like at least they’ve read it and no one’s going to tell them, if they read that my book, they’ve read the white paper, because it’s chapter five and I explain it.

1:42:50 Brian Rose: I love that. And, Michael, I love listening to you talk about this cycle.

1:42:53 We had like an hour-long Zoom conversation that I was, like, you know, hanging on every word, and I’m doing the same here. And it’s fascinating that you broke it down literally to these time bands and how accurate it is by the days. And it’s very hard, I think, for anyone to listen to you and not lean into this and say, “Okay, wow, I really need to be paying attention.” And in a world with so much noise, with presidents making things and missiles going here and Fed rate cuts and all these other stuff, it’s just amazing how you just cut it all out.

1:43:21 Say, “No, no, no. Look at this. Look at the goddamn calendar.” Because it’s taught us what’s going to happen. And so, I’m in this space, Michael.

1:43:30 And this has now become even more clear to me. And the problem is I got so much information in my head. The clarity of what you said still hadn’t sunk in until today. So, thank you for that. I’ll be making intelligent decisions in November and December thanks to you.

1:43:43 I hope everybody does this as well. Get this book, Bitcoin Super Cycle, and, Michael, look forward to having this conversation again. I’d love to have this conversation next year as well when we’re probably dealing with, you know, the price coming down. And it would be great to be talking to people and telling them what’s happening when they’re in it. I knew so many people that talked about stop losses in 21 that never actually put them in themselves.

1:44:08 And so these are the most educated people at the top of their game and yet their emotions got a hold of them. And so many people, the same thing’s going to happen to them again and they’re going to make all the wrong decisions when if they could just separate themselves, read your book and make logical decisions, it could really make a huge difference in their livelihood and their portfolio. So I hope we have another one of these, Michael, and thank you for everything you’ve done for this space.

1:44:31 Michael Terpin: My pleasure, Brian. All right, until next time. Thanks.