135. Bitcoin Hits $50,000 USD and Our Bitcoin Halving Strategy

Bitcoin has just flown through US$50,000.

We're not too far away from a bitcoin all time high.

This is what we call phase one of a bull market. And it's important to understand how these phases work because this is where you can really make a good amount of money. Welcome to another episode of the Ben and Bergs podcast. I'm Ben, your favorite high school dropout and founder of Collective Shift. Alongside me is Bergs, your favorite MBA and coo Collective Shift.

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Join us as we bring you world class crypto research and strategies to help you dominate this crypto bull market as well as behind the scenes view of us scaling a fully remote subscription research business. And today we're talking about Bitcoin has just flown through US$50,000, approximately US$75,000, 76,000 Aussie dollars even. And the bitcoin halving is coming up just around the corner. Burgs, we're only weeks away and the ETF is just pumping the price. So we're starting to see the inflows from the US spot Bitcoin ETFs which we've been talking about for so long. They finally got approved in January about a month ago and we're starting to see steady inflows.

Into these ETFs and then right into bitcoin. So you know, we're kind of seeing like on average you know, up nearly up to $500 million of Bitcoin being bought each day in the ETF, which is, which is massive. Right. And when we first had a bit of a pullback after the ETF was launched, it was a bit of the sell the news event. We also saw on chain there was just a lot of the grayscale bitcoin trust being sold off and we'll talk about how that sort of worked and why that was happening in the interim. But what's most exciting Burgs is we're getting such a, such an increase of the bitcoin price based on fundamentals and not speculation. This has been driven by genuine people buying the asset not because of some events, not because of what we think is going to happen, but genuinely because people want to own the asset, which is super exciting.

How good does it feel to have product market fit? Mate.

That'S exactly what this is. Right? Like we've, we thought this was going to happen and it has actually played out where you've got a vehicle now, an ETF which people can now buy through. There has been pent up demand and now there's a way for people to fulfill and service that demand. It is so good to see this continual buying, man. And just the sheer amount, we've got a, a chart here and it varies between kind of, you know, 500 million to.

Yeah, probably the average would be about 200 million per day being bought through these ETFs, which is just incredible to see all these different funds and where the money's actually flowing and that's like per day, this demand. And the media hasn't even picked this up yet. Right. Until we reach all time highs, they'll pick it up and then this will really start to drive and busting through 50k is just good to wake up and see that milestone.

It's, it's fascinating too seeing like what you mentioned there, like the Google trends and the exchange account signups are still quite low. So we're not seeing that retail wave just yet. And this is what we call phase one of a bull market. And we, the way we analyze the market or a bull market is split up into two. So you've got phase one and you've got phase two. And it's important to understand how these phases work because this is where you can really make a good amount of money if you have the assets that correlate to those phases. So we're going to talk through a bit of a strategy that we are utilizing ourselves in a collective shift about how to play this bitcoin halving. And it's because we're coming up to the second half of phase one of a bull market. Now phase one primarily is usually when we go where bitcoin starts to sort of lead the market. And we've been going through that now for probably two or three months. We're probably about 50%, maybe 60% way through phase one. But the second phase of a bitcoin market is when altcoins start to heavily outperform bitcoin. So the reason we know we're sort of about, you know, 60% of the way through phase one is because of the market dominance of bitcoin. And the bitcoin dominance has gone from about 40% in late 2023 to up around 52, 53% at the moment. And Bitcoin was up 155% last year. Burgs, we can't remember that like bitcoin continues to dominate. But as we go into phase two of a bull market, that's when altcoins start to take over. And if you can position, position yourselves accordingly before altcoins go Crazy. When the phase two arrives, that's where you can start to make a really good return.

Yeah, you go, absolutely, mate. And just look at the returns. Like bitcoin, if you've held it for a year, 130% returns, if you held it for a month, 17%, even a week, 17%. It's just absolutely incredible. And all those Ben and Bergs listeners, we're telling you, buy bitcoin for a while and congratulations, this is the reward. This is just the beginning of the beginning. Like Ben said, we're still in phase one. We haven't even reached phase two, where things get really, really insane.

Yeah. And, and the, and the things we're looking out for to make sure we know when things start to get really, really insane are things like, you know, app downloads, website traffic, Google, Google Trends, new on chain addresses. And we're not really starting to see that just yet. You know, maybe a bit of a pickup, but you know, fundamentally we know this is on chain because it's driven by institutions. And we're seeing this volume increase from the ETFs now another thing to just note that when the ETFs were announced, we had that bit of a pullback. We had bitcoin retrace, you know, 8 to 10%. And this was primarily driven through the grayscale bitcoin trust being sold off. Now, the grayscale bitcoin trust is or has been trading at a significant discount in, in recent months. And the real difference to understand that the grayscale bitcoin trust was a way that institutions could buy bitcoin, but it wasn't traded like an etf. An ETF is like a liquid asset that anyone can buy and sell. And that's where right now it's trading close to the spot of the bitcoin price because it's, it's very liquid. Anyone can buy and sell. But the grayscale bitcoin trust is like a fund. There's a limited number of shares that people can buy. And what this results in is a less liquid fund or asset where you start to get bigger spreads. So what basically happened as bitcoin was going down? More people were wanting to sell their shares of the grayscale bitcoin trust, but there were no buyers to buy them. So it was costing the people that were trying to sell their bitcoin even more because they had to sell their bitcoin at a lower price because no one would buy it. Right. Cause there's a limited number of people that can actually buy that by that fund. Now when the bitcoin fund from Grayscale converted into a bitcoin spot etf, that's when we started to see a bit of a sell off. And we can see this back on this chart here, we saw a big outflow for about a week or two of the grayscale bitcoin trust being sold off. And that was pent up selling demand of people that were tied up in that trust and they couldn't sell at the right price. They got rid of all of that bitcoin and now Bergs, there's only very little selling happening in the grayscale bitcoin trust. And as of about February 6th things have really taken, taken off in terms of price.

That's a beautiful chart. And since, yeah, let's look at January 26th up only, it's all positive like the selling pressure's gone. Even though GBTC is selling off still it's nothing compared to what all the other ETFs are scooping up.

Yeah, and we, we, we expect post bitcoin halving that the, the market will continue to grow. As with most bull markets or every bull market. So far it's happened the 12 to 18 months post Bitcoin halving has been the most profitable. And then that second phase of that period is when altcoin season starts to really go. So yeah, we, we are still midway through the first phase of this bitcoin, you know, bull market. But however, late in this year we do believe the altcoins will kick in. And it's why we're starting to accumulate altcoins and getting ourselves ready for that point in time which is going to be super exciting. Burgs, I mean alt season is always a fun time.

Old season's always nuts man. It's always like euphoria. I missed it, I'm chasing it. I've made lots of money. I couldn't sell gas. Fees are $8 million. It's a really, really exciting time. There's so much happening and look, we're not too far away from a bitcoin all time high. Like that was about 65, 66k USD if I remember correctly. And that is not far away at all. And when we hit that, that is when things really start to kick off. This is when, and I know things haven't kicked off yet because I get the message here and there like oh, I'd like this, I'd like that. These are from my friends and acquaintances that are already investing. But you know, when it's kicking off mate, when your Uber driver starts giving you tips or when you go to mate, you go out with your mates, you go to the pub and they pull out their phones and they're on some weird like pancake shibu inu bloody coin asking me about it and I'm like, bro, no, you shouldn't be doing that. Like those are the kind of signals where like things are starting to really kick off and get frothy, where everyone thinks they can make money with random coins because it's up only that's not too far away. And I'm very excited about that.

Well, that's when we could start to scale out of our positions. And for those that are listening, the pod, I hope that you have now positioned yourself correctly, you've done the strategy, you've done the work to take advantage of this. Because again, like we said the million times before, 90% of people in this market lose money because they start to come in late. And the ones that have been around, like all of you listening to the pod, are well positioned, have your assets and you can start to take advantage of the, the FOMO of the craziness of the chaos by getting out at the right time. And that's going to be the next big challenge we're all going to face.

That's the key and the measure of an investor is do you take profits? Like that is the hardest thing to do. And we've talked about Bitcoin. There's an etf, there's a halving, there's also the Ethereum ETF on the horizon as well, which I think will be another catalyst. And if we look at ETH, it's about 2,700 USD. 1 year return on ETH, 76%, 1 month return on ETH, 5%, 7 day return, 15%. Like these numbers are just, they're all positive, they're all crazy numbers. And mate, this, I cannot wait for this at all. Like it's just so exciting to wake up and just see that on your phone and know that things are playing out like it is. Just, it's beautiful, man.

The collector Shift app made the dashboard looks a lot, a lot healthier than recent months, that's for sure.

Oh, that's it, mate. I've been, been dog food and using the app myself and it's my go to app. Got all, got all my stuff in there and it's just easy and I love like seeing it.

Oh, Ben, One thing I just wanted to add, mate, just in terms of alt season and I think this is what's going to spur the price up? You know, this is big sleeping giant bergs, this big sleeping giant that has been around forever, mate, and yet no one's talking about it because it's just not moving in price. But yet people forget that he's the backbone of alt season and that's Bitcoin's closest friend, Ethereum.

Mate.

Ethereum has a couple of big things that are coming up that I just continue to see no one talking about. First of all, the Den can't upgrade, he said for March 13. We're about a month away. One of the biggest upgrades again coming for for Ethereum. The Testnet deployment went smoothly on February 7 and people are super excited about this because the scalability of layer twos are going to be bananas. You know, for example, main optimism, arbitrum 1 base, et cetera. But then also burks. Ethereum has been really underperforming and one of the biggest reasons for that was that Celsius was just, just barreling in dumping so much eth, you know, in their bankruptcy case. So they basically had about $1 billion worth of Ethereum that they had staked that they were unstaking and selling to exchanges to basically sell on the spot market. So these guys were just like just shoveling eth onto the, onto the market and.

And just basically selling it all off. So once this ceiling finishes, we've got the Den can upgrade and then we've also got the Ethereum ETF watch also on the horizon coming up in the deadline, sort of March onwards, there's some really good positive things happening in ETH that I think are going to spur more of these altcoins to start to rally in the coming months.

Absolutely, mate. And our mate, good old Sassel, he's like, the way I see it, the Bitcoin ETFs have surprised to the upside with how much money they've taken in and how the BCC price has bounced back so strongly after a sell the news event. This was two days ago. If only there was another crypto asset that is getting a spot ETF this year that you could bet on. He's like.

Isn'T it just sum it up nicely. And he's got some beautiful threads as well on things that are happening in eighth. Quite a lot of what you just covered then where the ecosystem is going and people just don't focus on it, they sleep on the next thing and they're looking for the next 100x or millionx. When you've got.

Really de risk things that.

People have a way of thinking about that generally drives their psychology. So it ends up playing out just happy. I hold both of those, man. Like I'm so happy.

We're an exciting time and I'm just so excited for all the Benneberg's listeners that have been listening for us for so long harping on about why, you know, bitcoin and you know, the, the broader crypto market was going to rally this year and finally we've seen that happen. But yet, you know, we're still not seeing that retail interest. And I think that once that starts to really come to fruition, we're going to start to see really awesome results. And bergs, we're also seeing, you know, the Benneberg's listenership grow in parallel with the bitcoin price. So, you know, we've just ticked over where are we ticked over 22 and a half thousand all time downloads, which is just bananas. So we wanted to just have a huge thank you to everyone that's tuning into the pod each and every week. We love it.

Absolutely. Thanks so much for listening and oh, we should do a chart. We should chart like our listens with the bitcoin price and see how well it correlates, mate.

Yeah, we'll overlay the chart and see how we go. Amazing guys. Thank you so much. Bring on the bull market. We hope you're prepared. If you're not, make sure you book in a strategy call with us. You can just hit the link below. 15 minutes. We're going to help you out, make sure in the right path, make sure you don't screw this cycle up and wait another four years. We really want to help you out so you can over there and check it out and we'll see you on the next episode.

Thanks champions.