141. Bitcoin Breaks ATH $100,000 AUD, Our Strategy

Bitcoin hit an all time high in Australian dollar.

Love it guys. We just need to.

Bitcoin is the exit strategy. It's where you hold your wealth.

Welcome back to another episode of the Ben and Bergs podcast. I'm Ben, your favorite high school dropout and founder of Collective Shift alongside Ms. Bergs, your favorite MBA and COO of Collective Shift. Join us as we bring you world class crypto research and strategies to help you dominate this crypto pool market. As well as a behind the scenes view of us scaling a fully remote subscription research business here in Australia and and burgs. What a time to be alive, mate. Bitcoin, the mother asset, the one we've been holding and hoping for so long, has nearly broken through all time highs. It has in Australia. $100,000. It got to 103,000. Had a bit of a pullback at the time of recording. We touched the USD all time high burgs. We feathered it, we touched it. We came and had a look. We touched it at massive resistance. We dumped like 8% but we touched it. We touched it. So in this episode we're going to be walking through what's going on in the markets, how you should be playing it, how we're playing it, why there's been a retracement right now, where we could be going and just generally just some market data to help you navigate this next little period. But yeah, man, what a time to be alive, man.

I'm so happy like, you know, for those that have been holding, those that have been listening for a while, you know, you're in a bear market, you're buying Bitcoin, 16k, 20k, 30k, 40k. And you're thinking, is this really gonna happen? Is it gonna be a thing?

The harvest comes, opportunity cost.

Yeah. Everyone buy property. Yeah. Everyone thinks I'm an idiot.

Yeah.

You know, my parents think I'm a loser.

Yeah.

My wife wants to disown me because I bought this magic Internet money. And now it's the sweet, sweet moment for the believers. Pretty much everyone is in profit that has bought.

Yeah, right. Actually it's funny you say that. I've been seeing this thing. Everyone's in profit. The reality is actually no, that's not right. Because so many people fuck it up. They buy and sell, they try and time the market. They're trading, they're getting into altcoins. Like the reality is probably not many people are actually up.

Yeah. Let me preface that with if you've bought bitcoin at any point in time and not sold, you are now in profit. But if you've been dabbling, if you've been trading, you've been getting in and out, you probably haven't made money.

Yeah, man, it's, it's been a bit of a wild ride. So bitcoin hit an all time high in Australian dollar terms, or as checkmate will call it, the Australian pesos, the Pacific peso.

Love it.

So this is, and the reason for this is bitcoin priced in USD because Australia's gone down so much against pretty much every other currency. It's now $1.54 USD. So if you're holding bitcoin you get that appreciation as well in USD terms, which is great.

So the Australian dollar just continues to decline. It's one of the reasons why long term we have so much conviction in bitcoin having, you know, our own capital in the business's balance sheet on bitcoin because it's just, it's, it's a diversification against one, inflation, but two, you know, other assets. So yeah, the Australian high, let's just.

Say it, let's say it like Michael Saylor, Bitcoin is the exit strategy.

What are you going to sell your crypto into Bitcoin?

Yeah, exactly.

So what's been driving this? We all know it's been the ETF demand. You know, as of yesterday we saw nearly a billion dollars just bought through the ETFs alone, which is unbelievable. There's a 10 times demand to supply right now in terms of the ETF institutional demand versus the Bitcoin miners. There's about 900 Bitcoin being mined each day. We're getting on average 9,000 Bitcoin being bought, which is unbelievable. And that's about to go to 450 bitcoin after the bitcoin.

Right, which is not that far away. It's next month, mate.

So one of the things that like I still see online is people waiting for a pullback. They're waiting for, you know, some, you know, technical analysis mumbo jumbo lines to shape up over this that's congruent with this and mining algorithms and some guys.

The old mate had a newsletter where the Harvey's coming and it's going to dump.

Oh like no, guys just, we just need to cut the, like there's just so much crap in this space and as the market goes up there's, there's so many new so called experts that have got this fandangle indicator that's going to give you the exact Time to get in and out. Like it's, it's 99% bullshit, right? If anyone's got a magic indicator or a magic way to know exactly when to get in and out, I guarantee it, it's not going to be given out to all of us on some YouTube channel.

Look at the classic example Michael Seller. He's bought every single top, continues to buy the top, because the top keeps going up, right?

And that's all that matters. So ultimately, the more complex your strategy, the harder it is to make money. Simplify it down. Buy good assets and hold for a long period of time. That's what we've been saying and harping on. Don't try and time the markets. Don't try and buy in and buy out. Now, this correction right now, you know, happening around the bitcoin halving event, this is what happened back in 2020. We had a. We had a retracement about 15, 20%. It usually happens leading up to the bitcoin halving. We have a retracement, a consolidation period, and then a big move to the upside. People have been asking me, Ben, should we now sell our crypto buy back in? Okay, well, let's look at that. Let's. Let's look at you trying to time the market. What are the upsides? Okay, you sell exactly at the right time and you buy back in exactly the right time, which, by the never happens. Which, by the way, is not gonna happen. You may get an extra 10, 15, 20%, maybe. What are the downsides? You sell too early, it rips the upside. Or you sell and never get back in the right time, and you'll move. You're missing out on 10, 20, 30% compounded as that goes up. So the upside is you make 10 or 15%. The downside is you miss out on massive gains because you don't get back into the right time, or you sell too early, and then you're in the same position.

And when you're selling, do you have everything set up? Can you get in? Can you get out? Will there be a liquidity issue? What makes you think you're in the 0.005% that will get it right? What is special about you?

This is it burgs, guys. This is a market. Who is on the other side of the screen? Do you think you're special enough, smart enough, have the quant trading, the algorithms and the capital to beat these massive quant funds and hedge funds? If you think you're that special, go for it. Yeah, but I Can tell you right now, I am not, you are, neither am I, none of us are.

And we, we lost money and we got the lesson to realize that we aren't because everyone thinks they are.

Everyone, everyone's done this, we've tried to do it right and we're just sharing this from experience. Guys.

The number one goal of you in this bull market, actually there's two goals. One is to don't fuck it up in terms of don't over trade and don't try and time the market. And two, don't wet the bed in terms of you're making so much money and you sell too early. That's like the ultimate goal, it's just not fuck it up. So we're going to be trying to help you guide through that and that's what we do with our collective platform. That's what we're here to do. But by looking at fundamental analysis and sentiment analysis to figure out when we get near the top and when we start getting near the top burgs, we start to dollar cost average out, we start to sell some of our positions in our short term bag, we might be rotating them into altcoins, into bitcoin. We've got our long term holdings, we're probably not going to be touching those. But ultimately we're trying to use the growth of this market over the next 6, 12, 18 months because the retailer arriving, if not already here now to really grow our overall bitcoin position, our overall fiat position and not try and make these 10, 15% moves. That's not why we're in crypto for you. Don't take all the risk to make 10 or 15%.

Exactly. And even in the stock market it was something like one day per year was responsible for 50% of the gains that year. You need to make sure you're in for that day. If you want to trade, if you want to muck around, think you're the king, great, great. Take a very small percent of your portfolio and do that. But with your other stuff, do not miss this. We all know this opportunity is here. It is in front of us, it is unfolding right now. The opportunity is there. Don't get so fancy, don't try and get right at the top, don't try and like sell right there and then buy back right at the bottom. Get that nice chunk in the middle, start putting your money in, that's great. And then don't piss the bed too early and get scared and sell. Just hold back for a little bit. The opportunity is there and it's going to play out. We'll keep you apprised of where we're actually at and the actions that we're actually taking.

It's good points burgs and we're now heading into phase two. So phase two of the bull market is when predominantly bitcoin rotates its capital into Ethereum and then into large caps and then into Alt season. So primarily we're getting a lot of attention on bitcoin at the moment, which has been pushed through the etf. But we're now starting to see that Altcoin and Ethereum moves coming through the retail investors. Ethereum's at, what, 60% in the last month, I think Bergs.

Yeah, it's incred.

It's had a huge run. We've been talking about this on the podcast that with the upgrade coming with the Den can upgrade. Ethereum has sort of been living in bitcoin shadow for the last sort of 6 to 12 months. I believe Ethereum is going to have a really good run into Q2 as well, as well as the layer twos. I'm personally holding Polygon and I think it's a good sector to be looking at.

Yep, I'm holding Arbitrum.

Yeah.

And look, we know this is playing out. We've now seen yesterday for the first day, the news is doing the advertising for Collective Shift, mate. They've come up and they go like, bitcoin has cracked 100 grand. We're here. It's across mainstream media. That's what we know. We know the halving is coming up next month. We know there's going to be a result either way from the Ethereum etf. I personally think mc. I think Ethereum is going to MC Hammer. It is going to be amazing. And we know that they're. Well, we presume there's going to be a rotation into alts that we usually see with these cycles, because you have a lot of people, a lot of people that have bitcoin from the early days. Right. Or Ethereum. They've got tons and tons. They're not banked, they're not putting that into a bank. What are they going to do with that money? They want to buy the next shiny thing. They want more profits, they want to build that stack, they want to stay in that ecosystem. We've seen this play out time and time again. It's very rare. Someone will just come in, buy something and then cash out for Fiat.

Totally agree. And Ethereum's also turned deflationary recently. They're burning. I think they're deflation. I don't know what it is. It's like I can't remember exactly what percentage I have the chart, but the burning.

But it's impressive.

Yeah, it's like I thought it was 7%, don't quote me on that. But like the burning mechanism of Ethereum is they're reducing their supply.

So if we just look at the basic things of the upgrades that are happening with Ethereum, we look at the, you know, the TVL in L2s, we've now got L3s and we look at an ETF, let alone the 20 other things that I haven't mentioned. It is ultra bullish for that ecosystem.

Ultra bullish. We're getting the meme coins that have strongly outperformed as well. Like there's whiff hat there's been. That's been going hard.

One guy.

One guy bought a token that was called used car because it was funny. Right. And it went up 250%.

Nuts.

It is wild.

Yeah. Pepe has been pumping. The meme coins are back. Coinbase suffered an outage after traffic increased by more than 10 times their normal amount. I saw Coinspot today's on the number one app in Australia for finance downloads.

Coinbase is like, I think it was 80 something. Last time I checked it was like into oblivion. Like number 10 billion on the App Store. Then it's like 500, 200, 100. Now it's like 48.

And then. Yeah. With the Ethereum upgrade coming on around March 13, the layer 2 network is going to be an absolute highway for things like Arbitrum Optimism. These, these fees are going to be like reduced massively. Nearly 60 time reduction, 60 times reduction on fees for some of these layer twos, which is insane.

That's really good because like you get stung. I've seen a lot of posts on Twitter about how much gas fees are like bridging across to L2s, bridging back. The L2 fees themselves are relatively cheap. They're going to get reduced as well. It's going to be great.

It's going to be great. Now, Bergs, we won't be sharing on the podcast, guys, because as you know, fellow listeners and members out there, we only share this for members. We have made a degen play. Yo, we made a degen play. We're about to share that with members in the next coming days. We made an investment. It's something we're going to be holding for at least six months as part of our trust and Transparency. As you all know, trust and transparency is our number one goal at Collective Shift. This is a. It's a small cap token. It's in the layer 3 space. It reminds me burgs of 2018 gaming and metaverse which that's where I made most of my money on. Reminds me of this, of that back then. It's got all the, all the green flags token economics are good burning mechanism. They're on arbitrum, they've got an upcoming grant market cap small. I just introduced them to a big VC the other day which I think they're pretty excited about it. So overall Bergs, I'm pretty excited about this new investment. As always listeners, you know we can't share everything on the pod so if you want to become a member and you know, maybe try and make some money this cycle, head over to Collective Shift and sign up. We'll be sharing that in the next couple of days for members but and.

This is the balance you need to have. So you've got to have your BTC and E stack and you have to have a few alts. You need to know when to sell those and then you've got to have a couple of moonshots as well. You don't put much money in the moonshots but they're moonshots.

Yeah, great. It's one of those things. It's like this could easily go to zero.

Yes.

But. But also has a very small likelihood that achieves what it sets out to achieve. And if that does then the return on that's going to be ginormous.

Yeah. And this is the thing. Are you going to miss that 0.1% of your portfolio you put into moonshots? No, you're not.

Yeah.

But the upshot of that is if it doubles your portfolio that's impressive.

Yeah. So yeah as always you need to be super careful with these investments.

Yeah. Don't bet the farm on that. Is a silly thing to do.

Very silly is because we're going, we're going into a bull market team. So we, we know that traditionally we're going to have multiple 20 to 30% drawdowns as time of recording. We're down about 8% overnight. Very healthy. There was a lot of people longing the market right before all time highs like coming in and complete degenerating leverage longing the top of the market. Like this is the stupidity guys. This is like yeah this we, this is the stupidity of bull markets. People coming in not having a clue what they're doing. Leverage trading long in the market after six months of green, the fear and greedy, the fear and greed index was off the charts. Greed, we had 85 out of 100, which is hasn't been seen since the November 2020 bull market. We need to be careful in these times of fear, times of Greenbergs, because this is where we get that volatility.

Yeah. And it's not the end of the world. You're pushing through to territory that hasn't been trodden before by bitcoin. I think of it like a barbecue, right. You turn it on, it's absolutely roaring. You're cooking, cooking, cooking. That gas bottle is going to run out. What do you do? You duck down the shop, grab another gas bottle and starts cooking again. In that meantime things either go sideways or they go down. It's just market psychology, people taking profits and also, you know, fear of the unknown. And even like the most advanced traders would be like, they know that is a huge resistance level. You don't just bust through that. They're going to be shorting that, they're going to be making money. These things are okay.

They're okay. And for a lot of you that are just investors and sitting and holding like us, that we have analysis, we're building fundamentals, it's just something you just sit and hold through. You weather the storm, you weather the drawdowns. This is crypto. This is the reason why you can make money because it is hard. Overnight you'll lose 10%, overnight you'll lose 30%. This is the game that we play. You've just done a fuck. You've just got to not fuck it up. That's, that's the ultimate thing.

It's the hardest thing to do.

Yeah.

Easiest thing to say, hardest thing to.

Do now in terms of the sort of next, next couple of months I expect some volatility and further retracements around the bitcoin halving. We're only a few weeks away now, Bergs, from that sort of early April date of the bitcoin halving. We're, we may have another sell off at the time of the bitcoin halving. But ultimately, fundamentally the peak of a bull market historically has been 12 to 18 months after the bitcoin halving event. Which puts us somewhere between early to mid next year being the potential peak of this bull market that may have been brought forward because of how fast we've run up. But we're going to be in uncharted waters here. Bergs in all time, high territory, uncharted waters as Our money rotates from BTC down. You know, who knows how crazy the altcoin market could get. As well as. We haven't seen this level of institutional buying of bitcoin at any level before. Like, the inflows from these ETFs are unbelievable, right? And then you've still got, you know, you've still got microstrategy coming out and, and, and buying like, you know, and taking loans out to buy more btc.

It's so crazy. So let me ask you this, what is it going to be like when Bitcoin hits 100,000 USD?

I think it's going to be pandemonium. We've been speaking about what is the narrative of this cycle. And my prediction was that I felt bitcoin was going to be the narrative of this cycle. We've had ICOs, we've had NFTs, we've had AI, we've had all of this sort of stuff. But the reality is there's a US election, inflation's rampant around the world, there's two massive wars going on, there's a global.

Sort of crisis in terms of cost of living. You know, people don't have the money to punt on these old coins. What they do have though is a way out where they're seeing an asset that's been around for 15 years, that's up 200% in the last 12 months. That is a limited supply asset. The more people are buying that now, global institutions are now recommending they hold Bitcoin like BlackRock in their, in their, in their, in their portfolio. Bitcoin is potentially a way out for them. And that is what I'm seeing. People now get into the market going for things like bitcoin and then we'll find their way into altcoins.

Isn't it amazing where if you want to get ahead, you have to basically work and become an investor and manage those investments and now it's like you can just buy bitcoin.

That's what you need to do.

Just practice your craft and that's what we're doing.

Long term. I buy 30% of my salary I put into bitcoin each week.

Yeah, we've got people that get paid in bitcoin that work for us.

Yeah, yeah, just keep stacking bitcoin. I want to be holding that thing for 20, 30, 40 years. Bitcoin could honestly be, who knows where it could be in 20 or 30 years time.

Honestly, when you hear those things about like, bitcoin is going to be a million dollars a Coin. Fundamentally, we know that target and we know how bitcoin works and we know given time it's going to hit that number. Yeah, but it still sounds so absurd to me. Does it sound absurd to you?

It definitely sounds absurd. What does the world look like when bitcoin's a million dollars per bitcoin, but the reality is it's a finite supply asset that currently has 10 times the demand of what's actually there to buy. Yeah, like that. That is fundamentally only going one way. As long as people continue to use it and as long as the demand is still there and people still are looking for an alternative against other asset classes, which we are seeing at a ginormous level, that's going to be the case now. Is it going to be massive volatility between it? Of course people are going to be taking profits. People are going to be taking massive profits because they're going to be making so much money. But.

It'S a finite supply asset that's getting fine, even more finite every four years.

I saw this clip of Michael Sailor and he was like, bitcoin, he talks about what it is, but he says it's this new financial instrument that solves problems for companies, rich people and people that don't have much money at all. It solves the same problem for them. And bitcoin being the exit strategy. So let's say I have 10 Bitcoin, right. And I sell that into fiat. What do I do with that?

Fiat now what?

Exactly like Bitcoin is the exit strategy. It's where you hold your wealth. I'm coming around more and more to that idea. Like we're investors, we put money in to get money out.

But a decent amount of my stack I will either convert to Bitcoin or leave in Bitcoin. That's what my long term savings, unless I need to spend fiat.

That's what I mean. Like, I feel as though here in Australia, sold into the dream of getting a loan, getting a mortgage, buying a house, and then you're a slave to your mortgage for 30 years. You're paying 7% interest on a house that they own. So over the course of 30 years, you're probably paying double the amount that you've paid for the house, but it's gone up 50%. So you think you've done a good job, but you've actually paid 50% more because of the interest and the cash that you're saving. And having that cash, you haven't adjusted for inflation over 20 years.

Yeah, like, and houses do make sense because of some tax efficiency and because the bank will lend you a shitload of money so you get big leverage and it's for savings. That's why it makes sense. But when you get to a certain level, you're like, or if you don't want to own and you don't want property, you want to be free, you want to be able to travel, what's the asset you go to? And it is bitcoin.

Now you're right, because I'm going to plan on, buy property and diversify away from crypto at some point once I've really built and accumulated enough wealth in crypto. But the point being for I think a lot of people that can't afford a house that go and get a house, you know, where really they're just a slave to that versus something like, like bitcoin. It just makes so much sense. Now. What I'm seeing, Bergs is like there is a lot of greed in the market. People are fomoing in, they're throwing the kitchen sink at altcoins. I spoke to an investor recently that's got his whole superannuation SMSF into three altcoins and hoping that he's 70 years old and can pull off the Hail Mary, like that scares me a lot. And I really warn people, please do not throw the kitchen sink at these shitcoins.

Like, bro, I spoke to a very smart business owner, we're at like a seminar together and he's talking about crypto and he's put a decent amount of money and I'm like, cool man, what do you got? Tell me about it. And it's literally like all altcoins I've never heard of. And I'm like, okay, how much BTC and ETH do you have? Donuts? And I'm like, bro, we're not at that point in the cycle now. You're going to miss out and you've got something that's relatively de risked in crypto and you've gone extremely risky, like too early. Like, how do you monitor all these? And he tells me like how he monitors these things, how he wakes up, he does this, he triangulates and then makes a decision. I'm like, bro, you don't need to live your life like that. It's a lot simpler. Don't make it so gambling.

Like you're gambling your life savings on this stuff. Yeah, and, and you know, because we speak to, you know, even our platinum members, like we, with our platinum members, we really just work on looking at Having a simple strategy holding for, you know, a good period of time and getting out at the right time. Like, you don't need to over over complicated. This is where we say you don't, don't fuck it up. Like, don't go chasing stuff, rotating in and out, trying to get in and out, buying this, selling that time in the market. Like, the more complicated you make it, because I've been there, the harder it is to make money.

It is. And even, even to offload it, to manage it, to not get fished. Oh my God, it is so, so crazy.

Yeah, keep it simple.

Absolutely. Keep it simple. And let's talk a bit about how the business is going and the change that we've seen. So you're booked up for the next month for strategy calls. We've literally had to change the call to action on our website from book a strategy call because you can't book it to sign up. It's incredible.

It's not so, you know, we, we implemented these strategy calls to help people and basically what we do is we sort of walk through where they're at at the moment and then we sort of guide them through on a path of we can show them how we can help. Now I.

Or if we can't help, then we.

Put in the right direction. Exactly. There's a lot of people we can't help. Erg. So I speak to them like, yeah.

You know, some people just aren't a good fit. Or maybe they're really advanced.

Yeah.

Like they're beyond the stuff that we do and they've been in crypto for 10 years and it's. Maybe you need to be in discords. You know, you're on a different level.

So, yeah, booked up right now until early April, which is just bananas. Right. As of time, recording a lot of calls a day.

It is crazy.

We're doing like, yeah, I think I've got 40 or 50 calls in the next three weeks. Like, it's just bananas.

Yeah.

And that sort of volume is unheard of. March is looking like it's going to be our biggest month ever on record.

Oh, the first day we did just day one. We did an amazing amount of sales. It was absolutely incredible. And we're talking about this not to big note ourselves, but to give you the insider view of what a crypto business is experiencing as a data point in the wider crypto market.

Exactly.

Because customers are actually coming to us.

Which is, which is nuts. And we're, we're, we're, you know, obviously doing a lot to Help a lot of people and it's amazing but we're trying to scale our systems to help more people because we'd plan for this but I think it happened a lot sooner than what we anticipated.

It's interesting where it's like, yeah, we're ready already. I'll share it to you.

Literally overnight. So yeah, things are working, things are working great on that front. We've got some meetups happening so you know as this will be out after the event but as of today, tonight we're hosting a meetup in Perth which is awesome. We've got 30 or 40 people registered for that. If you're in Melbourne, we're hosting a meetup on 21 March that's 80% booked out. It's a free event but we've only got limited capacity. It's already at 80%. It's three weeks out. So if you're, if you can't. So two weeks out. So if you're interested, head over to our Twitter. We've got it there on, on, on our page. Yeah, Bergs, the bull market's back. It's exciting, lots of things happening. You're coming to Melbourne in a couple of weeks too.

I'll be there, catch up with all the Melbourne crew. It's going to be amazing. I've already been hit up a few times on Twitter.

Yeah, we can.

It's going to be an awesome, awesome time.

Yeah, amazing. So it's an exciting time to be in crypto. We need to start thinking about planning, strategizing, exiting. This is now really the time to start thinking about that. If you need help, you can join us over at Collective Shift. You can head over to our website, you can sign up, join us. I'm hosting the next strategy session in a couple of weeks where you can jump on board, see all my investments, how I'm playing the market. We take you through our 10 step crypto strategy process. So we help you create your own strategy thinking about exiting and ultimately burgs. Like just us sharing all of our experience to, to help people not fuck this up.

Absolutely. And we just did an episode with Trav Thomas so that was awesome. He is an amazing dude. He's a coach and an advisor to us and basically what he does for us, we do for people investing in crypto. Like he helps us out, we bounce things off him. He gives us all of the kind of knowledge and experience and tools to not fuck up our business and we do the exact, exact same thing for people in crypto.

Yeah, amazing. So if you can head to the link below, you can join up, head to the Collective site. We'd love to see you on board and we'll see you on the next episode.

Thanks. Championship.