152. Crypto is down, this is your opportunity. Don’t F**k this up!

Do some independent thinking for the things that matter. Like you work your whole life for money, right? At least understand how money is made, where it's going and how you can make more of it and invest. I think that's just the basics that people need to learn.

100 and that. Like if you're holding cash in your bank, you're losing, I think at least 10%, you know, per year. Real, real, true inflation, you know, so gold, gold has always been seen as this hedge against inflation, right? Gold's only up 7 to 10% year to date in US dollar terms. Only up 11% in the last four or five years in US dollar terms. You know, not even gold is outpacing inflation, which is crazy, right? So bitcoin, although volatile, is right now one of the only very few things that I'd consider a genuine hedge against the debasement of currency.

Welcome back to another episode of the Bennetbergs Podcast. I'm Ben, your favorite high school dropout and founder of Collective Shift. Alongside me as Bergs, your favorite MBA and CEO of Collective Shift. Join us as we bring you world class crypto research and strategies to help you dominate this crypto bull market as well as a behind the scenes view of us scanning a fully remote subscription research business here in Australia. If you like the podcast, we'd love you to leave a subscribe or share with a friend. That's how we grow the podcast each and every week without advertising coming to you in your ears. Because today burgs we've got the bitcoin halving has just surpassed in the latest block about a half an hour ago. We're up to the new reward of I'm going to stuff it up. What's the new reward?

3.125 Bitcoin. So we've gone from about 400k USD to 200k USD per block and that.

Happened as a recording about 30 minutes ago which is super exciting. So you can see this live on the blockchain, which is super cool. You can basically see when the block transferred from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC and basically bergs. Now all the miners are going to.

Get half the revenue sucked in lads.

Bad for business.

This is interesting where you know things are going to have to adjust where miners may not be profitable now and they were profitable 40 minutes ago and now it's just halved. So hey, it's got to build an inflation or difficulty needs to adjust. Miners will come in or they'll leave. There's A lot of incentives at play here.

What's so fascinating is that we did some data digging recently into like, you know, bitcoin versus gold versus inflation. And we're in this period at the moment. We're in a bit of a correction. We're up, you know, 20, 30% correction and getting a lot of messages about, you know, what's going on. Wow. Our portfolio is down. Wow. Like, you know, shit is crypto over all this sort of stuff. I think there's a couple of things to unpick here. One is that altcoins are down 40 or 50% from all time highs. I think Solana is probably down 50% from its all time highs. For example, you know, recently it's down to $140. At the time of recording it got as high as when we get to, yeah, $200. So, you know, you're sort of talking down 30, 40% from all time highs. If you're holding majority altcoins in your portfolio, of course your portfolio is going to be hurt in the short term. That's why we always talk about holding majority BTC and eth. Nothing to panic about. Nothing fundamentally has changed. This is very normal, these corrections in bull markets. In fact, the last bull market we had, and I've spoken this, you know, a number of times before, we actually had 13, 10 plus corrections. In the last bull market, you know, some corrections were down to 30 or 40%. It's very normal. Things get very frothy, they get very euphoric. A lot of people are longing the top of the cycle, top of the market and they need to get washed out. We need to have a reset. We had six continuous green months of bitcoin in a row, which is pretty much unheard of and it needs to be flushed out. And these are great buying opportunities. We've also got the war going on, which is absolutely awful. What's, what's happening. But ultimately that will affect bitcoin prices and fundamentally why, you know, we had this question, the platinum group recently, like why does bitcoin go down when there's, you know, a war going on? Well, I mean ultimately there's a lot of uncertainty and markets don't like uncertainty. But, but also there's a, there's a, there's a, I guess there's a. Not a warning, but there's a concern that like if, if the war continue, continues on, it could drive up oil prices and with higher oil oil prices it could drive cost of living up and inflation goes up. And then, you know, we have the, the US maybe like not cut rates, they might increase rates, they might keep them as is, which means it's harder to get money, which means money doesn't find risk on assets like Bitcoin. So it's like this domino effect of, you know, what's happening on the ground in real, in real life and then how the flow and effect, you know, goes down, right down to bitcoin. But fundamentally burgs, nothing's changed.

We get this question all the time and people that have come into the market recently or our members will be like, hey, what's your take on what's happening? And the entire chain that you just explained there, that domino effect just kick off with the first thing where I think it might have been Israel and Iran fired some rockets at each other and they're like, oh no, the war's kicking off. Think about that for a moment. Let that marinate that statement. What you're envisioning, envisaging in your head what's actually happening, what kind of state you're in. You're like, you feel, oh no, you know, there's war, things are escalating, I'm anxious, I'm nervous, oh no, what's the next thing that's going to happen? And you start to go and the next thing and the next thing. And you apply that kind of negative mindset to everything down the chain to try and come to a future outcome. And really that what we're talking about is why has bitcoin gone down? It is because there are humans behind it, humans investing in it, and humans having that mindset that can potentially be, know negative and be like, no, I need to hold onto this money because everything's going to zero. I need money to survive. I need to be able to look after my family. And you're spot on when you say fundamentally with Bitcoin, nothing has changed, nothing has changed at all. You need to zoom out. And even with what you mentioned earlier with Solana, people like, it's down 40% from, you know, 200 bucks. Let's just take a longer term view. Let's look at a year ago. A year ago Solana was $20. $20, it hit 200 and now it's 140. You're up 7x from just one year. Even more if you go back further, right? So whenever you've got these thoughts and whenever you're thinking about, oh no, this has happened, that has happened, why has it happened? If there's any fundamental change in the network or cryptocurrency or whatever, you will hear about it, we will tell you about it. If you haven't heard that nothing has changed. Plus on, no harm, no foul, just keep going.

Yeah, people look so short term burks. And I think, you know, in crypto people are quick to forget. And also people come in at different times in the market. Like, you know, I've seen a lot of newbies and a lot of people that have bought recently panicking because they haven't sort of seen this sort of stuff before. You know, ultimately this is a very normal for crypto and, you know, bitcoin, you know, we just went past this bitcoin halving. If we look four years ago to the last Bitcoin halving. Bitcoin's up 800% since the last Bitcoin halving. It's already up 40% this year, you know, and ultimately, like just looking at bitcoin alone, bitcoin continues to, to push ahead as this is a hedge against inflation. And yes, it didn't quite play out that way in Covid, but ultimately we're still very early in, in, in the development of the asset. And at the end of the day, this is just humans trading this thing. Like, you need to have enough people believe that it actually is that for it to happen.

And bitcoin's outperformed. Probably what most people consider is the hedge against inflation being gold. Right. Like, what's the inflation at the moment? But I mean, the math, the, the equation they come up for, inflation's just.

Apparently In Australia, it's 4.1%. Yeah. Yeah.

That's why my coffee.

It's more like 20.

That's why my coffee costs 6.50 because it's up 4% from last year.

That's why my petrol is 2.20.

Yeah.

And my health insurance has gone up like $1,000 this month.

Exactly, man. That, that's why you need at least, you know, $500,000 deposit to buy a minimum $1 million property, you know, in Melbourne.

It is ridiculous, mate. Like, it's property's going up like 20 grand plus a week, mate. It's crazy.

But it's only 4%, mate.

Only 4%. Don't stress 4%.

We need to, we need to trust the government, man, because we don't trust them, we're in trouble. Oh, my God.

I saw this, this perfect meme and it was in the context of bitcoin, but it could be in the context of anything. A guy and a girl just walking down the street holding hands. And they're like, oh, I don't want to learn about bitcoin. It's too hard. And she's like, yeah, thinking's hard. And he's like, yeah, we'll just trust the government. She's like, okay. And they just keep walking.

Is there just life, though?

Oh, bro, it is true. You need to choose where you put your cognitive power and what you learn about, but at least do some independent thinking for the things that matter. Like, you work your whole life for money, right? At least understand how money is made, where it's going, and how you can make more of it and invest. I think that's just the basics that people need to learn.

100% and, and that, like, if you're holding cash in your bank, you're losing, I think, at least 10%, you know, per year. Real, real, true inflation, you know, so gold. Gold has always been seen as this hedge against inflation, right? Gold's only up 7 to 10% year to date in US dollar terms. Only up 11% in the last four or five years in US dollar terms. You know, not even gold is outpacing inflation, which is crazy, right? So bitcoin, although volatile, is right now one of the only very few things that I'd consider a genuine hedge against the debasement of currency. And, you know, you look at MicroStrategy, for example, you know, their. Their stock has been flat for 10 years. Like, literally did nothing for 10 years. He starts buying massive amounts of Bitcoin, and this stock has just exploded in price.

I listened to Michael Salah talk about this, and he said it took a lot of education of his to his company, to his board. And he said, look, we're a small kind of software company. We can continue the way we are. We're on a downward trend. And eventually within the next 10 years, we won't exist. We'll peter out. Or we can take this huge bet if we know we're going to die anyway and we. We're going to get out, competed by, by bigger software companies. We'll take this bet. It's an asymmetric bet. And this is what we can do. You can use the free cash flow. We have to buy bitcoin, put it in our treasury, become a bitcoin company, and then the operating expenses for the company can buy more bitcoin. We can get sophisticated in the way that we actually borrow money and issue debt, and we can accrue more bitcoin on our balance sheet at a very cheap rate. And it's very sophisticated. What he's done, but it has bloody worked. And it is absolutely incredible.

And he hasn't just been buying in the bull market like this guy's been buying and was underwater for a long time. And I think this is a lesson that, you know, we continue to try and promote and talk about is the fact that human psychology is the thing that you need to understand because your own brain is sometimes the person you got to fight against. Like, the best buying opportunities for bitcoin and crypto, in my opinion. And when I've made the best trades have been when it has felt the worst time to buy. I remember back, I can't remember exactly what year it was, but it was around covert. When bitcoin plummeted to 6,000 US and it was sickening. I was like, oh, my goodness. Like, this thing is like, it is dead, right? You know, God. No one was talking about it. Like, zero people on Twitter. Zero people. Just even interest in crypto. And then guess what? It went down to three and a half thousand. It went down another 40%. And then that was like the ultimate, like, knife into the wound. But being in the space for, for the. For as long as I have been in, the conviction that we had was a generational buying opportunity. And I literally put everything I had into. Into bitcoin at that time. And, you know, not to say I had houses that I was selling. You know, I didn't have a lot of money at that time, but I was like, putting as much as I could in. Because when 90 or 95% of the market is on one side, it's usually the other side that you need to take to get the asymmetric returns. And that's what's happening right now. People are panicking, people are scared, people are worrying because they don't know what they're doing. A guy messaged me the other day that it was actually a mate of mine, right, that I've known for a little while that I didn't know this, told me that he lost $40,000 recently because he bought into the market. The market retraced, had a pullback, he panicked, he sold, and then the market bounced and pumped back higher than it was before. And he's lost 40K. I'm like, what are you doing?

So this is crazy. I've had these messages as well.

A business owner guy, we both know, he's put. Put some money into bitcoin recently. And he's like, oh, man. What's your take on what's happening now? Because bitcoin Was down, I don't know, 15, 20%. And I'm like, bro, it's a gift from the gods, just accumulate. And he was like, man, I should have sold when I was 30% up. I'm like, no, mate, no, this is not a traditional market. We're not going for 30% here. No, we're going for. We're going for multiples here. We're going for generations here.

Is that funny that you get the messages of, like, what do you think? Like, what's going on? It's like, nothing. Play on, Buy More. It's like nothing's happening. Like, this is like, why there's literally nothing to talk about.

Yeah, exactly. It's like, keep calm, carry on, mate. What about the CEO of Telegram? What a lad. How he's like, I want to stay free. Got like 99% of his wealth in bitcoin, so I think he might have a house and that's it. So he can just travel the world, do what he wants to do, keep his life simple. And I start to think about this. So I've got a primary place of residence, I've got superannuation shares, crypto. The next investment I have is maybe an investment property. But even now, like, I can borrow a lot for investment property, which is good. But I'm like, man, do I want that headache? Things are getting expensive. Do I want to have to look after that thing? The best opportunity for me right now where it balances out gains plus lack of, you know, I don't have to look after something, is buying bitcoin. I wouldn't put my money anywhere else. And honestly, the thing you were talking about before, where we think bitcoin is expensive, I've felt that up until probably a couple of months ago, where even If Bitcoin is 70K and it goes down to 60, like, man, 60. So expensive. I remember when it was 2. But Bitcoin is always going to feel expensive no matter when you buy. And it doesn't matter because you're buying the best asset and it is going to dwarf these prices in the future.

I'll tell you what's exciting.

What's.

His cost of living is expensive.

Oh, bro, mate, you don't even have, like a family or pay rates or do any of that. You wait till you have all of that, mate. You're going to be crippled.

So, guys, I literally called up Bergs other day. I was like, what the actual is going on? Like, I paid so many bills so much, like, all this sort of stuff looked back and I was like, what the hell just happened? I just dropped like 10 grand on just like life.

Yeah.

And call out burgs is like, yeah, mate, guess what? Why didn't you get a family? Why did you have kids? Why didn't you have a mortgage?

That's like, you're like, I just dropped 10K. And I'm like, what'd you buy? And you're like, oh, I just existed.

Life like nothing, bro. It is so crazy. And yeah, so things are getting more and more expensive. So the reality is that you need to invest, you need to make more money rather than just relying on your income from your job. Like that is what the top 40% of people in terms of wealth do and the bottom 60% don't do. And that is the separator where they put their money in. They let it compound over time. And just back to what I was saying about having a retracement. In any asset market, if the fundamentals of the asset haven't changed and the price of that asset has gone down, that is a gift like you should be accumulating. And it comes back to a quote. And I'm going to read this quote. It's one of my favorite quotes. It's what I've matched together from Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. Think about what you have been putting off. Dead time is revived when we use it as an opportunity to do what we've long needed to do. Remember how long you have been putting this off? How many times you have been given a period of grace by the gods and not used it. If you do not use it to clear away your clouds, it will be gone and you will be gone and the opportunity will not return. And I even apply this to investing where I might. How many opportunities? Like I've been in crypto since 2017. How many opportunities am I going to be given to accumulate at an amazing price? This bear, this pool market hasn't even kicked off. Ben, amazing things are going to happen here. A lot of people are going to come in, a lot of money is going to be made. How many times do you get this opportunity?

Yeah, it's a great point and I think it's important to remember where we are in the cycle and like, you know, knowing where you know, because I know a lot of our listeners hold altcoins. We hold all coins and yes, they're down, you know, quite considerable from their all time highs. We're still probably a long way away from altcoin season. Like the retail interest is not quite there. You know, altcoin season really comes in like the later phases of a bull market, which I think is probably at least 6 to 12 months away. You know, money tends to rotate from bitcoin down as they start to take profits. Like if we look at the MVRV ratio, which is one that we like to look at, a click to shift, which is the market value to realize value ratio. This is basically a chart that, that shows you the amount of unrealized profit bitcoin holders are in or unrealized losses. It's a great signal for tops and bottoms. And this is what really helped us buy bitcoin when it was at 16,000 in December of 2022, near the bottom. We're probably at the moment in terms of like where we are in a bull market, halfway, I would say, versus halfway through a bull market, versus previous cycles of when bitcoin has started to take profits. And what tends to happen is when this ratio gets to a certain point above sort of 3.3, 3.4, which is hard for listeners to see, but basically once the price of bitcoin gets to a certain point where there's a lot of people in unrealized profits, they start to take profits and then money rotates down into altcoins, right? And that's how altcoins start to grow. Usually at the back end of a cycle, they'll start to go really chaotic. Mania in the air, people quitting their jobs, plumbers becoming crypto traders. Everyone's just going, oh my God, we're going to be millionaires. That is the time to get the hell out. We're nowhere near that yet. And I think that's really important to not overleverage yourself in altcoins too early because you will bleed to the downside during these corrections. So if you do have hold altcoins, either add to your positions or just hold. Don't panic, the market will return. But we need to see a few more things tick off. And I think we're going to see a bit of choppiness sideways for the next little while. Why we've got the uncertainty in the Middle east while the, the central bank at the moment is still not like in any sort of quantitative easing. Like we're not seeing lots of money being printed to come into bitcoin. The ETF demand is there, but it has slowed down. Like we, I think we're going to be in this. And now the bitcoin haring event has done and done and done and gone. We're now the market will Be looking for the next thing to be excited about. And ultimately there's not that much to be excited about in the short term. So I would expect the market to probably perform relatively poorly in the short term. And that's a good reason just to chill out. Everything's gonna be okay. Add to your positions if you have cash on the sidelines, but just don't panic.

Yeah, that's right. The next thing is probably what Ethereum ETF in May.

Yeah, yeah.

To look forward that it's the next event. Just keep calm, carry on. It's not a massive thing like a lot of people get. Like you get rewarded for a couple of things in crypto. One is.

Diamond hands, you get rewarded for that. And the other one is being able to stomach the pain of investing and not kind of selling it is. It is another aspect of having diamond hands. But if you can buy good quality tokens and you can hold them for any period of time until you reach your goal, you will be rewarded. The people that are rewarded are the ones that panic sell. Yeah, and we're nowhere near that. We're nowhere near that in this cycle, mate. Keep calm and carry on.

100%. Man, how I'm playing this, folks. For those that are interested, basically we'll continue to add to my bitcoin position continuously like, like I normally do and I will do forever. Won't be making any large investments. We made a pretty big ETH investment, about 3,3100 in the last correction. If we see a deeper correction like bitcoin going into, into the 50 thousands, like 55,000. 50,000. And Eth goes to like let say 2500, 2300. I think that's going to be a magical buying opportunity. It will be looked to go pretty heavy if we go down to those levels.

Is that a backup the truck scenario?

Mate, that's, that's sort of, you know, pick up the, pick up the keys, dump all the cash you've got and sell the.

Sell the Tesla, buy bitcoin, get rid.

Of the mattress, back on the floor, back on the ramen noodles, everything back in the market.

So good, mate. So good. And yeah, I just want to touch on gold. I want to rip on Peter Schiff for a little bit. It's a little prick. So all the gold bugs everyone that followed Peter Schiff. Mate, this guy's going on. He got absolutely trounced in this interview by. I forget the lady's name, but she was just amazing. She was so factual. Didn't do any personal attacks, nothing like that Peter Schiff comes in, he's like, gold's up 28 bucks. This, that I'm like, 28 bucks is like 0.6%. You've got a stat here. Like, what is it? Gold has been up 11% in the last four years.

Yeah.

That hasn't even beaten inflation and got a thing. Oh, the guy like the way that he's like, bitcoin is down this month and he's using like intraday percentages to try and validate his point of view. If you look at any decent metric, gold has been. Bitcoin's been. Gold has been trounced by bitcoin.

Right.

And bitcoin is just a better gold. It is just one of those amazing assets. It is. It is so crazy. So, mate, there's not much out there that is actually beating inflation. What's crazy is the stock market was returning around, let's say, 10%. What's wild is, first of all, that's not beating inflation because it's more than 10%. Even if we look at the numbers. So you have 10%. If it's under a year, you've got 10% more. Great. But then you have to pay capital gains on that 10%, which reduces it further. You're not even beating inflation and you've had to pay tax. So although the number you have has gone up, your real purchasing power, even though you're investing, has gone down.

Is that a kick in the guts?

Mate, mate, you made 10%. Oh, you want to sell it? Give us 50% of your gains. So now you're only at 5%. This is not be any inflation. So you're still down.

Bro, it hurts so bad. It hurts so bad. And this is the thing. Like, a lot of, like, my personal wealth has gone up, but the things I can buy.

No, that's so true. It's like property, man. It's like, oh, that's, you know, you. You bought. And to be fair, properties outpace inflation. But if you want to go buy or sell that house to buy a better house, well, guess what, all the other houses have gone up too.

It's not like, yeah, like if. If you had enough money in your bank to buy a house six months ago, you no longer had that money, even if you invested that money in something else to buy that house, because property prices have just outpaced everything. It is so crazy.

Oh, dear. The world, eh?

The world. But yeah, this is it. So this is why we go towards an asset class that has really good returns. So we can leapfrog all this bullshit. You're not caught in that. Have some will of having to work, go to uni for four years, then work for 40 years and then probably not even have a retirement because the government's going to dip into your super. Like you've got to protect your own neck and invest in decent things that have a decent return.

Yeah, I agree. Awesome. Right up, folks. We might wrap it up there. Happy bitcoin halving day at time of recording. Hopefully that's been helpful to give you a bit of an insight of where we're seeing the market go, where we're putting our money to beat inflation, where we're not putting it, that is gold. And.

Not to say gold's not a good investment, just saying that because outperforming it and. And yeah, what's going to be happening in the next few months. So hopefully that's been helpful. We'd love for you to share it with a friend if you have anyone you think would find this episode valuable. It's how we grow the podcast and we'd really appreciate you helping us out and we'll see you on the next episode.

Thanks, champions.