CEO Minotaur Trading Systems on the Jibber with Jaber Podcast

I think it's to the point that no one wants to sell their Bitcoin because it's going up. Why would you sell it? But now we have a problem. Well, what's the problem? Well, the problem is, if you don't sell it, how do you realize anything from it? So this is where we come in. Say I've got 10 bitcoin. I want to generate some returns from it. So I might take one of those bitcoins. I'm going to take the risk of putting it on an exchange, but I'm going to use the algorithm that I've developed. Now, that algorithm will allow you to use that asset, Bitcoin, which is going up in value as collateral, to then trade with. So then what we're able to do is put it to work to keep it simply. We've got this asset now that becomes productive.

Costa, how do you want to start this? I mean, do you want to. Is there anything specific that you want to do?

Well, I've flown all the way from Australia and I'm in Dubai, so. So maybe we just start. How do we get here? Yeah, yeah.

So let's talk. I want history. I want how you got into it.

What we're actually doing right now is we develop algorithms. And the algorithms are built to trade bitcoin, mostly bitcoin futures. And I can go back to when I first started because everyone gets attracted to this industry originally because they hear the stories about people making a lot of money, but particularly in 2021, 2022, there was a huge run on the altcoins. Right? There were people that were literally, you could buy anything and it was just like going up 10x. I was in Australia at the time. I'd been raising capital for a managed fund, an equities fund in Australia. I'd done a lot of work before online. I had a company in Australia, too. My best friend is actually a stock broker.

Okay.

Me and him ran a company for about seven years that went really well. And as we were having success with this, we're investing in equities in the Australian stock market. And we did really well from that as well. Now he's gone on to run a managed fund. It's one of the biggest in Australia. He's a value investor, actually. So one of the things that I got from working alongside him and learning from him was, was. Was the value investing approach. This is like the Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett approach to investing, where you need to look at the fundamentals. You gotta look at cash flows and book Value. And that's how you buy a company. You wanna look at something that's priced not necessarily cheaply, but priced reasonably, but has good, you know, future potential. It's gonna make money in the future. It's got good management, good company. You know, the stock price is reasonable. Okay, I'm gonna buy this stock and it's gonna go up because the fundamentals are there to drive it up. Right at this time was the 2021, 2022 cycle. So I'll tie it all together. And then I had another friend who was buying a lot of crypto, and we just cashed out of some really big trades. This is like a staking protocol of an altcoin that was returning 8% every eight hours. Eight hours? Yeah. It was insane. And he was like, my friend has been running this for, like, six months, and he's making this insane amount of money. And mind you, I didn't know was the top of the cycle when I got in. And so I'm like, wow. You know, this is, like, amazing. Like, so I bought a bunch, and I'm talking, like, in Australian dollars. It was over six figures of this coin. And I'm watching it. It's going up every eight hours, right? By 8%, it was going up by 8% every eight hours. People can look it up. It was called Wonderland.

Wow.

This was a big catastrophe in the crypto space. It was just before the FTX blow up, but this was a huge one in defi. So you can look it up. The Wonderland.

It was the Fire Festival of.

Yeah, kind of. You know, I'm seeing it for the first time. I'd never bought any crypto before. And then these things are, like, just ticking over, ticking over. So what do I do? I buy more. And then there was another thing that I'd invested in. You know, it kind of had a similar yield structure to it. And these are called Ponzinomics. These. These coins are centralized, so someone's released them, they own them, they. They control the supply, and they can basically issue at will. So what they're doing is they set up something that sounds really promising. People then buy the coin, they stake it, and then they basically start a process of inflation by releasing more tokens, promising you more of that token. Right. What eventually happens is as it accrues, everyone's making money, but you're issuing at the same time, so, you know, it's.

Not really worth it.

Well, no, what happens, it gets to the top, is everyone signed to sell, and it is a Ponzi Scheme like the reality is it is. And you know, if you don't get out quick enough, you will be exit liquidity. So I was exit liquidity and I learned my lesson and invested more in bitcoin. Well, this was the thing, right? And then I started to think, I started to do my research a little bit more and I took responsibility. I go, look, I've aped into this, right? I saw Easy money, easy, easy, easy money. And I got sucked in. I got seduced by it. And I got what I deserve because I wasn't stupid enough to think that I understood the tokenomics and I understood that the last man standing was not going to walk away with anything, right? So, so maybe, maybe that was a karmic thing too, right?

That's why you should have got a couple of friends to do it, so you can put out knowing they're still standing in it.

This thing had over a billion dollars at the time. I think it had a billion dollars. It got nuked.

Classes of rug pull or not.

Yeah, I would say as a rug pull, they didn't, they didn't disappear with the funds. The funds, it's just got, it's just got disappeared. The funds disappeared because they kept printing money to get the new people. So it's like, it's kind of sounds.

Like the world we're living in today.

I know, yeah, that's the thing. So anyway, so then. But I start to go, there was some really cool stuff, right? And it got my attention, the ease of transaction, right? The fact that I could buy something online using. I was using Metamask Wallet at the time, and I was able to do these transactions at lightning speed. And it kind of felt like the stock market on steroids. I started thinking though, about this whole thing and bitcoin was now starting to come down. And then we had the FTX crash, bang. And then we had another one bang. And I was going, I actually see the potential here, but the potential is not in this other stuff because of the reasons I just said, the tokenomics, the supplies, the centralized nature of them, and then you've got bitcoin here on the side. And then I started to go, there's gotta be a way to trade this smartly, right? And there is. And that's one of the things that we've started working on, is this algorithmic approach to trading Bitcoin regardless, to getting with what we do specifically and the problem we solve. Just bitcoin as an asset is interesting to talk about. A lot of the arguments against bitcoin is that it lacks fundamentals, right? Now you can argue about that till the, till the cows come home, but the reality is, is that it's following what's called a power law trajectory, right? A power law trajectory is something that we find in complex systems in nature. I'll give you an example, right? You got a lot of earthquakes in the world. You got a lot of tiny, tiny, tiny little earthquakes. And then you got like a few massive earthquakes, right? If you put them on a log, log chart. So a logarithmic of the y axis and a logarithmic of the x axis, right? You can plot a straight line through them. This is also similar in the distributions of cities, right? Lots of small cities and then lots of big cities like you can imagine. You've got Abu Dhabi, Dubai and then like tons of little, little things, right? Power law growth. So complex systems in nature follow power law trends. And funnily enough, Bitcoin is following a power law. Why does that make it unique? Well, no other asset class in the world, no other financial asset, None, No. Follows a power law. Then you have to ask yourself, why is it following a power law? Well, because it has the DNA of a natural complex organism. Because it is a network, right? Because bitcoin is shared between people. And the growth of it is like the growth of a city, right? It's like, you introduce me to bitcoin, I introduce you to it. It has a network effect. Gold doesn't have a network effect. Silver doesn't have a network effect. Oil doesn't have a network effect. Bitcoin does. These are the things I start to understand. And I got a lot of this through a professor. His name's Giovanni Santostasi. And we actually work closely with him now because he helps develop risk management. But he discovered the power law model for Bitcoin's trajectory. Knowing that, I started then investing in bitcoin, right? That was my thesis. So this would have been the end of 2022. So you got to learn from your lessons. Hopefully they're not big enough to knock you down and you can't get up. That's a big one.

How do you become miner?

You know, mining. Used to, you could do mining on your computer.

So you mine it and then you get it, right?

Yeah. The problem is now it's so competitive at any given time, when a block is approved by the whole network, that one who solves the problem gets the reward. The system is really robust, it's decentralized, anyone can do it. But it's. It's it's an institutional game now. The average person cannot do it.

Wow. See this is the thing, like I really want to get into it, you know, I know what about dollar, cost average and all that stuff. And I know about trading stocks and all that. But yeah, I just feel like I'm missing out by not trading in bitcoin.

In bitcoin, to be honest. Now I think it's to the point that no one wants to sell their bitcoin because it's going up. Why would you sell it? But now we have a problem. Well, what's the problem? Well, the problem is if you don't sell it, how do you realize anything? Yeah, right. You have to sell it at some point, but you don't want to sell it because you realize it's the hardest money on the planet.

It's got that thing though, because you might sell it and then two days later something happens and it goes up. Even when you're like, ah, absolutely.

So this is where we come in.

Okay.

And one of the things that we're working that we do really well at is using the infrastructure that the everyday person can get access to. So say I've got 10 Bitcoin, I want to generate some returns from it. So I might take one of those bitcoins. I'm going to take the risk of putting it on an exchange, but I'm going to use the algorithm that I've developed. Now that algorithm will allow you to use that asset, Bitcoin, which is going up in value as collateral, to then trade with. So then what we're able to do is put it to work to keep it simply. We've got this asset now that becomes productive. So instead of being a passive, still wealth building, but it is incredibly passive. We're able to put it to work without actually having to sell it. Right. That's very, very powerful. If you don't want to own bitcoin, but you realize that it's going up and you want a piece of the action, you can use our algorithm simply just to trade bitcoin. Just build cash. Just build cash, you know, in the regular way. So if you've got bitcoin and you want to use it as collateral, you get a double upside, right? You get the appreciation of the bitcoin plus the accrued, you know, productivity of the trading. Once it's engineered, it's hands off so you don't have to do anything. It'll do everything for you.

That's so Dubai, bro. So where's bitcoin? Going to be in the next 10 years.

So what's really cool about the algorithm is that it's, it's price agnostic. So regardless of what bitcoin does, it's still going to always be generating your returns. Right. Because it's doing that in a very, very sophisticated and predictable way. The market goes up, we make money. If the market goes down, we're also, we actually make, we generate more money, more money when it goes down. That's just part of the strategy that we use. So, you know, the other thing that we have is we've got these cycles and they're kind of like, kind of these like sine waves, almost like a clap. From the beginning of the first block, it was like a really big wave at the beginning and then a really, you know, then the next wave. But they're actually getting smaller and smaller. Like a sound wave kind of gets smaller and smaller. So today the price is 117,000. If you're following the trend of, of the last cycles. But also factoring in that these sort of sine waves are getting smaller and smaller, you know, we're going to have a top potentially, you know, and we can timestamp this probably 160 to 200,000, perhaps by the Q1, Q4 and a 2025, 2026, if the cycle continues how it has in the past. Right. But if we just follow the power law trend, which is that line is the most reliable thing. Right. There's no guarantee the cycle will happen. What the cycle actually does, it just creates that FOMO and then people go a bit crazy. But the power law, that line through the middle, when you do the math, the cycles actually cancel each other out. And we've just got this straight line. I think by the end of the year, following the power law, we should be at around 138,000. Right. So today 117, so let's say on the average it'll be 138. We could have a top and then a crash back down to the power law support at the end of next year, which is November 2026, brings it down to about 70,000. So there is potential that Bitcoin goes to 160 to 100 to 200, 180, 200 and then comes all the way back to 70,000 at least below 100,000. So what's going to happen? A lot of people are going to get wrecked. They're going to buy at the top. Yeah, a lot of companies are going to over leverage this if they want.

To sell quick and make a quick profit, right?

Well, a lot of, A lot of. A lot of people that bought at 16,000, they're going to sell at 200 and then everyone who didn't buy is going to start buying at 200. So if the price gets close to a second standard deviation from the power law, which is around 202, 10, the market at that point would be so overbought that I would consider rotating out a percentage of it and then buying back in in order to just multiply my bitcoin. But in 10 years time, we follow that trend, the power law trend, it should be a million dollars. In 10 years, the top of that bubble could be as high as around 4 million.

Would you say crypto changed your life?

I would say bitcoin did.

Ah, very good answer.

Very good answer, bro.

Thank you so much.

No worries.

My house is your house. And thank you so much for educating the people and hopefully we can do another one and thingy and see how much money I made and we'll have enough for our metric.

Let's do it, man. The money I put in there.

Ready?

Let's do it. Boom.