BTC012: BITCOIN ON-CHAIN ANALYSIS
W/ PLAN B & WILLY WOO
10 February 2021
On today’s show, Preston talks with Plan B and Willy Woo about Bitcoin on-chain analysis. They talk about some of their favorite metrics and what their expectations are for the current Bitcoin bull market.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN:
- What are some of the most important trends and data Plan B and Willy Woo are looking at today?
- What are their thoughts on a mature derivatives market having on the price?
- Thoughts on the impact of CBDC.
- Thoughts on the India ban.
- Impact of Tether.
- What is Willy’s Go-To chart?
- Willy’s pricing model vs. Plan B’s.
- Thoughts on the Lightning Network.
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BOOKS AND RESOURCES
- All of Plan B’s writings at www.PlanBTC.com.
- Willy’s Newsletter.
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TRANSCRIPT
Disclaimer: The transcript that follows has been generated using artificial intelligence. We strive to be as accurate as possible, but minor errors and slightly off timestamps may be present due to platform differences.
TRANSCRIPT
Disclaimer: The transcript that follows has been generated using artificial intelligence. We strive to be as accurate as possible, but minor errors and slightly off timestamps may be present due to platform differences.
Preston Pysh (00:00:03):
Hey everyone, welcome to this Wednesday’s release of the podcast where we’re covering Bitcoin. On today’s show, I’m really excited to bring you both of our guests because they’re two of the biggest names in the space. That’s Willy Woo and Plan B. Both of these gentlemen have over a half a million followers on Twitter alone. The reason why is they have some of the most fascinating on-chain analysis, charts, models and creative thoughts on what drives Bitcoin cycles.
Preston Pysh (00:00:26):
During our discussion, we talk about some of the metrics that they find important today, their favorite metrics for looking at trends, the impact of central bank digital currencies, their thoughts on further liquidity shocks to the overall economy, concerns or risks moving forward and much, much more. So without further delay, here’s my interview with Willie and Plan B.
Speaker 1 (00:00:48):
You’re listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pysh.
Preston Pysh (00:01:07):
Okay, so like I said in the introduction, I’ve got Willy woo and Plan B both here together. Man, am I excited to have this conversation. How are you guys doing?
Plan B (00:01:16):
I’m great, Preston. Willie, I’m very much looking forward to talk to the two of you.
Willy Woo (00:01:22):
Yeah, likewise, I’ve been looking forward to this day actually. I think this is first time we’ve spoken, Plan B. Quite an honor.
Plan B (00:01:28):
Likewise.
Preston Pysh (00:01:30):
So guys, I want to start off with Plan B, you recently put out a picture, just showing where we’re at in this cycle versus the previous four-year cycles that have happened before. Talk us through this a little bit, and then tell us whether you think that this is a good way to measure it, to look at things, just give us some of your ideas.
Plan B (00:01:50):
That’s a chart that shows the current price track from the time of the halving, that was May 2020. Then you compare it to the other two halvings in 2016 and 2012. What you see is that their current price track is right in between 2012 and 2016 price tracks. It already tells a lot, because there is a lot of people thinking that cycles are going to be longer and lower. But well, this data point shows it’s right in the middle of the last two halvings, and not lower. That’s one point.
The other point is the chart also shows that after the initial bull market, it will stabilize at an equilibrium after that bull market goes down, and then it stabilizes. For 2013 that was around, well, if you compare to current price levels, around $300,000 level. If you look at the more current 2017 bull run, that stopped at the 100,000 level. I find those very interesting of course, because those are exactly the price levels of my stock-to-flow model 100,000 and stock-to-flow cross asset model, that $288,000 level. Yeah, I like that chart. It’s very intuitive, it’s very simple. There is no models, yeah, maybe the model targets that I brought in there. But, I think for people new to Bitcoin, it’s good to see that there is a very distinct pattern after the halving. That’s a very interesting phenomenon in Bitcoin. So yeah, I would recommend learning everything about halvings, what that is, what that means, and also price-wise.
Preston Pysh (00:03:37):
Willy, what do you think about using the previous halving cycle? Maybe the number of days, the percent that it’s moved, just a metric to understand what might be happening this time around, what are your thoughts?
Willy Woo (00:03:48):
It’s absolutely obvious. It makes a large difference. I pictured it’s a shove, right? It’s a shove by… If you’re sitting in the bathtub and you kind of push the water at the right time and Bitcoin has this little push, the supply shock push on the market, the sell pressure halves, because the new supply is at the rate it’s coming onto the market is halving each time. So yeah, you get the shove and then it sets up this resonance and Bitcoin cycles and actually all the crypto, the entire crypto space circulates around these four year cycles of Bitcoins halvening. And so, no matter what asset in crypto you’re analyzing, you’re locked into these four year cycles because Bitcoin’s really the huge kind of 800 pound gorilla in the room, which all assets orbit around.
Willy Woo (00:04:41):
That shove tends to last. If you look back at the chats, it tends to last well over a year. And my thinking is that you get this year of momentum and then that develops this kind of, I guess, the upward price movement from the lower sell pressure and accelerates the price upwards. And then people get that kind of FOMO effect and people start buying and you get this run up in price. And the momentum sort of loses its steam and around the December after the halvening, like the year after the halvening, we tend to have seen all the market tops. I think that’s because people sell to pay the taxes because they’ve just had this year of ridiculous gains. And so really agreeing with Plan B here in that I’m not subscribed to this lengthening cycle thesis more that this four year cycle is the lock-in the tax season of the December after the halvening, the year after the halvening is the sell pressure that locks us back into this bearish market.
Preston Pysh (00:05:50):
So plan B, you and I talked a little bit offline about this idea of the four year cycle being broken into thirds and the first third being the bull market, the price action’s going up. The second third is the sell off. And then the third portion of the four-year cycle is the reversion back to the mean, or the stock, the flow valuation. We’ve never talked about it publicly. So I’m kind of curious to hear your thoughts. And if I was going to describe it to somebody who understands how the protocol works, so you have 210,000 blocks in a four-year cycle. And if you would divide that by three, every 70,000 blocks is a major inflection point. So this move that we’re seeing right now, I would guess we’re probably like 36,000 blocks into it from the halving.
Preston Pysh (00:06:34):
So there’s about 34,000 blocks remain until we get to that 70,000 mark, where we would have met an inflection point in the past. Now, whether that plays out again, moving forward, I have no idea, but historically speaking, that would be about halfway through this bull market. So I’m kind of curious what your thoughts are on the idea of splitting it into thirds and using block height is maybe a good metric to understand where inflection points have occurred.
Plan B (00:07:00):
That’s a very interesting point because although we don’t have much halvings to look back at only two, and that’s why this third halving very interesting to sort of verify this view. But if we look at last two halvings, and indeed you see a bull market that’s well, in 2013, it was like 17 months, in 2017, it was 13 months. So on average 15 months, which is about the 70,000 blocks that you’re describing. And of course we see the current track right in the middle. So it wouldn’t surprise me at all if indeed the next old-time hive, if you will be at exactly or around the 70,000 blocks after the halving, which would put it somewhere end of this year December, probably. Yeah, that’s very obvious. And it’s also very interesting because you see the blocks online, but you can see much more in online chain analytics.
Plan B (00:07:54):
So you see this, why is there a bull market after the halving? For example, is there any logical reason? And I think there is, and especially if you look at all the young chain data and Willie will probably recognize this, but you see the shortage actually far before the halving. It’s like a wave of constant demand or even constantly increasing demand. And then the supply of course is fixed and then it gets halved. And after that whole thing does a millennial dynamic that sharply increases this shortage and it’s like a wave that’s hitting the beach, it gets higher and higher and higher and it breaks. And it’s so interesting to see that on-chain. And the same in the second period. If I look at sort of first third, if you will, is the bull market, then we get the bear market, if you will, where people FOMOd in the last part of the bull market and they can’t handle the volatility, the weak hands as we like to call them.
Plan B (00:08:53):
So they’re selling. A normal human psychology is also there, right? There’s FOMO, there’s fear. And you see this fear in that second third of the cycles. And after that second part of the cycle, you get the last part, which is that you climb out of the bottom of the bear and you sort of stabilize around a price level that is reflective of the demand and the supply at the time. Then it’s slowly built towards the next halving. Very interesting to look at it.
Preston Pysh (00:09:23):
So Willy, a lot of people listening to this conversation right now might be fairly new. And you’re the expert of on-chain data and kind of reading where that’s going to take us kind of moving forward. I’m curious what some of the trends are, that you’re seeing today that people listening might find interesting.
Willy Woo (00:09:42):
The on-chain data, it’s very interesting in that every cycle, it’s completely different and as is this one. The one that has been very interesting to me is that there’s just so much of the coins that have been moved off the exchanges, as Plan B might break the cycle into these three phases, I break the bull market into three phases. You kind of have this accumulation ban that buyer step and you’ll see this price floor. You’ve seen it in every cycle, is a floor that it doesn’t drop behind the low because buyers will just keep scooping up those cheap coins. And then you get this initial breakout of that downward move. And that’s the initial early part of the bull market, it’s popped.
Willy Woo (00:10:33):
Then you get this bit where that settles and typically traditional investors would call that the re-accumulation phase of the bull market and with Bitcoin, because we’ve got this ledger, you can actually see the capital flows and this re-accumulation phase coincides with the inventory sitting on these exchanges where a lot of people store their coins, where a lot of people speculate and you’ll notice that the inventory starts to drop, these players come in and they buy those coins and they take them off the exchanges.
Willy Woo (00:11:07):
They put them into cold storage and they just keep accumulating. And you’ll see this kind of depletion in the last cycle we had five months. And this cycle has been, I think, 11 going on 12 months. I’m not even sure if it’s over year. And so this phase has been going on for over two times longer than normal. And this is obviously it goes with all of this narrative we’re seeing with institutions coming in. It started just before the COVID crash. That was six months before micro strategy announced that they started acquiring large amounts of Bitcoin. Michael Saylor himself said it was six months that they needed to get ready to buy bitcoin for that company. But we know that he and his peers bought most likely six months earlier. And that coincided with the start of the re-accumulation, and that’s still going.
Willy Woo (00:11:58):
What we expect right now is that eventually retail will come in and that’s what we’re seeing right now, is that since the Bitcoin sort of topped out at 42,000, we’ve retested around 29,000. And when this consolidation ban of up, down, up, down, shaking out the weak hands that have just recently bought, we’re seeing this quite accumulation of even more whales come in and we’re seeing the very first sense of retail. And when retail comes in, you’ll see the inventory on spot exchanges increase.
Willy Woo (00:12:34):
Now they increase because retail are small holders and they tend to store their coins on the coin basis of this world. And so in the later phases of this bull market, you see the inventory on these exchanges increase, and we’re still not seeing that yet. So we’re still really early in this phase. It’s just mind-blowing how different it is and that the length of their accumulation off exchanges is so long and so deep. Secondly, then the amount of whales, which are holders of more than a thousand coins. So around 35, $40 million of bitcoin upwards. That exploding in numbers right now, and we’ve never seen such a shat climb and that species of holders, then typically you’ll see that climb early. They’ll sort of stabilize near the mid end of the bull mark, and then they start selling and we’re just seeing a ramp up climb right now.
Willy Woo (00:13:37):
So it’s an incredible bull market, this one like [inaudible 00:13:42] traders looking at the price, say, “This thing’s overheated.” I’ve never seen a move like this in my career inside Bitcoin, where the price goes a sheer vertical wall yet the fundamentals of the buying is supporting that and there’s no real path right now for us to go down to some people who are saying, $22,000. My modeling or bare floor right now is around three and a half thousand, I think I checked this morning and that’s based on the amount of sheer capital that’s coming into the market.
Preston Pysh (00:14:18):
So plan B, you had mentioned that the volatility and how violent it gets at the top is what really kind of starts removing some of the speculators. And then you get the crash that follows. Based on what Willie just said. If this trend of pulling coins off the exchange, corporate buyers stepping in and putting it on their treasury, and they’re looking at it from a strategic longterm interest of, “Hey, I’m going to hold this thing for five or 10 years.” I’m not stepping in and being a day trader and trying to capture price movements on day-to-day basis. So if we see this trend continue, which it has not let up correct, Willie? This is just the people pulling coins off the exchanges, keeping pace. It hasn’t slowed down. Does that mean that that volatility that we’ve seen at the top call it 70,000 blocks after the halving might not be the same? Would that be your expectation? And I guess I’m opening that up to both of you guys.
Plan B (00:15:15):
If I may add to what Willy said about exchanges, where you can see people taking the coins off the exchanges, you can see actually also other stuff on-chain. You can see markers that are very specific for a bull market or markers that are very specific for a bear market. So you can actually really, let me phrase it another way. If you give me one month of blocks, only on-chain blocks, I can tell you without looking at the price, if it’s a bear market or a bull market. There are very distinct markers, it’s like looking at at a radio telescope data. You see these impulses, these spikes, these patterns. So I totally agree with Willy that we’re in a blue market and into early phase. So we have a long way to go. If you ask me, we’re in a bull market since November, December.
Plan B (00:16:00):
So we have, well, at least a half year to go and volatility-wise, what you see in bull markets normally is that the volatility disappears, right? Because it goes up and up and up and there’s less volatility, and then the big volatility comes when the bull market is over. So after the crash, that big crash brings the volatility back, but there’s also a big difference between the 2013 and the 2017 bull markets. For example, the 2017 bull market had six or seven corrections in between and big corrections, like 30% corrections all the way to the top. We did not see that in 2013. So there was one big plateau, if you will. It jumped from five dollars to $100, and then it stayed there for a couple of months and then it shot up to $1000, but no corrections in between.
Plan B (00:16:53):
So it’s very interesting to see what, what we will be having next few months, that will be 30% corrections in between, 2017 or not. But on the whole, I think if we look at the return distribution of this thing, Bitcoin, it’s not a normal distribution for sure, of course. It’s a very asymmetrical distribution. It depends on how you see it, but it’s a distribution that will have volatility think until the end. So it will not be like a classical startup or venture capital or Amazon-like stock that you have the volatility in the beginning. And then slowly, when it goes bigger, the volatility goes out. I know a lot of people see it that way. I don’t see it that way. I think it will stay a very asymmetrical distribution of returns with a lot of big swings upwards, big swings downwards, and very asymmetric.
Plan B (00:17:46):
For example, we have in the last 12 years, we had I think two or three down years and all the other years were up. So it’s the chances of having an up year will be so much higher than a down year. And that asymmetrical part is part of what investors like about Bitcoin, of course. I also look at on-chain data, you have to price data. But another thing I look at very frequently is the derivatives market. So in this case, especially the option markets, of course, and they trade volatility, right? So they trade implied volatility and you can derive implied volatility from the option prices.
Plan B (00:18:21):
These option prices show well, 80 to over 100% implied volatility still for options out one year from here. So I guess we will have volatility all the way to the end of this year and I don’t see it going away, to be honest.
Preston Pysh (00:18:39):
I want to get back to the derivatives, but I want to give Willy a chance to add his comments.
Willy Woo (00:18:44):
Yeah. The volatility changes a lot over each cycle. When I look at the price chart, I just see the entire history of Bitcoin etched on it. So I’ve pulled out the data from the very first day that we’re at a price, which is in 2009. Not many people see that on their chats because Mt. Gox didn’t launch until I think 2010 or ’11. And you can see this whole knee of different volatility and prints. For example, the 2013, that was the first major bull cycle where the whole world had excess via Mt. Gox. So we had kind of had our first liquid market and we had that double rally, the double pump. I liken that to an impedance mismatch of the sheer wall of capital coming in to this tiny [inaudible 00:19:34].
Willy Woo (00:19:33):
And you see these ways get set up and traders will see this in shorter timeframes when there’s a huge rally, they set up these waves and there was a 93% correction. It wasn’t a bear market, it was a consolidation because you can look at that on the on chain. And you can see that the buyers were still accumulating and it was really for another move up. But anyone in traditional markets would have said, that’s a crash. I think a crash is anything over 80% or maybe 60%. There was the imprint of volatility from a whole bunch of people coming in and buying quickly and leading the create.
Willy Woo (00:20:15):
The last cycle, particularly in the 2018 phase onwards, we had the invention of bit necks and we started to see these very, very, very high volume derivatives being traded. And in that market, you started to see the price being controlled by very high volume traders. You start to see this different pattern happening. It just so happens that in this last two years, the whole price of Bitcoin has been trading until well above the kind of… I call it a floor price, but it’s also what you might say is a model of what the organic prices supported by the longterm investors of Bitcoin, not the short-term speculators, and whenever we’re high above the organic price, we have a lot of volatility.
Willy Woo (00:21:06):
What’s happening right now is that we’ve got so much spot buying, actually buying the underlying asset and storing it in a way that the floor price has been creeping up and creeping up and you’ll see the volatility drop. It started dropping after COVID. While people were seeing this price flips or up and down, up and down, this organic valuation crept up, crept up, and it squeezed the price upwards because the up-down movement couldn’t go down anymore, it had to go up. So right now we’re seeing this volatility reduction and that’s because Bitcoin’s now getting into the spot dominance where underlying asset buyers are holding it rather than the short-term because of markets determining the price. And so I think the cycle we’ll see a net reduction.
Willy Woo (00:21:56):
We’ve already seen that in volatility. Near the tail end of bull markets, as always the price starts to get overheated. We start to rise above this organic valuation. The tops have always formed by lack of buyers. You can actually see this through industry data. You can see it through exchange user accounts. The new rate starts to reduce, the wallet companies to start to see a reduction of people coming in. And so this sort of buying and holding organic price doesn’t climb. The price still carries on with momentum, but then it whipsaws up and down. That’s when you get this volatility. And so I think that that’s going to be really interesting. The setup we’ve got right now, going into this next bear market. It’s I know it’s early, but thinking of the next beer market, I don’t know yet. But what I see is leverage is a friend of volatility, and this is the first bull market we’ve ever had in Bitcoin with significant amounts of leverage in the system.
Willy Woo (00:23:01):
We’ve got well developed derivative market. We’ve got products like BlockFi, which allows you to loan your Bitcoin or puts your Bitcoin out there, gain interest and or even get a fiat loan of that collateral. And a lot of those guys, BlockFi has reported that they’re using that fiat to buy more Bitcoin. So essentially there’s a massive leverage coming into the market. So that’s probably going to create a pretty volatile bear market, I would say. Yeah.
Preston Pysh (00:23:33):
So the whole BlockFi thing in the lending, and you look at how much that market, this whole derivatives market has matured since where we were at four years ago, it’s kind of mind-blowing how big this has become. Now, what I’m really interested in is hearing your thoughts on this idea. So when I was listening to interview with Zach Prince about BlockFi, and the question was, well, why would anybody borrow Bitcoin at nine percent interest? Why would somebody do that? And his response was, “Well, you have one of two situations. You have a corporation that’s just looking for working capital really fast, and they’re going to pay it back almost immediately within 30 days.” So it’s not a real big deal for them. The other person is a short seller who has to have Bitcoin in order to sell it short.”
Preston Pysh (00:24:23):
I thought to myself, “Okay, well, that’s kind of interesting.” And this is just me playing this out. I’m kind of curious to hear your thoughts. Let’s say you’re a wall street type and you’re able to sell it short. And you come to a place like BlockFi with USD in dollars and you put that up into escrow in order to borrow Bitcoin, so you can sell it short. If you’re not borrowing or lending Bitcoin, you might not fully understand how this model works and it’s through over-collateralization. So if you want to borrow one Bitcoin, and let’s just say, the price of Bitcoin is 35,000, you’re going to have to over-collateralize that at, I don’t know what the amount would be. It comes down to the rates that they use on their site, but you’re putting in more than 35,000. You’re putting in call it 50,000 or 60,000 in order to take out that $35,000 Bitcoin.
Preston Pysh (00:25:13):
I would imagine, but I don’t know for sure that BlockFi would immediately convert those dollars into Bitcoin in order to hold that in escrow, because that’s what the lender provided to that they don’t have any counterparty risk. So what I find fascinating is you’re having these people that are locking up Bitcoin in BlockFi in escrow, but they’re over, collateralizing what they lent out, meaning the amount that’s getting locked up that can’t go back onto the market is more than what’s being dropped into the market into a short sell. So because of over-collateralization of all lending that you’re seeing in the space, does this turn into an event that maybe drives the supply suffocation even more than what we’ve seen in previous cycles?
Plan B (00:26:01):
I think it will. And actually I tweeted once that forget about the mass adoption. It’s all about arbitrage and arbitrage will bring this about, and that’s essentially what you’re describing. Lending Bitcoin to go short, lending out your Bitcoin for interest. There is an entire space right now that’s effectively arbitraging the quantitative easing, easy money world with negative interest rates. And I mean, I’m talking from a European perspective with minus 0.5% interest for all accounts, with what $25 in the bank account.
Plan B (00:26:37):
We’re really looking for alternatives. And what you see right now, if you look at the futures markets for Bitcoin is a 20%, 15 to 20% base rate. So if you have Bitcoin, you can lend it or you can have it, but if you don’t have it, you can lend it. Then you use that Bitcoin that you have, and you sell it one month further or three months or a year further. That’s a short, right? By the way, that’s not a naked short, that’s not selling a future, selling a Bitcoin that you don’t have that selling a Bitcoin you have. So there is no risk. You just sell it. And the thing is, the future price of Bitcoin is about 20% higher on the annualized basis than the spot price, the current price.
Plan B (00:27:19):
So if the spot price is 35, then the future markets would be a 38 or something. So that’s an instant profit with almost zero risks because futures are collateralized daily-
Preston Pysh (00:27:31):
To the tune of 20%, right?
Plan B (00:27:34):
Yeah. So you can get a 20% return almost risk-free and it baffles me. I really don’t understand why not everybody is doing this because even if you don’t like Bitcoin don’t know what Bitcoin is, you can get Bitcoin, buy Bitcoin and sell it immediately at the same time for 20% more and cash the 20% in a foreign exchange of your have choice. That’s the game that 20% of course opens the door to more lending business opportunities. Because if you have cash, if you have funding, if you have Bitcoin, you can get the 20%. So every percentage below 20%, if you can borrow money for 10 or five or even zero percent, that’s pure profit. The only restriction here is funding. I guess that’s why those companies are growing so fast and the market is growing so fast.
Plan B (00:28:25):
So I also see this whole futures market and derivatives markets growth as a opportunity, not as a risk. I know a lot people see it as a risk and a people suppressing the prices with futures but I see it as a very natural place where speculators that want the leverage find the Wall Street types that are perfectly okay with a risk-free 20%.
Preston Pysh (00:28:50):
Do you think it’s a regulatory thing, Plan B, that’s holding back? Maybe these big bankers can see the trade, but because of regulatory reasons, they just can’t step in and do it with the massive amount of funds that they’re sitting on.
Plan B (00:29:04):
No, I don’t think that’s it. I think a lot of those big banks and even insurance companies have commodity funds and commodity mandate on their balance sheet. They’re doing this exact game with gold futures. Then they earn one percent every year, which is just laughable indeed compared to Bitcoin. The only thing is that Bitcoin is a new asset, so they don’t know it and most… 80% of the old traditional banks, the old institutions, I mean, I can say, because I work at one, they are captured in this narrative of, “It’s drug money. It’s for criminals. It boils the oceans.” They’re really stuck into that 2012 narrative still. But, the smart guys, the fast guys the little bit smaller guys, the hedge funds, for example, they’re moving fast and it’s fun to watch.
Plan B (00:29:53):
I really don’t understand why not everybody is doing it. My guess is that more and more people are doing this. Every day more capital gets allocated to this kind of arbitrage. I see them. We haven’t even talked about the option markets. So it’s-
Preston Pysh (00:30:09):
Yeah.
Plan B (00:30:09):
I think a lot of the action is going to take place here.
Preston Pysh (00:30:13):
On the option side, I want to get over to Willy, but back in June, the price was, I want to say it was around eight to 9,000. I bought options, long-term call options. They were like, I’d say $3,000 for a $10,000 strike. I was paying $3,000 for these options at a $10,000 strike and they mature in December of ’21. And so I’m not bringing up because of how awesome the trade has been, I’m bringing it up because the person on the other side of that, that wrote the contract had to lock up a Bitcoin for every one of these contracts that I bought until December because they’re European style options. So, that Bitcoin has been clawed off the market. It’s sitting in escrow 100% escrow, and it’s never coming back on the market until December of ’21. It’s crazy to me.
Plan B (00:30:59):
Yeah. And it’s great because you are happy and the guy who locked up that Bitcoin is also happy.
Preston Pysh (00:31:04):
He’s also happy, yeah.
Plan B (00:31:06):
And that’s why I think it’s a very natural meeting of the minds of people that are used to five percent interest.
Preston Pysh (00:31:13):
The reason why Plan B is saying that the person who wrote the contract to me is happy is because they were in the market to just capture that spread that he’s talking about, that 10 to 20% spread between the long and short. So they had a short-term focus. I had a very long-term focus and we both walked out winners of what we wanted. So, it’s crazy.
Plan B (00:31:33):
Or Preston, there have different balance sheets. You might maybe put a million in call options like this, but the other side has maybe a billion or 10 billion to invest. And they cannot do that in call options. That would be too risky. It’s also a risk return game. So the 10 billion they have, or let’s say one billion, they can put it easily in something that gives them a 20% risk-free return, right? Because they don’t have to have capital behind it. There’s no risk. They can put that big chunk of money to work. But with smaller amounts, you can do the leverage, like buying the call option you just described. But maybe one more thing and that’s a bit of a mistake in the markets and that’s why you can see the markets are not mature yet as well. Normally, as a professional investor, you wouldn’t do directional bets with options.
Plan B (00:32:22):
So if you think the price goes up, you would buy futures, not options because options is a volatility’s trade, right? You sell options when the implied volatility is high, when it spikes, when the fear is at the highest levels in the market. And then you sell them at that point and you buy them back when the fear is gone and the normal market returns. And now you pocket the volatility difference. Volatility harvesting is the name of the game. That’s what they do to big players. The one with the one billion dollars, he’s going to write those options to sell those call options when the volatility spikes, when the fear is at highest level and then he buys them back a month later or two, at normal prices. Yeah. I think there’s a lot of people doing directional bets right now with options, which is easy prey for professional investors.
Preston Pysh (00:33:12):
Willy, you got any thoughts on some of the derivative stuff?
Willy Woo (00:33:15):
I just like to see more of this arbitrage going on. Because it’s definitely going to make my funding of loans a lot cheaper. You can see how inefficient that market is. I just gather like anyone who’s in this space that really understands it, they want to go long. They don’t want to be in US dollar basis. But certainly these traditional fans out there that want a high yields, low risk US dollar kind of basis, they really need to be in this game. I just think that by the time they understand it, I do think that they’ll want to be exposed to the long side of it. Rather than be the sort of mark neutral arbitrage you would gain.
Preston Pysh (00:33:58):
So, Willy, before you were talking about this, like a price ceiling, you had mentioned that when the price goes up and goes through this price ceiling, that you’ve seen historically, that the price has struggled after doing something like that. I’m looking at a chart off of your Twitter. It’s just titled Bitcoin price model and you have this line that’s way above where the price is typically at. And then you have some lines down there that are kind of representing a floor. Can you talk to us a little bit about this? And more importantly, I guess the thing that I’m really trying to get at is if you would see this ceiling, projection model still stay significantly above the price action. Let’s say we’re beyond this 70,000 block mark, would you view that as a sign to continue to stay in because the prices might be going higher.
Willy Woo (00:34:48):
This is a main revision model, fancy words you’re saying there. Everything tends to it’s averages, but this one tracks the averages as it pertains to the very tops of the market. And it’s every single top in the history of Bitcoin and even in the early days, it doesn’t quite because a lot of things don’t hit in those early days. But, it’s only because we don’t have the price of Bitcoin from the time that Satoshi started mining and new Liberty standards, first price Bitcoins via electricity. So I actually think that model even works back then. I don’t know why it works.
Willy Woo (00:35:27):
Maybe it’s because Bitcoin’s like a machine. It’s got a very mechanical price rhythm to it with the halvenings, the supplies very set. But yeah, I have a lot of faith in that model. It tends to work, it always has worked, I should say. Right now when I’m looking at it, it’s $102,000 and it tends to curve upwards. So we’re still got a bit of room to move, incidentally in 2013 where it hit those two very big rallies that hit that ceiling twice before it topped out.
Preston Pysh (00:35:58):
I’m seeing CVDD, explain what that is for folks. And this is the floor in the model is titled CVDD. And does that also play into the top of the model, as far as the ceiling?
Willy Woo (00:36:12):
Yeah. Two very different models. CVDD stands for coin value days destroyed, and I should just call it the bottom model. So it’s based on one of the very first on-chain indicators, which is Bitcoin days destroyed. So we look at how much destruction there is for a day and that’s just a fancy way of saying, we look at the coins that are moving between investors over a window of a day. Then we look at how old those coins have been later in a wallet between moving from an old wallet to someone, a new investor’s wallet. You kind of tally up the days that those coins have been latent and those are the days that you’ve destroyed as those coins moved. And so it kind of works in this way, where if you get maybe it’s Erik Voorhees, or maybe it’s a Roger Ver, these guys that bought Bitcoins from the early earliest times of Bitcoin and they bought at maybe a dollar, maybe at 50 cents, now you’ve moved it to someone who’s buying in at $35,000.
Willy Woo (00:37:22):
Sensually, those guys are going to be wanting to hold their coins. They want to hold their coins at these higher values. And so the floor rises accordingly. So this is what this tracks. As old coins moved to new hands, the floor price moves up and of CVDD and that model hits all the bottoms.
Preston Pysh (00:37:44):
You’re not joking. I’m looking at the bottom that played out on the last four-year cycle. And I mean, it literally came and kissed that line and that was it. It’s amazing.
Willy Woo (00:37:54):
Yeah. You find a lot of this in Bitcoin is that, it’s very robotic and mechanical and it’s just mind-blowing how these models can put a wrapper around the price range and predict way ahead of time where the bottom may be. What I like about this model is that it goes up, only goes up. It’s very hard for it to go down. And so as floor rises and rises and you’re coming into a bear market and you’re in a bear market, you see this rising floor coming up at you as the price is dropping. So you kind of get a good signal there of how much further it may drop before the bear market is over.
Preston Pysh (00:38:32):
So somebody was asking central bank digital currencies. Just tell me your thoughts. How are these going to play a role moving forward? Because, I think this is a really important piece. I want to hear your thoughts.
Plan B (00:38:45):
Yeah. I think it’s logical for central banks to introduce central bank digital currency. Quite frankly, it’s not Bitcoin, right? Obviously. It’s a centrally controlled thing. They want to have control of the central banks. They’ll control the money supply. So it’s not scarce like Bitcoin. It will be easier for central banks to do quantitative easing, even more easy than it is today. And it will be especially more easy to get that money in the hands of the consumers, the people. Because right now they have to… They create money, right? The central banks, then they buy government bonds and then the governments have this money and the money then has to go to the people through fiscal policy. And that’s where it stops, a lot of times. So the central banks are actually frustrated, but governments not doing their part and doing fiscal policies.
Plan B (00:39:38):
With the central bank digital currency, they can bypass governments altogether. So you just get a wallet and they put money in that and you can spend it in the supermarket. So no fiscal, no government needed and also no banks needed by the way. And no clearing and no. So a whole industry. It’s a major threat to the traditional banking industry and it should be a top priority for the CEO of all the banks in the world, because there are going to be bypassed by their central banks very soon, because I think they will introduce it somewhere this year. Then another part is it is necessary for central banks to do this because they have to go to negative interest rates.
Plan B (00:40:20):
This will allow them to do that much faster because you are locked in into that central bank digital currency system and they’ll just say, it disappears if you don’t spend in a year or they put a negative interest rate on it, which is basically the same thing.
Plan B (00:40:35):
So yeah, I think it’s a logical step for the central banks to do, but it’s something completely different than Bitcoin and it doesn’t pose a threat to Bitcoin at all. If anything, it will make it easier for stimulus money to go to the public and for the public to use that stimulus money to buy Bitcoin. Unless of course they prevent that because that’s sold out for central bank digital currencies. They can put all sorts of restrictions on it. They can freeze at will, they can freeze your accounts. If you go to the wrong meetings or vote for the wrong people, they can just take your money and they will maybe not allow you to buy Bitcoin with it, which is even more reason to buy Bitcoin right now.
Willy Woo (00:41:19):
You’re saying that, this is the highest priority, if you’re a banker. It’s hot straight to the business. Do you think that it’s going to cause bankers to be allies of Bitcoin?
Plan B (00:41:30):
Very interesting thought. I don’t know, but, it would be a smart move actually. Because it would be one of the few things that they could do in that kind of environment. They could do custodian services, they could make it easier to buy and sell Bitcoin and they could open up the derivatives markets and indeed provide some kind of interest. So a bank could do what BlockFi is doing. It could be in the middle of this complex derivatives game and give half of that profit as an interest to their customers, which would make a hell of a lot more sense for customers than keeping that money in central bank digital currencies, with negative interest rates. Great idea.
Willy Woo (00:42:10):
What’s your thoughts, Preston?
Preston Pysh (00:42:12):
So I think that when you look at the whole tether thing or any stable coin for that matter, if it’s not auditable and some type of regulatory body saying, “Hey, we conducted an audit, they were a hundred percent backed.” To prove that there’s no fractional reserve being generated behind the scenes for whatever stable coin is, is that the stable coin that might be put up as collateral, could maybe the underlying piece of it, the protocol and the people that are managing that centralized token could be running a scam in the background. Does that have any type of long-term impact at Bitcoin? Absolutely not.
Preston Pysh (00:42:49):
It just has an impact to the people that might be exposed to that through lending. And so with a central bank digital currency, you basically remove that risk. Because it’s being issued by the government. But I think if I was going to push back on Plan B’s thoughts on the programability, I think that gets really hard. I think it’s easy for us to say that all those things are possible, but I think doing it from an engineering standpoint would be a little harder than people realize or think. But that’s just my two cents without having a lot of background or understanding of how that would actually take place. I just kind of suspect it’s a harder engineering problem than maybe we perceive it to be.
Willy Woo (00:43:28):
I’ve been in Bitcoin since 2013. I know the first few years probably still true today, a lot of people have a resistance to buying Bitcoin because they see physical dollars in their hands and they go, “This is what? Just what? A screen on my phone.” And they’re not used to this idea of evaporating and selling this cash that they have in their hands and having it appear as digits on their phone,. There are sort of like Gen X upwards generation, which, that’s most of the wealth that’s being held in those generations. If we move to a digital currency and that’s mandated by central banks, I think that you’ve just destroyed a lot of the resistance because everybody’s on a digital dollar now. I think that’s actually quite bullish for Bitcoin. Because of the sheer mindset of going, “Yeah. No, I’m forced to be in digital. This is digital and so is Bitcoin.”
Preston Pysh (00:44:29):
That’s a great point. And I’ve heard the same thing. I think when people can’t tangibly touch it or feel it or see it, it’s very hard for them to wrap their heads around what it is.
Willy Woo (00:44:42):
Yeah.
Preston Pysh (00:44:43):
So what are your guys’ thoughts on the whole India news? And what kind of implications do you think that has for other countries?
Plan B (00:44:50):
Willy has better view on that as me. I just see it as a China ban. What used to be China bans Bitcoin is now India bans Bitcoin. [inaudible 00:45:00].
Willy Woo (00:44:59):
Yeah.
Plan B (00:45:00):
But, maybe that’s too simplistic.
Willy Woo (00:45:03):
Look, we’ve seen all of this happen. We’ve seen Russia ban it, Pakistan ban it, countries go and attempt to ban it and then they backpedal. I just wonder how long it’ll take for them to backpedal. If you think of Bitcoin as the monetary network, the monetary internet, you might as well just ban the internet from your country and then see how, how well your country would thrive without the efficiency of internet and how well will your country survive without the monetary network of the future. So I don’t see that it’s going to stop. If you look at the history of bannings, is that it just makes their asset even more prized. So people tend to buy it more.
Preston Pysh (00:45:47):
I know the price was up on the day it was announced.
Plan B (00:45:54):
Usually when you ban something, when you make it illegal then when you criminalize it, price goes up, right?
Willy Woo (00:46:00):
It’s something in this. I should look into it.
Preston Pysh (00:46:03):
So I want to talk just overall macro market right now. Do you guys see a big liquidity crunch, credit crunch, like we saw in March playing out again maybe this year or the year after. What are your thoughts on what that might mean for Bitcoin?
Plan B (00:46:20):
You mean March this year, it was COVID, right?
Preston Pysh (00:46:22):
Yeah. The big downturn that we saw, just a run for dollars back in March.
Plan B (00:46:27):
I don’t think we’re going to see that again. I think the central banks are ramping up their printers and their stimulus and their quantitative easing. So liquidity, I don’t think that will be a really big issue. Solvency, however, the falls, and especially after COVID with all the companies in real trouble, because there are businesses essentially gone, right? Are people going to fly again? I mean, you can stimulate Boeing as much as you like, but they’re not going to fly again. And same with restaurants. You can help everybody through the Windsor, all the restaurants, but if people are not allowed to eat in restaurants, the business is gone. So there’s a long-term or solvency kind of problem lurking underneath. I think that will be a really, really big problem, more than a liquidity problem.
Willy Woo (00:47:14):
The COVID event was one in 100 year pandemic. I look at that as the whole world stopped, revisited the adverse models sell to cash, or the markets crashed against cash. And then they redeployed, and I don’t think we’re going to have this. You talk as you’re going to be some sort of a black swan or something unexpected. And I think people are very much expecting what’s coming out. I do think, the course of action right now is just print more money. So people are very heightened to a potential crunch, which means that it’s more or less, the risk models are planning for it if it’s going to happen. So it’s usually when things happen, that is beyond what we expected, that you kind of see the sort of crash where everyone runs to the safety of the US dollar. So any kind of downward move I think is going to be met with more quantitative easing. So yeah, that’s just bullish for Bitcoin.
Preston Pysh (00:48:13):
This is the question I’ve really been waiting to ask. You can only take one chart with you to show somebody because you two have the best charts out of anybody on Twitter. What chart does Willy take and what chart this Plan B take?
Plan B (00:48:28):
Willy, you go first. I have to-
Willy Woo (00:48:31):
I get asked this all the time and I go, “What is wrong with you? You want me to pick one shot?” Because the nature of this question is, “Show me this thing that’s going to work and will forever work.” We’ll all start off as traders or whatever. Show me the simple sine wave-
Preston Pysh (00:48:51):
Well, let me rephrase it. Which chart are you most proud of, Willie?
Willy Woo (00:48:56):
Okay, most proud of. I don’t know, I mean-
Preston Pysh (00:49:01):
I would get asked this question, but phrased differently.
Willy Woo (00:49:04):
Okay. The one that I have is a proprietary floor model that protects the floor price of Bitcoin based on the capital flows coming in. And it’s very responsive, very accurate, and it’s not publicly available.
Preston Pysh (00:49:16):
Interesting. Boy, I want access. Plan B.
Plan B (00:49:20):
I would take the stock-to-flow X cross-asset chart with a stock-to-flow in the X-axis and market value on the Y-axis with all the markets plotted together. So gold and silver, real estate and the clusters of the Bitcoin prices of the last four Bitcoin price clusters. What I like about the chart is that even without math, without a model at all, you can look at the data and you see this historical track, 12 years Bitcoin going one direction. And then at the end of that track lie the four other markets, silver diamonds, gold and real estate. You just know, you just sort of feel that this is not coincidence. The bonus point, I think what this chart really shows and what gives me all the confidence in the world is that gold has a higher stock-to-flow at a higher value, but real estate as well.
Plan B (00:50:20):
So we don’t have to extrapolate like all other models I know. We can just interpolate in a data range that we already have. So yeah, for me, that’s the one I take with me. It’s not the best chart to show at a newbie, someone who’s due to Bitcoin though. So it’s a chart I would take to my banker friends or investors that know risk return and Bitcoin history and all that.
Willy Woo (00:50:44):
Can I jump in and ask? This is like, do they ever come back and say, “Well, I don’t expect they know, but the stop-the-flow goes to infinite for Bitcoin. So what happens on that range when, it’s perfectly scarce? How does that met surprise?
Plan B (00:51:03):
Yeah. They keep asking that.
Willy Woo (00:51:04):
Oh, they do?
Plan B (00:51:04):
That’s the most quickly-
Willy Woo (00:51:06):
Oh, good. All right.
Plan B (00:51:08):
But frankly, I don’t care. I’m focused on, it’s like a weather forecast. I’m not interested in the weather over 10 years. I’m interested in the weather tomorrow or maybe next week. And right now I’m interested in the Bitcoin price the next four years when I expected the market to go to 5 trillion. And then after that, I’m really, really interested in the next phase that we can interpolate when we go off the real estate, when we go to 100 trillion US dollar, oh, I like that name, market. And after that, yeah, I don’t know, the world changes. It should be probably count everything in Bitcoin.
Willy Woo (00:51:45):
That’s exactly it. Right? It’s like if it does get infinite, right? Because you lose the unit of account in US dollars because it’s the new money.
Preston Pysh (00:51:55):
The question would be akin to, let’s say that you didn’t have all the countries in the world, but you only had one country, one country, and there was one currency for that country. What would be the value of that currency? You arrive at the same situation, right?
Plan B (00:52:10):
Yeah.
Preston Pysh (00:52:10):
You’d have to value it in horses and houses. And that’s the only way you could value it.
Willy Woo (00:52:15):
GDP. Yeah. Goods and services.
Preston Pysh (00:52:17):
Yeah.
Willy Woo (00:52:18):
Exactly.
Plan B (00:52:19):
It’s kind of funny that the global debt market is 100 trillion US dollars. The global equity market is 100 trillion US dollars. Global real estate market is 100 trillion US dollars. That number comes up too much.
Willy Woo (00:52:31):
I’ve been thinking about it. This whole thing about unit of account, this dollar thing, how big is GDP? Well, GDP should be the unit of count. How much money do we need to print so that the amount of units of trade matches roughly GDP, so everything flows and in Bitcoin, we don’t do that. Right? We’ve got 21,000,000 Bitcoins and we just keep dividing it smaller and smaller. So, I kind of think sometimes Satoshi if he had just invented bitcoin with a unit of a total unit, of all coins in circulation as one Bitcoin, we’d get over this whole idea of, I can’t afford a Bitcoin because you’re having, how much of the slice of pie of Bitcoin do I get? And if it became the entire monetary base, then that one Bitcoin, the only amount of coins and say collation, that one Bitcoin would roughly equate to GDP.
Willy Woo (00:53:27):
And so you get away from this idea of unit account, you just talk about slices of the GDP. At least people would start to think about the economy in that turn without being sort of led astray by this unit of one US dollar.
Plan B (00:53:42):
Never thought of it-
Preston Pysh (00:53:43):
Yeah. That’s a really cool idea. I love that. And Robert Breedlove loved it too. Hey guys, what are your thoughts on lightning?
Plan B (00:53:51):
Very interesting, of course, with the stuff that Jack Mallers and I was doing a strike, lightning and the other second layers on Bitcoin are food for the next phase, right? This will bring the transaction bark to this store value thing that Bitcoin is right now, and it will make very cheap, fast transactions possible. I think it’s the next thing and it’s big. Actually, if you think about it, you need Bitcoins to be part of this transaction network. So not having Bitcoin is a real disadvantage. I could envision a world where you can have a credit card once you deposit the Bitcoin as a collateral, and then you can buy it the supermarkets. And if you don’t have Bitcoin, you don’t get a credit card. You can out-buy at the supermarket or buy certain cars or travel, so it becomes sort of, you have to have Bitcoin, otherwise you can’t be part of the economy.
Plan B (00:54:42):
It’s very akin to like 100 years ago, you had to have land, right? If you don’t have land, then you have nothing. You can put yourself to work, but you will never earn the money, never enough money to make a good living. You need land. And that of course was Thomas Piketty his book, the capital book was the big socialist movement against it. But if you don’t have land, you were nothing. And that we might have a new world where if you don’t have Bitcoin, you cannot be part of the lightning network, you cannot have a credit card. You cannot earn an interest because you will be at the mercy of the central bank, digital currencies with a negative interest rate. So yeah, you better get some. That’s how I envision the end game.
Willy Woo (00:55:25):
If you look at Bitcoin from an engineering standpoint, it’s not really ever going to scale if everyone’s using the main chain. And so we kind of need a way to get the throughput of transactions to carry global commerce. There’s really no other technology that I’ve seen. You’ve got side chains, but that’s kind of centralized. You need federations, trusted parties essentially to make that work. And so lightning’s the best shot I’ve seen so far. It’s still in its early stages, but the performance on the stuff is just so great. And like I was thinking, here’s one implementation, which is Jack Maller’s Strike startup, and there they convert whatever currency you’re sending, maybe it’s us dollars. And I’m sending Euros over to Plan B convinced to Bitcoin and it zaps along the lightning within milliseconds and it does the 4X transaction to Euro.
Willy Woo (00:56:27):
The whole thing is instant, right? It occurs to me, this is like… Strike could have used MongoDB because both sides of that transaction is Strike, converting the Forex back to customers on their Strike apps. And so they chose to use Lightning Network as a proof of concept of how this works? What would make it really interesting is it’s not strike on both ends and it zapped across and it was another company, another bank, another payment provider that came in and it converted back to euros for plan B. Then you’ve got interoperability, between essentially users that are built on the Bitcoin network and Lightning network. And it’s not just this monolithic one app and that decentralizes this, normally we see as this one payment provider, whether it’s a transfer-wise or any number of their competitors. And so I find that very exciting. It’s almost like a DNA of Bitcoin, whatever it touches it decentralizes. And so yeah, I think it’s very exciting. It’s incredibly exciting right now.
Preston Pysh (00:57:36):
This is the first time that two have had a chance to talk. Do you have any questions for each other?
Willy Woo (00:57:41):
Yeah. I’ve already asked him, which is [inaudible 00:57:43], the banker question, which was what happens when stock-to-flow turns perfect, to perfect scarcity. I guess maybe a question is I see a lot of interesting chats that are coming out, but they’re not the well-known stock-to-flow models, but I think I just saw recently, looked like some sort of heat map of the blockchain and blocks and how you’re building models right now from it or is this a year research process you’re going through right now? What are the goals of this research?
Plan B (00:58:16):
Yeah. That chart is the entire UTXO set of Bitcoin and I track it from block-to-block. So I have 600,000 charts and that’s about 100,000,000 data points. So it’s really a lot of data. And what I do is it’s input it’s food for my models actually. So, those are the x-ray pictures that I’m looking for patterns and the way actually that you do them as well. So I look for coin movements, what are the old coins doing? What are the new coins doing? What are the bigger amounts doing? And the lower UTXOs doing, and who are they coming from? Are they coming from exchanges? How are they coming from miners? You can of course also track the Satoshi dice scorings or all kinds of known addresses, you can track. And yeah, so I track basically the changes, the deltas between a day or a week or a month and the UTXO set and there’s all sorts of markers that you find.
Plan B (00:59:13):
The goal is to, and I think that was 50% of the people, answering person’s question, what should I ask Willy and Plan B was about, when do we sell and what is an all time high? How do we play the top? Well, this is basically aimed at that. How can I recognize the next top and the bottom? Of course. And well, like I said before, give me one month or a week of blocks, no price data, no options data, nothing else. Only a week of blocks. And I can tell you if we’re in a bear market or a bull market, or at the top, actually. It’s astonishing how accurate it is. So I’m testing it in real life now, because of course, it’s all the history. But I have been trading these models the last couple of months and I have to say-
Preston Pysh (01:00:02):
It’s been nice.
Plan B (01:00:04):
Yeah. Those are the words. But yeah, Willy, I like to ask you, because I’m building all this stuff myself, I have this note, I’m a programmer, but I brushed off my Python skills. So I’m extracting all the data from my little note and I’m plotting them and doing the analysis. But I’m doing that all myself also because I don’t trust maybe other data, but I saw you use glass note or there’s a lot of people who already done this.
Willy Woo (01:00:36):
I wish that I had the patience to sit down and put a note on the network and sort of brush up my skills on command lines and then work from that level upwards. I’ve played a little bit with it, with [inaudible 01:00:50] and gosh, the amount of data you have to move just to index and stuff is ridiculous. Anyway, I’ve found that my sweet spot is really just working with data providers. I know they are probably losing I’m most certainly losing the same sorts of levels of detail that you’ll be getting. Because obviously when you work with this data, you see a lot of things. You don’t hit the sort of the level I’m working and I’m not going deep down inside the box and those being so close to the ground, there’s always stuff that comes up that I’ll be isolated from.
Willy Woo (01:01:26):
But yeah, I’ve been working with Coin Metrics and now Glassnode. And so I use a lot of the data that’s already pre-indexed and pre-processed and Glassnode have… I think that the team’s about 15 people now. So engineers, data scientists, a whole bunch of work and smarts as put on under the hood there. I get the privilege of just getting the very high quality feeds. For example, if we want to look at the flows coming into and out of the exchanges, that’s a full-time job, just indexing, tagging, and keeping on track of these exchanges, just move to a new wallet. Okay. We’ve got a label, the new wallet, and there wasn’t a flow out of the exchanges. That stuff’s manual work. And it’s just teams now to do this because the complexity of the ecosystem, so well-developed to now that I couldn’t ever possibly work at any kind of pace, trying to keep track of all of it.
Willy Woo (01:02:20):
And so, I’m getting feeds from stablecoins on other networks and not only Bitcoin, Ethereum, so I can track flows from one to the other. And so all that kind of stuff, I can get much more of a better high-level picture. Obviously, the models I do, can work off more networks, more data, more processed. And I guess it’s more classical rather than finite element, you might say in the engineering world. So, it’s the way that I’ve approached it, probably. Because I wasn’t a diehard coder from the early days and it’s led to different results. And certainly the way that I picked up, I’m going to be quite different from reading UTXO sets.
Plan B (01:03:07):
Excellent. Well, I think that’s the right decision. If you ever need something that providers can’t provide, give me a ring. We might benefit from teaming up.
Willy Woo (01:03:16):
Yeah, that’d be great. “Hey, Plan B are you seeing a top here?”
Plan B (01:03:20):
Yeah. Well, like that. Well, that’s always my fear, right? I know the time when [Mughat 01:03:26] had his funds and he used the data from blockchain.info, I guess. There was a data error with okay, a number of addresses. But then the SegWit addresses were not in the accounts and I’m always-
Willy Woo (01:03:40):
Oh, yes, yes.
Plan B (01:03:41):
That it’s not in the data or that there was-
Willy Woo (01:03:45):
I know this is like, I remember we were going well into the BSCs. And remember when we were in 20, what was it? 2018 and we’re trapped at 6,000 and the bottom wasn’t by a lot of people. And then we crashed, right? How’s it really true? The data said, we just did not have enough investor volume coming into this and that crashed at the low 3000s. And the data still said the bottom’s not. And then I remember we were just scratching our head. All of our on-chain indicators were saying, “The bottom’s in if you don’t use volume. But if you do use volume, on-chain volume, the boat will fall from the bottom. And it’s going to go down even further from the 3000 at the end.” The Nick Carter came along and said, “Oh, Coin Metrics, we’ve got this new estimate of volume.” He sent that data through. And yeah, that was that.
Willy Woo (01:04:34):
We were using blockchain.info who were the first providers of on-chain data. The new data came in and it was exactly that the transactions that were of the newer versions, the different types of, I’m not too sure. I’m not up to speed with the latest stuff, but at least the SegWit transactions would have been picked up as what we thought. And it was giving lower than normal volume between investors. And so it’s always a worry, but now we’ve got so many data providers you can sort of cross-reference to. I kind of spent a rainy day and barely trying to figure out what the odd chain volume is without using the data and using other indicators. And that was kind of the aha moment as well.
Plan B (01:05:18):
Yeah. Well, if you ever have a question or want to double-check something, let’s do it because those are painful mistakes, if you have real money on the line. Constantly-
Willy Woo (01:05:26):
Yeah. Let’s do that.
Preston Pysh (01:05:29):
And don’t forget about your friend, Preston.
Willy Woo (01:05:34):
Off, course.
Preston Pysh (01:05:36):
All right guys. I know we’re over the time that we had allotted and man, I appreciate your time coming together like this. I would love to do this again in the future, if you guys are willing, this was just awesome.
Plan B (01:05:46):
Thanks for having us.
Willy Woo (01:05:47):
Yeah. Thanks for having us. It’s been really fun.
Preston Pysh (01:05:52):
So guys, give a handoff to the audience where they can learn more about you.
Plan B (01:05:56):
Yeah, so I’m at PlanB@100trillionUSD that is at Twitter and actually everything is on there. I noticed a lot of new followers, 50,000 new followers last month. I think, Willy you had even more, but, lots of new followers and make sure you’ve read the articles as well. There are two or three articles that I wrote. And 80% of all the questions is answered in those articles.
Willy Woo (01:06:22):
So on Twitter, I’m on woonomic, so you can follow me there. You can keep looking at my profile and Plan B’s for that matter, because track the amount of new investors coming into the space. So I write a newsletter. It’s willywoo.substack.com. You can see it all on my profile on Twitter. So I do market forecasts based on on-chain data that you can subscribe to. And also I have a whole bunch of live chats on chats.bull.com. So a lot of the stuff we’ve been talking about, those chats throughout there for you to have a look at.
Preston Pysh (01:06:57):
Guys, thanks so much for making time. This was awesome. Hey, so thanks for everybody listening into the show. If you enjoyed the conversation, be sure to subscribe to the show on whatever podcast app you’re using. We really appreciate that. And if you have time, leave us a review. So thanks for joining us this week and we’ll catch you next Wednesday.
Outro (01:07:15):
Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to Millennial Investing by The Investor’s Podcast Network and learn how to achieve financial independence. To access our show notes, transcripts, or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.