Torsten Asmus
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Crypto Waves‘ Ryan Wilday talks sole concern about bitcoin’s raging bull market (0:40). Ether underperforming bitcoin (2:20). Playing the meme coin craze (3:30). ‘Corrupt’ Coinbase litigation (5:40). BlackRock overtakes Grayscale; thoughts on Bitcoin ETFs (9:20). Technical take on Ethereum ETFs (32:30)
Transcript
Rena Sherbill: Ryan Wilday from Crypto Waves on Seeking Alpha, crypto expert. Thanks for joining us. Really appreciate it.
Ryan Wilday: Of course.
RS: Yeah. Always great to talk to you on Seeking Alpha. Always great to talk to you about crypto. A lot of news about crypto. Some big names out there. Talk to us about, I guess, first, how you’re looking at the crypto space. And then if you want to touch on what’s happening over in Bitcoin, Ethereum, have that, and I’ll let you kind of set the tone.
RW: Man, I mean, there’s heck of a lot going on.
RS: Yeah.
RW: I mean, we’re in a raging bull market. It’s beautiful. It’s great. I mean, the only level in Bitcoin essentially that I would be concerned about is 50,600. If that broke, it may at least slow it down.
RS: And why that level?
RW: It’s the old Elliott Wave, like fancy Fibonacci voodoo magic. I mean, yeah, it takes a long explanation. I often demo it in our live webinars, but it’s essentially what we call the 50% retrace of the third wave that has been going on since September, late September last year. And so there was a big consolidation last year, and it’s sort of the 50% retrace of that roughly in log.
So it’s kind of how we stay in third wave, so to speak. Third wave is the fastest moving wave within a bull market and fastest, and not always – I shouldn’t say fastest, but it’s where you get the most return and it often is the fastest, and that has been the case in this third wave.
So if you look at September, I think it’s roughly September 23rd, where we kind of broke off this consolidation. And so we’re in a solid space as long as we’re above 50,600. And it can’t – right now, doesn’t even want to touch it. I would love to see it get closer to getting a little bit more cheap Bitcoin in my wallets, but doesn’t really want to touch it right now. I don’t think we have the greatest setup for going higher, but it’s possible that we’re just grinding towards 89. If we fall back, again, I’ll just be looking at that 50,600 area to accumulate again. So that was great.
I recently I wrote an article on Seeking Alpha about my concerns with Ether underperforming Bitcoin. It’s not that I was bearish. So readers can check that article out. I assume it’s not gone to paywall, it might be now. But it talked about some key support level that Ether broke.
It’s not a bearish view on Ether itself on a U.S. dollar basis. But typically in a bull market, I really stay with Bitcoin unless I assume that something else can outperform it and Ether often does have a cyclical outperformance of Bitcoin and it really has failed to do that this cycle. And so I’m watching for it to try to reinvigorate itself, or the market to reinvigorate it.
But right now, I sit underwhelmed with Ether. And I have not, I had said in the article that I was going to sell out when I say that I had a lot of Ether. So it took me some time and I’m not completely sold Ether for Bitcoin, but I’ve been kind of paring it back. And slowly take, I’ve got wallets and stuff like that. It always takes me a while to make moves like that.
I mean, the memecoin craze is wild. We have definitely been playing it. Our big win was a coin called dogwifhat, WIF is the symbol. I think we got probably about a 20x trade on it. So, I didn’t put much money in it.
I never do in frothy stuff like that, but Elliott Wave, it just speaks to sentiment and charts and it was very bullish, it was set up very bullishly and it ran. I think my net was 20x. I think the actual trade from like level to level was like more like 10x. But when I say 20x, I was able to trade in out a bit to like lower my cost. So I think I personally got 20x.
So, now, I’m not making it rich off memecoins because I don’t – I just don’t trade that way. I’m not – if you go on crypto Twitter, people are going wild over the stuff and a lot of them walk away losing money because they’re just crazed by the get rich scheme that they can offer, potentially offer if you get out at the right time. I do it small and then take – but that return for that small amount of money is kind of outsized.
Of course, we have the political side. I mean, that’s interesting. I’m very careful about the politics personally. It’s interesting that it is – it apparently now is maybe a political issue in the elections. We’ve seen some votes go through that Congress. I’m not really excited about the White House take on crypto yet. I mean, I don’t think they’ve made a really clear stance for crypto. Certainly, Trump has made a very clear stance. So it’s becoming an election issue regardless.
We still have active, I think, pretty bad lawsuits against Coinbase (COIN) and other players in the industry that I think should be shut down personally. And we haven’t seen the White House have the SEC stop that nonsense. It might be nonsense.
So I don’t know. I can’t really say that the Democrats have completely turned, although certainly some Democrats in the Congress, both Senate and representatives have.
RS: Do you want to just synthesize briefly why you are in disagreement with that litigation?
RW: Essentially, the Coinbase litigation I see is corruption because they allow Coinbase to become publicly traded as a stock, which means they approve of their business model, approve of what they’re listing. They’re not doing anything different now from what they’re doing then. And yet now all of a sudden they question their – they give him a Wells notice to say that they’re trading in unregistered securities, which they – the same coins in question were trading when they were approved as a stock.
So I see that as a very corrupt move. And at the same time, lots of players in the industries have said, well, what’s this registration that we can do? Because every time we’ve made attempts at registration, we haven’t been able to go further with that.
So I see that – I don’t know, I’m just reading the tea leaves, I hear corruption. I hear a very corrupt agency and that’s a very inflammatory thing to say, but I’m not the only one saying it, it just sounds that way. I, of course, I’m not firsthand on these things, except for the fact that I have followed Coinbase’s path to publicly traded stock. That’s about all I have. But this doesn’t sound right.
I think that – well, so the new – I’m always going to get these laws wrong, but the FIT21 law is going to take a lot of power out of the SEC and it’s passed through both Houses of Congress. So that’s just a question of whether the President is going to veto or not.
So that would take the power out of the SEC and stop this stuff. That’ll be really nice to see because that – because Congress sees it – actually sees it corrupt as well. That’s the – they’re basically checking the SEC on their views of crypto. So they’re – I think, they generally agree with me, although I don’t think the bills calls them corrupt. It’s just saying, hey, we’re going to take power out of their hands and give it to the CFTC because we like how they’re being a better player. So a more sound player.
RS: I appreciate that. Did you have more to say about the overview? I know I interrupted you there.
RW: About the bull market and whatnot?
RS: Yeah.
RW: I mean, altcoins in general pretty – I haven’t said much about that late. We’ve had nice runs in them, but other altcoins out there are very much gone into a siesta sleep, kind of sitting in their hammock. So there are some nice setups out there. We’ve got charts that we’re watching closely, certainly have some positions, but there’s not really much exciting there, I know that’s been excited later in the year. It’ll wake up again as long as the bull market’s on.
I mean, if Bitcoin breaks 50,600, it’ll take a lot of things with it. That doesn’t necessarily mean the bear market – the bull market is over, but it’s certainly the setups that we’re seeing probably will break fairly wholesale and we’ll have to look for new ones or wait for the market to settle out.
So really a lot pivots on 50,600 because altcoins tend to just draw liquidity out of Bitcoin. It’s sort of their cycle of where when no one likes crypto, buy Bitcoin. The people have said this and I haven’t come up with this, it’s – but when people don’t like crypto, buy Bitcoin. And when everyone wants to buy Bitcoin, buy altcoins, and then when everyone wants to buy altcoins, sell it all, it’s kind of the cycle of sentiment through the market.
So that’s to say, if Bitcoin really rolls over, it tends to pull a lot of things with it because liquidity goes through this cycle of Bitcoin first and altcoins. Bitcoin often tops first and then altcoins go with it. So we’ll just have to be careful if Bitcoin breaks 50,600. That’s really, really, really key, so.
RS: What are your thoughts about the ETFs in this space? We saw that BlackRock (BLK) overtook Grayscale (GBTC) this week. What are your thoughts in general about all the players in the ETF Bitcoin space? And what are your thoughts specifically around BlackRock?
RW: I did a nice article when they first launched in January. I think that one’s behind the paywall, but I did a layout of why – how I evaluate these ETFs. And I think the range of thoughts were, I cared about fees for sure. I cared about – I do care about whether the player is kind of native in the space.
So we look at Fidelity (FBTC), we look at, see whether other players VanEck (HODL). You can call them native because they’ve been very supportive of the industry. Bitwise (BITB) is another one. So I was very positive of them being in the space with ETFs in general. I’m very cautious about BlackRock, just a large institution. And when – I’ve long been in the markets trading, but – so I rely on these institutions.
But when it comes to crypto, I’m kind of a bit more bohemian like this is the people’s money. This is our decentralized finance and all of the things that Bitcoin gives us as freedom away from the institutional system. And partly because if the institutional system goes in a crisis, we can kind of sit outside that crisis with some of our assets and that’s one – a big deal to me.
And now, so in that regard, I have a little bit of concern with all the institutions getting into the game. A lot of Bitcoin is getting pulled into these wallets that are – the nice thing about ETF versus GBTC, GBTC is as we call it, a Hotel California.
Once Bitcoin went into the GBTC fund, this is the trust fund that existed before the ETFs. There was no way for it to get out. It was stuck in there. Well, what’s nice about an ETF is they do have to buy and sell Bitcoin to manage the float of shares and the asset value.
I know we can’t get into the mechanisms of that, but we’ve seen – we can now watch those wallets actually buy and sell Bitcoin. So it’s nice that that’s not a – no longer a Hotel California Bitcoin, so to speak. It’s not checking in and not checking out.
But at the same time, I would much rather see the people in general, meaning the populace, be able to freely have as much Bitcoin, get it cheaply and hold it in wallets. Just because that’s kind of my – that’s just my rebellious state, my rebellious view of Bitcoin that its value is standing outside the institutions and being able to have custody of something without a third-party.
Now, personally, what am I doing with those ETFs? Of course, I’m trading them. I want to juice up my stock returns, my stock brokerage account returns, of course. So it’s there. I’m not going to stick to my sort of theological views, if you will, for lack of a better term. And I’m going to use it because it’s there, like, there’s no doubt and we talk about those ETFs.
I haven’t kept charts on them because now there’s too many. And so I – what I do in the services, just present, this is the level of Bitcoin. This is the basic roundabout conversion to the level of Bitcoin, so that everyone has a rough amount of Bitcoin per share. And so I track that as best as I possibly can. It’s hard to get a very exact and I say, like, okay, now if you want to trade against say that 50,600 support level on Bitcoin, here’s your rough level – here’s your rough calculation to that level for the ETF.
So people can actually do that, and I’m managing it the same way, because I don’t keep my own chart on the ETF. There’s just too many.
RS: And how are you thinking – I know that you’re dependent upon sentiment and charts, but how are you thinking about it long-term? You talked about trading on the news and having more kind of fundamental beliefs around it.
How are you thinking this shakes out long-term or how do you see it going?
RW: The chart to me heads towards 1 million – 1 million to 3 million. That probably is not going to happen. I will probably be cutting my trading activity down by then. Well, I’ll still be running services and it’s probably like 10 years to 20 years from now. I may be wrong and maybe much sooner.
There are certain levels. I mean, it takes like something like 3,000 to break that. I still expect the norm – like the one people people have said is that the ETF will cut the volatility of Bitcoin down.
Well, let’s wait until we get a major bear market because you can’t say that gold’s volatility was cut by the ETFs when they came out. You can’t say anything about anyone’s volatility. And you’re still – when retailers sell their shares of an ETF, because like say retailers are in one of these ETFs and they’re scared by its volatility once it moves into a bear market, they are going to be scared out. And when they get out, they – then that, let’s say BlackRock has to sell Bitcoin to manage the flow.
So it doesn’t matter. Like, it’s really still retail sentiment that drives the asset value and it’s still a volatile asset class. In fact, with a lot of supply take up into these ETFs, you get a cut of liquidity in the spot market, the spot Bitcoin market, and that can increase. This Bitcoin is still driven by the spot market because it’s global. It’s not a U.S. market, right?
So you’ll still see all that supply take up risks actually increasing the volatility of Bitcoin because of the illiquidity that’s resulting from that supply take up. So I think a lot of people say that, I’ve heard a couple of players fall in my category of saying liquidity is going to drop, therefore volatility will increase. We’ll see.
But I still expect to have those long-term, at least, until further notice, I still like to expect to see 75% drops in the bear market, 60% drops. Those are all very normal for Bitcoin in its history and I don’t expect that to change. It may be that that 60% drop happens over two years, not one year. That may be reasonable. Therefore, volatility supposedly dropped, but the ultimate result of that bear market is still 60% to 70% drop.
So that’s in the future. That’s what I expect after 125 to up as high as 180 Bitcoin, 180k Bitcoin, I do expect the bear market to start. If we start breaking support at wholesale, it comes earlier. And so we’ll still – I still see that volatility, but those bear markets are great opportunities to start buying aggressively.
And what I do portfolio-wise is I use those bear markets to collect from my cold wallets. I’m not buying from my trading account. They’re more long-term buys. I haven’t done any of that for – I’ve just been trading it since our bottom at 15,500 in 2023. I’ve just been trading because I had used that low and a little bit higher than that as we came into that low to basically buy Bitcoin and put it in my cold wallet. And that’s kind of the long-term portfolio versus the trading account.
Now I’m just trading because I don’t have a low enough price to say, okay, this is a nice price to just tuck away. I differentiate things that way.
RS: How much do the interest rates and the macro environment, how are you looking at that? How are you parsing out the information and how do you think that’s affecting the crypto space right now?
RW: I haven’t – there has not been a correlation with interest rates whatsoever. I think people said that because interest rates started rising and then the bear market of 2022 ensued in Bitcoin, but that’s recency bias. Like they just saying that because it happened and now interest rates are sticking high and Bitcoin is rallying and we’ve taken out that high.
So it doesn’t make sense to – people tend to correlate things when they’ve happened and then they stop talking about the correlation without reversing and saying, oh, I was wrong. I was wrong about the correlation. All people that talk about correlation haven’t gone back and said, oh yeah, I was absolutely wrong. And so it just isn’t a factor.
I mean, I think the question, the interesting thing about Bitcoin is it’s been on this four-year cycle of when the halvings happened and we had the last one, I think, it was April and that has classically – it has still ticked – tick for tick behaved along the line of that cycle. My problem with that cycle is one, it’s only – we’ve only had three prior, this is the fourth. And so that’s not enough data points to make a strategy in anything.
I don’t make any trading strategies off three data points. And at the same time, it’s kind of diminishing returns because we’re just – we’re now at like an inflation rate of 1%. Okay, we’re going to keep having that like how much does that really impact the future Bitcoin supply, when the inflation rate is already nearly 0.
And so I question that, but I can’t argue with a tick for tick. It’s played out this cycle. So, it’s still a part of the game. So is that – so if I was to correlate anything, it would be that. But again, I’m going to question whether that’s the case in the future. I think it’ll break at some point in time.
RS: And is that a reflection of just a burgeoning industry that we’re trying to come to terms with how to gauge things and how to weight things and how to measure things? Or is it even…
RW: I don’t think like, I mean, any strategic theories about Bitcoin long-term is very, very suspect. I’m sure that we have an asset now that is, it was in 2009 it started. So we’re at 15 years. I mean, it’s pretty good. But I mean, we still struggle with strategy on the S&P 500 after 100 years or whatever it is now.
And so correlation comes and goes. And I’ve heard a lot of people – I’ve heard a lot of “macro people” that are really, I’m not a qualified macro economist or strategist, that just isn’t my edge.
And I’ve heard a lot of macros take mid turns on Bitcoin versus they may use the Fed liquidity. They use all these measures and I’ve seen them turn their assumptions over and say, I just, I had that wrong. Same thing on the interest rates.
Just like I said, some of the some very respected macro economists were saying Bitcoin’s going to be bearish as long as interest rates are high. Well, they’re high and now we’ve broken all-time high recently. So, they’ve had to turn tails. I mean, some have said they’re wrong, but a lot have not. They haven’t admitted to the fact that they just absolutely got it wrong. But anyway.
RS: Some people like to double down after being wrong. Some people don’t.
RW: Yeah, that’s true. Yeah. Oh, I was just and I’m not going to call out names. I do know of a macro economist I listen to, and he’s waiting for those interest rates to reassert themselves on Bitcoin. Like, this all-time high is just noise and it’s going – the market will reassert itself when it realizes interest rates are still high. It’s like, okay. Meanwhile, I’m making money on and I just have a support level that I’m just rolling up. It’s very easy trading.
RS: You love to see people work the data around their original point. You love to see it.
RW: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so man, the only thing that I care, if I was to go into data, my data is very short-term. Like when I have the wherewithal, I look at leverage in the system because the – we can’t take much leverage in United States on Bitcoin, but these exchanges that have 100x leverage, crazy exchanges, globally, watching those and where the leverage is.
I mean, certainly, when we get some of the big moves in Bitcoin, it’s because some of that leverage got kibosh, people were getting margin calls. Options data is interesting. I look at buying and selling just volumes and things like that. I mean, those are – that’s about where I operate when it comes to data. I’m not looking at interest rates. Interest rates are too slow moving for Bitcoin anyway. Like if I wait for interest rate moves before I make moves in Bitcoin, the move is already done. So just too slow.
RS: In terms of the Bitcoin halving that you mentioned that happened in April, how are you articulating or sharing with retail investors what that means for them and the plays that you’ve seen in crypto since then? Has it been what you thought it would be based on the halving?
RW: Yeah. Well, I recently went to a conference that I do sometimes do a series of, and I went through my slides from like the past. And so when we were going through the September ‘23, so I didn’t, it took, so it always takes a little bit in Elliott Wave theory to, which is the main theory we use for technical analysis, to know that you have a bottom.
There’s the sign of a bottom and then there’s confirmation of a bottom. And then we bottomed at 15,500, but I didn’t know it was a bottom till like mid-20s and that’s just the results of the structure of the chart and I needed to give it room to put in more lows and I said, okay now I have to say that we had signs of bottom and now we have confirmation. But then we had this consolidation in sort of mid-‘23, 2023, that really last, I think, was six months. It was – everyone went to sleep on it.
And I was very bullish during that. I just – I wanted it to go a little bit lower, it never did, but still regardless, that consolidation was viewed as very bullish. And I expected that to mark an important low eventually when it finally bottomed in this path to 125,000.
And so in this – this conference I was doing, I showed that slide from that day. And then I had another visit to a conference in like June, I showed that slide, I was like, check me on this. And it was like, and just moving my support levels as we go. And so it’s tough if you’re a person now, I mean, the people that are in the service, they’ve been the ones that were there last year, 2023.
Now some people have been in much longer. We started in 2021 on Seeking Alpha. So they’ve been through the end of the bull market, the bear market, and then the bottom. But if you’re starting now, well, we’re rolling these support levels up.
So you can make a choice and you can say, well, I would rather be a long-term holder of Bitcoin. Okay, then you have to understand, if you buy now, you have a couple of choices. You buy now and hope that you get 125, again, it’s my expectation, but 125,000, but it can always – the market can always miss my expectation, right? But that’s my expectation.
So you can buy now, but you might want to take some profit up there, okay? And maybe hold the rest for – and again, that’s what’s in my cold wallet, what I’ve put in my cold wallet, I won’t even sell at 125,000. That is there for what – that is there. It’s like my gold bars in my safe. They’re not moving. They’re just there as long-term unless I really hit some kind of life emergency, right?
Maybe I’ll give it to my kids. I have assets like that. I think everyone should over time, but it’s not practical for me to have 75% of my trading net worth there. Like that is like, I keep it at around 10%, okay? And then, so when you buy Bitcoin now, you have to decide whether you want to do that or if you want to take it as a trading asset.
So if you’re going to take it as trading asset, I’ve got support 50,600. And you get below that, you need to think about stopping out or cutting down, one of the two. I certainly will and then wait for it to see what happens. But if we get to 125 to get off, so you have to kind of decide whether, what do you want to do with Bitcoin here while we’re in the middle of a raging bull market?
I mean, ideally, everyone bought a 15.5 that was thinking about Bitcoin in 2022. But what happens in bear markets, I know how it goes, I’ve been in this a long time. When the markets dropping 75%, no one wants to buy, right?
I bought, but like I’ve done – I’ve been through this rodeo a few times So, but people never want –never want to buy. And in fact, when I do give talks, there’s probably one still showing up. So I’m not sure people are even going to recognize the people that are new to crypto, not been in crypto, I’m not sure they’re going to even give it a wink until it hits 100 – 6 figures. And then I will be saying probably not a good idea to buy it. Unless you just want to put a little in your portfolio in a little long time, that’s all well and good, but just know you’re going to take a big draw down.
RS: So speaking to allocating for portfolios, what would you say is an average retail investors’ best bet in terms of looking at the spot ETFs, in terms of looking at the miners, in terms of looking at a theory, like how would you or how do you encourage investors to think about that?
RW: It depends on where they’re coming at it. Like if someone has a stock account, I mean, I meet a lot of people day in day out in my life that actually don’t even have a stock account, which is crazy. But so if they don’t, that’s where to start, right?
But if someone has a stock account and they don’t have any exposure to crypto, I would say get in your stock account and get an ETF and then try to start to graduate to owning, in my opinion, and I’ll give them all the reasons why I own Bitcoin in a wallet, start to learn how to use wallet security and all of that.
I have actually taken some people that don’t even have a stock account and taken them straight to that. Usually by, there’s an app called Strike, which can be – it’s a Bitcoin. You can easily hook up your bank account buy Bitcoin and send to your wallet. It also can be used like for payments. I’ve actually sponsored a child in a third world country. And I found out the best way to send her money. She’s not a child anymore actually. I’ve been sponsoring her for 20 years. She’s like – she’s young adult, but still lives in poverty.
And I found the best thing was to send her Bitcoin. And it just happened to be that way because the wires to her country in Brazil would take, they would take 15% from me or her, right? It’s just implausible. I don’t send her that much money. I mean, it takes a little money to change her life. I don’t send her that much money to where that 15% makes any sense.
So I send her Bitcoin feeless using the Strike app, but I’ve also used that app for easily buying Bitcoin and putting it into my cold wallets. And so I teach people with that. It’s very easy. But when you go down that route of having cold wallets, you just got to learn all the security and all of that. So I take people through that.
So I do this kind of path of trying to figure out where people are. Do they have a stock account? Okay, then just jump over there and here’s the ETF symbol, buy it. Here’s a few of them. Pick one you want, buy it. Don’t worry about it.
RS: How do you encourage them to think about like a starter ETF, let’s say?
RW: I think that, like for instance, my daughter who I run her stock accounts, she’s not there with Bitcoin managing it. She’s not even interested in managing investments, but she just says, “Dad, take care of it.” I put a – because she’s young, I put a 30% allocation to Bitcoin and then like 10% to gold and like 30% to like S&P 500. So that’s kind of her allocation.
What I’d recommend to everyone, if you’re a retiree, probably not 30% Bitcoin, right? I mean, she will do well to capture the volatility, and she’s just putting money into that stock account every month. So she’s in a position to really capture volatility. If you’re a retirement person and you are needed to take money out of your account, well, then maybe 0 Bitcoin, right? But if you have money that will stay in your retirement account for a while, well, maybe 5%, 10%, right?
So it really does depend. I mean, it is the most volatile asset at like an institutional level. If you take a bunch of – if you take assets that are like the class of assets that an institutional will trade now and we could put Bitcoin in that category now since recent, the institutions have started to adopt it.
Well, Bitcoin is probably the most volatile asset in – on the planet, except for like options or, futures, which doesn’t make sense for most people to trade. So in that situation, you do well to capture volatility. But if you need the money right away, then you got your allocation of some tiny, right, because of that volatility, just practicality, especially any event in the next five years.
RS: And in terms of what you mentioned before, speaking to BlackRock’s place in the industry, would you – how would you contextualize the difference, or are there differences between, let’s say, GBTC and (IBIT), all the different Bitcoin ETFs?
RW: Well, the big thing is fee difference. I mean, BlackRock is low, but not the lowest. I forget which one is the lowest. Fidelity is quite low. Bitwise is quite low. I mean, I know fees was part of my – and I just – I want to capture the options. So I have four of them in various accounts because I’m kind of waiting for each one to have options first and I may go with that one.
So I have Fidelity, VanEck, Bitwise, oh man, what’s the fourth, Ark (ARKB). And they’re all in the low fee category, like sub 0.25, I believe. I can’t remember where BlackRock is, but I know they’re in the 20 basis points, fee-wise.
GBTC is up at 1.5, unless they changed it and I missed it. So that’s 150 basis points. Like I sold all my GBTC when the premium or the discount dropped near the announcement that it was going to become an ETF. I sold it because 1.5% – 1.5% fee is ridiculous compared to the rest of them. So there’s that factor.
So BlackRock’s not the lowest. It’s good. I think they’re coming around. But one of the reasons I’ve avoided is because even GBTC, Fidelity for sure, Bitwise, all these players are sort of crypto natives and they’re doing various things to support the space from a lobby perspective, political perspective and they care whether people can continue like one of the threats United States is we can’t custody our own Bitcoin.
I think Congress will come against that the way the Congress is starting to shift. But there’s concerns about that. And I expect these organizations based on their history in the space to help support that from a political perspective. I don’t know if BlackRock is going to say, yeah, we’ll handle everyone’s Bitcoin for them. Like I don’t trust them in that regard and their lobbying power obviously is huge.
And so I don’t know where they’re at on a political perspective. I want to be able to custody my own Bitcoin, so I’m going to be very much suspicious of them until I see them really support that politically.
RS: And any thoughts to share about Ethereum ETFs?
RW: I mean there’s a lot of things and maybe someone technically could challenge me on this, but because it’s a proof, this is going to get very technical, because it’s a proof of stake chain versus Bitcoin being proof of work, so they don’t mine the – basically, the validators have to own a certain amount of Bitcoin. They validate the chain, it’s very technical. But it’s – if I’m not mistaken, it’s concerning if there’s so much Ether held up in funds that’s not being used to validate and secure the chain.
So the SEC so far has been very antsy about them participating in validation. So I don’t know, maybe I’m sure in the comments, when you post this podcast, someone is going to challenge that or agree with that because I know there’s people a lot more sound on the technical, I’m a trader, not a coder, not a technician or someone in the technical space.
But that seems concerning to me. And that aside as a trader, again, like I said earlier, I have concerns about Ether just on its underperformance of Bitcoin, not on anything else. And so I sold my, what is it called, (OTCQX:ETHE), which is the Grayscale Ether Trust simply because I don’t like what Ether is doing. I may jump right back in as soon as the setup is better, right?
So I’m very much a part-time trader of Ether, when it’s set up right. And so I’ll just take it as it is. And if it’s performing right, then I will be in it as an ETF too. And if not, nope, I’ll just continue to focus on my Bitcoin ETFs.
RS: Well, I really appreciate this conversation for people wanting to know more and we’ll leave a couple of links up to the articles that Ryan mentioned. Check out Crypto Waves on Seeking Alpha for more insight on crypto.
Ryan, anything we left out of the conversation or you feel like you would want to share with investors?
RW: The only thing I would say is check out my Twitter. I actually do a monthly public webinar and that is right out of the Crypto Waves service. So they actually can get a taste of the service on a public basis for free once per month. It’s the third Saturday usually. Unless I don’t announce it, that means I’m on vacation or something. So they can check it out and they get a taste of the service without subscribing. If they’re then interested, they know where to find me.
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