 Hello, everyone, and welcome to Market Talks on Cointelegraph with myself, CryptoJeb. This is the show where we discuss the latest in what's shaping the markets, along with valuable insights from industry leaders, traders, and other influencers. Today's guest is going to be none other than the one and only Scott Melker. Scott Melker, better known as the Wolf of All Streets, is a trader and crypto advocate. He's a former DJ, and he now operates a crypto advocacy empire spanning all across YouTube, podcast, Twitter, and more. Let's go ahead and run that video for Scott. Scott, welcome to the show, my friend. How are you doing, buddy? I'm doing great, man. Thank you so much for having me. Absolutely. Thank you for coming on the show. I got to ask to start because you were a DJ. How does the switch from music to cryptocurrency happen? Well, I started in markets pretty early, actually. I mean, I started playing the piano when I was five years old, and that's sort of the music story. But I started buying stocks when I was a young teenager. Luckily, I had parents who were pretty up on financial education and viewed it as important, so they really helped me along the way. I went to the University of Pennsylvania in the late 90s, and everybody was into finance there, of course, because of the Wharton School. But I took a different turn and decided to pursue a career in music for about 20 years from there, with lots of twists and turns on the side. But I always sort of kept my finger on the pulse of markets. And I was always trading, honestly, quite poorly for most of the time for being Frank. I think I've followed into every trap, every pitfall possible for a trader. And eventually, as I was sort of getting older, I had my daughter. Didn't want to be on the road DJing anymore. I luckily really found crypto and came as a trader, really trying to make dollars and then fell down the rabbit hole. I think like a lot of other people and just completely switched gears. This kind of person I am is really once I get sort of obsessed with something, it becomes my singular focus. And that's really what happened to me for crypto in 2017-2018. That's incredible. A lot of big names got into the cryptocurrency space in 2017. We got into myself. I got nothing. I'm a big name, but I got into the cryptocurrency space July 31st, 2017. You've been in for quite some time. You've got 850,000 followers over on Twitter. And you've got some amazing insights here in the Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency space. We've all learned a thing or two from you, my friend. But one of the things that you've said that I really want to hone in on here is that you mentioned and I've said the same thing in other interviews with Michael Saylor and Charles Hoskinson and a few other big names here in crypto that Bitcoin is one of the most important assets ever created. That's one of the things you and I both have said. Can you share with us why you feel that is the case? Why is Bitcoin one of the most important things that we have seen in generations? Because it gives people the opportunity to opt out, right? And I think that that's more important to focus on that from a value perspective than from a price perspective, right? A lot of people get caught up in the price. They don't zoom out. They don't realize that you have to take a view that's multiple years, if not multiple decades, if not multiple lifetimes to really see how this plays out. But Bitcoin was born out of the necessity of the Great Recession 2008, 2009, 2010, the crash that was happening at that point. And that's when it really started to gain steam. People didn't have Bitcoin really as an out at that point. It was a nascent asset. They didn't really have access to it. They didn't understand it, had probably never heard of it. Well, this time we're seeing a very similar situation and people finally have a way to secure their assets, to store value. I mean, it's easy in the United States to sort of laugh that off, right? Every time we go on mainstream TV and they ask me questions, it's not an inflation hedge. It's not working here. It's just crashing alongside other markets. I like to remind them that we, a, live sort of in a glass ceiling here, right? We're very fortunate. We have access to markets. We have access to a robust, although somewhat broken, of course, banking system. If you live somewhere like Venezuela, right, where your currency is hyper-inflating tens of percents on a monthly basis, sometimes 50%, right? You have no option but to put your money into something that has a chance to store value. For a lot of people, that can also be stable coins, by the way. But Bitcoin is the best asset, obviously, for that. So those arguments don't hold any water in places where hyperinflation is an issue where people are unbanked or underbanked, where they need to find other ways to be able to even transact directly. You talk to, like, my friend, Ray Yusef, from Paxful. What's happening in Africa that nobody's talking about? I mean, the youth of Nigeria have created an entire financial system outside of the legacy system where everything is price-transacted, moved around in Bitcoin, from country to country, as well, because remittances in the banking systems in Africa are so broken. So I think we're seeing the early iterations in countries like that and continents like that of what it could look like here if things really break or if systems start to fail or if people just get fed up and are looking for another way out. But a deflationary asset that fights and hedges against inflation that is based on math and not hope and faith, I think everybody can agree that if it fulfills its long-term promise, this is the most important asset ever created. One of the things that Michael Saylor and I discussed on that topic is that Bitcoin is the first thermodynamically sound superconducting asset in the history of mankind. And what that means is that thermodynamically sound means that it doesn't leak energy through something like inflation, something that's thermodynamically sound, first of all, doesn't exist in the known universe, but it would be theoretically something that stores energy and it doesn't leak it through energy loss, through, you know, vibration, through heat, through anything, through radiation. It would not leak energy. So Bitcoin holds on to energy. Instead of the US dollar, which is constantly draining 2% a year in a good year or, you know, in the last 12 months draining 8.6% in a year, Bitcoin is thermodynamically sound. It holds on to that energy. You put Bitcoin, you put energy into the system. It doesn't drain out through inflation. Now the market might go down in price. Every market goes down in price. That's simple supply and demand. But inflation is not the same as price appreciation and depreciation and superconducting means that you can send it anywhere in the entire world without any friction, without any losses. You have to pay, you know, there are plenty of stories of people sending $50 or $100 million in Bitcoin to buy a yacht or to buy a painting or to buy a house. They spent $2 in transaction fees. With nobody telling them what to do within an hour it was done. You don't have to wait three weeks for the remittances like you were talking about in Africa. I would completely agree it is one of the biggest fundamental changes to the global financial system that we've ever seen. And one thing to add on top of that is that, do you think these people in the United States, they're saying, oh yes, but Bitcoin's down 70% from all time high. How can it possibly be a store of value? How can it possibly be a hedge against inflation? Do you think the people in the United States and the First World that were so sheltered from these things that are going on in places like Venezuela, that are going on in Southeast Asia, that are going on in Africa, they're going on in Eastern Europe, they're going on in Ukraine right now, that are going on anywhere. We don't understand how important it is that we have our own way of storing money into the future. Do we just not understand because we're so pampered in the First World? I think we have an understanding of it, but not that Bitcoin is the actual asset that you need to own in that case, right? I think we have a long history obviously of people acquiring generational wealth through diversified investing, but that always meant, you know, 60-40 stocks to bonds, owning some real estate, maybe a little bit of gold as a hedge, things like that. I think what we have is a recency bias in the United States or in First World countries, or just a bias in general that everything's always going to be okay, because historically in our lifetimes that has been the case, but we don't realize there can be these black swan events and that eventually the policies of the Fed, of non-stop money printing, eventually that bill becomes due and someone needs to pay it. So I think the transition isn't in getting people to understand the importance of storing value ahead, it's getting people to understand they need to own Bitcoin as the asset to do so. So I think that we all understand the core of the problem, it's just a matter of coming together to really prove that that's the solution. So I want to talk a little bit more about what direction the market itself is going on, but I really love the conversation we're having here about the intrinsics of Bitcoin because I think it's important and edifying for all of us in cryptocurrency to be reminded the concept of why Bitcoin. We have an entire series called Why Bitcoin where we talk about, hey, this is why Bitcoin is better than gold. This is why Bitcoin is not going to destroy the environment. This is why Bitcoin is the future store of value. So let's talk a little bit more about that before we move on here. What would you say is the reason that people don't understand it? Are we like in 1905 with the light bulb? Are we in 1915 with, you know, the automobile? Are we in 1920 with aircraft? Do people realize, OK, this is a thing, but most people just don't understand the shift in the paradigm that's about to happen? Do people just not get that because the technology is still so early? I think so, and I think it takes a long time to turn an aircraft carrier, you know, and actually we probably, because we've been deeply entrenched in this for five, six years, we feel like it's happening slowly, but the adoption of Bitcoin is faster than the internet, right? It's a hockey stick curve. It's absolutely going parabolic. People don't really have the ability to think exponentially to understand that parabolic, to understand that parabolic growth because we're very entrenched in what's happening at this exact moment, right? So I think that it's just a matter of time and it's inevitable and it is just really the early days, like you said, giving those examples, like the light bulb in the early 1900s. It is, I mean, people like us, we obviously believe it's inevitable, but it takes a lot of time for people to choose a new asset when they've been deeply conditioned to invest in a certain way, which we have in this country. For those who have been lucky enough to receive any financial education, right? You have your retirement plan, your 401k, your Roth IRA, whatever it is that you've been told is the way to invest, that's the way everyone approaches it. It takes a really long time to change that. Yeah, absolutely. And that paradigm shift is going to take time, but like you said, it is going even faster than the internet. But then let's go ahead and move on and talk about what we're seeing in the market right now. Obviously, we've seen Bitcoins drop below $20,000. We've seen Bitcoin go through a major drop from $69,000. And if we were to go and tell people that are not in Bitcoin right now, well, Bitcoin's going through parabolic growth. Bitcoin's growing faster than the internet. The regulation's growing faster than the internet did. The on ramps are being built. The Netherlands approved a spot ETF this morning, right when Grayscale got denied late yesterday. We've got four or five spot ETFs around the world in multiple different countries. We had a sovereign nation adopt Bitcoin and more might be on the way relatively soon. All of these things happening in just the last 12 months, but people are so inclined to look at price. And so what do we say to people when the market has dropped from $69,000 down to $20,000 for somebody who's not in crypto when the only thing that they can see is that price data? How do we tell them, hey, calm down. Market's healthy. In fact, it's growing faster than any other industry in 100 years, but the price is down because they're going to call us out when we go and tell them about Bitcoin. What should we respond to them with? I don't know. Ask them if an asset that's up five times in two years appeals to them because in March of 2020, this asset was at, you know, 3,800, 4,000. You could even say 6,000 if we're going to be honest because it only dropped below 6,000 for a few hours, but it did go down to 4,000. And while the stock market casually doubled for March of 2020, Bitcoin went up 17 times and is still up four or five times from that point, right? It's all about where you set your bar, right? Where you started. Of course, if someone bought Bitcoin for the first time at 65,000 or that's the first time they heard of it or started looking at it, they're going to talk about how far down it is. But if you've been here since before, obviously, 2020, you talk about how far up it is from those points. So it's really about, again, I hate to harp on the same point, but it's about zooming out in the way that you look at it. Also, in the past, we had these crypto winters, bear markets, whatever you want to call them. And they were sort of these insular things that were happening only in crypto where other markets were raging and Bitcoin was suffering, right? We sort of saw it at the last summer after the May crash, the Elon Musk fund, all of that. Of course, the entire crypto winter of 2018-19, that was while the stock market was generally performing well. Well, this time you can say to them, okay, if you think Bitcoin's a problem because it's down 60 or 70 or 50%, now do Netflix. Now do Facebook. Now do PayPal. Now do Kathy Wood, who's the genius investor of our generation. Everything's down. There's absolutely nowhere to hide. Last time was the first month. Last month was the first time, I believe, I saw research from Masari that said there wasn't a single place that you could have basically put money in an asset class and stored any sort of value. And if you stayed in cash, you lost 8.5% of your buying power doing that, right? So not only is every asset down, you can't even hide in cash reliably because of inflation. So it's disingenuous to point out the crypto crash when there's obviously context of everything dropping at the same time. It's just not a really honest approach to it. Bitcoin is still performing, and listen, Bitcoin's doing poorly. I'm not trying to deny that. But it's doing poorly alongside almost everything else, right? This is just what happens. Markets are correcting now. I go back to March of 2020. We can talk about what it looks like when things start to bottom and when there's a bear market and when they crash. But like I said, from March 12th of 2020, Bitcoin went up 17 times. The stock market doubled. So if you believe that there's a bottom soon or at whatever point you believe you've identified the bottom, your indicator tells you it's the bottom, what assets do you want to be in moving forward? I think it's very obvious that this is the asset class that you want to buy when things start to reverse. I completely agree. The traditional markets are a sinking ship and our ship's getting rained on. But we should not fail to realize that while both of them have water on the deck, one of them just broke its keel in half and is about to sink. And we should probably jump ship to the other ship even if it's not doing the best as it possibly could be right now. People really need to look a lot deeper than price action. I think you explained that absolutely beautifully and eloquently. Thank you very much for that. But let's go ahead and talk about the drop. Bitcoin obviously is sitting around and a little bit below $20,000. What would you say the condition of the market is right now and what's your, let's say, three to six month outlook? I would say that the condition of the market is poor and that there's, listen, I hate the terms bullish and bearish because they have to be assigned to a timeframe and people rarely do, right? So you say I'm bearish, I'm bullish, and people believe that that's your general bias. It's impossible not to be bullish on Bitcoin long term. And if you zoom out to the monthly chart, it's higher highs and higher lows consistently. It's the never ending bull market, right? But when you zoom in, it would be ridiculous not to say that the trend is bearish. It is obviously. And not to say that we've been in a bear market by any definition. So I think in the shorter term, you obviously have to remain, you know, the trend is your friend, so you have to assume if all things are equal that down is more likely than up. That said, to me, there are a lot of signals that we could eventually or soon be coming out of it. We have a lot of historical precedents, not for Bitcoin, but for markets in Fed tightening cycles. There have been 12 since the 1950s. There was a great article in Bloomberg about this. 12 times a Fed has tightened major tightening cycles since the 1950s. In 11 of them, the stock market has performed exceptionally well when you zoom out from one to three years. So generally what you see is a very, very negative sort of impact on markets from the tightening cycle in the first three quarters or so, which is what we're going through now and would effectively take us to the end of the year because the market is absorbing the information, the liquidity is being removed, people are starting to deal with this sort of hawkish tone from the Fed. But then after that markets eventually, they sort of just come to this new reality, right? And they adjust to this new reality and they continue up as they always do. Also, I think in this case, assuming as we are that Bitcoin is trading like any other sort of risk asset, is that we have an election cycle. There's never been a time in one of those tightening cycles when it was a midterm election or a main election year that markets did not perform well in Q4 and Q1 of the subsequent year. Why? Because politicians hate losing their jobs, right? So come October, which will be the fourth quarter of the year, I assume that the Fed will effectively turn the printer back on or at least slow down the tightening, slow down the rhetoric and we'll probably see markets rise into November when the election happens because if we don't, if we're in a recession, if the market is doing what it is now, literally every single Democrat there will lose their job and we know that there's going to be a lot of political pressure for that not to happen. And I assume that that will continue. So my best guess is that we have a very choppy, boring, low volume, low liquidity summer, maybe even low volatility summer, maybe we put in new lows or maybe we just chop around from, you know, 17, 5 to 22, 23, something like that. And then we really start to see what the market's made of as we come into the end of the year. I mean, that would be my general prognosis for markets in general. And right now we know that there's some correlation between the crypto market and other markets. So that's my view. Well, I think that that is a view that I very closely hold to. I do think that you're going to see, like you said, a very low volume, low liquidity sideways movement going through the rest of this year. I've put the bottom probably around $14,000 to $15,000. It could wick all the way down to $9,000. I don't think it's going to go quite that low, but as you talked about, we have low volume, low liquidity right now. If we did see Bitcoin start dropping, it'll probably drop pretty quickly. As we saw in the last couple of drops, we saw Bitcoin drop 27% then 30% twice over the last couple of months. And if we did drop again, I think you would see another relatively substantial drop. If we drop down to $13,700, which was the top set in, I want to say April, it might have been May of 2019, then we would see Bitcoin bottom out on the 0.5% Fibonacci extension level pulled from $3,000 in the bottom of 2018 all the way to $69,000 the all-time high if you use logarithm mode on that Fibonacci extension, which would actually be following a lot of the trends that we've seen in the previous bull markets of kind of stepping down the Fibonacci rungs there. So I think that we could see about $14,000 to the downside sideways trading, like you said midterms are coming up. They're probably not going to keep the interest rates hiking that long. I think that, and this will be the first part of my question, I think they're probably going to hike the interest rates until about maybe four or five, maybe 6%, then plateau those. But then I also want to ask you, do you think they're going to turn the printer back on in a big way, or do you think that they're going to leave the printer off to try and stop the inflation because they're very hard on inflation right now, the Fed, and just taper interest rates or start lowering interest rates back down to try and hold off this recession? Because we just confirmed 1.6% negative GDP growth in quarter one. We're looking at 2% to 3% in quarter two. We're going into a recession. That's all but confirmed. Do you think that they're going to do those two things? Yeah, I think the printer is inevitable, right? I mean, that's effectively the structure of anything based on a fiat standard, right? Eventually you have to print money, debt-based system, and it's absolutely inevitable. And we've seen these cycles before. There's never been a time that the Fed became hawkish and tightened and didn't eventually start printing again and go the opposite way. Literally how the system is built, like you said. Yeah, yeah. So if that happens in six months, or if that happens in a year, it's absolutely inevitable that eventually we print our way into hyperinflation and failure, right? And so listen, I'm not one of those people who's going to tell you that the dollar's going to be dead in five years. I don't believe that, right? But I do think that it will likely go the way of every other fiat currency eventually. Like I said, again, the same analogy takes a long time to steer an aircraft carrier, to turn an aircraft carrier, and the dollar still is the global reserve currency, so it's going to take quite a while for that adjustment to happen. I mean, look what's happening with the ruble. Look what's happening in China. They're obviously working on a central bank digital currency. I think that that process is accelerating. End of the day, we're always going to print because that's the way that the wealthy and the powerful keep themselves wealthy and powerful. Absolutely. Well, during this winter that we're going through in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, obviously it's very difficult for the average investor because Bitcoin is so low right now. A lot of people are holding big bags and they don't have much left because either they've had to sell to cover expenses because the economy's been tightening and gas has gone off. Lumber's up 200%. Price of vehicles has gone up significantly and is going to continue going up as inflation works its way through a multi-year supply chain. What do people do to survive this Bitcoin bear market and still be able to dollar-cost average through it? And I think you and I would both agree, hey, buy these lows if you're, we're not financial advisors, but buy these lows if you're planning on holding for the long run. That's what I would say anyway. But how do people survive and even thrive during this crypto winter? Well, I would say to your point, you dollar-cost average in the bull market on the way up just like you do on the way down. The beauty of dollar-cost averaging is it's completely market agnostic and it doesn't matter what the price is. You just do it because you believe that long-term price will be higher than it is and I do. As for the crypto winter, it's a really tough question, right? Because you've probably already bought the dip earlier thinking that the bottom was in. You may not even have that dry powder, in which case the best you can hope for is to hold. Now, I want to say, you know, it's sort of a meme to say, only invest what you can afford to lose because first of all, nobody can really afford to lose anything. So maybe the term should be only invest what you can afford to set aside for a bit, right? But that amount when you make the decision is not always the same once the bear market in the crypto winter hits, right? What you could afford a year ago before all those things you just mentioned, before all of the sort of symptoms of inflation hit, before maybe you lost your job or before maybe your rent went up or any of these things was very different, right? When all of your assets dropped together, again, your crypto didn't just drop, right? Everything became more expensive and everything you invested in probably dropped in value outside of maybe real estate. So what you could afford to lose a year ago now may be money that you need. And unfortunately, that means, and you should never feel guilty if you have to sell something, right? That means you might have to sell and Bitcoin might be your most liquid asset to do that. If it's Bitcoin or your house, you're going to sell your Bitcoin, right? And I think there are people who are obviously in those situations and should not feel guilty that that's the case. Now, let's assume that you have somehow remained financially solvent to this point. Absolutely what you said. The best way to survive is either to just hold and wait, literally turn it off. Like it's amazing. I want everybody to watch us and talk about this and think about this. But really the least emotional way and probably the most rational way for your sanity is you just turn it all off and come back in a year, right? I mean, because the price will probably be higher and you will not have been tempted to make any bad financial decisions that you didn't need to make. If you don't need the money, you just sit on it right now and circling back to the question, if you have dry powder right now. To me, like this is a generational buying opportunity, even if it goes to 9,000 as you mentioned, right? It doesn't matter where it goes on the way down. It matters the potential long-term on the way up, right? If you buy one Bitcoin at 20,000 and price ends up at a million, you made $980,000, right? If you bought it at 10,000, you made $990,000. I'm not saying it's not a big deal, but those entry points when you zoom out and look at it in the long term, if you're buying this asset for its full potential, it's basically irrelevant, right? We're buying at what are likely generational lows, even if it cuts down another 50%, right? It's sort of, you have this sort of, I think bipolarity as a human being. You say, I'm buying this asset. It's my hedge against inflation. It's my retirement. I'm giving it to my kids. And then you're like, what's it doing on the one-hour chart, right? And those two things are such in conflict because you're not going to do it. All you're going to do by looking at the one-hour chart, if you're not scalping literally with leverage on a daily basis, which you should not be doing unless you're like a professional, all you're doing is giving yourself chances to make poor emotional decisions or bad decisions based on half-ass information and emotion. So like if you really believe in this asset, if you bought it and nothing has changed about your conviction about it, if you bought it because you believe it's going to a million or 300,000 or whatever that number is, you don't do anything. You literally just do nothing. And if you can, you buy more. Yeah. Absolutely. And that's what Michael Saylor is doing over at MicroStrategy. They just bought another 480 Bitcoin adding to their stockpile. They're sitting on 129,966 Bitcoin now, I think is what it is. They bought in an average price of just a shy bit over $30,000 for $3.98 billion. It's how much money they've put into it. Again, the average price for that 129,000 Bitcoin is at around $30,000. So they're down 50%. But Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy are still buying more despite concerns pretty common in the cryptocurrency space that Michael Saylor is going to get deleveraged and he's going to get called on all of that and have to sell all the Bitcoin. It's going to crash the market. That's a different conversation. The point is their dollar cost averaging the bottom. Do you think that it's time for us to continue buying this dip because Michael Saylor is doing it? Or should we, you know, be more introspective and come up with our own reasons why we should be buying the dip? I mean, listen, he's, you know, being down 35% for him, especially after he was up so high is probably not the most fun thing in the world. But I think that buying the dip now when people said he was going to be liquidated at 21K pretty much shows that that was nonsense fun. And as he said, he could basically collateralize his Bitcoin and lower his liquidation down to like 3,000 or 4,000, which I don't think anyone believes is in sight for now. Right? So that said, he has dollar cost averaging. Michael Saylor basically raises money or raises debt at any point that he can and he used it to buy Bitcoin and that's really, I think, like I said, agnostic. It has nothing to do with the price. Of course, he wants to buy it on dips. He was doing the same when price was going up and that is how people should approach it. But should you buy the dip just because Michael Saylor just bought? No, because Michael Saylor isn't trying to buy the bottom. Right? I don't think that's his strategy. I don't think that that's his intention. I don't think he's pulling out a chart and trying to find out where the 200 weekly MAs, right? It's just not their strategy. He's got $10 million in a change in his couch cushion. So he drummed up here a little bit and bought some more Bitcoin. I think the general approach is correct. Absolutely, as we've already discussed. But do I think that that's a bottom signal? No, I don't because I don't think that he even is viewing it that way. Absolutely. I think it's encouraging to see that the big players that are not getting deleveraged and going under and we're going to talk about a few of them in a second are still buying and continuing to buy. Like you said, if Michael Saylor got liquidated, it looked like it'd have to go down to $3,000 or $4,000. And I think the reason I ask that question is because a lot of people want to look to influencers like you or myself or look to billionaires like Michael Saylor and say, he's doing this, so therefore I'm going to do that. And I think it's very important that we take caution and we thank for ourselves and educate ourselves and not base our own investment decisions based on the opinions of other people solely. But let's not let other people make decisions for us. Let's watch a show like Market Talks here on Cointelegraph. You should tune in. 12 a.m. Eastern every single Thursday. But you should also tune in to your Twitter and to plenty of other different people for opinion, but we should be making our own decisions. That's why I ask that question. I think it's very important. But we have a lot of other drama going on in the cryptocurrency space that I want your take on. JP Morgan came out recently and for once I actually agree with him. They think that the deleveraging cycle going on in crypto is going to happen very quickly. What they're talking about are the not so much lunas of the world. That's not exactly a deleveraging event, but that is an event of cataclysmic proportions happening at the bottom of this market. We're seeing Celsius shut down with draws. They are absolutely illiquid, potentially insolvent. They just hired a bunch of lawyers. Not exactly sure what those lawyers are doing, whether they're trying to sell off assets for the sake of producing liquidity to pay back their customers that are trying to leave or if they're actually insolvent because JP Morgan also offered to buy their assets. So there's a lot of questions going on with different things such as 3AC. I forgot about 3AC. They just went insolvent and were being called to be liquidated by the British Virgin Islands. They owe $670 million in the form of 15,250 Bitcoin and $300 million of USDC. There's a lot of people getting deleveraged right now. They're running out of money. They're becoming insolvent. They're going bankrupt. They're getting liquidated. JP Morgan thinks that that's going to happen very quickly. What do you think about all of these liquidations that are going on, all of these companies going under? Is that a bottoming signal for you? And does the government need to step in or should we just let the market bleed a little bit? We should let the market bleed a little bit, 100%. The last thing we need is to just become the other markets and start bailing out zombie companies. Listen, that doesn't mean I'm cheering against these companies. Totally agree. There's nothing I would love more than to see Celsius work this out. Be able to turn on withdrawals. Everybody who wants to gets their money out and they continue on. There's nothing more I would love to see. But if that's not going to be the case, we have to let it fail, unfortunately. And I had the same opinion of Luna, right? I mean, I think Luna 2.0 and all those things are absolute insanity, really sad. Because we don't want to be the things that we've been railing against. We don't want to be the things that Bitcoin was basically created as a hedge against. Unfortunately, what we did to some degree, and I'm not saying across the board, like not necessarily in DeFi, but like with C5 certainly, right? We created the same problems that existed in legacy markets, but actually with less secure rails and no regulation, right? And it's fun to talk about no regulation and we don't need it until your average person is losing all of their money on something that they believed was safe and was marketed to them as basically a bank, right? And I think that that's the case. Listen, I love the ethos of Celsius and Voyager, all these, I have coins on quite a few of these platforms, but only the ones I was willing to put at risk, right? So I'm a, I will say, I'm not going to say victim, but I'm also experiencing this alongside, I would say everyone else. But if you want to have a free market, I believe that Break Bitcoin is the last greatest free market basically of all time, right? People love to say that Bitcoin is manipulated, but it's not manipulation just because somebody has a lot of money and can move the market. That's actually a free market because you have the opportunity to be either with them or against them, right? When Bitcoin hash rate went offline in China, the Bitcoin network dropped 50% of the hash rate and just continued chugging along. When the market goes down from 69,000 to 17,000, we don't need bailouts from the government. We don't need a central authority to step in. Everything just keeps on moving. Some people lose their money. People don't. It's literally a free market and that's what we need to protect. Now talking about the contagion of all these things, listen, Luna was a disaster. It still makes me mad when I think about it. I wasn't even exposed to it. I never owned it. I was exposed to it through some hedge funds that I was invested in who are heavily invested, but I never personally owned it. And, you know, watching that happen, watching real people lose their money was very sad, but there was no one to come in and bail them out and there shouldn't have been. Now the problem obviously is that this contagion that's happening, it's very hard to predict. You're talking about J.P. Morgan. Very hard to know what the secondary effects of that are, right? I never thought that Voyager in any way, shape or form would be affected, but to some degree it was more complicated than that because what happened with Luna, you know, and obviously three arrows capital had a couple hundred million, $600 million maybe in Luna, which was then worth $600. They were highly leveraged on longs that got liquidated and somehow we're still convincing everyone, most likely through fraud, it appears, right? They were lying basically to creditors to give them these huge loans. I mean, Voyager, who prides himself on being exceptional risk management, exceptional at identifying counterparty risk, gave them $700 million. It just came out yesterday. It looks like BlockFi gave them a billion dollars, although that was a over collateralized loan, so they probably had about $1.3 billion in collateral at least during the bull market before Bitcoin dropped in price. So the problem is that one of these things leads to contagion in the next and then the kind of trusted counterparties that you had, they fail, and we don't know what the secondary third fourth effects of this are. Like how many smaller funds, how many smaller exchanges were exposed to this that we just haven't heard about yet? So I don't think yet that we can start to call it a bottom signal. JP Morgan said it would happen very fast. It has happened very fast. I mean, right? It doesn't seem fast in crypto terms, but in real world terms, and basically a couple of weeks, a few short months, we've seen major contagion from a few of these events. And it would be, I think, a bit dishonest to say confidently that that's done, right? Because we just, a lot of these are, you know, they're decentralized. We haven't really heard what those effects are going to be. So I think it's still a time for extreme caution because, you know, if someone else we find out about gets liquidated to the tune of, you know, nine, ten figures, that could certainly continue to push the market down. Absolutely. And if you continue to see this go on, then you continue to see trust come out of these parties because now everybody who has money on a lending platform that is not Celsius is seeing they're saying, hmm, maybe I should withdraw and then you end up having, like you said, the contagion that as the market is starting to know it as, start to have knock on effect. And you have a run on the banks. You have a run on one bank and then that bank fails and everybody thinks, oh, wow, I should go pull the money out of my bank. And then that bank fails and then you have everything knocked down and then you delever the entire space. The good news is there's this overlining here is that one, it happens fast, like you said. And two, it normally will knock out everybody because there's no government to come in and prop up. I'm so glad you said these zombie companies right now that are making no money or making almost none, no profit or almost no profit, no profit at all. They're being propped up by all these bailouts and they're continuing to destroy the economy through the way that they're operating. By not stimulating the economy, by not being a real profitable company and they need to be allowed to fail, it's not too big to fail, it needs to fail. So I think what you'll see happen is a lot of companies that should have failed, fail very quickly. And I hope and I pray that this industry will learn from the mistakes of all these different companies that are going under right now and understand, hey, we need to have more money on the side so that if 600,000 people want to withdraw all at once then they have the ability to and we're not doing 2% fractionalizing or reserve lending in the same way the banks are trying to do but they have all this government regulation and bailouts from the FDIC. We don't have the FDIC in this show. We need people to do those bailouts. What scares me there, yeah, to your point, what scares me there is to say, hopefully we'll learn from the future but the crypto industry didn't learn from 2008 what happened in the banks, right? I mean, we're doing our own Lehman Brothers thing here. Yes, we're doing our own Lehman Brothers right now. Yeah, we're literally doing that and so do I have confidence that the next bull cycle when everybody goes full FOMO and no, because that's what humans do. We go through cycles, you forget it all. You think that you're a genius, you over leverage and then that leverage gets rinsed out of the system, rinse and repeat, unfortunately. But I think that like, as you said, I think it will sort of be a paradigm shift in what platforms people trust or choose to put their money in. Maybe we'll sort of have a side effect of people educating themselves more after saying, you know, hell, this went really badly for me. I'm not going to do that again next time, you know, at the individual level. So I listen, I don't want to see anyone fail but when something needs to fail, you got to let it go. Yeah, and it's sad, but you got to turn these companies over to the consequences of their own failure or else again, like you said, we'll build what we're trying to fight against. We'll build just a centralized finance on top of a bedrock of traditional. We'll build, we'll try and build decentralized finance on top of the principles of centralized finance because we got too greedy and we ended up building the exact same thing because we forgot our principles and that's why I encourage everybody to remember even much, much more importantly than what the price of Bitcoin is, the why behind Bitcoin, the principles it was built on. It was built on decentralization. It was built on not having counterparty risk. It was built on being unhackable. It was built on being one of the most robust digital systems that has ever been built. It was built on, frankly, simplicity. When you think about it, Bitcoin is not that complicated compared to a lot of these altcoins and DEXs and DApps. It was built on a lot of very core principles. And when we start trying to build centralized finance into DeFi because that's more appealing and we're used to this Keynesian economic model that we're living in, that's when we start having problems. It's not when you build based on the principles Bitcoin was founded on that you start having problems. It's when you start pulling the principles in from the external world into crypto for the sake of getting rich quick because if you forget the why of Bitcoin, you will almost certainly fail in the investing side of Bitcoin. Scott, do you have any final thoughts before we wrap it out here? I mean, I think we basically covered all of it. I mean, I think it's just very important and everyone will tell you the same thing over and over again. But if you are in a place where you personally are solvent and you personally don't need to dip into your funds to pay for things in your life, right now really is a good time to just take a deep breath. I think zoom out, realize that we've been here before these bear markets are brutal, but they are always just a part of the cycle that leads to new highs, a new bull market. So if you're panicking here during crypto winter, really you just need to sit back, relax and know that we will always markets always make new highs. It's just a matter of having the patience and the time and being willing to really sort of withstand this temporary pain. So I would just say calm down. Don't do anything drastic. Don't do anything dramatic. Don't make any stupid decisions and just basically sit on your hands and wait it out. I love that. We have Fabio Bandiera in chat that said, don't look at the price. Look at the future value. And I think that's exactly what you're getting at is quit looking at the price so much if it's freaking you out. Like you said, if you're solvent, chill out a little bit. It's going to come back. Bitcoin is the most robust digital system ever built in the history of mankind. And it solves $100 trillion problem called everything centralized finance was built on. We are sitting in the paradigm shift of many generations, many generations. I mean, I genuinely think, I love your thoughts on this and we'll wrap out. I think Bitcoin and cryptocurrency built on the actual principles of original blockchain technology of Bitcoin is a bigger paradigm shift than maybe even the internet because it changes the entire global financial system and everything goes back to finance. And that's what we're sitting on top of. Bitcoin's at $367 billion. I think it'll be at $367 trillion with the inflation of the U.S. dollar and with how much growth that we're going to see happen in Bitcoin in the next 50 to 100 years if it remains top dog. Scott, thank you so very much for coming on. I'll have to listen to 10 trillion. I'll take 10 trillion. I won't even get greedy. I'll take that. Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. Well, Scott, tell us where we can find you before we wrap it out. You can just check me out on Twitter at ScottMelker everything basically is linked to there. You can find the podcast, YouTube and newsletter all from there. Boom, there you go. Well, guys, thank you so very much for watching. This has been Market Talks with Cointelegraph and we will see you at noon eastern next week with our next guest. Thank you very much for watching. Peace.