the hodl game is going OK. I've skipped Go to Jail. landed on park place and considering buying hotels--in my dreams
I'm passing the time by trying to calculate UTXO cost basis for CashApp Round Ups. (where you can buy bitcoin with the change on CashApp card taps--similar to donating to Ronald Mcdonald house at the drive-thu).
one thing i would tell myself now is label every purchase with the purchase price.
"hodl game" is a very good way to describe it. it's the main force pushing the price up. the game is being compromised by the presence of BTCs and other institutionals who are naked shorting it, and paper bitcoin, which is diluting it. the arc of the whole chart shows a clear deceleration which i attribute to growing adoption by fiat finance degens, who don't believe the hodl narrative, though they often are instrumental in manufacturing the bear and bull cases around a year after each halving.
i agree that the utxo hodling is the bedrock foundation.
i disagree about how much of the problem is paper bitcoin or institutions.
there's enough other reasons i can think of:
1. it's hard to convince new people to try saving in it. Have we reached all the gamblers and forced adopters(it would be great for G4zans, but do they even have electricity at this point) already ?
2. AI buildout investment competition.
3. Gold performing a final number--maybe this is fake and keeping excitement out of bitcoin--before going the way of tulip bulbs?
4. inflation/deflation -- i personally can't save as much as previously due to salary decreases (labor deflation! AI to blame? ) and expense increases--maybe other are experiencing the same ?)
5. the QE chart which i will try to dig up and put below... the current still hasn't reversed. but as of 12/12/2025 the US Treasury is going to pretend every month that 40 new billionaires popped into existence and bought Treasury bills.
napkin math:
so there's apparently 3000 billionairs in the world with 16 trillion total dollars. if we just went by each billionaire with 1 billion dollars there would be 16,000.
so if 40 fake new ones pop into existence and plunk their 1 billion $$$ into treasuries, the rate of growth of billionaires each month is 2.5% or ~25% yearly
my math is off by 10X
Says that's 3% a year growth.
AI says that's still fast but not like rabbits breeding...
Grok:
"A permanent $40 billion/month Treasury purchase program grows the “paper billionaire count” at a rate that feels slow in Wall Street terms, but is actually frighteningly fast in any biological or historical human context — faster than almost any sustained human population boom in history, and right in the zone of a well-managed livestock or early industrial societies."
"Well-managed livestock" :-D
the 2% target that central banksters and fans have bandied around for decades actually works out to halving of the value of each unit every 10 years. that's not slow, either.
the thing is, not selling, is an act of faith, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as long as the number of hodlers, and their sum of holdings, continues to grow, pushing the pressure on demand and thus continuing to raise the price.
IMO, this is quite a delicate situation when the enemies start to really get involved with their degenerate babylon fiat system mindset. i personally am downgrading my expectation to not see much better than maybe 150k in the next bull season, which is likely to be this winter.
still better than USD but as the differential starts to narrow, the risk of mass defection (liquidating hodlers) is quite serious, especially if your stack has an age under months average.
on the other hand, i do think that such a mass defection is at least 6 years away.
the seeming exponential rate tracks with the typical network effect of technology adoption. the more who hold it shorter terms and short it more than hodl, will eventually break the mexican standoff.
there is also other issues relating to the centralization of control in governments leaning on the big miners. already 41% is concentrated in two companies, both of them registered in the USA. you know what happens if US corporate registered miners reach 51% hashpower. the only thing that is probably going to slow it down is it's about 10 years before all the work happening now to reverse the trend of declining power generation capacity starts to yield, and right now, AI is burning more KW than bitcoin mining, and by jevon's paradox, even if they cut the power cost of these LLM farms down to 10% of now, the share it takes will continue to grow.
but if they make a strategic pivot and start to really try to grab the 51% hashpower share, and exert influence on protocol governance to make it into a defacto CDBC, it's over for the hodl narrative. russia and china are not joining the game, so unless they do, i don't see a bright future 2 halvings down the track, and it will dim steadily up to that point.
fiat doesn't care about hard money, and hate hard money, and will do everything they can to turn bitcoin into fiat.
we have time to brace against that though, many ways that might work. IMO nostr's simple network architecture will open up things in distributed monetary system networks that nobody would have expected over the next 8 years. every time i use alby go i'm reminded that this would never have been possible without nostr.
Nostr saving bitcoin adoption from fiat corporate capture is a fun thought... actually Nostr would probably be the easiest way to sell bitcoin adoption. people like to sell something/earn points.
I have convinced several people to try Nostr. many more than i ever convinced to try bitcoin.
i agree with your 150k prediction this winter... although TBH i thought it was going to be 1 million... i guess the bitcoin god decided his followers needed some additional humbling.
i'm trying to transition away from credit cards to a "Satoshi standard" in which all money must go thru bitcoin.
incoming cash --> bitcoin
expenses:
find merchants accepting bitcoin
sell bitcoin on cashapp to get cash
the fees will be painful, but maybe that will incentivize me to spend less.
yeah, me too, and i'm now in a place and have friends who can direct me to vendors who accept sats. gonna be getting raw milk for sats :) maybe i will even be able to buy some sheep to mow the lawn with sats (and make tasty bbq later).
circular economy does change the equation, and like all network effects, it seems slow at first
also, the nature of the game, on the HODLer side, is a mexican standoff. if too many people defect (blink) the price fall from coins back on the market could be catastrophic if it pushed much past about 40% in one day.
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