# Bitcoin Cycle Shifts and Institutional Impact

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-09-01

## Transcript

Bottoms have never had a V-shaped recovery.
That's not what a bottom looks like.
It's called capitulation for a reason.
People give up.
Bitcoin has been consolidating around $78K, but has a bull market started, or are we just heading for another pullback and new lows?
Hello and welcome to The Milkrow Show, the podcast that knows that calling a Bitcoin bottom is basically astrology with extra steps, but that's never stopped anyone from trying.
I'm your host, John Gill, and today is Tuesday, September 1st, and today we are joined by Michael Turpin.
Michael is the CEO of Transform Ventures and founder of BitAngels, the first angel investor network built for crypto.
CNBC calls him the godfather of crypto, and he is full of alpha.
Today, he's going to share a lot of wisdom and insight with all of us.
If that sounds good to you, make sure you like and subscribe.
Share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it.
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So keep in your heart for more information about them later in the episode.
But for right now, I want to bring on Michael Turpin.
Hello and welcome to The Milkrow Show.
Michael, how are you?
I'm doing great.
Glad to be here with you.
I'm glad to talk to you.
We've been trying to get together for a little bit, but I think this is a great time in the markets to talk.
Bitcoin is up over 20% this month.
It's around 79K, I think, at the time of recording.
Previously, I think you were expecting a bottom in October.
Does this move from Bitcoin change that outlook for you?
And what's your updated thoughts on the market here?
Sure.
So I said in June that I thought that that might be the bottom.
It was about a 40% chance.
And I thought there was still a 60% chance that it would be around October.
just based on what happened the prior cycles.
We've always had about a year.
The first halving was a year and five weeks.
The second halving was a year minus three days.
And the most recent halving, it was part of this one, was one year to the day.
top was November 10th of 21 and then the bottom with FTX was exactly one year later November 10th of 22.
When Michael Saylor said the bottom was in February just did not look right to me for a couple of reasons.
Number one, a few other people said that as well.
Some people are actually calling the bottom in November and I was like you're not going to get away with a six-week bear market.
No.
And in both November when it dumped hard and then after it did the death cross and then bounced back hard the next day.
And then also in February when it bounced back 10% the next day, bottoms have never had a V-shaped recovery.
That's not what a bottom looks like.
It's called capitulation for a reason.
People give up.
And June was really the first time that looked like it might be capitulation.
It did not move anywhere for a couple of days.
There was a decent amount of volume.
i mean it's a really um good thing in terms of the crypto ecosystem that the worst macro news that we had to cause the bottom of the june or technically the bottom price was july 1st uh the bottom closing price was in june but i was counting the actual bottom even if it's a wick as being below for that cycle what was the worst news that we had four years ago it was ftx right and that was after celsius and block fight all these bankruptcies that were around uh over leverage and getting caught with collateral damage.
Four years earlier, it was breaking Bitcoin apart, right?
When we had Bitcoin Cash then broke into Bitcoin SV and Craig Wright came out and said, I'm going to destroy Bitcoin, you know, the ungodly ones who are not obeying my laws.
And then four years before that, you had Mt.
Gox, which was 90% or so of the entire trading just, you know, blow up completely, still being sorted out.
And so what's the worst that happened this time?
Some people got, you know, leveraged at the wrong time on stretch and got caught with a short squeeze and had to sell when they didn't want to sell.
And, you know, the Fudsters came out and it's like, oh, stretch is deep, Peggy, it's go to zero.
It's just like Terra Luna.
And of course, that wasn't true.
But, you know, it helped people who were shorting it.
I was telling everybody in the world because I already had a fair amount of stretch.
uh that like guys you're getting 12 dividends and you're now getting them at a hundred dollars you can buy them at 75 that means you're now getting 16 this is good news this is not bad news there's no way i think the projections with uh stretch going under where that sailor couldn't pay back out of his 850 000 bitcoin that'd be yeah bitcoin went down to 10 000 stayed for five years that wasn't happening so um i thought we were still in a fragile enough space that One more piece of bad news in September, October, which is when a lot of bad news happens.
Stock market crashes historically have centered around September and October.
Many of them going all the way back to the great financial crisis, way back before that to the Great Depression.
The stock market crash at 29, stock market crash at 89.
September, October is weak.
And I also thought that there was a good chance, and I guess there still is, that some AI hack.
would go in and rip apart some leading wallet.
If North Koreans can do it with social engineering, maybe Fable can do it, powered by North Koreans, and rip out a billion dollars or so.
That still could happen.
But that's really, I think, the only thing that's going to derail this rally is some unexpected bad news right while we're still in the bottom.
Otherwise, I'd say we're 80% that the bear market's over.
We're out of fall into what I call Bitcoin winter.
Hi, everyone.
This is John.
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Okay, well, we can talk more about that.
I thought a good way to get into this part of the conversation.
And by the way, thank you for that comprehensive history lesson.
This is why I was excited to talk to you because you're an expert on Bitcoin and its history.
But you wrote a book in 2024, I believe, called Supercycle.
Yeah, there you go.
Bitcoin Supercycle.
So I thought this would be a good time to check in with you about that and the framework that's in there.
But, you know, people use this word super cycle.
It means different things to different people.
Let's start with that.
What is a Bitcoin super cycle?
What does that mean?
Explain to that idea.
So I use the definition that the CME gives for super cycle.
I mean, the phrase super cycle and sort of entire cycle theories goes back, you know, not quite a hundred years, but close to it.
Elliot wave and some of the, you know.
theories of like the great the grand super cycle of like 400 years where societies change and uh Ray Dahlia that was talking a lot about that um and uh within that then you have different cycles going all the way down to cycles that can be you know um measured in minutes or hours you know obviously uh the fundamental thing that has moved Bitcoin price so far and I believe is still uh going to continue for at least 20 years um is going is is the uh the having cycle which is They call it a four-year cycle.
It's actually been 47 months, all but one of the cycles, and that was 43.
So it's every 210,000 blocks.
If it was exactly four years, all the havings would be exactly on, you know, January 3rd.
And they aren't.
But the CME basically talked about commodity super cycles, and they defined a super cycle as a period of time lasting at least five years.
You can't have a one-year super cycle.
perception of the value of the asset such that it goes up typically over that period of time.
And the CME had said that that happened in the 1970s with gold.
In the 1970s, gold was pretty flat.
And, you know, Nixon took us off of the gold standard.
So all of a sudden, there's more, you know, kind of a definition of scarcity and demand for gold because It's not something that's being used as a global commerce anymore.
And at the same time, you added a new class of buyers when just a couple of years later, they re-legalized the ability to have Americans own gold, which they weren't allowed to legally do since the 1930s when FDR, you know, kind of stole it from people.
And so that, you know, quadrupled the price of gold in less than a decade.
The next one that they talked about was a broader based commodity super cycle in the 90s, copper, nickel, that was based on excessive demand from China.
China was industrializing at a rapid pace, just can't get enough of commodities.
And it said, actually, when I went to press that too early to tell, but we may be approaching a new super cycle based on, you know, money printing, monetary debasement.
If I'd read my own book, I would have probably invested hard into gold shortly thereafter, and it did pretty well.
But I'd say now it's pretty concrete that gold and silver are probably in that super cycle that started in 23, and who knows how long it's going to pop.
There's a lot of theories now, everybody from Porter Stansbury to others.
that are basically saying that the fourth turning is going to be sort of reaching its frenzy in 2029.
End of the decades, I talk about Bitcoin cycles, but I've been a student of cycles in the stock market, not writing books about it, but just my own personal investments.
I've always been very religious about selling May and go away.
And that kept me all in cash during the 2008-09 crash.
I sold in May.
And when the time to rebalance in November before the Santa Claus.
rally came and was like, whoop, the world's still on fire.
And so I was able to buy a lot lower when, you know, when all of a sudden April came around and everything sort of bottom.
And so the other thing that's interesting about the stock market is it pretty reliably moves in 10 year cycles.
And they usually have the bubble pop at the end of the decade.
Bubble popped at the end of the 20s, bubble popped at the end of the 80s, bubble popped at the end of the 90s, took a couple of months until it actually, you know, showed up on the charts.
and the bubble popped at the end of the teens.
Money printing kept it going a little while and COVID put an exclamation point on it.
We are looking by many people's reckoning to have an everything bubble.
And it's uncharted territory.
And so if you've got the money printing of the three or $4 trillion per year, a trillion of which is apparently going to be used to buy back long dated bonds per mesent.
And then you've got, you know, the stock market, if it follows course, will probably have a parabolic rally and, you know, peak at unforeseen levels in 29, right around the same time that Bitcoin is probably going to peak.
And so we'll see whether, you know, how that affects all asset classes and whether, you know, it accelerates Bitcoin's crash or whether it just has a standard, you know, one-ish year.
retracement and maybe gold goes crazy we'll see people typically rush for cash first until they realize that that's what they should be running away for and then and then they make up their decisions so it's going to be very interesting next two cycles so basically we haven't had it by the definition of the cme we have not had a bitcoin super cycle yet so we've not had a five-year period where basically the fundamentals change we've we've had typically parabolic rallies in what i call um bitcoin summer So just to give the cliff notes on my thesis, what I really wanted to call the book was The Four Seasons of Bitcoin, which I came up with in 2015.
I've been in Bitcoin since 2012 and very heavily since 2013.
But my publisher liked Bitcoin Supercycle better, and that's part of the narrative.
So The Four Seasons of Bitcoin, simply put, Satoshi said in his early writings that as long as the amount of new money moving into the ecosystem every four years in between halvings exceeds the amount of inflation from the halving.
The price has to go up.
It's supply and demand, pure and simple, over a four-year period.
And so far it has.
$12 at the first halving, more demand.
$670 at the second halving, more demand.
$8,700 at the third halving, more demand.
$63,900 at the fourth halving.
And I can pretty much guarantee you it's going to be higher than $63,900 at the next halving.
I'm guessing somewhere around, you know, double-ish, maybe a little bit higher.
And so...
You've had this always up, sorry, from having to having, but people, particularly traditional investors, who I wrote the book for, the ones that I told about Bitcoin when it was $100 and they laughed at me or they asked their broker and they said, look at what Warren Buffett says, it's a scam, it's a Ponzi scheme.
Because they didn't understand it.
They understood their own asset class.
They understood real estate cycles.
They understood stock market cycles and values.
And so this book really...
First and foremost is for them.
It talks about why Bitcoin is worth anything and why it has been the best performing asset class for the last decade and longer and will continue to beat the traditional ones over the next decade or two.
And so what scares off investors has been volatility.
Although, as I like to say, volatility, if you understand it, can be your friend.
So the volatility is not caused by math.
It's not caused by supply and demand.
I researched it in 2015 and decided, and I think I've been proven so far.
today, it's caused by fear and greed.
And so I map those quadrants that every cycle has done in the exact same order into four quadrants.
They're not the exact same time, but they do happen in the same order.
And I call them the four seasons of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin spring is not what people call crypto spring or crypto winter.
My definition of Bitcoin spring is the day of the halving, or as happened the last time, you can have an early spring if the new all-time high happens before the halving.
But believe it or not, it doesn't affect Bitcoin summer.
And I'll get to that in a second.
So the seed of the new cycle is planted on the having date.
In one 10-minute block, you go from the miners making, let's say, 10% profit to having a 40% loss.
At the same cost, all of a sudden the rewards cut in half.
You would think the price would plummet.
It doesn't because most people aren't miners anymore.
There are enough people that sort of realize that the price over time goes up.
And when they see the price drop because of miners selling, they buy.
But they don't buy in great enough quantity to push the price to a new all-time high quite yet.
So really, the last four out of four of the last Bitcoin springs have been flat.
And including this last one, it was $64,000 roughly on the day of the halving.
Six months later, it was still $64,000.
It pushed down a little bit to around $49,000.
It pushed up a little bit to $70,000.
But until it hit the...
all-time high of the prior cycle which happened only a month before the halving that was 73 850 it didn't go parabolic it did go parabolic when it hit that number which to me shows that the high after the having is the important thing to create bitcoin summer not the high before the having it just raises the bar of what that number is so bitcoin summer so again spring last four to seven uh months so far and it's interesting it's been a little bit longer each time it was four months then five months then six months and seven months We'll see if that continues because there are some other trends that were elongated, including the time from having to top that did not expand.
So there's about 40 things I track.
And so far, like 30 of them usually repeat.
The agonizing part is figuring out which 10 aren't going to repeat, right?
So that's why everybody can't rely on my predictions 100%.
Hopefully, I'm 80% right.
Or anybody's predictions.
So basically, Bitcoin summer has lasted nine to 11 months and has also been expanding.
But I thought it might hit 12 this time and it didn't.
And Bitcoin summer, the price goes up like a rocket ship, usually in two stages, right?
Like a rocket does, you know, stage one, it gets up to a certain level.
Then usually in the summer months, it'll kind of retreat a little bit.
This time it retreated from the macro event of the tariffs.
Remember Liberation Day?
Everybody remember Liberation Day?
It went all the way back down.
almost to where it started i actually tweeted the time it's not going below 75 and it didn't and uh and then it went up to uh 126 and this has been a frustrating cycle because you know the the diminishing returns that i talk about in the book and diminishing losses have been affected by macro the last two cycles so the first um cycle you ended up going having the high the first cycle before the having right um from 2009 to 2012.
Your first sale of Bitcoin, it was only a single sale.
I'll talk about this in the book.
It was $5 for $5,050 Bitcoin on PayPal.
Someone paid for this thing called Bitcoin on PayPal for $5.
I don't know if we've ever tracked that person down.
Hopefully he still has it.
But he bought it from Marty Malmi, who I call Satoshi's interns.
That was the college kid from Finland that read the white paper, said, hey, I like what you're doing.
Can I help you?
I know how to build websites.
And he did help him.
He ended up with over 50,000 Bitcoin.
And according to him, he has none left because he spent 5,000 for $5.
And then a few years later, he was able to buy an apartment in Helsinki for 50,000 Bitcoin.
Obviously, he'd be extremely wealthy if he held under the 50,000 Bitcoin.
But that's the story of a lot of the early people, including the pizzas guys, right?
Buyer and seller each claim they have no Bitcoin left.
So anyway, so that's Bitcoin summer.
And when the bubble pops.
That is what I call Bitcoin fall.
And so Bitcoin fall is where you make all of your money if you're not going to be a HODLer.
By projecting or by properly analyzing, predicting the first day and the last day of Bitcoin fall, that's where you make all your money.
Because if you just held on to Bitcoin since the first halving, $12, I'd say about a thousand of them, $12,000 investment today is worth $79 million.
Pretty good return.
I don't know of anything in the stock market that would beat that, even Nvidia.
But if you sold within 20% of the bubble tap, so you were able to guess the first day of Bitcoin fall within 20% or dollar cost average, and then bought within 20% of the bottom, you would have 60,000 Bitcoin, not 1,000 Bitcoin.
Because you would have sold at $1,000, bought back at $250,000, sold at around $16,000.
bought back at around $4,000.
So literally the first couple of the last few cycles, you would have almost quadrupled each cycle your amount of Bitcoin.
And going forward, I don't think it's going to be quadrupled, but I think it can be close to double for the next two, three cycles, particularly if the super cycle effect kicks in.
So we haven't had a five-year period of sustained growth, but I think that a super cycle can do it.
I'll finish with the season.
So Bitcoin fall, Bitcoin spring and summer.
Anyone can tell.
It does not take a genius.
You can tell Bitcoin spring with a calendar.
It's 210,000 blocks.
We know right now it's going to be either late March or early April of 2028.
As it gets closer, you'll be able to pinpoint it almost to the hour.
And you can tell Bitcoin summer with a calculator.
Is it $1 more than the old all-time high?
That's a good time to buy, by the way.
The short-term IRR that's your best time to buy.
It always explodes once it hits the new all-time high.
Four times out of four.
Actually, five times out of five, we include prior to the happening.
So basically, you know, that's the first three seasons.
Winter is not what people call crypto winter, which I think most people define as you're depressed because the price is lingering down there.
But to me, Bitcoin winter is the last day of Bitcoin fall.
You've hit the bottom.
You hit capitulation.
You often don't know it is until it's proven that it's not.
And then that's actually the longest season.
So if it ended up being July 1st, you know, we've got historically it's been about three years from the bottom to the top.
In fact, the last three times have been almost exactly 35 months, three out of three.
So we'll see if it's four out of four.
And if it is, having the earliest, the shortest fall ever means that if it's 35 months, we would pop the bubble in May.
of 2029.
It should be the first time that it did not pop in the fourth quarter of the year after the having.
And so there's your four seasons.
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Michael, this may be the easiest interview I've ever done.
I think I asked one question and you just gave me a complete history lesson on the cycle thesis on Bitcoin.
There's a lot in there.
A question that I did have about this, this is, I guess, what we're talking about for this episode.
But a lot of people have been saying that if the low for this four-year cycle...
does get confirmed as being in, as you said, end of June, beginning of July, then that would mean that the four-year cycle thesis on Bitcoin has shifted and that if the low doesn't come in October, that something has changed.
How do you think about that idea?
Where does that fit into how you interpret these things?
I don't think it breaks the four-year cycle because it never was a four-year cycle.
I mean, you can say it was broken in 2016 when we ended up having...
uh 43 month cycle because of mining disruption in china and it took a while for them to get re-established in texas so it's historically been about 47 months um for from like having to having and it looks like this next time it was april 20th and now they're talking late march early uh april so the having cycle itself is what you're talking about and then the behaviors you know there's a little flexibility around them for me it's not broken as long as my four seasons still interact within that.
In other words, I would say it would be broken if you had a screaming all-time high the day of the having, right?
And then it would have accelerated and started decoupling from the behavior of the scarcity, which that's what drives this is, you know, I get frustrated when I'm, and I've been constantly on panels.
I was talking about this and debating people.
Hong Kong and Miami and every major conference, Bitcoin conferences, census, everything.
The opposite side says, well, no, it's all institutions.
The hamings are meaningless.
Another argument they give is that it's so low inflation that it's meaningless.
I'll answer the second question first.
It's not meaningless because you don't go and say the 0.8% annual inflation.
is meaningless next to the 0.4 percent after the next halving you don't compare them to each other you compare them to demand right and if the demand keeps going up and the supply gets caught new supply gets cut in the app you know that that that is um that is what causes supply shock and so to me supply shock is what kicks off a super cycle And we've had supply shock a couple of times in Bitcoin, but never enough to go and disrupt the diminishing returns.
So my definition of a super cycle, a Bitcoin super cycle is it's triggered by supply shock and it lasts at least two cycles.
Doesn't mean that you don't have a crash in between the two cycle highs, but it's lower than it would have been without it.
So if you look right now at, you know, kind of the way that I read, diminishing returns and diminishing losses, which is obvious that there have been some.
But if you look at the numbers, let's include the first cycle.
First sale of Bitcoin, you know, single sale for a tenth of a penny.
Somebody tried to do a quarter of a penny later and got rejected.
So it was considered a fair market price at the time.
It's like, what do you use this thing for?
What can you buy from it?
Do you just go and gamble on Satoshi Dice?
That's about it.
What's it worth?
Well, someday you'll be able to buy a cheeseburger with it.
Not now, not in 2009, 2009, barely in 2010.
And so from the bottom to the top was 3,000 X, one tenth of a cent to $30 when you had that magnificent pump from about $2 up to $30.
And then rapidly corrected.
Did not take a year.
It took like.
couple weeks because we didn't have a hammock involved we just simply had excessive frenzy over a gizmodo article um that basically said hey there's this new thing you can buy drugs with on silk road might be big and then it got um on you know slash dot and a lot of techies run it it got forwarded around and people like i better go and buy some of this if you can buy drugs on it it's secretive and um you know the supply was so small and the only exchange in the world was Mt.
Gox at that point, that it did explode the value.
And then it crashed when Mt.
Gox couldn't handle the volume.
And it was taking people a while.
Mt.
Gox did not crash in 2010.
It crashed a few years later, but people thought it did.
And so that was some of the early pains of Bitcoin.
So that was 3,000x and then a 97% drop.
After the first halving, you then had 100x.
$12 to $1,200 and then 85% drop to $171.
one having later you had a 30x uh run up 30x in any other asset class becoming would be considered insane right imagine if gold went up 30x in the next year goes from four thousand dollars to Would that be 120,000?
I mean, that's equivalent of what Bitcoin did in 2017 in plain sight of everybody who, I bet I pretty much heard of Bitcoin because, you know, they got very famous in 2013.
Then it got famous again in 2017 and in 2021.
And, you know, it frustrates me that the mainstream media doesn't put these things together and really recognize the cycle behavior.
Every four years you have a bull market and, you know, and then a year later you have a bear market.
The bull market has always been the year after the presidential elections, and the bear market has always been during the midterms.
And I think that Satoshi planned it that way.
I mean, it's not an accident, I believe, that he picked sort of the halvings to occur logically, presuming the mining accuracy in 2012, 16, 20, 24, 28.
I think that when you have mining get out of the presidential election years, then you might have a change.
At that point, you might have a change.
And institutional, where that's come in to answer the first question, is that I think that you ended up having a dampening.
It's not like, you know, Matt Hagen from Bitwise said, oh, it's all institutions.
The whales are out.
They're irrelevant.
They're not.
They still own the majority of the coins.
But I think institutional is like maybe 15% if you include corporations.
It's only, I think, about 7% for ETFs last I checked and about, you know, maybe 6% for dance, most of that micro strategy.
So, you know, with less than 20% being institutions and 80% still being, well, geez, you know, we're certainly not at the place where institutions control everything.
However, I would say that the way that the ETFs work, where it's not trading on chain and you're not buying Bitcoin, you're buying a claim on Bitcoin, which...
You know, if there's a great, you know, kind of reset, you're not going to get your Bitcoin back.
I mean, Obama said in 2008 during that crisis that they're in 2009 that, you know, we're never going to do a bailout again.
We're going to do a bail in.
It's a bank's problem, like take their assets and deal with it.
And so there's a very good chance that the ETFs would under that kind of directive.
Governments do funny things during big crises, you know, like seize gold.
and decouple the dollar from gold is meant forever.
So next time they might allow ETFs and banks to sort of just nationalize or corporatize or make part of their own assets during a bankruptcy, your Bitcoin that they're holding, you just have a claim on it.
And so that's the risk with ETFs.
But anyway, what I was going to say is that...
I was just trying to get to the point of like if we've made a low.
Yeah, go ahead.
But the point that was in the side, I agree.
So the point of it was that because a lot of the trap, the trading is not on chain.
That I think is a fundamental reason why we had an earlier bottom is because.
One of the things that was every single cycle and did not happen this time was the CVDD, the Coin Value Days Destroyed, which is an on-chain index that was supposed to be around 43,000, 44,000 to mark the end.
And I think that because a lot of the trading was not on-chain, that kind of masked it.
Okay, I see.
Okay, so...
uh what does that mean if we've if we've made a low in summer and everyone was expecting a low in fall how does that change how you think about these four-year cycles or does it not change it i think that it's likely to go and shift them and the question is how long will it will it repeat or is it a one-time phenomenon in 2016 mining disruption moved us up um from a 47-month cycle to 43 and it never repeated or at least it hasn't since so um you know we will probably keep The mining, let's presume, in fact, if anything, the mining is slowing down.
So it might actually be a 48-month cycle between 2028 and 2032.
And who knows, maybe it'll be a 49-month cycle at some point.
So if you look at it staying in the presidential year for the next three, four cycles, you would basically, but you look at institutions having a bigger influence and that if, and it's not a complete.
100%.
If that means that you end up having a bottom happen earlier because of it, then yes, that would end up meaning that you had a shorter period to have Bitcoin summer.
Does that mean that you think we're going to see Bitcoin back over 100K by the end of this year and sort of like pull forward the bull run that we've traditionally had?
Or how do you think about that going into the end of 2026?
I don't think we're going to see 100k by the end of this year.
If you're a firm believer in it, you should go to Polymark because I think it's currently at 1%.
This is probably a good bet just for a YOLO bet.
But no, I really see us going sideways for the next couple of months and having a risk of retracing at least part of this rally.
I don't think we're going to retrace it all the way to a lower low again unless there's a big macro shock and particularly a crypto macro shock.
So 20% chance we do get a new low, but 80% chance, you know, we don't, but that doesn't mean we're not going to retrace.
And I think that we're going to probably most likely kind of go back and flirt with the 70K, maybe go down to the 60s.
That, of course, will put fear back into the market.
And it depends what happens macro-wise during that.
If, you know, when...
you know, clarity gets rejected, that might, you know, be a bad thing.
If it got accepted, that would be a good thing.
So there are a couple of things that, you know, bad news tends to, as I mentioned in my book, I call my news paradigm, news relativity paradigm, is that bad news gets accentuated during a bad market and good news is ignored and the reverse happens in a bull market.
And so we're still so tender and fresh coming out of the bear market.
Chart-wise, we're not out of it yet.
We still need to close sort of a week above about 79.5, I think it is, and we haven't.
So that's what we sort of are confirmed to be in the bull market.
We're often close.
What do you expect to happen in the altcoin market towards the end of 2026 here?
Because obviously you've talked a lot about and done a lot of research and study on Bitcoin cycles, but altcoins behave much differently and they don't quite follow these kind of clear patterns like this.
But they have been outperforming in this recent short squeeze here.
What do you expect to see in the altcoin space through the rest of 2026?
Well, of course, altcoins are not created equally.
Otherwise, my bags from 2018 would be mooting and they're not.
Now, altcoins...
um have their own cycles they are you know at least fundamentally related to the bitcoin cycles but sometimes they they they kind of uh represent a um sort of a um movement right so somebody makes money in a bitcoin pump or it stays flat and you see certain category altcoins moon like privacy coins this year and so typically if you're going to go and play a percentage of your portfolio and i usually encourage people even if they're experts not to not to spend more than like you know 30% of their crypto portfolio at all unless I mean, unless they're like, you know, full time and like running a fund or whatever.
But I mean, look, I've been in the industry a long time.
And I still like, you know, don't get all coins, right?
I mean, I try, I still, you know, have a small part of an altcoin portfolio and a couple of funds that that are altcoin related.
You know, I've got a fund of funds called Kuma Capital that the chairman of that that you know looks for the new things and and uh i'm gonna i'm with a sigma capital that's a general partner there that's looking for the next suey um but um you know it's it's something where you know it's it's every cycle has had different if you went and basically sold at the top and bought back at the bottom of bitcoin you'd be up every time because there's always a brand new all-time The only altcoin that is really sort of a major one that's had a new all-time high every time is Binance, BNB.
That's the only one of the top coins.
Even Ethereum, of course, famously, was 4,800, you know, two cycles ago and only got up to 4,000 this fast cycle.
And if you judge it in Bitcoin instead of dollars, it's way underperforming.
So, you know, I think that it's all about narrative, you know.
So if you were to make money.
By selling at the top and buying back at the bottom, you have to switch coins.
So if you were, you know, and I know at least one investor who's been amazing at this, pretty much his full-time job is just analyzing altcoins with a team.
And so if you were able to go in, the way you would have made like even better money in Bitcoin for this part of your portfolio would be you go in and like, okay, you sold all your ICO coins and you came back a year later with the cash and you basically said, What's going to pump this next time?
And you would have said DeFi, NFTs, metaverse.
Who knew, right?
It wouldn't have been just random ICO coins.
And then when that bubble popped, you'd have to go sell that and you would have gotten clobbered if you put it back into NFT related things at the bottom of the next market.
It would have been, you know, the next narrative, which was like AI, RWA and Dexys.
OK, we're now at the bottom and the start of the next altcoin cycle.
And memes, of course, are just every cycle they tend to pump and then be pronounced dead.
I thought, you know, that by and large, they were going to have a long time to recover from what happened with, you know, liquidity being pulled out with a Trump coin and Melania coin and, you know, what happened with the Malay coin, etc.
And yet here we go.
I mean, the number one gainer today is a meme coin, like a useless coin.
it's called useless yeah yeah it's a top 100 coin now it's like up exponentially since it launched and uh you know go figure i mean the you know and i guess there's fartcoin maximalists out there All right, I have a very specific ask for you guys.
Somebody listening to this knows the person running marketing at a crypto or AI company that should be advertising with Milk Road.
We reach more than half a million investors across everything we do and Q4 is filling up.
So don't be the brand that waited too long.
And the cool part about sponsoring the show is this episode is still going to be getting plays months from now.
So send this to them, look like a genius and tell them to go to milkroad.com slash sponsor.
Yeah, well, hot air rises.
Michael, I think we've used up our time here, but I think this has been a really great episode just as a refresher on a lot of the history of Bitcoin, the cycles, the seasons, and just how to think about this because it's a good time to be checking in as we turn cycles and as we see these major market events happening and hopefully the bottom getting confirmed here.
Michael, where can we send people to find more of you and your work online?
Sure.
So I'm at Michael Turpin on X and other platforms like then Instagram.
But X is a really good place and LinkedIn.
Transform Ventures is my website.
It shows all the various things that I'm doing.
I've been incubating some things.
I've actually got a new agent AI platform I'm getting ready to launch in a couple of weeks.
And also my fund is Bitcoin Supercycle Fund.
And there's some information.
That's for credit investors only and some information on the site there about that.
And yeah, so and just, you know, Michael at TransformVentures.io is an email.
Michael, thank you so much for being on The Milkroach Show.
I hope we can catch up again soon.
Me too.
And thank you all for joining us.
I hope you all learned something today.
There's a lot in this one.
So if you need a history lesson on Bitcoin, this is a good place to start.
But until next time, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish, and we will see you all on the next episode of The Milkroach Show.
Thanks for being here, everyone.
Bye.
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