The four-year cycle is dead (once more...). Our beloved Mr. Yakes is out here slaying it (spreading premature rumours of its demise?? #1572208)
"The recent price rally to $85k has cemented the idea that this market is no longer following past patterns."
I believe Bitcoin is driven by fundamental demand for monetary assets. That demand has a long time horizon and is driven by structural demand from the world’s largest capital markets
I've never put much faith in these overlapping-cycle comparisons... there's no fundamental/real/serious/rational reason why bitcoin 4, 8, 12 years ago should inform us what direction it'll trade now. It's a different world, different fundamentals; cycle hopium is chart porn for Bitcoin bros. Still, this looks pretty... neat? (less bad than the others; earlier recovery)
Historically, people have viewed the asset as following a 4-year cycle based on halving schedules and have fitted different models to this narrative. People always want something to anchor to, yet markets are dynamic—once information becomes common knowledge, the market reacts, and the model breaks.
"Think of bitcoin as a product in a market with substitutes as its competition."
This illustrative comparison shows that Bitcoin’s acceptability problem is a function of Liquidity and Stability. These are both problems of scale. Meaning, Bitcoin’s only problem is that it isn’t big or old enough yet.
If I told you there was an investment opportunity where a product is better than its competition in every way except that it is new and requires more scale to be viable, then I would be describing the exact purpose of investing. That is the optimal risk to assume as an investor.
Reassuring.
"Bitcoin is looking like a different asset, and the short-term narrative impact will catalyze its long-term fundamentals."
Bitcoin’s price has been driven by risk appetite and market liquidity, but now it is responding to the US government’s fiscal irresponsibility. The path towards this continued price action remains to be seen, but it is something we have been waiting for and predicted would happen this year in the Epoch Bitcoin Ecosystem Report.
We believe Bitcoin is undergoing a global monetization, something that hasn’t been seen in centuries. Monetizing is not a straight path and requires the asset to fulfill one function of money before it can serve users with the next.
The institutions are coming; the institutions are coming!
TL;DR, we're just early. Let shit grow and blossom
Bitcoin is a much larger vision than just a store of value. Bitcoin is a permissionless network—independent of any monetary system in recent history. Once Bitcoin has consumed the store-of-value market, it will have the liquidity and stability it needs to be used as a medium of exchange. At that point, it will enter another S-curve of adoption. Once it has consumed that, it will naturally become a unit of account, and at that point it no longer has a price; it is the price.
Beautiful. Money is the moderator and bitcoin is the price.
I was also immediately skeptical of the 4-year cycle notion, but seeing crashes and recoveries slide earlier is how you'd expect to see the market start pricing them in (as well as reduced magnitudes of price swings).
Yates has some nice writing chops!
The shift from 4-year halving cycles to institutional demand flows completely changes how liquidity moves. Once sovereign states and ETFs absorb supply, local market volatility behaves more like macro commodities than speculative cycles