ETFs are buying... Institutions are buying... Who the hell is selling?

2024 brought a mass of commentators looking at ETFs flows, as if that's all that matters. What matters is total demand and supply. Here's a 101 thread on how the modern #Bitcoin market works.

First, let me tell you who is selling. The OGs. They are selling They have more BTC than all the ETFs put together... 10x more. And they sell into every bull market.

We are now in the modern age of BTC. Paper BTC has flooded the market since 2017. Futures markets. If you want to buy BTC, it used to be you had to buy real BTC. You can now buy paper BTC. Thus a no-coiner can sell you that paper. Together you have made a synthetic BTC.

That would-be demand for BTC gets diverted to paper BTC, fulfilled by counter traders who have no BTC to sell, they just have USD to back their bet. In the old days, BTC would go on an exponential run because the only sellers was a trickle from the OGs and an even smaller amount from miners with their newly mined coins. Today the magic of paper BTC is what you want to watch.

The 2022 bear market was dictated by a flood of paper BTC when spot holders didn't really sell. In this current bull, I have marked where paper increased, these were times when price didn't rally. We are in one of these right now.

So... not a great idea to look solely at ETF buying. On-chain data... derivatives data... technical price action... All of these add to the demand and supply picture. Putting it together is an art, not a quantifiable science. Everyone is just making educated guesses.