Summary

Neither host thinks this is a bull market — Avi got bullish on the late-November crash expecting a bounce to $105–110k BTC and $3,400–3,600 ETH, but concedes the market is “sort of in the decay mode”: BTC is down on the year, there’s no wash-trading rule in crypto, and funds will dump their biggest losers into year-end. The playbook: “take the last week of December off… or short into the last week of December” — post-FTX, Solana traded to ~$7 “the last three days of the year” on exactly this flow.
The next big trade in crypto is shorting the L1s. Even the cream of the crop — Solana sideways since the 2021 “pico top,” ETH sideways four years “despite massive growth. And they’re legal now” — can’t hold a trend, and Jonah’s commodity math is brutal: 100M+ ETH circulating with under 2% spent as gas per year means “the commodity model suggests that ETH should be basically worth zero.” The expression both like: “go long anything that makes money and short all the L1s against it.”
Dead metas don’t come back. Avi rage-quit his CryptoPunk (a ~$400,000 liquidity event including a 40% tax-loss recovery) after Bitcoin rallied ~500% while punks fell 70–80%; Avi’s law: “once a meta is over, it doesn’t really come back” — ICOs, 2020 DeFi, 2021 NFTs, the L2 trade — “the only thing that keeps coming back is Bitcoin, Ethereum.”
Trump trades are the favored altcoins now: Avi has ~5% of his portfolio in REMX (US rare earths) on China’s “soft war,” plus long Bitcoin into next year because “Hassett is ridiculously bullish crypto. The market isn’t pricing that in.” The shared worry: midterm-bailout stimulus is already priced, making the midterms “the number one threat” to the tape.
Jonah’s macro spine is “stupidly bullish” medium-term: AI-driven white-collar unemployment plus rising stocks plus social unrest is “the best recipe that I could possibly imagine for stimulus” — unless the administration pivots to Main Street at Wall Street’s expense, which Avi calls “inevitable,” citing the Trump–Mamdani housing agreement as “horseshoe theory” at its purest.
Hyperliquid has a supply overhang — “Bitcoin was up and hype was down, that tells you everything” — with team unlocks seemingly hitting spot and 60% further downside possible. Avi frames HYPE as “the Uniswap”: 6–12 months of underperformance versus Lighter (whose “very uniform” volume “suggests a lot of wash trading”), then survival.
Everything long-duration competes with Bitcoin, which Jonah sees as a liquid 10x with max 30–40% drawdown. Against that hurdle: SpaceX went $77bn→$800bn (played out), RKLB “could 10 to 15x,” Avi’s humanoid-robotics SPV (likely Apptronik, $1.2bn valuation) “could genuinely 100x,” and Anduril is “going to be a trillion dollar company.”

Deep dive

1. This is not a bull market — trade the tax-loss calendar

Avi’s setup: he turned bullish on the late-November crash, targeting BTC $105–110k and ETH $3,400–3,600, but has conceded “we’re sort of in the decay mode.” Jonah’s frame for the next three weeks: de-risking, tax-loss harvesting, CTAs pushing lower — “just going to be like random price action” until January, when “we can maybe start actually trading again.”
The mechanism both stress: crypto has no wash-trading rule, so funds sell losers, book the loss, and rebuy immediately in the new calendar year. Avi’s specimen is post-FTX 2022: “I remember Solana trading to like seven bucks… it was all the last three days of the year because every fund, every person took advantage” of the loophole — which is still in effect.
The playbook: “the more down it is and the more unrealized losses that you think people have on this coin, the harder it’s going to fall” — so “take the last week of December off… or short into the last week,” targeting coins where funds sit on big unrealized losses (“like a TIA for example”). To the chat’s 2017 objection (BTC peaked in late December that year): BTC was up massively then — no loss to harvest; the effect only bites when the market is down.

2. Dead metas don’t come back — anatomy of a punk rage-quit

Avi sold the CryptoPunk he bought at the November 2021 peak — sized deliberately large because “I kind of need to feel feelings in order to learn stuff.” He stopped liking it (“I felt like I was trying too hard to be crypto cool”), and once the emotional bond goes, “it just becomes a trade.” In a high-tax year with other gains, eating the loss recovered ~40% plus the ~$200k sale: “basically like a $400,000 liquidity event” to redeploy into “Bitcoin or Hyperliquid or Aster.”
The tell that forced the exit: Bitcoin rallied ~500% while punks fell 70–80%. “It was very much a 2021 meta… punks aren’t [crypto]. Maybe Ether Rocks are crypto, but punks aren’t.”
Avi’s law, the episode’s most repeatable idea: “once a meta is over, it doesn’t really come back” — ICOs never returned, 2020 DeFi never returned, 2021 NFTs never returned, the L2 trade never returned. “The only thing that keeps coming back is Bitcoin, Ethereum… that’s it.” NFTs now reduce to asking “will oil paintings rally again? Maybe some of them will, but 99.9% won’t.”
Why Avi still holds his Ether Rock (peak: $3M a rock; he “could see a million, 2 million bucks” again): only 100 exist, and it’s “an access ticket to a community of some of the most interesting and successful people in the industry.” His scaling rule: “groups stop working above 60 people… once you get to 500, everything’s an abstraction” — with 10,000 punks and low-ticket holders, the punks discord is “a dark place.” And anyway, “the flex is still offline.”

3. Trump gives us trades regularly — REMX, Intel, and the midterm risk

Avi’s Trump thesis: he needs the stock market, wants a new Fed chair, rate cuts, balance-sheet expansion — “and he probably doesn’t care what happens after the four years,” happy to “mortgage our nation’s future” via inflation. The Intel stake was the template: “wink wink, nudge nudge, buy.”
Avi’s expression: REMX, the US rare-earths ETF, ~5% of his portfolio — China “has basically started a soft war over rare earth minerals” and Washington will have to support the domestic complex. Plus long Bitcoin into next year: “Hassett is ridiculously bullish crypto. The market isn’t pricing that in.”
The shared worry: the market is leaning on stimulus to bail Trump out of a bad midterm, and it’s priced. Avi: “the midterms are the number one threat in my mind” — hedged by the observation that Trump “is acting extrajudicially” and might push his agenda even under a Democratic Congress, since “the last sweeping piece of legislation that got done… was Obamacare.”

4. Stimulus money buys Bitcoin and Tesla, not commodities

Avi extends the inflation path to “very bullish on commodities still”; Jonah’s pushback — worth keeping: “in commodities the solution for high prices is high prices” — production comes out of the woodwork — and stimulus flows chase accessible bets on the future: Bitcoin (alternative reserve currency), NASDAQ/Google (AI), TSLA (humanoids). “You might get lucky for 20%,” but he wouldn’t buy the GSCI or BCOM into a stimulus package. Concession: miners over the raw basket, maybe — though he admits he doesn’t know the space well enough to say definitively.
Avi’s single names: Robinhood is “a no-brainer trade for the next 5 years”; Tesla is “currently the only clean way” to own the robotics thesis — but versus Google’s cash flows it’s “just totally out of whack,” and a 50% drawdown “wouldn’t surprise” him.

5. AI unemployment is the stimulus recipe — “stupidly bullish,” eventually

Jonah’s chain: AI guts white-collar work (“you can’t just be a middle manager on Zoom anymore”), companies keep profits with fewer people, stocks rip while unemployment and unrest climb. “Low inflation, rising unemployment, rising stock market, social unrest — that’s the best recipe that I could possibly imagine for stimulus”: subsidized groceries and affordability interventions rather than COVID-style checks. Medium-to-long-term, “the setup is stupidly bullish… it’s going to get rocky for a while though.”
Avi’s interjection en route: this means “the stock market has never been less representative of the overall economy.”
The risk case: the administration helps Main Street at Wall Street’s expense — capping grocery margins, clawing energy profits. Avi thinks that pivot is “inevitable,” pointing to Trump and Zohran Mamdani agreeing on building housing while calling each other fascist and communist: “I’ve never seen horseshoe theory quite as good as that.”

6. Trump accounts, negative equity, and getting long dysfunction

Jonah defends the $1,000 Trump accounts against the “529s already exist” critique: “it’s a marketing play” — a gift forces people to look, exactly like his old trick of onboarding friends by sending them $10 of Bitcoin and opening the account for them. Avi’s read of the signal: “the dollar is over — the new denominator for anybody’s net worth should be the S&P 500.”
Jonah’s counter, via Peter Thiel: “a lot of people just have negative equity in their lives” — a denominator only helps if you have money. His fix — force university endowments to pick up student loans instead of taxpayers — draws Avi’s “Sounds a lot like communism, Jonah.”
The populism trade: with Luigi a “folk hero,” United Healthcare fell from $600 to $324 — right at the pre-runup 2020 base, “a pretty good place to get back in if you’re bullish on healthcare dysfunction” in a system Jonah calls “the worst of both worlds… an absolute Frankenstein labyrinth” (he’s paying ~$1,000/month for minimal self-employed coverage). And the evergreen: M2 money supply “is a chart you can get long now via Bitcoin. I still think that holds.”

7. Space and robotics must clear the Bitcoin hurdle

SpaceX went from ~$77bn on secondaries two years ago to $800bn — the trade is “for sure not as juiced as it could have been.” Jonah’s only public long in the theme: RKLB, which “could 10 to 15x” — and Avi’s “actually dead serious” view is asteroid mining for rare earths within 10–15 years.
Avi’s private investment: a humanoid-robotics SPV (likely Apptronik) at a $1.2bn valuation that “could genuinely 100x,” while Jonah says Anduril is “going to be a trillion dollar company” — for Palmer Luckey’s modular-weapons insight: US weapons are built in hyper-specific facilities that can’t scale, so build weapons that share parts and run on any manufacturing line — “missiles can be built in the Ford factory.” Jonah says Luckey’s Rogan appearance showed some Twitter-related “derangement”; Avi says it might just be megalomania.
Avi’s own caveat: “supply comes out to meet demand” — as with the post-Facebook VC wave that funded 95%-useless SaaS (“connect your dog’s brain to your microwave”), private robotics investment “may have already hit peak”; hardware has a higher bar, but expect fundraisers who never build.
Jonah’s hurdle rate: these themes “compete with Bitcoin,” which he sees as “going to 10x with a max downside of 30 to 40% at any given time” — liquid, with max conviction — while buying Anduril privately means paying a ~30% premium going in and taking a ~30% discount coming out.

8. ETH fails even the commodity test

The Santiago debate on CT (vs. likely Haseeb): value L1s on price-to-sales — crypto can’t justify its valuation on its user base, and most of the TAM is stablecoins. Jonah agrees with the substance if not the delivery: at a few billion of market cap “you can go venture capital mode”; at multiple trillions “you should probably look for some real auditable financial progress.”
Jonah’s demolition of the ETH-bulls’ “it’s a commodity, not a security” defense: he once bought the refining analogy himself — ETH as crude, gas as gasoline — but proof-of-stake broke it, and the math is fatal: over 100M ETH circulating with under 2% spent as gas per year, versus oil’s tiny circulating-supply-to-daily-demand ratio. “On that basis the commodity model suggests that ETH should be basically worth zero.” His actual view: not a commodity, not a security, not zero — Avi: “I think it’s a company”; Jonah: “a DAO that sells blockspace.”
Avi’s structural problem: the burn was smart, but L2 ecosystems like Base and Arbitrum cut fees 100x and cannibalize the underlying value — crypto hasn’t found a way to raise platform fees without degrading the platform. The $500-per-transaction NFT era is gone forever “because blockspace is now near infinite.”

9. The next big trade: short the L1s, long whatever earns

Avi, categorical: “the next big trade in crypto is to short all of these L1s.” The evidence — “the reality of the situation unfortunately is that flows are all that matter”: Solana has gone sideways since the 2021 pico top; ETH sideways four years “despite massive growth. And they’re legal now. How can anything else compete?” Monetary premium and gambling demand accrue to Bitcoin alone — “I don’t think you can have multiple competing currencies at that level.”
The risk-adjusted expression both endorse: “go long anything that makes money and short all the L1s against it” — with the caveat that even the earners face supply problems (Hyperliquid’s, below).
Mechanics disagreement worth keeping: Avi only shorts bounces — if it goes $5 to $2, “I short if it goes back to three” — to dodge squeezes and harvest “inorganic price action” (Worldcoin his long-running candidate). Jonah, from commodities, shorts smooth downtrends outright — Aptos/BTC, Optimism and Arbitrum versus Bitcoin: “smooth downward sloping charts are safe to short… there’s still billions of dollars to extract in shorts in this industry because these things are going to zero,” and right now “you can’t have a short squeeze if there are no shorts.”

10. Hyperliquid’s overhang — and what’s left to do in crypto

“Bitcoin was up and hype was down — that tells you everything that you need to know”: a supply overhang from team unlocks seemingly hitting spot. Avi came around to stepping aside (“you sound like me now,” Jonah laughs) since it “could go down like 60%.” His frame: HYPE is “the Uniswap” — Lighter is cheaper and may take some liquidity, but its “very uniform” volume “suggests a lot of wash trading, not real volume”; there may be 6–12 months of underperformance while zero-fee incentives run, then HYPE may survive, as when Sushi-era dexes died and Uniswap didn’t. Same shape for Jonah’s Aerodrome idea (AERO as a proxy for Ethereum-ecosystem transactions): good dip-buy, “you just can’t catch the falling knife” — wait for capitulation volume, then crickets, then the uptick. “We’re in a raging bear market for altcoins.”
Career advice, set against the viral “I wasted eight years of my life in crypto” essay (2M views; the author still made money and still sees Bitcoin at $1M — he just lost faith in the ethos): Avi’s three paths — professional investor (start publishing: “the best way to figure out if somebody is intelligent is if they have a well-maintained Substack”; his own 20,000-subscriber newsletter at 22 launched his career), builder (compare the opportunity across all of tech, not crypto-to-crypto, and ask whether crypto actually beats the existing solution), or keep your career and just invest. If you’re 19–22, take the risk. Or, per the chat: “be early or scam.”
Closers: Zcash +21% on the day may reflect a hack with proceeds hidden there — which is itself the bull case, since every big hack now flows there. “Getting long crime is a great trade. Crime is never going to stop.” And Jonah on quantum: “There is no quantum threat” — the developer community just forks Bitcoin to a post-quantum algorithm.

Market Overview, December 9, 2025 The Chip That Could Unlock AGI.