How High Can It Go?

Summary

• The parabola run is on. With Bitcoin at $120k after tagging $123k, Avi’s tell was the Wednesday candle that took it from 109 to 111 and then held for 12 hours — “that’s as good a sign as any.” Jonah sees exhausted profit-taking at the 110k consolidation, cleared short liquidations, and “an air pocket upwards from here” — “literally going to be an ice luge straight to 150K.”
• The driver: “money is too easy.” Lagged M2 money supply is hockey-sticking and Bitcoin is following “tick for tick” — the same force lifting oil on terrible fundamentals, EUR/USD from near parity to almost 1.20, and the S&P. Traced against M2, “it’s kind of a straight shot to 150.”
• No broad alt season — Jonah says “there were too many coins a year ago and there are even more too many coins now.” Jonah’s screen: the most negative-Sharpe alts in the top 100 (steady, smooth selling) become great shorts versus BTC, not USD, after they bounce. Avi’s partial dissent: rotate a little Bitcoin into laggards like HYPE (~47) or Syrup if BTC hits 130 first.
• Treasury companies are the froth to monitor. Likely Metaplanet, Strategy (600k BTC), BMNR +20% as a levered ETH bet, a dead biotech tripling on a Hyperliquid treasury pivot, even a French MicroStrategy clone in the works — “they’re all buying… when they all want to rush for the exits at the same time, there is going to be a red candle for the ages.” The GBTC premium-to-discount unwind is the template; German treasury cos already trade at a discount to NAV vs US premiums, setting up pair trades.
• Exit discipline over vibes: Jonah’s metric is MVRV Z-score — above 4 or 5, start derisking; if fresh capital keeps buying the highs, “I’m safe.” 150K is his “call level” to re-underwrite the whole position. Avi counters the data may be broken: Coinbase shuffling tens of billions between cold wallets registers as fresh UTXOs, so the metric “should be at like eight right now, flashing sell with both hands” for all anyone knows. Avi plans to sell into the 137-158k zone for the long run.
• How high can it go? Avi’s original target — 10-25% of gold’s market cap — is already at its bottom edge (BTC $2.4T vs gold $22T), and “if you’re lifting up your targets as you reach them, you’re probably doing something wrong.” Jonah’s rebuttal: gold itself went from $10T to $22T, and his probability-weighted sketch (~2% BTC flips the dollar, ~10% it flips gold) puts EV “still probably way above 150K.” Avi’s preference: derisk Bitcoin into gold, never into dollars — “I don’t want any dollars in my portfolio.”
• Two of three commodities-supercycle boxes checked — broad adoption (yes), a Facebook-style multi-year run (yes), a supply bottleneck (unproven, but Strategy and Satoshi don’t seem to be selling) — so “this thing can run another 10x.” For now the whole job is “to not get knocked off the mechanical bull”; Avi, the house alt-short specialist, is “more inclined to buy trash than sell it” — until “the best short of a lifetime” sets up.

Deep dive

1. The parabola run is on — “an ice luge straight to 150K”

• Recorded on Jonah’s 40th birthday with Bitcoin at $120,000 after a $123k high. Avi’s tell: the market puttered at 109 where he’d gotten nervous, then Wednesday’s candle took it from 109 to 111 “and we didn’t sell off for like 12 hours — that’s as good a sign as any that we might be entering the parabola run.”
• Jonah sees no reason to take profit: the selling around the 110k consolidation is exhausted, short liquidations cleared, and it’s “an air pocket upwards from here — there’s not a lot of resistance.” His only regret-check from last episode: “good thing I didn’t sell any calls.”
• The operative posture: “there’s just so much money in being long Bitcoin that the goal is literally just to not get knocked off the mechanical bull.” Diversification earns a conversation at 130, 140, 150 — not before.

2. Why here, why now: “money is too easy”

• Avi’s puzzle — equities aren’t ripping, gold isn’t ripping, so why Bitcoin, why now? Jonah’s answer: lagged M2 money supply is hockey-sticking and Bitcoin is following it “basically tick for tick.” “The debasement theorists saw this Bitcoin rally coming 10 miles away — we are part of that group of debasement artists.”
• The same force explains everything else: oil rallying on terrible fundamentals, EUR/USD from near parity to almost 1.20, the S&P up on so-so fundamentals. Trace M2 against Bitcoin and “it’s kind of a straight shot to 150.”
• Avi’s meta-point before Jonah answered — worth keeping: if you can’t pinpoint a reason for the rally, “it’s hard to pinpoint a reason to sell too.”

3. Alt chatter: short the negative-Sharpe junk vs BTC — don’t buy it

• Everyone suddenly wants “every alt that’s ever existed”; Jonah disagrees. Crappy alts are “still backed by teams loaded with bags waiting to dump,” and unlike 2021, nobody bag-holding Cardano or Polkadot harbors illusions that fresh retail will buoy them — his TA-psychology lore: a traumatized participant base sells the next massive rally.
• His actual screen: Sharpe ratios across the top 100. The most negative-Sharpe names — steady, smooth constant selling — become “great shorts versus BTC after they’ve appreciated a little bit from here. Not versus USD.”
• Avi’s partial dissent: Bitcoin has outrun even the good stuff, so if BTC hits 130 while HYPE sits at 47 and Syrup is down since the run began, chip away at Bitcoin and rotate. Jonah does not expect a broad alt season: “there were too many coins a year ago and there are even more too many coins now… otherwise, where’s the money coming from and why and how?”

4. Treasury-company froth: dead biotechs, French SPAC, and the GBTC lesson

• The bid keeps rolling: likely Metaplanet bought another $100M, Strategy holds 600,000 BTC (“I’ve said it before — I think it’s too much,” per Avi), BitMine Immersion (BMNR) is up 20% as a levered ETH proxy, and Sonnet Biotherapeutics tripled on announcing a Hyperliquid-treasury merger. Avi’s structural read: these vehicles are dead one-drug biotech shells — drug fails FDA trials, company dissolves into a holding shell, and selling out to a treasury pivot is now the best exit. A basket bet that they all sell out one by one is, per Avi, “not a bad take.”
• Even Jonah’s private-equity friend in the south of France is assembling a MicroStrategy-alike for the French stock market. Jonah calls the whole complex “absolutely a sign of froth” but not yet cause for concern; his underwriting: the unwind gets catalyzed by broader macro contagion — credit cracking for these companies — not an exogenous Bitcoin crash.
• The template is GBTC: the fake-ETF traded at up to a 100% premium (averaging 30-40%), the deposit-season-sell arb got crowded, Three Arrows levered it up, and it flipped to a discount and unwound with casualties. Application: the more treasury companies exist, the lower discounts should go across all of them — since “you just raise money and buy Bitcoin,” managing one is not exactly financial wizardry.
• Dispersion is already visible: German Bitcoin treasury companies trade at a discount to NAV while US ones sit at “an incredible premium which I still can’t fathom” — buy the cheap ones, short the rich ones, delta-neutral. “Pairs trading is going to become the new thing once things stabilize.” And the exit warning, verbatim: “when they all want to get out and rush for the exits at the same time, there is going to be a red candle for the ages.” Escalator up, elevator down.

5. Exit discipline: MVRV Z-score and a 150K “call level”

• Jonah refuses to pound the bull drum without an exit metric (“that’s stupid”). His pick is MVRV Z-score — market value over RV, scored in standard deviations: “when this thing gets above five or even above four, you’re supposed to start getting nervous.” Crucially it’s a ratio, so if fresh capital keeps buying the highs the score stays low — “if it’s just tons and tons of fresh capital buying on the highs and that metric is still low, I’m safe.”
• 150K is his “call level” — the Goldman market-making concept: don’t execute on my behalf, wake me so I decide on the wire. At 150 he’ll set everything aside, dive into the book, and re-evaluate every assumption that got him in.
• The backbone of his conviction: a Goldman commodities floor head once berated him on a bad P&L day — “even a broken clock is right twice a day, you have to adapt” — but riding GBTC from a 25-30% discount with BTC around 20-22K (an effective ~15-17K entry) became “without any question the best trade of my life.”

6. Avi’s caveat: the onchain data may be broken

• Institutionalization and ETFs have corrupted onchain datasets: Coinbase moves tens of billions between cold wallets for storage reshuffles and security tests, and those UTXOs register as fresh transactions at current prices. So MVRV-Z “could indicate it’s working perfectly and the market’s super healthy — or the metric should be at like eight right now, flashing sell with both hands, and the data is totally bogus.” Jonah concedes the point; since 2023 the metric hasn’t traced its historical boom-bust pattern.
• Avi’s own tool: an extended-Bollinger-bands framework from an old-cycle metrics builder (name garbled in audio) — every deep push into the red zones has tended to produce a pullback, 2020’s 17-to-65 run included. His zone this cycle: 137 to 158k, where he’s “definitely going to be taking off some” — for the long run, not to re-buy 10-15k lower.
• Jonah’s un-doctorable alternative: coin flow to exchanges from long-term holders. If Satoshi-era coins or mega-wallets start hitting exchanges, “maybe that’s a sign to buy puts or get out of the way or short altcoin junk against your portfolio.”
• Avi’s lament en route: metrics innovation has stalled since the old days — “the average intelligence of a crypto person has gone down pretty significantly… it’s all suits now.”

7. How high can it go — 10-25% of gold, or a moving target?

• Avi’s founding thesis: Bitcoin matures at 10-25% of gold’s market cap. With gold at $22T and Bitcoin at ~$2.4T, it’s already at the bottom of that range — “$120,000 per Bitcoin is nuts.” He’s updating priors toward 30-50%, but flags the trader’s tell on himself: “if you’re lifting up your targets as you reach them, even on a multi-decade trade, you’re probably doing something wrong.” The engine of outperformance is that Bitcoin is underowned; somewhere — “whether that’s 150,000, 250,000, 500,000 — it starts to act like a normal asset.”
• Jonah’s rebuttal: gold is a moving target — its cap went from $10T to $22T — so even a capped share of gold keeps compounding. Avi’s probability-weighted sketch (he may tweet the toy model): ~2% chance Bitcoin flips the dollar in 10 years, ~10% it flips gold (flipping gold is “on the table — maybe a 25% chance” and near-consensus among Bitcoiners), remainder around 20% of gold — “the EV of Bitcoin is still probably way above 150K in any of those scenarios.”
• Avi’s proposed synthesis: derisk Bitcoin into gold, not into dollars. Jonah: “I think the dollar is going straight down for the foreseeable future. I don’t want any dollars in my portfolio” — stocks, real estate, Bitcoin, gold, anything that holds value against the dollar.
• Avi’s sympathetic hedge, drawing on his own de-dollarization article from four years ago: reserve assets are balkanizing and Bitcoin can eventually cannibalize gold’s position — but the process takes “a very very very long time,” and a 150-to-100 drawdown “would delay the process by like another three years… three to like 10 years.”

8. Contrarian vs. trend-rider — and the three-box supercycle test

• Avi is the self-aware contrarian “doing the Warren Buffett thing” as everyone gets greedy — but concedes the impulse “hasn’t served me well” this past year. Jonah’s framing of the moment: this is the mainstream-adoption phase, like “trying to be contrarian about Facebook after The Social Network came out” — and Facebook proceeded to rip faces for 15 years.
• Jonah’s formative scar makes the point: he bought Facebook at $19 post-IPO on firsthand conviction (“every day we’re getting more views than the Super Bowl”), sold at $30 for a ~55% profit, and watched it trade past $700 — “obviously, I’m the fool.”
• His commodities-trader checklist for Bitcoin: (1) a broad-adoption supercycle like 2000-08 China commodities — yes; (2) a Facebook-style multi-year societal run — yes; (3) a bottlenecked supply, where the commodities saying holds that “80% of the profits come from the final 20% of the move” — unproven, but Strategy and Satoshi don’t seem to be selling. Two of three boxes checked: “this thing can run another 10x from here.”
• Avi’s closing tease: shorting alts is “my favorite thing to do in the world,” but not yet — “right now I’m probably more inclined to buy trash than I am to sell it… there will come a day where you will hear me talk about how this is the best short of a lifetime, and you should take it.”