Bitcoin rally and whether the bear market is over, with Digital Asset News

Transcript

There's a website visa onchain analytics.com and you can take a look at that and see what the major chains are that are being used for all stable coin and it was always the same four the same four are always the ones up there I call it the best which is Bitcoin is finally back above its 200E moving average which usually marks a bare market bottom so why isn't everyone rushing in to buy and how much longer is this going to go on hello and welcome to the Milkro show the podcast that knows that DCA and hodddle is much easier said than done I'm your host John Gill and Today is Wednesday, August 19th, and today we are joined by Rob from Digital Asset News. Rob is the founder and host of Digital Asset News, a crypto YouTube channel known for clear, daily, no hype breakdowns of

cryptocurrency, macroeconomic trends, and market developments. Rob is really awesome. He is a former US Army combat medic who's been involved in digital assets since 2017 and is recognized for his balance and experience-driven perspective on the entire space. Rob's going to share a lot of wisdom about crypto with us today. So, if that sounds good to you, make sure you like and subscribe. Share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it. A reminder, today's podcast is free, and that would not be possible without our wonderful sponsors at Saber. Money, the stable coin payments platform built for Asia. Keep an eye out for more information about them later in the episode, but for now, welcome to the Milkro Show. Rob, how are you?

>> Great. John, that was a great intro. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. >> Well, I'm really excited to have you on the show. I've been following your content for a long time and I thought a great place to start this conversation would be with your thoughts on Bitcoin here because like I said the the Bitcoin price has now finally gotten over this 200WE moving average but sometimes it stays around here for a long time in bare markets. Do you think we've bottomed here or do you think we have more more like bare market uh price action in front of us? >> That's a good question. I hope not. I hope it hasn't bottomed. And if we, you know, historically speaking, the 200week moving average has been a pretty good time to buy around there. And if we go back all the way to 2015, we just

breached it barely. And that was back when, you know, Bitcoin didn't cost too much. And of course, it was just a crazy thing to invest into. And that it just dipped slightly. And then in uh in 2018 after we had our all-time high in 2017 when I got in then we had a little bit of a breach there uh in the 200week moving average. And of course people were were saying everything was dead. It was never going to come back. And uh then of course the ones that were the wise ones they just said no I'm just going to keep accumulating dollar cost averaging. And then everything was going pretty good until we had this thing called the corona virus. I don't know if you heard of that. It's like a big thing back in 2020 and everybody was freaking out. I I and I think that also breached

the 200week moving average. Again, a great time to buy, you know, when you could get it at just cheap. And then fast forward to 2022 and we actually went below the 200week moving average, 250 and even 300we moving average. So, I see it now and we're kind of teetering around that that that uh that time frame, the 200E moving average. I think we may be above it right now. Uh this is in August. So, I would just say for me, I feel like it's a pretty good time and I don't want to do the same mistake I did last session in 2022, which was I did this stupid thing called micro DCA.

And I actually reduced the amount of dollar cost averaging. And I thought, well, I'll just save it up to when it, you know, goes really low. If I just would have kept to the plan, which was just dollar cost average and then buying more as the price started to tumble, I would have been in a much better position than uh what I am. I did okay. But I I think that everybody in the audience can agree that, you know, buying around 156 17,000 Bitcoin in 2022 wouldn't have been a bad thing. Or maybe buying at 3,000 in 2018 wouldn't have been a bad thing as we move forward. So, so John, to answer your question, yeah, I I I don't I hope it hasn't bottomed. We'll see if the four-year cycles play out perfectly like they've been doing or if this was just a

pretty good time to buy. If you are not already a Milk Road Pro member, now is the time. On August 26th, the price of Milk Road Pro is going up. Monthly goes from 25 bucks a month to 39 bucks a month, and annual goes from 250 to 299. And here's why. Milk Road Pro used to just be one paid newsletter and one portfolio. Now, it is a complete platform. There's proprietary analysis and a full panel of five analysts, each with their own portfolio, their own research, their own trades, and you get full access to it in real time. This is going to have all the information and notifications you need to stay up to date up to the minute with their research and with their moves in the market. And the results have been insane. Melvin's portfolio alone launched in February. It's up over 45%

since. If you'd put 10 grand in behind his moves, you'd be sitting on over four grand of gains today. Five months of Milk Road Pro costs just $125 over that same period of time. The ROI on that investment speaks for itself. If you join before midnight on August 25th, you keep today's prices locked in for as long as you are a member and we hope you will stay a member because we love our community. Uh but that's it. After that, it's gone. So get in on this today. Lock in this price on Milk Road Pro. Link is in the description. I'll see you there. Rob, I'd love to elaborate more on this and and hear more about what your DCA strategy is. is now. This is one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you because going through a bare market like this, Bitcoin's price can chop and

languish for months at a time. You famously DCA into Bitcoin on Mondays. I believe that's that's that's still your plan here. Could you talk us through how you arrived at that strategy and what that actually looks like in practice for you? >> I So, what I do is um I take a look at the risk levels and I steal this information from Ben Cowan's website. If you guys want to sign up, I'm sure there'll be a link in the description. And what we take a look at is just, you know, as the price starts to go down, the risk levels go down. So when you get to 0.5 level, what whatever that actually is or 0.6, you start to buy.

And then once it goes below to like 0.49, you for what I do, of course, I'm not I can't give anybody any financial advice, but I double up what I would have bought the last Monday. And then Monday turns around and maybe we hit 0.39. Well, now I have to quadruple up. And if it goes below 0.29, 29, then I have to 8x what I buy. And I got to tell you, uh, when when we were in those those risk levels, I was like, h, this isn't too bad. But as the price starts to go down, I have to manually adjust it, which isn't too bad because, you know, it it fires at 6:30 a.m. uh via the cash app. I know people say, why do you use the cash app? It's because if you set it up for recurring buys, it actually is very low. Like, I don't think there's I

mean, the fees are almost non-existent. The spreads are pretty good. I think they're getting its uh OTC. But if you set it up like that, it works out pretty well. And that's what I've been using. So again, what I do is as the price goes down, I double quadruple 8x up. And I don't really think about it too much. It just I think to myself, you know, in the future, this will probably be a good buy. Just right now, it uh it is interesting to see it keep going down, but I'll be okay, I think. And I think the all the viewers will be okay if they maybe just dabble into it. Yeah, this is why I said DCA and huddle is easier said than done because while you're doing it, it feels terrible, but later on it might work out really well. Um, where are you

on that spectrum of doubling, quadrupling, 8xing your your buys right now? Where where are you in at this moment? >> I think I haven't looked at it right now, but we're at 0.3. So, roughly I'm at either I think I'm at quadrupling. So, then once we once we go below that, then it's an 8x. I got to tell you, when I when I do those types of things, sometimes I'll get a a call from my from my bank and they're like, "Hey, did you?" I'm like, "Yes, I did." So, now they just they just stopped calling me. So, because it is a lot of money. >> Okay. Well, I I I think that it's good someone's checking on you. Uh do you do a similar thing in the bull market, right? Like you DCA in uh in a bare market. Do you also DCA out in a in a

bull market or is that not your strategy? You just just hodddle? You know, I got to tell you, I did a much better job in 2021 when I just set price targets and just sold off in tranches. And uh it would what I would do is I would just do fractions and I would just say okay well Bitcoin from here to here the last cycle did so much amount 2x 3x 4x whatever it was and then from there I would just say okay once it 2xes from the low then I want to take a little bit of profits once it goes to 4x I take a little profits and so on and so forth.

So in 2025, I thought, okay, I'm going to use some indicators because that seems to be the smart way to do things. I'll take a look at the PI cycle top, the MVRV score, the PO multiple, and everything else in between because those won't let me down. Unfortunately, they did. And really, what it would have been the best thing was just to listen to a Reddit user who called it like three years ago and said, "Hey, October 6 is going to be the absolute top just based on the time frame as far as four year cycles." I'm like, there's no way that can work out. And of course, 126 October 6, 2025 is exactly what it was. So, I took a little bit of profits on the way down. I didn't hit the absolute top, but I don't think anybody's really hitting that. So, what I try to do then is just

tanches. And I'm going to do the same thing moving forward into the the next the next fouryear cycle. I know people will say, "Well, Rob, you should never sell your Bitcoin." Look, uh, everybody's got goals and my goals are not your goals. So, the things that I'm doing with it, it is nice. There is something to be said for having no debt and having that hang over your head because I mean, Bitcoin's great. it's gonna be the greatest thing, you know, as far as like monetary issuance. But for me to like pay off some things and get some things done and roll it into some things that I think are a little bit safer, maybe a little S&P 500, maybe bonds, maybe real estate, I do those types of things and then I can sleep a little bit easier at night. But the

majority still stays in Bitcoin, not altcoins. Rob, Bitcoin has put in like historically low levels of volatility in the last few weeks and months here, especially compared to other asset classes like even gold. Um, but certainly the, you know, the stock market. Do you see any near-term catalysts that might change that that might spark some more volatility back into Bitcoin and get some some motion out of this like just tight range we've been in for like two or three months at this point? >> Anything? It'd be very difficult to say because if we're taking a look at what could be a catalyst positive, there's always negativity around it. There's always FUD. There's always things going on. The AI bubble could pop. Uh we could see another massive hack in some cold

storage devices. All those things, sure, positively. I thought it would be a nice positive move for the Clarity Act to pass. Now, unfortunately, I didn't think it would. I talked about this on on the show quite a bit, but if it would have actually passed, I thought it would have been a nice positive change and a little momentum moving forward. I didn't think it would, though, because we're in the midterm year and the other party uh Democrats are do not want to give Donald J. Trump a win. So, why would they allow that to pass and then of course he can just do a uh a victory lap and dunk on all the Democrats? They don't want that to happen. They're going to shoot it down. So we had that but as far as like like positive I think if we can I mean what else do we have? We have these

institutions we have I mean we have the black rockck I just saw a story about city a city group which has you know I think it's the third largest bank in the world and they're going to do uh custody of Bitcoin only and then every other business is getting into or institution is getting into Bitcoin. We've got a pro uh pres a pro- crypto president. Well, maybe that's just for for world liberty financial, but just kidding. But uh there's a there is a president who ran on it and promised a lot of things unfortunately really can't deliver and uh for especially this clarity act. So as far as like positivity, I think I on the short term, I don't really see too much. I think the SEC and the CFTC will step in where Congress has failed us,

which Congress always fails us, and they're going to make changes and they're going to make provisions and that could probably help a little bit, but I don't see us getting major moves until we get out of this year because everybody thought it was all about the fundamentals and what was going to happen and look at these institutions and really what it came down to was just a four-year cycle. So, as soon as we get out of that, the mentality might switch and then we can actually start to really see some price appreciation. >> Okay, you brought up a lot of good things in here. I want to talk about some of these hack incidents. But first, I want to pick up on this thread on regulation, the Clarity Act. Obviously, the Clarity Act has stalled out. It's not dead, but it's been postponed to September. I really appreciate your

healthy pessimism about all these things, but right now today, I think as we're recording this, um, President Trump is having a meeting with a lot of the heads of the crypto industry in the White House. Is there anything that might come out of this meeting that you're watching for that that might move the markets or or the investors should pay attention to or do you think this is going to be another sort of nothing burger? >> I would like it to be something, but I just saw that with uh World Liberty Financial, they're trying to I they just got provision from the the OC, the office of the comroll of the currency to get a provisional charter bank license.

And because of that, they want to get into the stable coin game, which is they already have their own stable coin. I think it's like the fifth largest and because of that that is going to help strengthen the dollar globally. Stable coins I believe as far as like what we actually have to uh have in reserve for that. So I see it as it's not going to go over well but I see it as President Trump probably is going to want to make this happen because it is great for world liberty financial. However, if we take a look at I know people are gonna, you know, some people love that, some people hate it. But if we if we deal with our sphere of control, what can we actually do? What can we actually take away? I can't control a sitting president of the United States making their own company,

their own business, which, you know, piggybacks off crypto. It's fine. If he can actually go in there and and talk to everybody, and then we can actually get some kind of movement in Congress to move this needle forward, then so much the better. But for me, I just think it's it's a posturing type of thing because what else can we do? There's a potential we could get this in September and it could actually pass. But, uh, I'm not going to hold my breath. So, um, no, John. Unfortunately, I don't think it's it's that great. >> Well, again, I appreciate the healthy pessimism and yeah, you know, look, just like you said, there's pros and cons to this quote unquote crypto crypto president. Um, I think it's it's fine to be very critical and have questions about what he's doing and and see how that all plays out. I I do want to ask

you about something that that is happening though. Um the SEC has voted to roll out something they're calling regulation crypto which is a framework that lays out you know how to operate in digital assets in the United States including um ICOs, initial coin offer offerings, fundraising and sort of an innovation exemption for projects that are still trying to build their networks. How do you respond to to this movement from the SEC? Do you think this is bullish? How important is this and what are your thoughts on that? So ICOs well you know government is uh you know about five six years late and uh I would have really appreciated that uh back in 2017 when I first got into digital assets and uh there was nothing but ICOs going on everywhere and it was the big

rage and of course you could have I mean back then you could have gotten into a lot of different projects that would have done pretty well. I think with the SEC and the CFTC again, it is it is great for the allocation of capital and I took a look at it and I think it's up to $5 million. There's really no provisions and also another one for 75 million depending off over four years. If they could do something like that, there'll be money that will come into the crypto sector. But what I worry about, and I can't really do too much with this, is that do we really need more startups and more altcoins and more cryptos to to bring into this this cauldron of of uh of craziness as they

start to go, I have a new altcoin or I have a new add-on or I have the the the next greatest DeFi thing. I mean, that's great. It's a free market, but we've already got like I what's what's the number, John? 100,000 altcoins out there. >> It's hard to to to tell you. It depends on who you ask and how you measure it. It's it's a lot. It's many millions. >> It's many. It's many millions. I I just look at it like this. I think the ones that are battle tested are doing pretty good as far as alts. Um let's just stick with those, build on top of them, and maybe if if people are so inclined, we can use the Bitcoin as a settlement layer like people were were talking about way back in the day. But for this

to happen, I like to see the SEC and CFTC get involved positively, but I don't really see, you know, this being like the major catalyst, but I could be wrong. You know, one thing we've talked about a lot on this show is that crypto is quickly becoming a huge part of the global payments infrastructure. And nowhere is that more obvious than in Asia. But if you're actually running a remittance company or a payment business, you know that the hard part isn't moving the stable coins. It's dealing with local banking partners, compliance, liquidity, and all of the operational headaches that come with sending money into places like India and Southeast Asia. That's why today's partner is Saber. They give payment companies stable coinpowered infrastructure to collect and make payouts across Asia without having to build all of that complexity themselves.

They've already processed more than $3 billion in transactions across 40 different countries. So, this isn't just a concept. These guys are actually doing this for real. If you're building payment infrastructure or expanding into Asia, make sure you check out saber.money. Gotcha. Okay. Well, so I think that this is an interesting point though because we had an ICO, an initial coin offering craze back in 2017 and a lot of people are asking if that same kind of frenzy is going to come back and if it does might kind of re rejuvenate investor interest and attention but you know at the same time there are a lot of rug pulls that happen with that too. How how do you think about that dynamic of like wanting to see like you know attention activity in digital assets but also investor protections and and not repeating some of the same mistakes of

the past? >> Well, I think with the SEC and the CFTC, they're going to put those guard rails in place. So, it won't be as easy as before because it was the wild wild west. But I I will say because I mean me and you and everybody watching this video, we're kind of in a a little crypto bubble and and we see the positivity that's going on. we see the the greatness that could be. But what opened my eyes was when you go out and talk to other people that are outside of this this sphere. They're like, "Yeah, crypto is that that stuff with the meme coins and and things that were going on and didn't you guys have a hack recently?" And then and just look no further than the last Super Bowl commercial with Coinbase. It was a singalong at first and then when it was

it switched to Coinbase, it was nothing but booze and jeers because they're like, "Uh, yeah, that's the same place that I lost a bunch of money." also, you know, that could be, you know, memecoin, that could be Trumpcoin, uh, Melaniacoin, I mean, you name it. Uh, those things just kind of, uh, really, really wrecked a lot of people. So, if the SEC and CFDC is, again, I think this is a good thing, uh, for them to actually put those guard rails in place, but how many more products do we need that can actually move the needle? >> Rob, I want to get your thoughts on some of these hacks and security breaches we've seen. It's it seems like it's been relentless. There was Cold Card, then there was Treasure, then Safe Pal. Um that was just like last week, right? Um

and you know, some of these are security breaches, some of them are hacks. It's all a little bit different, but people in general, I think right now seem to be a little bit less comfortable with self- custody. And I'm just curious your thoughts on that. Like what should people do if they're worried about this? Do you think self-custody as an idea is going to like, you know, suffer because of this? And what's your reaction generally to all these hacks we've seen? Well, some people will say, well, this is just a timing issue because now, and we just talked about this a couple minutes ago, you know, Cityroup is is getting into it. There's a lot of uh custodial services coming online. So, it is interesting the the timing, but you have to remember like I mean with with Cold Card, that's been around for years

and years and years. And I know people will say, well, there's a conspiracy theory, but what what it is, it doesn't matter. What what matters is is that a lot of people lost a lot of money. And I think moving forward for someone to say this is the future of finance. I on these cold storage devices, I think it's not for everybody. And I remember Plan B a couple of years ago. He came out on Twitter and he said, "I'm moving everything to ETFs." And that's a guy who's been around for a long time and he knows exactly how to cold storage and he knows the risk and he knows what he should do. and he said, "I'm I don't want to deal with with the headache and uh you know, not your keys, not your problem." But on the flip side, you you'll take a look and look at Simon

Dixs, one of the one of the smartest guys in in crypto and uh in Bitcoin, and he would say he's like, "Look, this is a move to get people to stop self-custody and move in the other direction for custody." For me, I look at it as like this. I get an email probably every week or two and it's from somebody who's lost their entire life savings and it used to be just hacks because you're susceptible and it's not just that you're susceptible because you don't know what you're doing. you're susceptible because Ledger and a lot of other I mean there was another one Safe Pal and a couple different other hard storage cold storage wallets they had unfortunately lost the information or

were hacked for personal information. So now these hackers have your address uh they have your emails uh they have all your your phone numbers. So then it's a big issue. So there was that and now moving forward now we can't even trust all the cold storage devices. So there's a there's a saying it's it's it's it's not about I do know what I know or I think I know I know what I don't know. One of the issues that so I know that I don't know everything about cold storage and and the the uh right algorithm and the right security features. I I'm just not as uh as well like as read as I should have been because if I would have

read more into cold cold wallet I could have warned people it didn't work out. The big issue I have is I don't know what I don't know. And when I say that, it's like how many more in the future? I don't know how long it'll take, but what if some other major cold storage device comes out and says, "Oh, you know what? We had this this this issue, this fault, and for some reason we didn't catch it and AI caught it and unfortunately, you know, we really apologize for the hundreds of thousands of people who lost all their Bitcoin. Really, really sorry about that." That I think it is the big thing. Now, people will say, "Well, Rob, you're just spreading FUD."

I'll tell you, you know, I think a lot of these cold card people would have liked to have heard more of this FUD so maybe they could and I and I talk about this as well on the show, which is you can diversify your portfolio. You know, we can do stocks and bonds and gold and crypto, but I like to diversify now my holdings or my security. So, I will have some on a ledger. I will have a good amount of tangent. I'll also use ITR custodial services which is the same one that Sailor and Strategy uses as well as Larry Frink and Black Rockck which is Coinbase Prime. And um I will also put those into ETFs because I refuse to be that guy that has to go and tell his

wife, "Hey, I know I put everything, all of our life savings into this, but somebody from North Korea, the Lazarus group, just hacked us and now I have to uh we have to start from scratch." I refuse to be that guy. I will spread it all around and that's just how I see it. >> I think there's a lot of wisdom in that. That's kind of a little bit similar to what I do too. I don't like to have, you know, a lot of like personal vulnerability or responsibility for some of these things. At the same time, I also like having some control and autonomy about this. But I really think the the thing you that stands out to me from your answer is diversifying your solutions for this, right? Instead of having all of it in one thing, using a variety of solutions to custody of the

assets, some third party, some personal, like different things like that. Is that like a best practice that you recommend everybody follow or is that like how did you arrive at that like diverse set of solutions? >> Yeah, because I I had on uh Steve Wnooki. He is he's an LA Raider. He's going to be a future Hall of Famer and uh he had actually put in over $3.2 million uh into uh Bitcoin. And then he got hacked, but it was a it was a scam attempt and it actually went through. I had him on the show and he he walked us through it. But it was around that time that I started to to to think to myself, you know, Steve's a pretty smart guy and

there's a lot of smart people that have been hacked and or they've left over their uh pneumonic phrase. They put a key here. They didn't really realize it. There was one guy, I think, that he had locked everything down, but at one point, five years ago, he had printed out his pneummonic phrase and he just had forgotten about it and he doesn't know how his ledger got hacked, but for some reason somehow they got the uh pneummonic phrase and maybe he thought maybe it was some kind of old recycled information enterp.

But I came to this conclusion after getting so many emails and personal requests of asking me, Rob, what can I do? Because now I have to tell my wife and now I have to, you know, tell the kids that, you know, I can't pay for their college. What should I do? And and who should I contact? I'm like, there's nobody you can contact. This is a self custody type of issue. Even you can contact the FBI. You can contact the local authorities. There's a couple of people I recommended, Zach XBT and and another group. But at the end of the day, are you going to see that back? probably not. And I just thought to myself, there's got to be a way. It's It sucks to lose 25% of your stash. It sucks to lose, you know, however much and with taxes. What what the worst

thing is is to lose 100%. And not have any control over it. And uh that was the the big thing. I said, I would like to protect more people than to have them go out there and try to do it everything themselves. >> Rob, I really appreciate you sharing the wisdom on this. And I think this our audience is going to appreciate you doing that as well. So, thank you for for kind of walking us through your thoughts on this. Um, I want to pivot now a little bit towards a conversation around altcoins because we talked about your DCA strategy on Bitcoin and I think Well, you're already laughing here. Okay. But I I I'm curious, are there any altcoins that are also in that DCA bucket for you or that you're accumulating or maybe if not accumulating just holding through this this bare market and just what's your

outlook on the altcoin market here? So, I always took a look at I thought it would be because we know stable coins are going to do quite well and especially like we talked about it's going to strengthen the US dollar. I took a look at uh Visa. There's a website visa onchain analytics.com and you can take a look at that and see what the major chains are that are being used for all stable coins or for us. Well, for the the major ones, Tether and Circle and some other ones and it was always the same four. The same four are always the ones up there. I call it the best which is Binance, Ethereum, Salonatron. So BNB, Ethereum, Solonatron. That would be like the best.

Now there's some other ones that that you can throw in there. You can talk about Polygon. And of course the XRP people will tell you, "What about crossber payments?" And I get it. I get it. It's just I I only have so much money. I mean, I really can't put everything into everything. It's just it's just impossible. So I look at, you know, the BEST BNB, Ethereum, Sonatron, and then people will say, "Well, that doesn't matter. Even though we have payments, which is trillions of dollars across the way, even though we have that, that that's only a fraction percentage of what the price accumulation can be. And they're absolutely right. So, if we take a look at just payments, it's one part of it.

Then there's all then the biggest factor is speculation. Let's just be honest. And then past that, you have to think to yourself, okay, what else can these rails do? Well, what about tokenization of real world assets? We can tokenize bonds. We can tokenize oh you know like the stock market and we can tokenize real estates and we can tokenize a whole heft amount bonds everything else. So I take a look at something like like that and what we can do and the rails that that it can be built on and then you you amp it up by speculation. I think those things can work out pretty well and you know BNB some people don't like it but Ethereum seems to be like the choice for institutions in Wall Street. We'll see that holds true, especially as we take a

look at some problems that it has. And it seems like every hack seems to happen on DeFi, which is built on Ethereum. Not that that's an Ethereum issue. I get it, but it just seems like a negative stance on that. Maybe Salana. And then Tron, if you look at Tron for payments, I'm an American, so I don't, you know, have to I don't really deal too much with Europe and Southeast Asia. It is like a juggernaut, especially for Tether. And I think it's over 60% of the volume that Tether actually does, which is Entron. Okay, so BNB, Ethereum, Salana, Tron, that's a pretty tight list and it seems like a lot of the the majors in terms of market cap there. Is there a a time in the market where you would start to look outside of that, expand that portfolio and and maybe get interested in some

other projects as well, or do you like keep it pretty tightly focused just on those four? >> No, there's I mean, I'm I'm always open to it. If if if the market changes, I change. I'd love to see it. I mean, I see what what's going on with with Canton. You know, there's I mean, tokenization for if you look at take a look at this website, rwa.xyz, you can take you can break it all down by the chains and Canton has a as a pretty big hold. And then, of course, there was hyperlquid, you know, if you look at per and the activity that's going on there. So, it looks pretty good. It's just that when I look at these things, I'm just I I think to myself, would this really make me want to move out of my positions right now and diversify?

Not right now. I'm just uh pretty tight because if anything's going to go down, it's going to be altcoins. If the traditional market uh sneezes, then Bitcoin catches the flu. And then of course, if we go down to altcoins, uh they are on a on a ventilator in the ICU. And that's pretty much the uh the trajectory of uh of momentum for digital assets. I >> I want to get some more thoughts on that trajectory and momentum and some of these like major narratives in crypto. It seems like, you know, you mentioned tokenization, real world assets, stable coins, agentic finance, all these different things are sort of like the meta narratives.

>> Yeah. And like I'm curious your thoughts on that as we go into the next bull run. Is there one of those sectors or or themes that you're most excited about or or do you think that like there's one that's overhyped? What are your thoughts on these major trends in crypto as we go into the next bull run? >> I do like the uh agentic payments for doing things because there is one commodity that we can never buy in this time. So if if if I have a bot that hopefully doesn't kill me or destroys my entire life savings as it goes out there like Skynet, if it can do something like that to say, "Okay, I want to travel to Puerto Rico. I need a really good uh time frame and just set it all up for me. Would you do that for me, Claude?

Sure." And it does that and then it pays for like a super low payment and then also it maybe does something to get a to get a nice little rebate. If they can do something like that, so much the better. And then you have to take a look at, well, what kind of Rails are they going to build on that? Well, it's going to be the same types of things we just talked about. There's probably some other ones I'm I'm missing, but I see it as as the same thing. And then, uh, Cloudflare, which is I I've been dabbling around with with Claude and Cloud Code. I'm actually able to to to build these websites that used to cost me a ton to almost free. And Cloudflare is the one that does it. And Cloudflare just announced, I think it was last week or so, about uh integrating Agentic agents

to pay with cryptocurrency for the different payments that you actually need. And we're not going to be using it's not going to be like uh 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction like PayPal does. It's going to be fractions of a penny for all the things that we're going to want to do on the on the internet by agents and let them just rip and do that thing. I do see a problem though moving forward, but we'll see how it uh it all works out for agents going crazy. >> I I have to ask like what is the problem moving forward that you see like what what's the hangup here? >> It's the same thing. That's a good question, John. Remember there was there was this this story was pretty great about uh an an AI I don't know I don't know if it was Claude or was it OpenAI

and Chad GPT where one of the developers says, "Hey, I need you to clear out my email inbox." Very simple, right? Clear out all my email inbox for like all the spam. So what did it do? It deleted everything. And then it deleted all his files on his computer. He's like, "What'd you do?" You're like, "Oh, I deleted all the things that didn't make sense." And he's like, "That's all of my files." So like I I think we have to we're going to see some issues. And let's not even talk about the robots that are coming. I mean, we're going to see some issues that are going to come down. They're like, "Oh, we didn't didn't think about that. We just didn't know. We didn't know." and then we see a bunch of uh problems. But we'll see as it comes.

>> Yeah. Well, see, this is actually one of the reasons why I think I'm so bullish on digital assets is that I think that smart contracts um and and cryptocurrency um decentralized identity solutions, all these different things that, you know, digital asset ecosystems enable and support um can be really helpful in solutioning for some of these things, right? Like smart contracts to control behavior and so forth. there there's there's a there's another side of that coin that that might be even more bullish, you know, once once some of these identity solutions and things get adopted, but we'll have to see because it's it's still a blue sky frontier. We don't know what this is going to look like yet. Um Rob, I I want to ask you one more final question on this. Uh you are scheduled to speak at Ben Cowan's Investing Through the Cycles

conference uh in November in Miami. And Ben is a mutual friend of your channel and ours. Everybody loves Ben. A lot of people hate Ben, but I love Ben. I love that so many people hate Ben. Um, but I'm curious about this. Like November is a long way away. It seems like Ben scheduled this pretty far in advance because he's hoping by then we'll be in another bull run. Do you think we will be in a bull market for Bitcoin by November or before November? >> Man, I hope so. That'd be great, actually. So, so we because he had he because we we do this this weekly show uh NFA Live and it's it's me, him, and then Guy from Coin Bureau. And afterwards, he he said, "Hey, stick around. Let's talk about this conference." And we he told us like, "Hey, it's going to be in November. Can

you guys go?" And I was the first. I was like, "Yeah, sure. Guysy's in Dubai, so he's like, "Hey, we'll see, mate." Or whatever. But uh I said, "Hey, November is not a great time, right?" Because I mean, I think we're still going to be in a bareishness. And he goes, "Well," he goes, "That's why we're going to do it." He said uh he said if we can pull off a conference in a pretty brutal bare market, we know that the next year will be better and the year after that will be better when we have a having and the year after that will be even better when we're going into a ma magnificent bull run. I said that's a pretty good idea.

So yeah, this will be like like the litmus test to see if this is the the great thing. So will we be in a in a bare market? I mean if we take a look at the four-year cycles, we're supposed to, you know, bottom out around October. So, what does the bottom look like? Is it 55? Is it 50? Is it 45? People's got I mean, there's plenty of price predictions out there. But let's just say that we go down to 45. If we go to November, what we could go up to like 50 55 if that's that's the case. If if if that is what is happening, I'd be very happy first of all because that means that I am accumulating them pretty pretty uh low.

But I think at the point in November, we should be still in the doldrums of hopefully coming out of it to a little price appreciation. But I think there's a little more more pain, if you want to call it that, uh coming up. >> Well, uh while we've been having this conversation, Ethereum popped over 2K and Bitcoin is now over 68K. So, who knows? Maybe maybe we just put in the bottom on Bitcoin in this conversation today, Rob. Who knows? >> Congratulations. Congratulations. We did it. We saved the whole market. I got to have you back on the show more often. Uh Rob, thanks so much for being on the Milk Road Show. I think, you know, like I said, you're you're a really respected and trusted voice in the space. There's a lot of wisdom in what you share and just the experience that you've had in

this market for so long. I think a lot of people appreciate that, especially during a bare market. Where can we send people to find more of you and your work online? >> Uh there's there's two main places. We got it underneath here. You can see at newsasset over on X. I don't post as much as much as I used to. It's a It's a very interesting place on X, but we'll do a daily uh live stream on YouTube, so you can find us there. >> All right. Well, great. Thank you so much, Rob. I hope we can have you back on the show again soon. >> Absolutely. Thanks, John. Appreciate it. >> And thank you all for joining us. I hope you all learned something today. There's a lot of wisdom in this episode. So, until next time, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish, and we will see

you all on the next episode of the Milk Road Show. Thanks for being here, everyone. Bye. >> Thanks for listening to Milk Road. If you enjoyed the show, make sure you like and subscribe. And if you're struggling to find winners in the market, that's exactly what Milkro Pro is built for. Our analysts have called some of the biggest winners early, and Pro lets you see what they're buying next, every trade they make, and the research behind every position. Check out Milkroad Pro at the link below. Everything you hear on Milkroad is forformational purposes only. These are our personal opinions, not financial advice, and we may own some of the investments we talk about. Always do your own research and make the decisions that are right for you. See you next time.