저자: MichaelTerpin · 외국인
요약 보기
Terpin은 비트코인이 4년 반감기 사이클(Spring/Summer/Fall/Winter)을 따른다고 주장하며, 현재는 아직 약세장(bear market)이고 바닥은 약 10월경으로 본다. 과거 1,000 BTC 사례로 사이클 매매의 복리 효과를 강조하며 '1만 2천 → 약 60억'식 수익을 제시한다. 또 AI 토큰(VVV 등)이 향후 수년간 비트코인을 아웃퍼폼할 수 있다고 본다. 과거 Warren Buffett 비판 등 미디어 논란과 자사 펀드·디지털자산 트레저리 기업 홍보도 포함됨.
다듬은 글
I think with me, you can always tell the pioneers are the ones with arrows in the back. I said years ago that when Bitcoin gets cold, the rest of crypto gets pneumonia. Having 12,000 turn into basically 78 million, it would turn into about 6 billion. Welcome to the Founder and Co podcast. Today have a very special guest, Michael Terpin, one of the earliest and most influential figures in crypto, often called the Godfather of crypto.
He's been investing in Bitcoin since the early days and he's helped change the industry through companies like Transform Ventures, Transform Group, Bit Angels, Coin Agenda. He was also an early backer of Ethereum and has spent more than a decade studying crypto, market cycles, institutional adoption, decentralized AI, and the future of digital assets.
He's got a awesome book called the Bitcoin Supercycle talking about the four seasons of Bitcoin and argues that crypto markets move in predictable, psychological, and macroeconomic cycles. Michael, welcome to the show. Happy to be here. So, you were very early in both internet and crypto. Very few people like got those two things right, I would say.
When you compare the early internet era to where we are today with Bitcoin, crypto, and AI, what feels similar? What feels different? And where do you think most founders today are kind of building correctly or building incorrectly? Well, I've often been quoted as saying, I've seen this movie before.
And I think there's a lot of similarities more than there are dissimilarities of those. If you really look at sort of the wave of innovations that we've been having, it's interesting that they tend to happen now about every 10 years, right? So, you ended up having the PC era that started really in the '70s instead of like mainframes and mini computers.
10 years later, you had the mobile era where the first cell phones came out. Then 10 years after that, and they all tend to happen at the start of the decade. And then the bubble happens at the end of the decade. You know, that's been pretty predictable. They ended up having for the last few decades, you had the internet that even though the internet had been around as a DARPA experiment since late 60s, the web happened in 1991.
I got involved in 1992, started my first company in 1993. I think with me, you can always tell the pioneers are the ones with the arrows in the back, right? And I have sort of the blessing and the curse of seeing things early. I'm very curious, I read a lot, I ask people a lot of things what I'm curious about it.
And the things that say the internet and Bitcoin and now AI have in common is that, you know, people don't believe it at first, they poo-poo it. Social media as well, that was sort of in the, you know, 10 years after the internet and then the bubble popped and then all of a sudden social and it got, you know, they usually end up getting sort of dismissed at first and then and then some people are just like crazy believers and then usually the bubble comes up, it pops and then nobody believes anymore and then it gets big, right?
I mean, I lived through the the dot-com, you know, run-up and bubble and you know, and bust and fortunately the company that I started during that era, Marketwire, originally called Internet Wire, is the first internet-based press release distribution company. Started it in 1993. Launched the product in 1994 and you know, just bootstrapped and then all of a sudden I realized that all these companies were getting funded and if I didn't take some funding, somebody else would just copy my model and raise a few million dollars to, you know, race past me.
So, I took some angel money in 98 and then in 99 I got a big check from Sequoia Capital and from Hummer Winblad and grew that. We sold it for 35 million in 2006. Against my objections, I lost the board vote but I wanted to keep building it because but it was, you know, year year seven of the fund and you know, hey, you know, we're all doing well on this investment and it's just like, yeah, but we just started growing.
We haven't even we did not even go through our venture money yet cuz we got profitable too quickly. I remember telling them at the time, if you hold on until we actually start paying taxes, it'll be a $60 sale not a a million I was wrong. 11 months later, the people who bought it from us flipped it for $100 million.
And then they sold it after operating for a few years back to our original partners, NASDAQ, for $200 million. NASDAQ then sold it in 2019 for $300 million to Apollo. Apollo sold it last year for $500 million. And Bullish just bought it with some other assets for $4.2 billion a couple weeks ago. So, um you know, it's amazing you know, I think Bill Gates said, you know, most people overestimate what they can build in a year and under estimate what they can build in a decade.
You know, my baby kept on growing and now it's part of a $4 billion company. And I know the Bullish folks really well. So, that's really what I think founders need to think about is, you know, what they can really build over a decade and not be disappointed if everything doesn't come true in the first 12 months.
Resilience. All right. So, you've become widely known for your four seasons of Bitcoin framework. And you believe that Bitcoin moves in long-term psychological and macro cycles. What are kind of like the biggest signals that you watch to tell you whether we're entering accumulation, euphoria, contraction, expansion?
And how should builders think differently during each of those phases instead of just reacting emotionally? Sure. It's great question. So, everything follows Bitcoin. I said years ago that when Bitcoin gets cold, the rest of crypto gets pneumonia. And that happens with venture funding, it happens with altcoin prices, etc.
You know, I started with Bitcoin, obviously not known as the Godfather of Bitcoin. I'm known as the Godfather of crypto because I worked on so many early crypto projects. I helped launch Ethereum. I helped launch Tether when it was, you know, Brock Pierce and a couple of guys in the a small office in Santa Monica, three blocks from me.
And, you know, I worked with over, you know, I guess it's almost 500 crypto projects now over the last 13 years. And so, I'm by no means a Bitcoin maxi. Um I call myself a Bitcoin preferentialist, which is I recognize that other entities and other coins can do things that Bitcoin can't. Um Ethereum without Ethereum you wouldn't have had NFTs, you wouldn't have had DeFi, and you wouldn't have had uh other things like the metaverse.
And uh purpose now. So, there's a lot of things that um you need altcoins for, and I think overall, it builds value to the Bitcoin ecosystem as well by bringing people into Somebody comes into Shib, you know, makes money there, and then, you know, they say, "Oh, what's this Bitcoin stuff?" right? So, I think it's the maturest asset in the class.
It's always been the the highest valued. They almost We were talking about having an Ethereum flip thing a few years ago. It never happened where Ethereum become bigger than Bitcoin. And so, I think that Satoshi in the white paper, you know, and subsequent writings basically said that as long as the amount of new money coming into Bitcoin every 4 years exceeds the amount of new coins being issued, the price has to go up.
It's math. And of course, Satoshi structured Bitcoin to issue 21 million coins over 145 years in 33 cycles that are called 4-year cycles, but actually, they're 210,000 blocks. They've never been exactly 4 years or every having would be on January 3rd. And so, but where all the volatility happens because every having has been always up.
$12 the first having, $670 the second having, $8,700 the third having, $64,000 the fourth having, and it'll be higher next time in 2028. But all the volatility happens in between, and that's not based on math, it's based on fear and greed. And I identified back in 2015 that these behaviors happen in the exact same order, and for about the same amount of number of months.
So, I named them after the four seasons. Bitcoin spring happens the day of the having. It's when the seed of the new 4-year cycle is planted. So, we're going to the third cycle, fourth cycle, fifth cycle. We're in the fifth cycle right now after the fourth having. And um so, what happens is you would think that the price would go down at the having because all of a sudden, one 10-minute block, miners go from being Let's say 10% profitable, 15% profitable to losing money, right?
So, if they were making 10%, now they're losing 40%. And so, they shut down their computers. They use that as a time to go and upgrade their machines, maybe move to a place with cheaper electricity, etc. And in many cases, they have to sell Bitcoin to keep the lights on. But for every miner selling Bitcoin, and there's fewer fewer than half that sell Bitcoin now cuz they got better reserves.
Maybe they're public companies or they've got funding. But, for everybody that sells Bitcoin, the price doesn't go down because there's panic in the streets cuz they know that it's a cycle. And for everybody that sells Bitcoin, there's somebody who looks and says, "Wait, the price goes up every 4 years.
Maybe I should buy Bitcoin now." But, they don't buy it in great numbers until they see price discovery of a new all-time high. And that happens 4 to 7 months later. And that's what I call Bitcoin summer. And um Bitcoin summer is is I define as the day that it goes, you know, one penny above the all-time high from the last cycle.
That typically is the shortest season, remarkably, cuz when you get into Bitcoin winter, you think you're never going to see another all-time high. And yet, once you get the having, it's it's fairly short. That is a day that on a daily IRR basis, you make your most money because every time that you had a new all-time high, it shoots up like a rocket ship for a few weeks.
Then it sort of stalls out. Most cycles have had what they call a double bubble, where it goes up and then it kind of retraces. And then you have the final, you know, launchpad that goes to wherever the bubble pops. The bubble popping is the first day Bitcoin fall. Summer so far has been between 9 and 11 months.
And both spring and summer have gotten a little bit longer. Winter has gotten a little bit shorter. That's always been the longest season. And the one that's until this time, we'll see cuz it's not over with yet, the one that's stayed exactly the same is fall. Takes about a year to go through the froth, to go from the froth to depression, to go to capitulation, as they say.
So, the first uh having went up 100x, dropped 85%, and that took over a year to to go through all of the painful unwinding. And And at the bottom, it didn't move. Capitulation is everybody's given up. I remember my ex-wife coming to me and saying, "Oh my god, you got to sell it. It's It's down below $200.
It's going to go to zero." I was like, "No, no, no, no. This is the time to buy, right?" And that happens every cycle. And so, the last cycle, 4 years ago, was exactly a year to the day. The one 4 years before that was 3 days off of a year. This time, Michael Saylor and others are saying the bottom was in after 12 weeks.
I don't see that. It just every other than maybe one or two metrics, every other metric has not been met. And so, I'm still one of the few voices in the wilderness saying that we're not in a bull market yet. We are still in a bear market, and it's going to keep going down until about October. And then it'll turn around.
That's when everybody will say, "Okay, we've given up. We were wrong, you know, it's going to zero." Whatever. The media went down in February, Financial Times said, "Okay, this Bitcoin thing is over with. It's worth zero." And I think Michael McGlone from Bloomberg said it was going to go down to 10,000.
And so, yeah, when the price goes down, everybody runs in the streets, and that's the best time to buy. And that's what I advocate in the fund. If you're not just holding forever, if you're in a low lower zero tax jurisdiction, you do better. Even in a high tax jurisdiction, you can do better by selling at the top and then buying back at the bottom.
And that's all about what you do in Bitcoin fall. If you're able to go and judge when the bubble pops within even 20% and then judge when to when capitulation happens within 20% above what holding is. For example, going back the last you know, four halvings. If you were to buy 1,000 Bitcoin, sounds like a lot, right?
It's a lot now. It's $80 million. If you were to buy 1,000 Bitcoin in the first halving at the end of 2012, price is actually lower at the start of 2013. We'll just give that date, end of 2012. You would have paid $12,000. Today, it's worth $78 million. That's doing nothing. But if you were to go and sell within 20% of the top, it went to 1,200, you cost dollar cost average out around 1,000.
And then went down to 171, you had a long time to buy back in around 250. All of a sudden, now you have 4,000 Bitcoin instead of 1,000. And then 4 years later, you could have went up to 20,000, you could have dollar cost average out around 16, it went down to 3,000, you could have dollar cost average back in around 4,000.
Now you have 16,000 Bitcoin. So, you can see how that compiles. So, literally, instead of having 12,000 turn into basically 78 million, it would turn into about 6 billion. And that's the thesis that I ask people to consider in the book, and that's the thesis that my fund, the Bitcoin Supercycle fund, follows.
Very cool. I love that. And Bitcoin itself, I mean, it started out kind of like this anti-establishment movement. And I think we were all excited about that for a while, but now like Wall Street, governments, institutions, they're all kind of got their fingers in everything. Well, you know what else started out as an anti-establishment institution?
They had these things called the Netizens. Do you remember the Netizens? You're You're too young. That was basically they had this thing called the electronic the EFF, the Electronic Freedom Foundation. And there was like one of the members of the Grateful Dead was on it. And it was like all these people said There was a t-shirt that said that the EFF put out that said, "The internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it." And it was all about have a free, uncensored, for the people internet.
These days you don't have that, right? I mean, basically you don't even touch the internet. It's all the stacks. You go through the rules of Facebook, of Amazon, of Netflix, of of everybody who's built these kingdoms on top. And you know, and then they are allowed to go and like, you know, monitor different, you know, access grids to it.
I mean, so it's not the free-for-all that everybody anticipated in the glory days of the early internet. And you know, same thing with as anything succeeds, you're going to move from the early the crazy early adopters, right? I mean, this is all laid out in several models, including Crossing the Chasm by, you know, Geoffrey Moore, Silicon Valley VC, Gartner's hype cycle, the S-curve of adoption.
I mean, all this stuff basically tells the same story where the early guys are the ones that really get it going. And they have a complete different vision of from where it's going to go than the people who ultimately adopt it. And you know, you wouldn't get to, you know, 6 billion people on the internet today if they were still, you know, had to follow the rules of the Netizens, right?
And same thing with Bitcoin. I mean, Bitcoin for years, one thing keeping it down was Wall Street saying, "Oh, it's a scam. It's, you know, I mean, I talked to so many intelligent, you know, tech and real estate and even gold investors about Bitcoin. And they said, "Oh, this sounds really fascinating.
I'm going to go and ask my broker." And of course the broker said, "Oh my god, did you see what Warren Buffett said? It's rat poison. Stay away. It's going to You're going to lose all your money." And I told him that $100 actually spoke at Silicon to the New York Angels in July of 2013. 100 investors in the room.
$66 Bitcoin. I told them I thought it was going to reach $10,000 by the end of the decade. It actually reached $20,000 only 4 years. It wasn't 7 years. So, it doubled the price in half the time I projected. And what I projected sounded crazy. And even if it only went up 10x to $600, it would have been a big home run.
And they were throwing 25 and $50,000 checks at Yolo startups that went out of business and not a single person in the room bought Bitcoin. And so, it's been kind of a passion of mine to explain Bitcoin. And so, that's why I wrote the book really for those types of investors. It's not Bitcoin for dummies.
It's Bitcoin for investors who weren't properly explained how Bitcoin works and why it has been the most uh you know, profitable investment of the last century at least. And so, that's continuing. And I think that now I hear the narrative that you can go and buy it in your Charles Schwab account or in your Morgan Stanley and you you can buy an ETF from BlackRock and Fidelity that oh, it's too late now.
It's too late. It's already been the lights $80,000. It'll never go above that again. And you know, I don't think you're going to have another 1,000x within our lifetime. But, you know, 100x is not out of the question by any means. I mean, if you look at I think Max Keiser said it's not uh a matter of uh how high Bitcoin can go.
It's a matter of how low the dollar goes. And so, at this point it's largely a uh as it's always been. I mean, you know, it was not [clears throat] an accident that the white paper came out in the middle great financial crisis. And it was not an accident that when the Genesis block happened at the start of 2009, that um they inscribed in the first uh you know, block, the Genesis block, the headline from the Times of London that day about a bailout.
A lot of Easter eggs. Yeah, everywhere. One of the more interesting things you've talked about recently is your belief that decentralized AI and AI tokens could outperform even Bitcoin over the next few years. What happens when AI agents can own wallets, transact autonomously, coordinate economically on chain?
How do you think these changes How does that change the structure of companies, labor, capitalism? Sure. Well, I think there's going to be a great competition over the next decade. You know, obviously a lot of people will be totally fine just, you know, giving their money to Anthropic, to Microsoft.
Hey, they already give a lot of money to Microsoft for enterprise products. So, I don't think they'll have any problem. But, they are going to start asking, "How do I go and, you know, protect my proprietary data?" Right now, they don't have an answer for that. And so, I think that more and more, they're going to start looking at solutions like Venice, right?
I mean, Venice AI, my friend Eric Voorhees, is, you know, probably the best most successful and the best known sort of serial entrepreneur in the crypto. He started Satoshi Dice, which was the first app on Bitcoin. It basically let you gamble your dice and sold it for 110,000 Bitcoin back when Bitcoin was $100.
Hot. And yeah, then he started ShapeShift and and, you know, kind of the then developed Morpheus, which I'm an early investor in. And then I went off and did Venice. And Venice is about 2 million users right now. It's about 40,000 a year ago. And it basically lets you go in and go privately and use all the, you know, kind of current models, you know, Grok or Anthropic or whoever, and you'll run them underneath the Venice layer.
And so, they'll still take your data, but they won't know who it come who it's coming from. That That's the first level. The second level would be just it'll run sort of open-source models on top of it, and then nothing stored. And they're working on sort of an end-to-end encryption thing. And they're not the only ones doing this, either.
So, they just have the lead. And their token basically lets you go and pay for your compute by staking the VVV token. And they're up like 800% in the last 3 months. So, I mean, that's why I think that the AI tokens are going to outperform. They not going to get bigger than, but they're going to outperform in terms of if you were to buy, you know, a bucket of tokens today in the AI space, 3 years from now, you know, if Bitcoin's up, say, 3x from where we are today, you know, I could see those tokens being up 5 to 10x.
Wow, interesting. Okay, well, Michael, it's been super cool hanging out with you today. I loved all this information. If people want to grab the book, get more information, how can they find the book? Where can they get it? How can they How can they get more information? Sure. So, um the book is uh available Simon & Schuster distributes it.
It's also on Amazon, very easy to easiest way to find it's it's on Amazon Bitcoin Supercycle by Michael Terpin t e r p i n and I also have a site called bitcoinsupercycle.ai where you can go and have my avatar tell you things from the book and so that's an annual subscription and then, you know, I'm on all the different social media at Michael Terpin on X on LinkedIn on, you know, Instagram.
So, I'm not that hard to find and then uh the fund is only for accredited investors, but um you can go to the uh email there. Um we got a contact link and then I'm also getting ready to market a digital asset treasury company based on the cycle as well and it's going to be called Supercycle Finance and I'm working with Boosted Securities on that and so we're hoping that that will be uh you know, out in the fall about the time that the markets are down at the bottom.
So, Very exciting. Lots of stuff to look forward to. Michael, thank you so much for taking some time out of your day and sharing all of your information knowledge with us today. Appreciate it. to be here. Thanks, Michael. Okay.
Comments 0