Bitcoin BLEEDS $235B As Saylor "Gaslights" Holders

**Scott Melker** (0:01)
Bitcoin bled $235 billion in market cap last week, and there's zero consensus in the industry on why the sell-off happened. Michael Saylor is saying that it was AI-related. Jeff Dorman and Arca are saying that Michael Saylor is gaslighting us, and Marka Seelan from 10X Research saying it's all about inflation, and neither of them are right. We're going to unpack that, but everything else in the news today, of course, with Andrew and Tillman, with special guest Bill Barheide from Arbra. Let's go.
What is up, everybody? Happy Tuesday to those of you who celebrate Tuesdays. It's great to see none of you through the screen, but to know that you're here. I've got Bill Tillman and Andrew. Good morning, gentlemen.

**Andrew** (0:58)
Good morning, good morning.

**Scott Melker** (0:58)
How's everybody doing?

**Bill Barheide** (0:59)
Hey there, good to see you all.

**Scott Melker** (1:01)
So, yeah, I wanna start with the first story here, because Bill, I've got you, and I want your opinion. I've talked to these guys a lot, obviously, about Saylor and the sell-off, but Saylor blamed AI for Bitcoin crash. Arca has one word for that, nonsense. And then as I said, we have some research that says that the real problem is probably inflation and neither. So listen, there's a lot of, we'll call it FUD for now around Saylor, around what he did, what he should do, the signal from the 32 Bitcoin that was sold. I mean, how do you frame this whole thing?

**Bill Barheide** (1:37)
Well, there's a lot in there. So the 32 Bitcoin, I think he kind of had to do that. I think we talked about it the last time I was on. As soon as he started marketing to retail, the whole narrative shift and the legal requirements for what he needs to be able to do, show, disclose, whatever, changes significantly, right? Because the narrative used to be, if you're in retail, just buy Bitcoin. That's what he would say, like, don't buy my stock. Now, of course, he's out saying, buy my stock. And not MSTR, but stretch, which he basically uses then to buy Bitcoin. I think he had no choice via his kind of legal cohorts, but I don't think that's why Bitcoin's been selling off, if that's the question. I think Bitcoin's been range bound for several weeks, and I think it's bottoming now.
I think liquidity is coming back into the global system. I think maybe mid July to mid October, we're going to start to see moves upward, unless liquidity changes, unless war expands, which I think is probably the single biggest issue that would prevent a catalyst from moving us higher. Meaning if we get clarity and we don't move higher, I can only see that being some kind of war oriented thing.
There is some truth to the fact that a lot of money is moving into AI stocks, but that tends to be different money than was coming into crypto in previous cycles anyway. There's a lot of money out there, okay? It's not all the same. So this idea that, oh, it's only over here, or it's only over here, or it's only over here, it doesn't really work for me.
So I think what's been holding crypto down for a while now is two things. One, I think there's a lot of truth to the narrative from Q3 of last year that as Bitcoin hit 125,000, it was an IPO moment for the space where very, very long-term holders took profit. That's not unreasonable if it's new found wealth and you want to sell 25 percent or something like that, that makes a lot of sense to me.
Then the last thing is just the global liquidity narrative. I mean, we never got to reset the interest rates the way Bessent wanted. And there's a lot of reasons for that in the late stage debt cycle. And I think that they know or believe now that they're unlikely to get those interest rates down. And so they're going to bite the bullet and start implementing something that looks like quantitative easing, yield curve control, whatever FUD narrative you want to give it, that basically avoids the reality that we're going to be buying our own debt, pumping money into the system, and resetting expectation narrative probably closer to four to five percent.

**Scott Melker** (4:31)
I do have a corollary to that, though, to ask. So I agree that liquidity is not all in the same buckets, right? There's different pools of capital. But we do have SpaceX IPO this week. OPAI just announced their intention. Anthropic announced their intention.
If all of these are going to be funded and traded as heavily as we think, that is a shit ton of liquidity no matter where it's coming from. And I would imagine it has to come from all buckets, just to keep the market afloat with the size.