Was Bitcoin’s Price Suppressed? | Alex Thorn

**Alex Thorn** (0:02)
It's very possible that if you don't have a fleet of robots working for you, it'll be very hard to acquire one, because all the work and labor you might do to earn the money to then acquire your first robot, my fleet of robots can probably do that labor better and cheaper than you. If you have a long-term view in your long-term Polish Bitcoin, like you should look at these as opportunities. The best money is made buying when everyone else is afraid. You want it distributed to people who buy it at a higher cost basis. And the realized price, it is higher. And that's a good thing. That means people, they're willing to buy Bitcoin at really high prices. We really should focus on explaining its fundamental purpose and use cases and value to a holder of Bitcoin as the reason that it goes up, right? Stop begging for like Jay Powell to buy your bags. That's not nearly as durable as the reason it going up being that people deeply understand the savings technology that is Bitcoin.

**Danny Knowles** (0:59)
Let's get into it, Alex. How are you doing, man?

**Alex Thorn** (1:01)
I'm great, Danny. Thanks for having me back on.

**Danny Knowles** (1:04)
How are you surviving amongst all this market manipulation that we're going through?

**Alex Thorn** (1:08)
Market manipulation? What are you referring to exactly? You're talking about Jane Street?

**Danny Knowles** (1:12)
The supposed Jane Street? This thing is, this has annoyed me so much. We have all these free market people in Bitcoin that are now up in arms because Jane Street might have gone short. Like it blows my brain.

**Alex Thorn** (1:24)
Yeah, and I happen to think this is most likely just straight up Twitter cope. There's a market making firm, a quant trading firm, they're very often, in a trade like this, most commonly they're probably trading at neutral, delta neutral. So they're doing the basis trade or some kind of arbitrage or hedge, right? So what do we think the actual incentive would be for them to be to suppress the price? Like, there are dynamics in options markets that can cause, you know, like, gamma squeezes and things that can, you know, put dealers in positions to either, like, amplify or damp in volatility. And there are, and they, for all we know, they're holding a lot of Bitcoin and they decided to be spot sellers. Sure, but like, it just seems like hope to me, right? They had the lawsuit come out from Terraform Labs against them and then this thing about the 10 a.m. dump, like, this just seems like manufactured controversy to me.
You know, people coping, because Bitcoin is down 47% or something from all time high.

**Danny Knowles** (2:27)
Yeah, like, I was looking at this a little bit. Like, I could see the potentially being something illegal that they did around the Terra stuff. We'll find out, I guess.

**Alex Thorn** (2:34)
It's totally possible. Yeah.

**Danny Knowles** (2:36)
Because, like, it sounds like they might have been trading with insider information.

**Alex Thorn** (2:40)
I saw there's an allegation, there's like a chat, right, that they had with somebody at Terra Luna, and they knew that the liquidity was going to be moved from this three pool on curve to the four pool before others knew. However, you were able to, there is a plausible explanation based solely on public information, which is that they saw them move UST from the three pool and decided to immediately remove theirs. Like, I mean, that is possible. The sequential order of events makes that possible. It's true they'd have to be monitoring it actively, but if they had a big position, they probably would have been. So there is, as far as I understand the facts, a totally plausible explanation. That doesn't mean there wasn't also something untoward happening, and that is the purpose of discovery in a lawsuit. So it's possible if they did, we might find out. But Bitcoin is a multi-trillion, well, whatever it is, one point something trillion dollar asset. What is their incentive to artificially suppress? Or is the trading rude? I'm not quite sure what the people are thinking. That's manipulation? Like in some, I don't know, it's hard to manipulate markets of scale in a specific direction, because it is a free market and it's a large one.
These firms like Jane are very secretive, rightly so, or like Renaissance, Rentech, because they have code and algos that are their literal alpha. That secrecy makes it easy for outside observers to blame them for things. Most likely, my base case is that that's what's happening here.

**Danny Knowles** (4:17)