Bitcoin drops below $82K support as macro headwinds weigh on crypto markets
Rob from Digital Asset News hosts a live discussion with Guy from Coin Bureau and Ben from Into the Cryptoverse on Bitcoin's price action and macro conditions.
Summary
Rob, Guy, and Ben discuss Bitcoin breaking below $82K support amid a broad market selloff, with gold, silver, and Asian equities all declining. The conversation covers whether current conditions resemble the 2022 bear market, a clip of Chamath Palihapitiya arguing Bitcoin is "capped" and will eventually be hacked to zero, and the sustainability of the AI investment boom following Nvidia's $365 billion weekly loss. Ben argues that while Bitcoin would initially suffer in a risk-asset selloff, it would likely benefit from the subsequent policy response. Guy contends that Bitcoin's appeal lies in its role as an inflation hedge rather than its connection to the AI trade, and that the era of parabolic altcoin bull markets may be behind us. The episode closes with a substantial discussion of the upcoming Into the Cryptoverse (ITC) Conference in Miami (November 20–22), covering speakers, international attendance, format, and whether it will be streamed.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Opening: Market conditions and the macro backdrop
Rob: Hello everybody. Welcome back to the NFA live show, which we do every Thursday. We are joined as ever by friends of the show — Guy from Coin Bureau. Guy, you're looking sharp today. How are you doing?
Guy: Thanks, Rob. I'm well, thank you. You're looking pretty sharp too.
Rob: Yeah, it's a nice green screen. And then of course Ben, looking a little tired today with everything that's going on. How are you doing, Ben?
Ben: Aren't we all wearing black?
Rob: I just don't have the nice logo right here. And you know what — a few trillion among friends, that type of thing.
So everybody, today we've got a pretty good show. We're going to have to go through a lot of things. The markets are hectic as usual. Just yesterday we were around $83K, and now of course this morning as the markets open up we can see that we have broken the level of support at $82K and we're coming in around the $81K position. We can also see that gold and silver took a bit of a jump — they've wiped out roughly $500 billion dollars. Gold is down 2% in the last 24 hours. Silver is down — let me refresh this — a little bit more. And it looks like a trillion dollars was lost in the Asian stock market.
We're waiting for the QQQ and the S&P 500 to open up. But the question I have this morning — and this is all macro, my favorite part — is: the Fed raised rates in September. CPI is 3.7, PPI is 6.3. We're going to get a new print tomorrow for the producer price index. In September we only added 29,000 jobs instead of the expected 90,000, so we're slowing in the job market. All 100 economists in Reuters — actually it was 94 out of 100 — are pretty much saying, look, we're going to pause the rate hike in October, because there is not a chance that's going to be raised right before the midterm elections. I can kind of agree with that.
So the question I have — I'll start with you, Ben — when has Bitcoin ever done well while the Fed was hiking into a slowing job market? Is this 2022 again, or is this something different?
Ben: Well, the Fed raised rates in 2023 as well, and Bitcoin went up then even though the job market was slowing some. So it's not like it hasn't happened. I think there was a lot of excess back then in the labor market too. We've certainly seen them raise rates and the markets go up. And I think one of the reasons why is that when they raise rates, normally it actually means the economy is fine. So we'll see if that's the case this time.
Right now Bitcoin is still kind of fighting against some of the technical analysis that is more bullish versus some of the macro stuff — like oil prices spiking and everything else — that are providing macro headwinds. But for the most part, raising rates means the economy is okay. It's rapidly lowering rates where it normally means something bad is happening. That doesn't mean the markets can't ever go down — we saw Bitcoin go down in 2022 — but then it recovered after that. So yeah, it's happened before, but it's been a few years.
Chamath Palihapitiya's "Bitcoin to zero" argument
Rob: Got it. Well, we'll see what happens. Guy, the same question for you, but with a little wrinkle. When we talk about 2022, it seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same. One thing I keep thinking about is the calls of Bitcoin going to zero — the Peter Schiffs, the Dan Pañas of the world. I can kind of see where their discrepancies are because they don't believe in it and haven't invested in it. But this one came out of left field. This is Chamath. He was on the show Disruptors, and I thought it was quite interesting. I'm going to play this and then get your opinion on the macro and the calls for things going to zero from a person who was a very early investor, even though maybe he's gone into a bit of a grift. Take a listen.
Interviewer (in clip): So OpenAI solves 722 math problems. None of them reported encryption. I'm assuming that encryption was to a significant degree correct if it was pointed in that direction. What's your view on crypto given the meteoric rise of super intelligence here? Are we safe? Are we not?
Chamath Palihapitiya (in clip): "I think it's capped. I think that traditional crypto lacks the fungibility to have all forms of buyers. The buying pool is really retail, then institutionals, and then central banks — and retail lacks the fungibility to be owned by central banks. So it's capped from that perspective. Then it's capped because there are enough leaks around who owns what that now create security risks. I think France is the best example, where the French government forced publication of who owned what crypto assets and you had just a complete flurry of kidnappings and all kinds of really bad things.
And then the third is around AI — where if you believe that recursive self-improvement is pointed towards cryptographic hacks, the most obvious thing to point it to would be Satoshi's wallet, to break SHA-256, drain the wallet, go short, and then tell people that you did it so you make the money twice. All those things I think are realistic reasons why it's capped and there's an upper bound. And so it's incumbent on these efforts to migrate to quantum-secure, quantum-resistant cryptographic mechanisms — which, as you can see in the Bitcoin community, is basically impossible because it's a bunch of people that can't even agree on where to meet, let alone what time the meeting starts. So I think crypto is a bit lost in the woods here."
Interviewer (in clip): Do you think Bitcoin is cooked?
Chamath Palihapitiya (in clip): "I just think it's capped, and then I think eventually it gets hacked and then it goes to zero."
Interviewer (in clip): Do you own Bitcoin?
Chamath Palihapitiya (in clip): "Through a company — through a company called Digital Currency Group. So I had this very long-term investment in Bitcoin. I seeded it to DCG a long time ago. They started up a bunch of ETFs, they gave me stock in return, and that was much better for me because I alleviated myself of the storage risk and the security risk and I had equity."
Rob: So just two things before you answer, Guy. It looks like there is another person who has offloaded. That makes a lot of sense. But he did say that we don't know where to meet and what time to meet. I will tell you there is a conference we can all meet at, and that's going to come in November — November 20th to 22nd. But just to get back to that piece — Guy, what are your thoughts on all these things? Is it just another person calling for going to zero, even though I think some of what he said actually made sense?
Guy: Yeah, I agree with a fair amount of what he said. I wasn't quite so on board with the idea that retail involvement is overstated — I actually think retail involvement is kind of overstated at the moment. I don't think retail really accounts for that significant a chunk of Bitcoin investment anymore. I think it's becoming more and more of an institutional asset, which is a shame because that's not really the way it should be.
But yeah, he's right in terms of the things it faces. That's an interesting way of going about it. One of the things I always thought was: if you tried to hack one of Satoshi's wallets, if you knew anything about Bitcoin, you'd know that as soon as a single sat from one of those wallets moved, it would sell off so massively that you probably wouldn't be able to sell very effectively. But I suppose you would just take out a massive short on it and then start moving it. So that's kind of worrying.
He's right that there is a lot of concern in the wider crypto community about the quantum-safe aspect. We're seeing a lot of projects expend a lot of time and energy on that — some are quite far ahead and others are lagging behind. And unfortunately he is right about Bitcoin in the sense that this is where its decentralization works against it, because the Bitcoin community is massively divided. All it takes is for someone to publish or propose a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal and Twitter will just light up with people dunking on them, and worse. So I think it's going to be a very difficult problem to solve. I think they can get there in the end because the urgency of it should be clear and is probably only going to get clearer. But yeah, that is definitely a concern for Bitcoin.
Whether or not it gets hacked before those upgrades happen — that's the multi-trillion dollar question, isn't it? But there are certainly some legitimate concerns in there.
Rob: Yeah. And the multi-trillion dollar question is it's not just Bitcoin — it's everything out there that can be hacked. I think that is the big thing. And then the last thing before we move on: when we talk about 2022, this thing just keeps happening again and again. We're in the bear market, here we are in Q4, we're getting more calls for zero. It seems like things just kind of repeat. I wonder how the narrative will change, especially for Chamath, in about a year or two or three years when we get into a massive bull market and all of a sudden it's like, "I knew it the whole time." Anyhow, let's move on.
The AI boom, Nvidia's losses, and what it means for Bitcoin
Rob: Let's go into a little segue into AI. Guy, I'm going to ask you this first because Nvidia just lost $365 billion dollars in a week — not a great week. The question is: is the AI boom running out of money? For Nvidia, the worry isn't demand — there's demand — it's whether AI companies can keep borrowing to fund the buildout. Morgan Stanley projects $1.5 trillion in AI spending next year. If the AI trade cracks, does Bitcoin go down with tech, or does money rotate into it?
Just for a little perspective — everything sounds good for AI, but if you're familiar with this, which was put out about a year or year and a half ago — all roads lead back to Nvidia and it's kind of like a circle of revenue. The loop goes like this: Nvidia sells GPUs to cloud providers, Nvidia invests or partners with them, they build capacity and report massive demand, Nvidia backs that capacity and they buy more GPUs from Nvidia. It was the same thing with the SpaceX earnings — everybody was super excited, but if you take a look at where those earnings came from, it was big multi-year compute leases to other companies like Anthropic at $1.25 billion per month and Google at $920 million per month. But then you look at Anthropic and you think, how is that working out? Because they just had an $80 billion loss in the first half of 2026. So now I'm seeing this whole picture and thinking, maybe there is a bigger narrative out there around a collapse. What are your thoughts, Guy?
Guy: In terms of the continued funding of the buildout, I think there is still money to come there. They can still raise money, but as we've seen with CoreWeave just recently, it's going to get more and more expensive. Those corporate bonds have always been riskier, so they've always generally commanded a higher premium than sovereign bonds. But yeah, I think there is probably still the appetite to invest — they're just going to want more interest to protect against the downside.
I thought it was very interesting with all this stuff about OpenAI solving various maths problems, because I guess that is the sort of thing they're going to have to be able to talk about if they're going to keep raising money — and then of course the other side of it, which is arguably more important in the long term, is actually persuading people to use it. If I remember rightly, the stats around AI are quite interesting. I think about 65% of Americans have used AI — they'll say they've used ChatGPT or Gemini — but not many of them use it often. A much smaller proportion use it regularly, and an even smaller proportion than that actually pay for it. And I think that is really what they're going to have to solve. They're going to have to get people to pay for it like they would any other utility — like broadband, water, gas, electricity. They're basically going to have to make it like that to stand a chance of recouping some of this investment.
I think in terms of what the technology promises to do and what it can already do, that is possible, but it's going to be a huge battle to get people to pay for it. Things like these maths discoveries count for a lot, but I think they really need some kind of big breakthrough to convince people. Like, I think they literally are going to have to cure something like Alzheimer's in order to convince people: "Okay, yeah, this is the real deal. I should have this in my life. I should pay for it."
So that's the AI side of it. There's a lot that needs to go right, but I think there's still the appetite for investment there.
As far as what it means for Bitcoin — I think the interesting thing is that Bitcoin is kind of the absolute opposite to the AI trade in many ways. I think we've seen Bitcoin decoupling from tech stocks a bit recently. Bitcoin is just a hard asset. There's no opaque funding structure behind it, no complex structures of lending and borrowing. You buy it and you hold it. It serves a very obvious purpose to those who take the time to understand it. And with the insane amounts of money being thrown around, all of that is going to feed back into inflation. It's telling that Bitcoin's big rally recently happened off the back of Scott Bessant's announcement that they were going to try to tackle the US bond market. I think that is where Bitcoin's appeal lies. It is not about AI. It is not about some shiny product. It is about protecting yourself against inflation and currency debasement.
Hedging strategies: metals, energy, TIPS, and Bitcoin's role in a downturn
Rob: Well said. And that is the big thing — where do we go from here? Ben, not financial advice — what Guy just talked about, what we just saw: how do I hedge my bet? Should I say, well, if this collapses, a harder asset like Bitcoin would hold up? And if you take a look at investing through the cycles — the dot-com era, the great recession era — is there a universe where Bitcoin just keeps doing well while other things crash?
Ben: I think if risk assets sell off, if stocks sell off, Bitcoin will get hit pretty hard in the sell-off. We already saw that in the pandemic — we already saw what a recession looks like for Bitcoin. It's not good. But then Bitcoin would likely benefit from the response that comes after — the policy response that governments would deploy to try to make things better, just like they did with the pandemic. So I think initially Bitcoin would not do well. It would be kind of scary. But then it would probably do well from the policy response that follows that sell-off.
The whole business cycle — this is not the first time we've seen one. They've happened many many times in the past. I know there are a lot of people who think we can never go into a recession, but that's the way all business cycles eventually end. I think this time the narrative is simply that fiscal dominance will keep us out of a recession, but you could argue that fiscal dominance didn't stop the 2020 recession. We still got it anyway, even though they were spending a lot of money back then too. So I think you could have one, but Bitcoin would probably benefit from the policy response — the actual drop in AI stocks, though, I don't think riskier assets would do better in that scenario.
Rob: Yeah, that's a good one. And I know from watching your channel that you jump into the equity verse and the metals and commodities space. How do you protect yourself in this situation as things start to go down, especially with what Guy just talked about regarding AI?
Ben: You could always hedge by having metals and commodities. One of the things that's been doing the best in my portfolio this year is the energy markets. Normally at the beginning of the year we talked about how Bitcoin bleeds not only to the stock market and gold and everything else in midterm years, but it really bleeds to energy. It's bled to energy every midterm year, and this is no different. And I think too, with energy at the end of a business cycle — whenever that happens — energy tends to do well for about 6 to 12 months after the stock market has topped. So I think energy is one way to prepare for that.
Commodities in general — metals, bonds. I know bonds are sort of a joke at this point, but I've actually started to think they're beginning to look attractive, at least as a short-term thing. If you look at TIPS — Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities — they're currently at around 3%, which means the real return is 3%, which is above inflation. So imagine if inflation were to go back up because of money printing. That will likely happen, and then locking in — I'm not saying people watching this are going to be interested in a 3% real return, but there are funds that would be, and that means there could be a little bit less money going into equities as real returns are that high. The last time TIPS gave you a 3% real return was almost 20 years ago. People my age just simply haven't seen market regimes like this before.
And it probably helps explain why some markets have done so poorly for so long — because this macro regime is just different from what we've seen in prior times. You could actually argue that it's AI that has been somewhat detrimental for crypto, because if it were not for the AI buildout and all the capex spending, you could have argued that the stock market would have shown weakness a long time ago, and that would have justified looser monetary policy and ending quantitative tightening way sooner than December 2025. But because of the AI buildout and all the demand from that, it arguably kept monetary policy restrictive, which ended up hurting Bitcoin. And it's one of the reasons why a lot of the meme coins just bled to Bitcoin for years — they would have their little run and then spend the next many years bleeding out, because the looser monetary policy that people were banking on didn't actually happen last cycle. And who knows when it's going to happen again. It probably will happen again, but we just don't know when.
Rob: Yeah, cycles — they're a funny thing. They seem to repeat, and every time we bet against them, they still keep kicking us down. Good answers from both of you. That gives me a little more perspective.
There was just one thing, Ben — when you talked about energy as a hedge, which makes a lot of sense especially with AI and data centers, there was this comment from Elon Musk about this age of abundance as AI and robotics come in. He says the dollar goes away and the future currency can run on watts, mass, and energy — which I thought was a pretty big ploy for Bitcoin. Maybe that is the future and maybe that is a good hedge as time goes on. But we'll see. Fiat goes to zero at some point, so we'll see how that goes.
Audience Q&A: When does the bear market end?
Rob: That's it for the prepared questions. I want to get to some audience questions so people can interact with you guys. This one is for whoever wants to take it. Ricky asks: "When is the bear market going to end, and what are your thoughts on this bear market?"
I think it'll never end — no, I'm just kidding. I think we go through the cycles and we'll see how it goes. Who wants to take this one?
Ben: Which bear market?
Rob: The crypto bear market. When does this bear market end?
Ben: I mean, don't ask me. My answer was: don't take out the May high — which we did.
Rob: We know what your answer is going to be. Ben's account on X is great to follow for the trolls, that's for sure. Guy, what do you got for this one? When do you think things end, or do we just extend?
Guy: I don't know. I think bull and bear markets are becoming harder and harder to tell the difference between, because people's impression of what a bull market is has been so shaped by these parabolic runs we had for everything in — especially 2017 and 2021 — and it's like we're just not going to see that again. We're now in this post-ETF stage where most capital that finds its way into Bitcoin does so via ETFs, and doesn't then necessarily bleed into every single altcoin after that. The big altcoin rotation just doesn't happen as it used to.
I think we're moving more into a stage where if an individual project has merit and can demonstrate firstly that it's actually a viable business earning money, and then — arguably the more difficult part — actually drive that value to token holders, then projects like that can stand out no matter what the wider market is doing. We've seen examples of that with the likes of Hyperliquid, for example — genuine product-market fit, makes a ton of money, and they figured out a way to drive that value to token holders by doing these huge buybacks. There are others as well. Near Protocol recently has been doing very well off the back of Near Intents and the progress they seem to have made towards quantum resistance, and there's also the privacy angle through Near Intents — you can mention Zcash in the same breath.
So I think we're moving into this stage where not everything is going to go parabolic, because at the moment the pool of capital chasing altcoins just goes round and round. I don't think there's much new capital coming in. It just rotates from one altcoin to another narrative. As Dana says: there's always a bear market somewhere. I just don't know whether we will get that same sort of melt-up in crypto that we've had in previous cycles.
Rob: That should be the ITC slogan — instead of "there's always a bull market somewhere," it's "there's always a bear market somewhere." So people know what to expect when they come.
ITC Conference details: Miami, November 20–22
Rob: If you had any transgressions against the ITC conference, you know what you're going to get. But I remember 2021 — you know who we need back? We need Ben back. That's who we need to get this bull market going.
How about this one — Rusty asks: will there be a streaming option for the ITC conference? Can people who can't attend pay to watch some of it?
So if you're unaware of the subtle hints I've been dropping, there is a conference going on November 20th to 22nd in Miami. You've got Saylor and Cardone, Mike McGlone — that's going to be a super bullish talk — Rastani, Kim Carson, James Czech. Jason Thompson, Tom Crown, FA. There are a lot of good people. So two questions: is this going to be streamed, and how does this compare to other events?
Ben: You know how my channel is never really flashy and it's kind of boring — videos are never really edited and it kind of pales in comparison to most channels. So the conference will probably be similar. The focus of the conference will be more on listening to people's opinions rather than flashy stuff. Basically, if you like my channel and the way I do things, you'll probably like the conference, because it's not going to be smoke and mirrors and flashy. There's not going to be any of that stuff. I don't know yet if we're going to stream it or not. I know it will be recorded, and I might post some of those videos on my channel at some point, but I don't think we're going to live stream it.
Rob: Okay, so sorry everybody — this will be the first inaugural year. We'll see how things go.
MD asks: "I'm not American. How can I join ITC?" Well, first of all there's a link in the description if you want to join the ITC website. But as far as the ITC conference, everybody's welcome — even foreigners like Guy.
Ben: We actually have a lot of international people. You've got Jason Pizzino coming from Australia, James Czech is international as well, CryptoKid is coming, and Alessio is coming from England — across the pond. And then there are people on my team coming from Argentina, Spain, and the Netherlands. So it'll be well represented.
Guy: I'm never a good salesman for this stuff. Let's put it this way: if you want to go to a conference where there's a lot of entertainment, music, and sound and stuff, don't come to this one.
So I'm not going to be able to get loads of free socks and ride a giant mechanical bull with Ben's face on it outside the venue. That's not happening.
Ben: I might try and cancel my flight.
Guy: Do you give refunds?
Ben: We do give refunds. So if anyone's like, "you know what, I was expecting more flash" — you can always get a refund.
Rob: Well everybody, things are going heavy out there. Gentlemen, thanks for joining. If you want to find anything we talked about, there are links in the description. That's it for today. We'll see you guys next week.