When to Buy & Take Profits on Bitcoin (Uncut) 02-10-2025

Global Game Theory to Play Out Among Nations, When to Buy & Take Profits on Bitcoin | Aaron Dishner

Hey everyone, welcome back to Kitco News. I’m Jeremy Safran. Well as Bitcoin bulls await the news around the creation of a Bitcoin strategic reserve in the U.S., we saw Bitcoin take a hit while gold sold to a new record level.

Now panic selling sent the crypto market tumbling while traders braced for more volatility. So let’s break it down here. Bitcoin plunged to around $92,000 at the start of the month on Terra Fears, which then sparked a wider sell-off in crypto.

Ethereum also plunged more than 20% in the last seven days, touching a new low around $2,500. And overall, the crypto market saw $400 billion wiped out as liquidation surged. Meanwhile, investors flocked to safe havens like gold and the U.S. dollar.

Gold hitting multiple new record highs and nearing $2,900 an ounce. At one point, we even saw gold-backed cryptocurrencies surge in price. Now Bitcoin did see a huge bounce back above $100,000 after U.S. employment data came in weaker than expected, just 143,000 new jobs added in January, falling short of the expected 169,000 jobs.

And joining me to get some clarity on what to expect next in the Bitcoin and larger crypto market is Aaron Dishner, a.k.a. Mooning Papa. He’s a crypto trader and an educator with over 25,000 students from around the world. Joining us now from Japan, one of my favorite countries.

Great to see you, Aaron. Yeah, nice to see you too, Jeremy. And thank you for having me on.

Of course. Now, I know it’s quite early over in Japan for you and you’re getting the news just as we get it when you wake up. But, you know, we talked a little bit about in the intro where crypto is right now.

But can you kind of give us an overview as to what’s happening in this space? Because we can hardly keep up here. I’m right there with you. This has been one of the wildest three-week periods in crypto I’ve experienced in a long time.

I’ve been trading crypto since late 2017. I’ve been through bull and bear market. And this is, again, a new unique experience that we all get to treasure together, I guess.

But ever since Trump won the election, there was a massive pump in the cryptocurrency market, which was to be expected to continue. But unfortunately, as soon as January hit, things regrettably slowed down and we had lots of teases. Senator Loomis was teasing out that there was big news.

And for all the crypto people out there, we know that big news is not, you know, we don’t, we want the actual news. Tell us that there’s a Bitcoin strategic reserve that’s happening. But all this teasing, all this back and forth, and then all the tariff fears that plunged the price of Bitcoin earlier this week was just, it’s been a brutal month, way different.

It’s gone much more differently than I expected. That’s, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Well said. I think for a lot of people too, you know, sitting here waiting. But in the meantime, you know, gold is reaffirming its status as a safe haven.

Bitcoin is struggling to gain that momentum at the moment. You know, this dynamic is driving Bitcoin to gold ratios lower. That ratio hit 12 week low as physical gold deliveries in the U.S. continue to surge.

And we did see, you know, the ratio between Bitcoin’s price in U.S. dollars and gold’s price per ounce falling to 34, its lowest level since last November. Obviously, we know that gold is in high demand right now and it’s more than just a safe haven. Traders have been loading U.S. bound planes with physical gold and the gold prices in COMEX futures have been trading well above spot prices, of course, fueled by more tariff concerns.

What are your thoughts here when it considers, you know, this Bitcoin to gold ratio dropping to this low? I think you’ve actually laid out a really good argument for why gold is such a safe haven. And the main reason is that tariffs are causing a lot of fear and short term panic for a lot of U.S. investors. And they’re wanting to find a way to hedge their portfolio against all the uncertainty that’s ahead.

And a friend was telling me that the Bank of England is having a similar problem where, and I’m not a big gold guy, but I know enough about what’s happening with gold to know that there’s this fear of a shortage. And anytime there’s this idea of scarcity, it’s going to drive up the price, especially during a time of fear. So all of that is it actually, sorry, let me say it this way.

Gold is doing much better than Bitcoin right now. Because gold is doing exactly what Bitcoin was created to do. Bitcoin was created to be a limited currency, a limited amount of coins that will ever be produced, 21 million, and 4 million of those are likely lost.

And now we have a president, a sitting U.S. president that is actually entertaining a Bitcoin strategic reserve. So in the same way that we’ve seen gold soar because people are flocking to it as a source of stability in uncertain times, when we have less of a supply out there and people are having to physically move it into the United States, guess what’s going to happen to Bitcoin when all of these other nation states are going to go, oh, the U.S. just did a Bitcoin strategic reserve. I think we should do that too.

To be honest, other countries have already been doing this too. El Salvador has been mining their own Bitcoin for, I think, about a year and a half. And they’ve bought, I think, 20 plus Bitcoin in this past week alone.

And then we also have the country Bhutan coming out of nowhere saying, oh yeah, we’ve been mining Bitcoin for the last several years. We have about 15,000 Bitcoin. So I really do think it’s going to be kind of a Bitcoin arms race.

It’s going to be game theory playing out, but among nation states. And that will drive up the price of Bitcoin. Interesting.

So you’re talking kind of on the sovereign wealth fund there. I mean, there’s been a lot of speculation about some of these countries front running the U.S. when it comes to this. You know, a lot of people still saying, hey, maybe that’s not happening, or at least on paper.

But, you know, last year, Aaron, I spent most of the year talking about the Bitcoin spot ETFs being approved. We’re very excited about that. And, you know, there was $4 billion in inflows in those U.S. listed spot Bitcoin ETFs.

So the buying pressure hasn’t translated into major price gains, as some expected. What do you think is driving the price of Bitcoin down right now? Right now, I think it’s a lot of unmet, I guess the best word would be wishes. A lot of people are looking at the cryptocurrency market as a get rich quick scheme.

And admittedly, there are many, many coins that pump thousands of percent in a day. And while it can be very profitable, short term, long term, those charts aren’t feasible. All the dogs with little hats on, all the frogs, all the cats, all of the vaporware, like it’s deceptively intriguing.

And people are looking for get rich quick right now. They want the price to go up. Sorry, the reality is that this is a long term play.

And I think a lot of people are impatiently waiting for Trump to come through with this and go, OK, we’re going to do this. We’re going to do this, just like he’s done all these other executive orders. But it’s taking a little bit longer with crypto.

But with that said, he also has this cabinet of people that he’s assembled at David Sachs being the crypto czar saying, OK, we’ve got about nine, I think he said 60 to 90 days, and then we got 180 days until these different things are happening. So it’s not like they’re just twiddling their thumbs doing nothing. It’s just going to take some time.

So I think the price action right now, in my opinion, is basically investors are feeling a little bit deflated, given all the hype that they were promised before by President Trump. But with that said, he’s also come through on a lot of the promises that he’s been campaigning for the last year and a half. So I believe crypto is still important to him.

And that will be met, or rather, those hopes will be met by the crypto savvy, the crypto friendly people out there. But it’s just taking a little bit longer than we all really want it to. Right.

Makes sense. And, you know, busting through the noise is always difficult, too. You mentioned before here, Aaron, about this game theory that’s starting to play out.

It’ll drive prices up again. I’m curious on targets. I mean, how high, if this happens, would the prices go on Bitcoin if that happens? Well, I mean, you got people like Michael Saylor saying Bitcoin, like one million dollars is programmed.

I believe him, but I would definitely not say by the end of this year or even next year. But I think long term, sure. A million dollars per coin.

That makes a lot of sense. We get a lot of analysts making some really amazing predictions that, boy, oh boy, I wish we could take bets on because we’d all be making a lot of money betting against them. We’ve also seen lots of crazy predictions, too, in previous bull markets.

I remember back in 2018, people were going, oh, it’s going to $100,000. And then back in 2021, oh, it’s going to go to $150,000. And now we see targets of like $500,000.

Well, the reality is that it’s way better to just be a little bit more on the conservative side, in my opinion. And my personal target by the end of this year is $173,000 based off of Fibonacci extensions. But of course, you’re going to have people on the other side saying, well, no, we’re definitely going to go to a million dollars this year because of all the mass buying.

But if, like you said, we’ve seen all of these amazing purchases happening. We have spot ETFs, which means you have to buy the physical Bitcoin in order to have that available for people in the ETF. Yet it’s not really pushing the price up.

So, this is also making me think, with all the amazing things that are happening, with the future potential of Bitcoin going to a So, I think it’s way better, way smarter to stay more reasonable for a decent target of a meager target of $173,000, which is still incredible for Bitcoin. But long term, yeah, it’s going to go way higher. Yeah, great upside still.

I mean, at $173,000, I mean, a lot of people would be excited about that. I got to ask you here because we’re talking a lot about inflows with the spot Bitcoin ETFs and what have you. You did mention offline when you and I were chatting before about seeing some strange outflows or having a bit of a notion.

I’m curious if you could share with the audience about anything strange that stood out to you here. Well, unfortunately, the big strange thing that happened was around last weekend with this whole tariff trade war scare that happened. Arkham Intelligence is an amazing website that anyone can use.

And part of the beauty of blockchain is that it’s transparent for the most part. I mean, 99.5% of the tokens out there are transparent. They’re on a blockchain.

You can track addresses, you can track flows, whether going to an exchange or from an exchange. And all that to say that we can track the World Liberty Financial wallets, which is controlled by the Trumps. And they have been accumulating a massive amount of Bitcoin, wrapped Bitcoin and Ethereum.

But unfortunately, on Sunday, they had to make some smart business practices. I don’t know what that really means. They said they’re not selling.

But all of this Bitcoin, all of this Ethereum, all these other cryptocurrencies were going to Coinbase. And from all my years analyzing all of these inflows, outflows, whenever a large wallet is sending funds to an exchange, it’s primarily to sell. It makes the most sense.

Why would you bring it to an exchange if you’re not going to be selling it? Vice versa, when we see a lot of bullish buying on exchanges, and we see lots of withdrawals, we can also take that as a bullish signal of confidence in the market. So when I see large deposits, hundreds of millions of dollars, especially from World Liberty Financial, which is supposed to be a pro-crypto family, pro-crypto president, I just kind of look at that and go, well, that’s not, I mean, sure, maybe you have to pay people, but it’s a little bit strange. Hopefully, they’re going to provide some more clarity on that.

But again, the main point being that anyone can actually track this stuff, which is what makes crypto so effective and so powerful. And Elon Musk also teased out the fact of putting the U.S. Treasury on the blockchain, which means that anyone could view any money going from point A to point B on the blockchain and it’s forever imprinted on it, which is a great way to keep countries and keep governments accountable for their spending. Yeah.

What kind of downside pressure are you thinking? I mean, we go back to talking about this short term price, if this continues to happen, if we have these sellers, as you’re kind of, you know, talking about here at the same time when the Trump coins come to play and the Melania coins come to play, it’s interesting timing. But how much downside pressure do you think is going to be on the Bitcoin price here in the short term? In the short term, I really do feel like we saw the low at $91K. Just because it’s in such high demand, it’s hard for me to imagine the price of Bitcoin dropping back down again, again, with lots and lots of big buyers.

However, the price is obviously pinned. Now, there are so many other cryptocurrencies that had a major lower wick down on Monday. And unfortunately, as the week has progressed and there’s not enough bullish news to pick up the market, a lot of them have retraced back down.

Ethereum now, as of the filming of this video, is starting to head back down again. But long term, everything is supposed to tick back up. So it’s a little bit of a head scratcher right now, to be honest.

But I think that’s okay. I think it’s all right for me being in crypto for eight years and looking at this market and going, I really don’t get why things are not picking up. But at the same time, it would be foolish if I keep doing the practices that I did when I first entered the market like seven, eight years ago, which is basically never selling.

And I’m seeing a lot of sentiment from people right now on crypto Twitter. I’m seeing people on YouTube, other talking heads saying, well, we’re just going to buy, it’s going to be bullish forever. No, that’s really foolish.

I mean, if you haven’t learned anything from crypto, it’s just a little bit volatile. So if you don’t take profit, a little bit of profit on the bounces, you are going to be sorely mistaken. I say often that a lot of traders in cryptocurrency, when you start out as a trader in crypto, a lot of them buy a lot of a coin that they’re really like, project, company, someone that’s shilling it.

And instead of being a trader, all of a sudden they become a long-term bag holder. So it’s really important that if you are going to be a trader, that you want to make sure that you are taking profits, even on the smallest little bounces, because as we know, lots of prices go up and they go down real fast. So there’s always a chance to reinvest profits on the dip.

And that’s kind of my strategy, but it’s worked really well over the last month. Yeah. Yeah.

Making money off of the volatility as opposed to just being looking at your phone and worrying about it. You know, Standard Chartered released a new price forecast stating that it sees Bitcoin hitting 500,000 by 2028 as access to the cryptocurrency grows and volatility drops, as you mentioned. First, do you think it’s feasible? And unpack that a little bit more here, Aaron, when is it the best time to take profits? The best time to take profits is when you’re in the green, at least in my opinion.

If you’re making some money on anything, this actually goes against a large group mentality in crypto, where people are demanding 100X gains off of every single entry that they get, which is totally unreasonable. So for me personally, just to answer that last part, I like to look at least 10%, 15% and just shave off a little bit, because you can guarantee that the price is going to come down just a little bit more, and you can always reinvest those profits back in. But as far as Standard Chartered’s target of $500,000, you said, by 2028, three years? Yeah.

So there’s a little bit of a problem with that, because we’ve seen this four-year cycle play out for Bitcoin consistently since 2013. Now, I understand the whole argument I just made for nation-states buying Bitcoin, but I also agree with you in that while we’ve seen spot ETFs not really do too much to drive up the price of Bitcoin in a dramatic way, like everyone was expecting it to. So while I expect these nation-states to be buying it faster than it can be produced, that should drive up the price.

However, I think it also would make more sense to look at the four-year cycle as being still in effect, which means that this year is a top year. And that means after the top year, there’s a bottom year, and that would be the bear market year. In 2021, we saw a massive, massive bear market.

And it was punishing because so many cryptocurrency companies and tokens failed, collapsed, claimed bankruptcy. We saw the collapse of FTX. We saw BlockFi, Celsius, Terra Luna, the list goes on.

It was a rough bear market. But to be honest, that’s the timing of the crypto market. We have one year where things just go absolutely crazy, which was late 2020 into the end of 2021.

And then things after that fell, Bitcoin fell about 75%, 80%. So if we’re, well, rather, if I’m expecting a target of $173,000 by November this year, then I don’t think the price is just going to keep going up into the right forever. I think there will be a blow off top.

And I think we will see a drop of around 70, 75% from that next new all-time high. Wow. Okay.

So draw down 75. What will be the trigger? And what does that mean for the prices? How low will the floor get? And what are you doing then? Are you rebuying? What are your thoughts? Oh, absolutely. Yes.

I mean, that’s what I did in this last bear market. We took profits, unfortunately, a little bit late. I didn’t catch the absolute Pico top.

And I also didn’t catch the absolute Pico bottom. I don’t think that’s really the name of the game. I think it’s more about gauging the sentiment.

And when I look at a target of $173,000, please understand I’m not waiting for the magical number of 173,000. That’s foolish. As soon as we start getting closer up to that target, I’ll start scaling out of my positions.

And then over the next year, I’m going to be using DCA bots to be accumulating more stable coins, making profits, buying as the prices go down, but selling on the bounce each time. So that way, when the market finally bottoms out, probably around 70% or so, then I’m going to flip the switch and start accumulating Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, just doing the whole thing over again, just like we did back in 2022. And if you actually sold even in December or January of 2022, December 2021, or January 2022, you still would have done really well.

I actually bought the majority of my Bitcoin back at around $21,000, I think, and I think about August of 2022. And it was before the FTX collapse happened, just because I was seeing signs of a bottom. So even still, buying a 20K was a great entry considering the price of Bitcoin right now is still almost at $100,000.

So the point is not necessarily to try to time the ultimate Pico top and the ultimate Pico bottom. But if you can be close to those levels, you’re going to do way better than most of the people that are just going to be buying and holding and not doing anything with those funds. Namely, because if you’re taking profit at such a massive, massive return on investment, and you wait for that bottom to come, then you can take all those profits and buy way more of whatever you want.

It’s literally like a shopping spree. When the market bottoms out, there’s max fear. It’s amazing.

It’s interesting because, I mean, you’re launching a new crypto course titled the Complete Cryptocurrency Investor Course. And I want you to tell us a little bit about it. But first, I mean, how do you put those blinders on, right? There’s so much volatility in the crypto space that as a trader, how do you best handle it? I think if you can learn how the cryptocurrency market works, which is a unique market, it’s not like Forex.

It’s not like gold. It’s not like the stock market, although there are similarities in how it behaves and how it’s influenced by the major markets. But if you can start to approach crypto as its own market, then things start to make way more sense.

While there will be in the stock market, for instance, there will be tech that do well, medical stocks that do well. Maybe there will even be eggs that are pumping, right? The price of eggs going absolutely crazy. So if you pay attention to the news, you’ll notice that there are certain things that will be moving up together when there’s scarcity or where there’s less demand in the market that’s going to affect the prices.

So in the same way, cryptocurrency has a lot of those elements, but things move so much faster. Honestly, crypto is like dog years. So I’ve really been in crypto for, I think, 50 years right now.

It feels like it. It’s showing in my hair, believe me. But the best way to navigate it is to really adopt this idea of, okay, if it’s a four-year cycle, and this is going to be a topping year, then it means I need to be realistic about taking profit.

I don’t want to be married to any of my bags. I want to make sure to sell on the way up. So that I’m prepared to weather a massive bear market.

I can reinvest my profits either back into crypto with, I guess, with DC bots like I do, or you could even go back into gold if you want to. You could use it even outside of the markets to accumulate more, whether with buying bonds or whatever you want to do. But the main point is recognizing the seasonality of it.

And for most people, like I’ve been helping my parents with this for years, and they’re doing really well. Sometimes my mom is actually making better trades than I am, regrettably. But she gets it because she’s not checking the charts all the time.

Yeah. And I don’t think most people really do. Most people really just need to know, well, there’s a start and there’s a flow of the market and eventually we reach a point of euphoria.

And when we’re getting close to that moment, you’re feeling that itchy feeling like, okay, I think I’m going to take some profit here. You should just go with that feeling. So, the idea of the course is not to go super heavy into all these different trading concepts, but more of like a global macro view of what crypto is, what Bitcoin is, how to navigate the market successfully for a more of like an investor’s mindset, more of like an investor’s way to approach the market where a lot of your viewers, I believe, are.

I mean, if we think about gold, sorry, just to finish this last thought, but if we think about gold, gold is always a great buy. Even if the price is going down, but there are seasonal times to buy. There are signals in the market where it’s like, oh, I think I might want to take some profit.

And I think that rings true for any market. But with Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, knowing that it’s so much more volatile, which is good, volatility to the upside is great. But that also means volatility to the downside can be painful.

So, if you can take that seasonality, if you can take those cues from the market and learn how to be satisfied with any amount of profit, learn how to stick to your trading and your investing plan, no matter what, you’ll actually do really, really well in crypto. Interesting. So, a lot of it is just, if I hear you right, just educating people about the markets and how to study them with the crypto space in itself.

But again, 10-15%, I mean, geez, it’s not a bad return. Yeah. I mean, if we see a massive drop on Bitcoin at the end of this year, starting the bear market down to 75%, I haven’t done the math, but that’s going to be a massive drop down back below $100,000.

And you better believe that the top 10 tokens are going to go down 80%, some tokens will go down 99%. But the reality is that we’ve seen this cycle and this pattern happen over and over and over. So, it’s really, really tempting to get swept up into euphoria.

But if you can take profits on the way up to secure at least some profit, that way you can at least enjoy and weather the storm. And when things really start to turn, then you can just go, okay, I’m good. I’m satisfied with my profit.

I’ll wait till things bottom out. And Aaron, to your point, I mean, it’s funny because a lot of the arguments I get from people when it comes to the gold space, looking at the crypto or Bitcoin space specifically is, there’s not a ton of history and data to look back in. But to your point, you know, we do have times in the charts that are starting to give us some technical analysis that point every four years is a drawdown.

So, I guess now’s the time to keep looking at it. Yeah, no, I fully agree. And like you said, a lot of people do criticize Bitcoin for being too young, too new.

But a too young, too new asset that grew from literally nothing all the way up to $100,000 isn’t just any old asset. I still think that Bitcoin is number one. Well, I do like trading lots and lots of different altcoins.

I have my degen picks, my low cap picks. I’m always focusing on growing my Bitcoin stack because that’s the one that has weathered every single bear market and come out stronger every single time. Yeah, well said.

Okay, well, we’re going to get you to give those tips the next time you’re on, my friend. We’re out of time today, but I appreciate it. Aaron Dishner, aka Mooning Papa, for joining us today from Tokyo.

Thanks for this, Aaron. I’m excited to check out the course. Yeah, thank you.

You guys can go ahead to masteringassets.com and check out my new course called The Complete Cryptocurrency Investor. I like it. We will do that.

Arigato gozaimasu. I’m Jeremy Safran. I’m Jeremy Safran.

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