The Chicken or the Egg: The Trump Trade and Bitcoin's Glass Ceiling This is a very long thread and intends to capture my iterative development around Bitcoin's price ascension since October 15th, and to re-affirm original views made around my guest appearance on @1000xPod. Before we begin: I want to make this very clear. This is not suggesting you long or short any coin, especially as OI/positioning remains extremely crowded over the next week. It is extremely possible (would err toward even very likely) that we challenge an ATH, which could create significant right-tail effects. Specifically, I think managing a new short position from here could be very difficult. With that being said - Today, I seek to define the nature and intensity of flows that have have since entered Bitcoin (+$250B in BTC and +$400B in total crypto market cap since $59K lows) since mid-October, and to characterize the capped capacity that I believe exists for Q4-24 (which I believe will not be meaningfully broken). My belief is two-fold: 1) new money remains constrained (which is a necessary pre-requisite); the heavy inflows we have observed in the last 2 weeks are highly mercenary and 2) the excess liquidity necessary to create a blow-off top (like we saw in 2021) is not present. However, I believe the following tenets are highly under-covered and under-discussed, namely for one reason: cupboard analysis is very lazy as it pertains to why price goes up, and generally only starts becoming active when price goes down. What you must believe: 1) The direction of the election does not drive a price-dependent outcome; rather Bitcoin is currently being used as a liquid proxy to hedge a Trump win. 2) "Easing conditions" present today for manufacturing a new TOTAL-high is insufficient. The correlation of rates and other popular heuristics to faction liquidity is much weaker than popular rhetoric suggests, with signs pointing toward price ultimately being suppressed rather than price discovery.