James Check: Bitcoin Is in the Discount Zone
Transcript — TFTC
Article: https://www.tftc.io/james-check-bitcoin-discount-zone
Transcript page: https://www.tftc.io/james-check-bitcoin-discount-zone-transcript
Published: 2026-11-14
Machine transcription, lightly cleaned; may contain errors.
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[0:36] Marty Bent: James Check, it's been too long, sir.

[0:38] James Check: It has, mate. How you doing?

[0:40] Marty Bent: Doing well. Doing well. Wrapping up my my Wednesday evening here with a conversation with you, which I always like the the five p.m. to six thirty conversations with James Check in the middle of the week. How's your morning going?

[0:54] James Check: It's all right, mate. I've dropped the kid off to— dropped the boy off to daycare. You know, he's off making friends. It's funny, actually, there's a little girl. She was there for his, like, first hour, like his introductory hour, and she was just smitten with him. She's just turned 3. And it's to the point now where, like, he'll get there and she'll be on the other side of the playground and she'll just, like, start smiling. As soon as he locks eyes and realizes who it is, like, he starts smiling. And she's got a doll at home named after my son. Like, It's just the cutest thing ever.

[1:22] Marty Bent: Have the parents started building their Bitcoin dowry yet?

[1:24] James Check: I haven't gone down that path yet. Look, I've got a few suitors, man. My boy's got a couple of options on the table. But yes, we're weighing up how orange the dowry is.

[1:33] Marty Bent: Yeah. Well, it's great. Like I was saying, my youngest is right around the age of your son, and we've been going through some sicknesses here. That's why we were supposed to record last week. We're here this week. But like I said, A lot has happened in the last week from a price action perspective, so it's probably good that we're meeting after while we're in this air pocket, as you've been describing in the newsletter.

[1:55] James Check: Yep. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. I mean, like, you know, it's a sad thing about politics because we are in a very volatile political environment, just socially, right? You saw that, like, Trump had arguably one of the biggest political comebacks of all time in the presidential election, and within 2 years, he's just, you know, he's pissed it against the wall and You know, now you got the other team in and they're going to do no better. And like, we're just— and my big takeaway from this whole thing, and again, I'm an Aussie, right? I got no dog in the fight. I'm just— I just simply suffer from the consequences of what, what the rest of the world does.

[3:33] Marty Bent: Restore.

[3:34] James Check: Yeah, restore. There's this third party thing. where people have just had enough of the status quo and they're just voting for something different, even if that something different is just as retarded as the other system and no more experienced. What are you currently doing on blue and red just isn't working. So people have just like a volatility of how willing people are to put up with stuff, I think is really hitting its— it's hitting its limits, which is an interesting part and very Fourth Turning type setup.

[3:59] Marty Bent: I was going to say the Fourth Turning vibes are rising by the day. Yes. In the West and globally. And I mean, I think we caught up in May or June, so it's been quite a bit, at least 5 or 6 months since we last sat down. A lot has happened since then. I think we start with today. Let's talk about the air pocket. Where's the price action today? But then I want to go back and talk about the time pain that we went through in the summer. Obviously, we had the AI trade blow up in the middle of the summer with This is me. You're scaring me, Leopold. We had the AI-enabled attacks and vulnerabilities discovered in Bitcoin. We had the largest heist in the industry's history with Binance a few weeks ago. There's a lot to catch up on, but let's just start with where the market is today.

[4:55] James Check: If I'm not mistaken, if we last spoke like in May, June, Price is probably dead flat between when we last had a chat because I think we would have rallied to the high in May. Then we had our time pain capitulation, which was interesting because that period, that's where we hit max bearishness. 5 billion over 8 weeks. Saylor started selling. I think he sold like 6,000 coins or something like that. Then we had Coldcard, which was its own like shock to the system for Bitcoiners. That was a big one. We had a failed soft fork, right? And through that whole period, we're chopping in and around like we tagged $58,000.

[10:13] Marty Bent: Going back, and that's again, we'll only know in retrospect, look back 6 months from the bear market bottom at a much higher price and say, ah, that was it. But again, considering the sentiment, that's one thing I've been saying is that the sentiment, despite the relative shallow nature of this particular bear market compared to others from just a peak-to-trough perspective seems to be somewhat detached from the price at least. But when you consider, again, everything that's happened from this time last year, we were coming off all-time highs. Everybody's very bullish. So the last 12 months have been like, okay, we thought there was a bull market correction.

[11:41] James Check: Yeah. And it really has been an onslaught. And like, this is, this is across many levels. I mean, you probably saw there's a bunch of posts semi-recently where it was like over like a 48-hour period, just the— not just Bitcoin, like just the internet in general, programming languages getting hit, website servers getting hit, credentials getting hit, just like stuff just getting ripped apart. So we're in this global inoculation period as AI just finds every loophole that could possibly be found. It's going to be probably a rough 12 months just as everything just gets tested. And, you know, one thing that I find very interesting, there's been a lot of attacks, hacks, cracks, breaks.

[12:48] Marty Bent: I don't think it's appreciated at all.

[12:49] James Check: No. And I think, you know, there was this whole— if you wind back the clock, what, 3 months ago? Not even. The primary debate was that Bitcoin Core is crooked and corrupt. And then I just look at it, it's like, well, those crooked and corrupt folks have written some of the most amazing code ever. So let's give them some props there. That's pretty remarkable. I mean, that's not an easy thing to do, right? To just be able to write this stuff to be so bulletproof. And it's part of Bitcoin's design, right? So simple, and elegant and it just does one thing, right? No, sorry, that's not correct.

[15:27] Marty Bent: But I've been told by Jason Calacanis, the infamous investor, that I should drop Bitcoin and get into the AI trade.

[15:35] James Check: Did you see though, the most important part of that tweet was, here's all the reasons that Bitcoin's going to die. Second tweet, buy this shitcoin. You know what I mean? How many times have we seen this bloody narrative and story? And by the way, how many times is— I'm not an all-in listener. I have listened to my fair share of episodes to understand their dynamics. If I was to choose any of those guys to be like, Yeah, I think he's fairly accurate. Jason's not the one. You know what I mean? That's just my opinion. He's not the guy that I look at and go like, yeah, he's been pretty on the money for most things. That's not been my takeaway.

[16:10] Marty Bent: No. And not to straw man Jason, because I think we can put together a case, the two of us right here, building on what you just said. I mean, when we talk about the stock market, what's investible, I think objectively already, if you look at the concentration of the stocks participating in the AI trade, I think it's something like 7 stocks are driving 60% of the returns in the S&P 500. Something like 95% of S&P 500 companies have not outperformed the index.

[16:40] James Check: And whatever crazy amount of the economy is being driven by those 7 stocks spending a ton of money, you know, it's like, it's a very concentrated setup.

[16:48] Marty Bent: Yeah. And then not only that, if AI continues on the trajectory that it's taken over the last few years by many observers, metrics, it is actually outpacing expectations pretty dramatically ahead by half a year, depending on who you ask in terms of the ability of the models to complete particular tasks that take a high degree of intelligence. And when you get into that world, to your point about moats and defensible business models, what business model is defensible? in that world. Yeah.

[17:23] James Check: Oh yeah. No, it's, it's really challenging. And like, even just like from the security element, I just imagine how much cost is going to go into fixing, repairing, understanding the problem in the first place. Like, think about all your banks. I worry about things like utilities, like these, you know, government websites. How, how well protected is any of this stuff? And the answer is not very at all. So it's a really, really— it's a very hairy scenario for a lot of things. And the costs are going to go up eventually. They will go through this inoculation period. But in the short term, there's just a ton of costs, a ton of obsolescence that will come out of this. It'll harden everything over time, but man, it's a tricky time.

[18:01] Marty Bent: And on top of that, you have the likes of Elon Musk. And I think with the blue tsunami, the blue wave that we got here in the United States in our midterm elections, and many people looking at the last 2 years of Trump's presidency, I think he's not going to be able to do much. And The way things have historically worked in US elections, if there's this much of a bloodbath in the midterms, it's likely that the party that benefited from the midterms will take the presidency in 2 years. And you can definitely see a scenario in which— you can see 2 scenarios which I think would be beneficial for Bitcoin.

[19:34] James Check: Oh yeah, there's a ton of things. I mean, look, the one thing that I think is pretty obvious The Republicans came in on the, you know, one of a few platforms, but we're going to cut spending. Right. Doge lasted 15 minutes. The richest man in the world couldn't put a dent in it. And like, there's no interest in cutting spending or austerity of any form anywhere in any political system worldwide. There's just none. It very much feels like they're just so far past the point of control that they're just like, just just press on. There's no political will to change the current setup. So I mean, look, I can't see deficit spending not continuing indefinitely.

[24:29] Marty Bent: Well, to your point about the institutional flows and going from 0.1 to 0.2 or maybe 1%. I think we have leading indicators of that potential flow over the last 3 months. And I think the largest one being JP Morgan putting out an official Bitcoin allocation recommendation and putting it at the top of their list of assets that are going to perform the best in the coming years.

[24:53] James Check: The other one is Morgan Stanley launching their low-fee ETF. And I mean, it's actually worth looking at. If you look at the Morgan Stanley flows, It's just up and to the right, right? It and Grayscale's mini Bitcoin, which is the BTC ticker. Now these are small. 5%, 4% of total ETF holdings, but it's up and to the right. And if you think about it, why would somebody buy a low-fee ETF? They're not trading it. That's a holder's mentality. These are people who are just buying and allocating. And like Morgan Stanley's launching 2 years after all the other ETFs have gone live. And they're still attractive.

[26:55] Marty Bent: Yeah. I mean, you have to do that weighted probability. Absolutely. The probability

[27:00] James Check: is a 75% chance it wants to be higher. Q25, 75% of the time it's higher. Which one do you want to do?

[27:06] Marty Bent: Sup, freaks? Listen, stacking Bitcoin doesn't mean making a big purchase every time you go to buy. Everybody's like, oh, I got to get a hold of Bitcoin. I got to do this. I got to do that. No, you don't. On Cash App, it can happen in the background of your everyday life. You turn on roundups, As you're going and you're spending using the Cash App card, every purchase rounds up to the nearest dollar with spare change going into Bitcoin. You can also get paid in Bitcoin, so part of your paycheck stacks the moment it lands. You can set up direct deposits into Cash App. You can send Bitcoin to friends and family wherever they are.

[31:48] James Check: Yeah, we're seeing quite a heavy redemption period over the last couple of months at a rate of $14 billion a month. I think they're down $22 or something billion from the highs, mainly driven by USDT and USDC, the 2 big ones, naturally. So yeah, very interesting there. I mean, one of the things that I— so I can certainly see and appreciate the— and just from a free market standpoint, the developing world, not the governments, the people, you know, go to Turkey, go to Venezuela, go to, you know, lots of places in Latin America. Tether is very common, right? Parts of Southeast Asia, Tether is very, very common because it's just better than their currency, right?

[34:55] Marty Bent: I wouldn't be shocked if it's Binance related. Could be seeing people seeing the stablecoins flow out of Binance be frozen within hours. And if you are operating in that gray market, black market territory with stablecoins, probably got the message like, okay, maybe maybe it makes sense to convert this to something else rather quickly.

[35:15] James Check: Yeah, it's possible. I mean, because the numbers are far— I mean, it's not the numbers that were frozen. What was it? $2-point-something billion, $14 billion a month, $22 billion down total. It's a much bigger number, 10 times what they froze.

[35:28] Marty Bent: Yeah. Do you think they're— I mean, this is one thing I've been pondering. Do you think Bitcoin needs a narrative refresher? You think it's going to need that? The narrative will come after the price goes up, but it doesn't seem like it's—

[35:46] James Check: Yes. Yeah. I mean, Bitcoin has one, I mean, it has many remarkable skills, but one of them is it just reinvents itself over and over and over again. And I think it was Travis Kling actually who had this great line some time back. He put out a post where he's basically saying that Bitcoin, for whatever reason, it's an asset that when it goes through its bull cycle, it just attracts the most noxious, horrible scamming, grifting people of all time. Just— they're just attracted to it like baby shit to a blanket. And once they're on it, it has to then go through the cleansing process, which is the bear market.

[41:22] Marty Bent: Do you find any merit in the narrative that Bitcoin, at the very least, will see significant uptick in activity and maybe purchasing due to the agentic economy?

[41:33] James Check: No. Look, I don't think so. I think this narrative that AI bots are going to be using sats, I think it's The bot will use what you ask it to use. So if you ask it to use Bitcoin, it'll use Bitcoin. Yeah. So I'm not— there's that whole debate around medium of exchange versus store of value. I'm very much of the view that medium of exchange is important. We are decades away from that being a centerpiece of the equation. Bitcoin absolutely can be, should be, and probably will be used as a medium of exchange in some way, shape, or form. But we are so far away from that that I don't think it's something that we should be stressing about if it's not happening.

[42:32] Marty Bent: XBX 6900?

[42:33] James Check: Yeah, whatever it is. He used to have this chart. It was like a big logarithmic curve and it showed all the different— it was like little stars showing all the different stages of monetization. And what I found interesting about it, there's no actual timeline to it, but the store of value phase, there's all these increment— I can't remember them now, but there's all these incremental parts from collections up to store of value. And there's all these little things and you're like, yeah, we're kind of there. And you're really early on that curve. And your medium of exchange comes further and further down the line. So that was, you know, that's something that's always just stuck with me. It just takes a really, really long time and it's got to go through tons and tons of stages before you reach that level.

[43:11] Marty Bent: Yeah, I'm looking for the chart now to see if we can bring it up. I can't see it though. I'm not going to find it here. But no, that is a great chart. I mean, you brought up Murad and I forgot to bring this up when we were talking about Trump administration shedding the skin. I think that is, I mean, at least from the American perspective, I think that's what we're going to go through over the next 12 months. And it's going to accelerate in January when the Democrats take over Congress. They're going to go after World LibertyFi. There's going to be a bunch of trials about it. And I think that's going to be the job of Bitcoiners in 2027, And hopefully not 2028, but probably 2028 as well, leading up to the next presidential election, is separating Bitcoin from crypto, particularly meme coins.

[44:02] James Check: It's an endless battle, isn't it?

[44:03] Marty Bent: Which should be fun.

[44:05] James Check: It's an endless battle, but it's an important one. And going back to the AI agentic thing, what I do think is very interesting is that AI understands the difference. If you go and ask an AI why crypto, why Bitcoin, it does actually understand. And whether that's just because Bitcoin is memed enough on the internet, could be. But certainly there is this underlying— and I think that separation has largely happened. It doesn't mean it's not going to be a constant fight, but I do think that we've done a pretty good job of actually creating that very clear and distinct separation between the two. So it'll be a constant fight.

[44:39] Marty Bent: Well, we need private Bitcoin. We need Zcash.

[44:41] James Check: Yeah, sure. Yeah. It's interesting, isn't it? My read on that— now look, Zcash, I'm sure, has great technology. I've always thought that Zcash and Monero are 2 projects that the privacy side, it's really important. And I'm not going to dispute there are some really, really qualified people working on it, some really, really cool technology. Problem is network effects. You know what I mean? You can't fork Bitcoin and expect to get the same setup. It's just not going to be the same. There is only one original invention of digital scarcity. And I've been saying for the longest time, Bitcoin, the most important part of Bitcoin is not the proof of work, not the code base, is not the 21 million, right?

[46:08] Marty Bent: What's up, freaks? This episode was brought to you by Simple Mining. I'm sure many of you listening to this right now own Bitcoin and own it the same way. You go on an exchange, you buy it, sweep it to the cold storage, maybe you keep it on the exchange and you pay full price. But there's a smaller group of business owners, family offices, and investors with sharp CPAs that are quietly getting theirs a different way. They own the machines that make it. Here's how it works. You buy the miners at Simple Mining. Simple Mining hosts them, runs them at their facilities in Iowa on industrial power rates you could never get on your own.

[48:58] Marty Bent: You mentioned that 2018 to 2022, heavily retail-driven. Like, does retail have enough money to get into this market in size moving forward?

[49:06] James Check: Yeah, I mean, I think so. So my general view and the way I try to look at things, we think about things from a psychological standpoint. So you can, you can bucket up different investors. There's different ways you can do this. You could do it by how long they've held their coin. This is your long-term holder, short-term holder, hotter wave type stuff. The other way that I like to do it is you look at who is taking profit, who is taking losses. So if you have bought coins from below $58K, you are going to be in profit and meaningfully so. Right. So everyone who's in a meaningful amount of profit is from a previous cycle and you can argue fairly tenured.

[54:59] Marty Bent: Are there any abnormalities— excuse me, I can get it out there— that you're seeing on-chain?

[55:05] James Check: No. Honestly, the one thing that I covered in my recent report that I found very interesting and a little bit surprising actually was transfer volume. I don't look at on-chain activity metrics. And when I say activity, active addresses, transaction counts, on-chain volume, fees, those kind of things that show network activity. And there's a handful of reasons for that. Active addresses are somewhat poisoned by inscriptions just because of the way, like, same address, we don't double count them. So the same address transacts multiple times on the same day. It's one address. Transaction counts, same thing. The way that miners have been packing blocks, just the way with the witness discount and all that stuff, transaction counts are through the roof.

[57:24] Marty Bent: That is shocking.

[57:25] James Check: Yeah. Yeah, no, it's really trending higher. So there's a lot of volume, a lot of people settling value on it, which I find intriguing.

[57:33] Marty Bent: We've got Thanksgiving here in the United States 2 weeks from tomorrow. What should the conversation at the Thanksgiving dinner table be for, for the freaks out there who get, who get knocked on by their family members? Or maybe they're— maybe this is the year they get the presentation. How should they present it to their family?

[57:53] James Check: Look, honestly, what I've found to be the most effective way to handle this is to just have people ask questions. Don't lecture. Allow people to ask questions because they're going to have counterpoints that they've heard in the news and stories and all that kind of thing. There are so many, like, and you can go back and look at what Andrew Bailey and co did with Resistance Money where they do all these philosophical tests. All right, I'm going to pull you out of your body and drop you somewhere else in the world. You're going to be someone of the 8-something billion people out there. Would you rather Bitcoin existed or not?

[59:12] Marty Bent: Yeah, I completely agree. And again, to your point about the left wing should be very aligned with Bitcoin, I mean, again, going back to midterms last week, I think that was the crux of the issue. You mentioned it, my back pocket is no better off. The big meme going around the United States outside of subpoenas to come for the Trump administration is affordability. Affordability. This was a referendum on affordability at the end of the day. And that's the, the great shame of the platform of the left here in the United States and how it's evolving, is you have the Democratic Socialists coming to power and saying we need to seize all the wealth and redistribute it to the working class.

[1:00:58] James Check: That's it. And the other side to this whole thing is it's very hard to pitch the— I've said this before, but like, so let me tell you about fiat money and how the entire world's a scam. It's a big eggshell to open up, right? So it's how you lose people along the way with that conversation. So that's a tricky one as an opening line. However, I think that Bitcoin is one of these unique assets. Gold is a good analogy here. because it's just honest. It just is. People have opted and selected Bitcoin just of their own volition. They've opted gold of their own volition over thousands and thousands of years.

[1:06:24] Marty Bent: No, I mean, another point to rag on Jason again, get into the AI trade. Well, it's like, well, all these companies just went cash flow negative for the first time. Instead of using their cash to buy back stocks, they're now issuing and diluting the overall amount of their company currency, their stocks. as well. And so to your point about demand elasticity, not only does it exist for commodities like gold and oil, but it also exists for equities as well.

[1:06:54] James Check: Yep. And another thing, which is kind of a totally separate topic, and again, I don't pay close attention to the equity market, so someone can tell me I'm an idiot for saying this, but I've noticed more that I think Google did a series of preferred shares I would not be surprised if what Michael Saylor and Strive and all these companies have been doing with the preferred stocks, it would actually amaze me if that doesn't turn out to be like a bit of a turning point in capital markets where more companies start doing that and using that as a vehicle. I have a feeling that like people may rag on the guy, right?

[1:08:25] Marty Bent: Yeah. It's thrown in gold and Bitcoin. Gold and Bitcoin.

[1:08:27] James Check: It's been normalized. Yeah, totally. And then they usually caveat because they always got to caveat. generally caveat being like, you know, if you're in your 30s or your 40s or you're young and you've got time, then maybe Bitcoin's a better allocation because you've got that growth potential. Where is Bitcoin going to be in the next, you know, 30 years? We've got to retire. You know, I've got a retirement account. Where is Bitcoin going to be in 30 years' time when I need that? Lord knows, right? It's only 17 years old. So add another 2 times its life, man. Exciting stuff. If you're older, then gold's probably better.

[1:12:28] Marty Bent: Yeah. Incredible point there. That'll be clipped. We got to wrap up here, but just to make sure we have well-rounded coverage for everybody, fingernails, air pocket down to $72, potentially down to the mid-$60s. What should people be looking for on the upside?

[1:12:46] James Check: Yeah. So look, my general view is that we want to be holding $72. And again, if we don't, it doesn't change my overall view that like, guys, we're in the, we're in the discount zone, you know what I mean? Like, if you think in the low $70s, up to $60s, take it, right? Just take it unless your flowchart is that Bitcoin is going to die, which I view is not likely, and the rest of the market The tenured guys at the table don't seem to see that either. If we are to set a monthly higher low somewhere, right, maybe 73, 72, whatever it is, then the next move probably is a springboard up towards 100.

[1:16:20] Marty Bent: You heard it here first. Perfect place to end it, James. As always, thank you for your time. It's always incredible catching up.

[1:16:27] James Check: Thank you, Matt. It's good to be back.

[1:16:29] Marty Bent: Peace and love, freaks. Hey there. Thank you for watching the whole video. If you made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of it. If you wouldn't mind liking and subscribing and maybe sharing with friends and family, it helps us out here at TFTC immensely. And then beyond that, we have a very valuable newsletter. called The Commoner. io and subscribe to that. We cover Bitcoin, AI, energy markets, macro, political, cultural discussions. We've been running it for a decade. Highly recommend you sign up for that to stay up to date with what we're covering beyond these conversations. io/ai as well. We have an MCP server with all the episode transcripts, all the newsletters we've ever written, and even some data, Bitcoin ETF flow data, Treasury auction data, Treasury general account, US debt.