Bitcoin’s price rises are like waves hitting a glacier

When the Bitcoin price rises, it's like waves hitting the side of a glacier. Every so often, they knock off a piece of ice that falls down, which is like knocking long-term Bitcoin supply from a Bitcoin OG, and that Bitcoin supply has to be absorbed then by the marketplace. I heard this analogy, someone used it on Twitter or somewhere else. Anyway, I thought it was a really good one because uh we know even though the average price of Bitcoin throughout 2025 was 54% 54 54% higher than the average price in 2024, it did feel like oftentimes the price would rise and it just couldn't stay there, right? I mean, the price would just come back down. And if you follow James Czech, um, who's my favorite Bitcoin analyst, he kept highlighting the fact that every time the price would rise, uh, past that sort of psychologically important level of $100,000, eventually if it stayed above $100,000 long enough, somebody who owned Bitcoin a long time would decide that it's time to buy themselves something nice, get themselves a second home, you know, I don't know, set up whatever for their kids, I don't know, whatever people spend Bitcoin on. Uh, so in my case, after Bitcoin passed $100,000, I decided at some point I'm going to buy a whole house generator for my house because I was sick of the power constantly going out. Um, because the power is ridiculously unreliable where I am, which is absolutely insane. Obviously, it has to do with the fact that the power company has a government monopoly on the generation of power and therefore there's nothing you can do. There's no recourse. I can't switch providers like you can in Texas to a different power provider that's more reliable. Anyway, Mississippi has a monopoly system for power. So, whoever wins the contract and runs the power uh system for your uh area of Mississippi, you're stuck with them. No matter how bad their service is, there's nothing you can do about it. So, anyway, I wanted a generator. So, again, uh at some point I was going to sell $20,000 of Bitcoin to buy myself a generator. And I decided, you know, after uh, you know, the price had stayed above $100,000 long enough that it was finally time. And I did some videos on that. But but think about that. If the price had gone above $100,000 one time, meaning the wave hit the side of the glacier one time, that for me was not enough to say I can afford a whole house generator. But as the waves keep hitting the side of the glacier of my Bitcoin holdings, you know, day after day after day above $100,000, month after month after month, above $100,000. And my power keeps going out every week and a half for, you know, four, eight hours, 12 hours, 24 hours. Every time the power goes out again, it's like the wave hits the side of the glacier. And at some point, I'm like, screw this. I'm getting a generator. I'm sick of my power being out all the time. And so I did. I bought a generator with $20,000 of Bitcoin. Now, I was also a Bitcoin accumulator throughout 2025. So ultimately, I ended up buying more Bitcoin in 2025 than I spent in 2025. But a lot a lot of original, you know, Bitcoin OGs did not, right? I mean, a lot of them have so much Bitcoin that they bought at $100 a Bitcoin. They're not buying more Bitcoin at $100,000 a bitcoin if the Bitcoin they own was mostly bought at $100 a bitcoin. Um, but so again, the price crosses $100,000, it's like every time it crosses $100,000 or every time it stays above 100,000 for a week or a month, it's like a wave hitting the side of that glacier. and maybe they're sitting on 10,000 Bitcoin or a thousand or 100 Bitcoin. Every time the wave hits that side of that lecture, they're thinking, "Huh, you know, I don't have a yacht or I don't have a private jet or I don't have whatever it is they might want." And at some point, they decide they want one. And when they decide they want one, unless they can finance it, which, you know, jets and private yachts and what all that sort of stuff are, you know, notoriously difficult to finance depending on where you are in the world. I've never tried. I'm hypothesizing here. So they end up selling, you know, I don't know, five Bitcoin, 10 Bitcoin, 100 Bitcoin, whatever to buy whatever nice thing they want or whatever. So again, when the waves hit that side of the ice, the glacier enough, it knocks off 100 Bitcoin. It knocks off one Bitcoin. It knocks off, in my case, one between 1/5 and one sixth of a Bitcoin. Ultimately, I bought the generator when Bitcoin was 120,000 a coin. So it cost 16th of one Bitcoin to buy that generator. But again, I didn't do it immediately. So, if you're wondering, you know, we've talked before in other videos about how $100,000 was a psychological level for a lot of people that had held Bitcoin since, you know, $100 or $1,000 or even $10,000. And up there at 100,000, a lot of people just thought, you know, that's a big number. That's a big number. And it's a big number that justifies buying themselves something nice or improving the lives of themselves and their family in some way. And so, but it's not like when it hit $100,000, everybody did something all at the same time. Just like the very first wave that hits the side of a glacier doesn't immediately knock a big piece of it off. So, that's what the story of a lot of 2025 was. Even though the average price in 2025 was up 54% compared to the average price in 2024, uh which made it a great year by that measure, which is in my opinion the most accurate measure of what it was like to buy or sell Bitcoin in 2024 or 2025, was the average price throughout the year, not the beginning or the end price. Um, but it the reason it was not a lot higher than that was that throughout 2025 there was just epic amounts of OG Bitcoin redistribution. meaning Bitcoin that had been sitting idle for 10 years or five years or seven years or eight years coming alive and making its way over to Coinbase or River or Kraken or some other major exchange where somebody plans to sell it to buy themselves something nice and some new Bitcoiner like me even though I because I'm still accumulating Bitcoin buys Bitcoin because I decide that I want Bitcoin more than I wanted Tesla stock or whatever the last percentages of my net worth were in before I converted 100% % to Bitcoin. So, understanding the waves crashing against the side of a glacier or waves crashing against the side of a uh iceberg is a helpful framework to understand what happens in Bitcoin land when it has trouble clearing a major hurdle. Now, the next major one certainly uh there will probably be other ones along the way, but one that will be huge is $1 million per Bitcoin. Whenever we get to $1 million per Bitcoin, it will probably take multiple years to definitively clear that threshold where we don't look back, where the price just stays above a million and never falls back below. And the reason is exactly the same thing. There's a whole bunch of people, including me, that have been holding Bitcoin a long time, and including you. If you buy it now, you'll be up more than a,000% on your investment. And after a thousand% return on your investment, 10 times your money when it crosses a million dollars per coin and everybody's talking about it and bit, you know, everyone owns Bitcoin and it's the monetary system of the world and all that, which is probably going to be a lot higher than a million dollars per coin before it's the monetary system of the world. But let's assume it's just well-developed and almost everybody has them at that point. Uh, and everybody understands it. Then you're going to be thinking, "Huh, Bitcoin's at a million dollars per coin. It's hanging around here for it's dropping above a below above a below above a below. At some point you're going to say, you know, I've been sitting on this Bitcoin for a long time. I'm up a thousand% of my investment. I might buy some myself something nice. So even you eventually the waves crashing against the side of your uh iceberg of Bitcoin stash or crashing against the side of your glacier of Bitcoin stash. the waves crashing against your Bitcoin stash up at a million dollars per coin or 500,000 or 250 or whatever that is will eventually break some of yours loose. And all the people that are buying Bitcoin for the first time at $1 million per coin are going to be complaining that we just can't seem to get above a million dollars per coin just like people are complaining that we can't seem to stay above $100,000 per coin for all the same reasons. Because people, you know, when the waves crash against their Bitcoin stack long enough, they decide there's something nice they want that they don't have and they break off part of that stack to buy something. Same thing will be has happened in 2025. Same thing will be true in the future at a million dollar per coin. And the exact same thing happened at $10,000 per coin, which I lived through myself after 2017, in 2018, 2019, and even part of 2020. It took a long time to definitively clear $10,000 for the same reason. a lot of lot of Bitcoin was getting broken off those glaciers or those icebergs of Bitcoin held by OGs because $10,000 back then was just a really big number. Obviously now it looks small, but at the time it looked really big. Um especially if you bought Bitcoin for a dollar or 10 or 100 or whatever or even a thousand. 10,000 is a big number. So hope that analogy of an iceberg or a glacier with waves crashing against it helps understand some of the price performance in 2025. But the bigger story is the price, the average price in 2025 was up 54% compared to 2024. So which made it a great year. Everything was 33% off if you were smart enough to buy Bitcoin before and spend it in 2025 and accumulate now for the future so you can do it all over