Benjamin Cunningham

your echo chamber is a falsehood... peep the game at hand.

[Benjamin Cunningham @BenjManGoinDeep]

@BTCoptioneer are we going to $50?!?!

[Phong Le @phongle]

Bitcoin is Freedom

I spent the last few weeks in my motherland, Vietnam. The country has transformed since my family escaped in 1978. It is more prosperous, energetic, and ambitious than the Vietnam I left behind. A young population, rising investment, and global aspiration have created extraordinary momentum.

And yet one thing remains clear. For many in Vietnam, the ultimate dream is still America. And if they cannot make it to America, they want to wear American brands, eat American food, listen to American music, and exude American confidence.

My trip to Vietnam reminded me of this, and the World Cup has made it visible on a global stage. America remains not only a country people admire, but a place people still want to reach, represent, and belong to.

The United States remains the land of the free, the Wild Wild West, and the home of the American Dream. Walmart and Waffle House. Boston and Austin. Silicon Valley and Wall Street. A country where people can still rise from welfare to extraordinary success through hard work, ingenuity, risk taking, and some luck.

My family experienced that promise directly. We arrived in America as refugees, sponsored by a Catholic church in Syracuse, New York. We received public assistance, food stamps, and free school lunches. My father worked three jobs. We lived frugally and dealt with poverty and racism. America was not easy, but it was open. It gave us a system where effort, education, entrepreneurship, and perseverance could compound.

This is America. The world still aspires to be like us.
What has made America successful over the last 250 years is not accidental. It is a principled Constitution, geographic scale, abundant resources, and a culture of liberty, capitalism, entrepreneurship, and reinvention. Other nations try to replicate the recipe, but often waver. Interventionism, bureaucracy, corruption, and ego get in the way.

Which brings me to Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is the United States of money. It aspires to do for money what the American Constitution aspired to do for government: create a system governed by transparent rules rather than the discretion of individuals. Built on a principled white paper, digitally enforced scarcity, and proof of work, Bitcoin is digital capital governed by code, energy, and consensus.

But beyond that, Bitcoin is hope.

It provides hope for those who have worked hard for their money and want to protect it from monetary inflation. It provides hope for those born in countries without reliable rule of law or economic freedoms. It provides hope for anyone seeking protection, opportunity, and a form of property that does not depend on geography, politics, or permission.

I was born in the year of America’s bicentennial. Fifty years later, the future of American dominance is being questioned. I have no question. The United States of America is the greatest country in the world.

My life is proof of what America makes possible. I left Vietnam as a refugee, grew up poor in America, built a career through education and hard work, and now have a wonderful wife and three children. That is the American Dream to me. It is not just wealth. It is freedom, family, opportunity, and the ability to determine your own future.

That is also why Bitcoin resonated with me. I found Bitcoin because it reflected the same principles that shaped my life: clear rules, individual sovereignty, property rights, resilience, open competition, and long-term conviction.

America gave my family freedom through a country. Bitcoin offers individuals monetary freedom through a network. One opened the door for me. The other opens a door for anyone, anywhere, to protect the fruits of their labor.

That is why Bitcoin is freedom.

[Benjamin Cunningham @BenjManGoinDeep]

@DavidKairoT Hard Pass. 48 Laws Reigns.

[david friedberg @friedberg]

if @elonmusk paid 100% of his net worth ($1.4 trillion) as a tax it would only cover federal government spending for 77 days. this isn’t a tax problem…

[Benjamin Cunningham @BenjManGoinDeep]

Finally, an adult entered the room.

[Lyn Alden @LynAldenContact]

I'm imagining the bears who think that Bitcoin is so weak that if you buy 4% of it and talk a lot, you can destroy the whole network.

It's not even a person, but a group. Bought 4%.

Like, somehow the key weakness of Bitcoin is that if someone buys 4% of it, everything fails.

[Benjamin Cunningham @BenjManGoinDeep]

@elonmusk coming through, then Twitter, and holding auditions within proved the devil in the details.

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

Notes on 100+ Recent Technical Interviews

I interview a ton of engineers. Recruiting is the single most important technical CEO activity. Here are a bunch of impressions

1. There is a severe ZIRP engineering overhang that is currently washing out. They're getting laid off, managed out, etc. after having been massively overhired around 2020-2022. This is worst for Tier-2 big tech (think PayPal, Bill, etc.) but also FAANGs. These are overwhelmingly bad engineers.

2. This flood of unqualified but good-on-paper candidates makes this the hardest SF hiring market I have ever seen, due to the amount of nominally strong-looking candidates that you need to grind through.

3. I am highly skeptical of "AI as a cause for engineering layoffs". I think this is a large-scale polite fiction -- the companies don't want to admit they overhired, the engineers don't want to admit they are bad at their jobs. Everyone's blaming AI when it's really just the market rectifying itself.

4. Many of these engineers appear never to have had a real engineering function at their corporations. They're sitting in meetings, "making decisions about technology" but are unable to write software. I leave many interviews baffled by what exactly they were doing for so many years, let alone what their manager was doing.

5. I have interviewed some engineers from FAANG companies so shockingly nontechnical that I am forced to conclude that there is either (1) a lot of resume fraud going on or (2) that there are kickback grifts within those organizations -- people hiring their cousins and splitting the pay, that kind of thing. I have no other explanation.

6. There's a fun side-effect where after interviewing 20+ people from certain small but public companies, I actually feel like I am gaining a short sellers' advantage: there are financial technology companies out there that, knowing what I now know, I would never deposit a single dollar into.

8. Based on this "exhaust" data, and extrapolating a little bit, maybe aggressively so: I think folks like @pmarca are basically right when they say that ~every tech company is overstaffed by a factor of 2-4x. Whatever the reason -- staffing ahead of need, monopolizing certain engineer types (Google-style), headcount-driven promotion incentives, the reality is that a lot of these companies are not being run for the shareholders. The aggregate SBC expense is insane, and I expect this is going to get rectified eventually.

I'm sure that AI will play a role in rectifying this -- but I fear that people are going to blame AI for taking people's jobs when the reality is that the jobs were already long-gone, possibly always useless, but the highly-paid butts-in-seats remained. People will be mad at AI for taking away their lucrative sinecures. Maybe that's the same effect from a public policy perspective, but it feels different morally.

[Benjamin Cunningham @BenjManGoinDeep]

@suekhim 11 year old and 8 year old twins… mathematics, plz.

[Benjamin Cunningham @BenjManGoinDeep]

Robotics might be the new league.

[Brett Adcock @adcock_brett]

We just wrapped what began as an 8-hour challenge - and it ran for 200 hours without a failure

Shoutout to the team for the hardcore engineering behind F.03 and the robust Helix models powering it

[Brett Adcock @adcock_brett]

We just wrapped what began as an 8-hour challenge - and it ran for 200 hours without a failure

Shoutout to the team for the hardcore engineering behind F.03 and the robust Helix models powering it

[Josh Man @JoshMandell6]

I ya Toll ah

[Benjamin Cunningham @BenjManGoinDeep]

charts, bro

[Jurrien Timmer @TimmerFidelity]

Below we can see that when Bitcoin peaked last October, the ETP flows left Bitcoin and jumped on the gold bandwagon. Now that gold has lost its mojo while Bitcoin is finding its footing, the flows have reversed. To me this is a good way to think about why gold has started acting like Bitcoin and bitcoin has started acting like gold.

[Benjamin Cunningham @BenjManGoinDeep]

idiot geniuses bro

[Benjamin Cunningham @BenjManGoinDeep]

levels

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️Bitcoin has been crossing disbelief thresholds for thirteen straight years.

First $1.
Then $100.
Then $1,000.
Then $10,000.
Then the ETF wall.
Then treasury adoption.
Then state-level and sovereign-adjacent relevance.

Every stage looked insane before it happened. Then it happened. Then the market normalized it and immediately moved the disbelief threshold higher.

That is why these anniversary posts matter more than they seem to. They reveal how badly human memory fails in the face of compounding reality. People stare at Bitcoin where it is and argue about whether it is disappointing relative to the latest fantasy. The real story is that the world keeps forgetting how many layers of impossibility have already been broken.

The deepest read is simple.

Bitcoin is no longer proving that it can exist.

Bitcoin is proving that the world still has no stable framework for pricing a non-state monetary contender as it climbs the hierarchy of legitimacy.

That is why the emotional experience stays so chaotic. The asset keeps advancing through disbelief barriers while every new holder cohort treats the latest level as normal and demands immediate transcendence from there. Nobody honors the breach. Everyone immediately wants the next one.

The highest-level coherence is this:

This is about how a civilization watches a monetary insurgency compound for over a decade and still keeps reacting to it like a short-term trade.

It is about how reality can keep winning while the public remains trapped inside recency bias.

The clean version is simple.

Bitcoin at $100 was already the signal.

Everything after that has been the world taking too long to understand what it saw.

[Benjamin Cunningham @BenjManGoinDeep]

Better start trading onchain to avoid the after hours fees.

[Common Sense Investor (CSI) @commonsenseplay]

One of the strangest patterns in the stock market that you don't know about! $SPY $VTI $VOO

I recently watched an interview with Samir Varma, a theoretical physicist turned trader hedge-fund manager- he earned his doctorate in particle physics from University of Texas at Austin, and was one of the first to execute profitably quantitative futures strategies.

He noted - over 30 years, almost all of $SPY ’s gains happened while the market was CLOSED! I found this super interesting, so I did some digging to see if this was true and here's the data:

According to a long-term analysis (1993–2025), the “overnight” strategy for SPY i.e. buy at close, sell at next open, yielded cumulative gains of 1,105%, while the “intraday” strategy, buy at open, sell at close, only delivered about 27% over the same period

i.e. - If you bought at the close every day and sold at the next open, your return would be about +1,100% - If you bought at the open and sold at the close, your return is only around +27%

Same index, same time period but insanely different returns.

This doesn’t mean the market always drops during the day - it just means that the average intraday move has been very small over the long run, while the average overnight move has been much larger.

Why might this happen?
- News and earnings usually come out after hours
- Futures markets react overnight
- Big institutions hedge when markets are closed
- Risk premium for holding exposure through uncertainty

This pattern shows up again and again in the data. Why this is not a free trading strategy? because costs and spreads can wipe out the edge if you try to time it.

But for long-term investors, it highlights something important:
- A big part of the compounding has come from simply holding overnight.
- The market often moves the most while you’re not watching, a lesson for intraday index traders ;)

[Benjamin Cunningham @BenjManGoinDeep]

@_The_Prophet__ NEEDED THIS!!

[Benjamin Cunningham @BenjManGoinDeep]

Markets need a bluechew.

[Ignas | DeFi @DefiIgnas]

The Banana Zone 🍌

[Benjamin Cunningham @BenjManGoinDeep]

Gentlemen and Ladies, its been a pleasure.

[Benjamin Cunningham @BenjManGoinDeep]

How sure are we that they’re on our side?

[The Wolf Of All Streets @scottmelker]

JPMORGAN SEES $BTC SUPPORT AT $94K, MAINTAINS $170K UPSIDE TARGET

[Benjamin Cunningham @BenjManGoinDeep]

needed this.

[BRAVE NEW CRYPTO WORLD @bncryptoworld]

This will go down in history as the Great Shakeout of 2025, and I'd like to offer some perspective, some positivity and hope for people in the crypto market here.

Lots of people are clearly hurting now, we've been delivered multiple punches recently and lots of people are showing signs of losing faith, some partially and some altogether. Losing money is painful and it is without doubt an emotional game.

Do bare in mind that everything is only ever a paper win or loss until you have actually sold.

The greatest victims in this market are those who think they can outsmart or guess where the market is going by leveraging and longing or shorting the market.

Trading with leverage in the crypto market is financial suicide - just stop it, it is the fastest way for people to destroy their chances within what is the greatest wealth accumulation opportunity of all time.

I have always remembered Raoul Pal's ( @RaoulGMI ) position on it, leveraging has always been a key part of his @RealVision's "Don't Fuck This Up" thesis, and today those words couldn't be more abundantly clear.

Lots of people are crying about market manipulation, yet they are out there placing leverage, long or short positions. Is this not a bit like playing poker and letting everyone know what your cards are before they lay their hands?

All we are doing here is allowing the exchanges, the market makers, the institutions and the whales to enter the market with far greater financial power to counter positions and liquidate them, which is what is repeatedly happening. I've no idea how people do not recognise this.

For everyone who are shouting the market is over, or are sitting there fearing as much, just take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

We are on the verge of a solid rate cutting cycle. Trillions of dollars of debt across the world needs to be refinanced. QT is about to end which will be followed buy QE, massive liquidity is going to be flooding in. The entire global monetary system is in the process of being migrated on-chain. No bear market has ever been born out of fear, it comes from peak euphoria, which we clearly haven't even touched. We have key regulatory acts that are on the cusp of being announced. Financial institutions are buying crypto. Actual countries are buying cryptos. ETF's are being approved. We are in the glorious position of being able to take part in what is the greatest financial revolution of all time - let that sink in.

The reality is the crypto space has never, ever looked this bullish before and what we are seeing now will go down as the greatest shakeout. Don't become a victim of it.

I have always said that the key to maximising the gains in this market is to buy solid utility projects with real fundamentals that will attract real adoption. Buy with conviction, hold and do nothing. Shut out the noise, and simply do nothing. It is also the key to riding the multiple drawdowns that are characteristic within every bull cycle, and now is no different.

Crypto isn't for the faint-hearted, you have to program yourself differently when navigating this market.

Those who overestimate their own intelligence, who are constantly buying in and selling out, changing lanes, thinking they can predict the market, taking long and short positions and chasing dick-driven greed through insane leveraging will invariably become the fallen soldiers of the market, and will ruin their chances in the greatest wealth accumulation opportunity of all time. And those who buy, hold, shut out the noise, and do nothing, will most likely achieve the success they set out to achieve.

I can't emphasise this enough but for anyone who is looking to educate themselves and to gain an advantage in navigating the crypto space, and who want to develop an understanding of the things that truly drives asset prices, take a look at joining Real Vision @RealVision, it is by far the best thing I ever did.

The team are incredible and it has a fantastic community for you to connect with. The information and insights they part with is pound-for-pound the most valuable alpha and intelligence that you could possibly absorb. The intelligence and understanding you will gain will help you to sail through these shit storms with a far greater calmness, to take a step back from the chaos and shut out the noise.

As always, stay calm and don't fuck this up.

Holders will outperform traders.