A Once in a Lifetime Crash is Coming! - Lyn Alden

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]I've had a view for a while. I separate Bitcoin and stable coins from kind of the rest of the space. I think that the broader crypto is is kind of stagnating going forward. I mean, it has ups and downs, but I think it's it's it's generally structurally stagnating. And I think the areas of opportunity, I still think Bitcoin is going to be a larger network. I I don't think the two trillion dollar market cap that it reached was the peak.

[00:00:22]I think it'll go higher because I think there's a demand for a decentralized ledger backed by energy and kind of a portable store of value and permissionless payments. I think that there's a lot of demand for that.

[00:00:34]These things tend to be very self-reinforcing. It's a winner-take-all or winner-take-most market. And I think Bitcoin is basically that the protocol of value in that sense. Market surged last week on optimism as tensions eased, oil dropped, and crypto rebounded. It looked like stability was returning after the Strait of Hormuz reopening, and confidence rushed back across risk assets. But that narrative is now breaking down as geopolitical tensions start flaring again. The US-Iran ceasefire is weakening, threats are rising, and oil is climbing once more as uncertainty returns to a key global supply route. At the same time, the Fed quietly injected 7.5B in liquidity, often a sign of hidden stress in the system. So, the real question is, was this rally genuine or just a trap before the next wave of volatility? If markets roll over from here, the bigger issue becomes survival. Lyn Alden argues that in that scenario, most crypto assets won't make it through unchanged. So, here's the question. Are we entering a real reset or just another temporary shakeout before higher highs? Hey, I am Maria with Daily Dose Crypto. Have you noticed that gold, silver, and Bitcoin have hit all-time highs recently? Is this a coincidence or are smart investors [music] onto something? The dollar is depreciating, inflation is eating up all of our cash, and the US national debt is through the roof, hitting new highs every day. [music] That's why people are shifting to alternative assets like gold, silver, and Bitcoin. We at Daily Dose Crypto have partnered with iTrustCapital, your one-stop platform [music] to buy and securely store 80 plus digital assets including Bitcoin, gold, [music] and silver to hedge your future against debasement. With over 200,000 accounts, 15 billion in transactions, and 11,000 plus positive reviews, they're helping real investors build long-term wealth with their tax advantage IRA and PCA, which is a premium custody account that supports the highest level of custody and security in the space. They do this all with institutional grade custody through partners like Fidelity Digital, Fireblocks, and Coinbase Prime. Keeping your assets secure while you can trade 24/7. Fees are just [music] 1% per transactions with no monthly or annual costs. Getting started is simple. Sign up for free and fund an IRA or PCA today. You'll receive a $100 bonus and start growing your assets the smart way.

[00:02:40]Click the link below to open your account now and begin your journey toward generational wealth. So, there there's kind of there's a call it the big print camp where people say, you know, things just around the corner, we're going to print a ton of money like COVID.

[00:02:53]Uh people have been saying that since a year or two ago and and it's you know, it's it's not really happened. Uh and I've been in the camp that no, we're in a we're in a gradual print scenario as a base case, meaning that um and this is before the Fed started ending their balance sheet reduction and resumed growth. My view was that that was going to happen, that they were going to end it, they were going to go back to uh roughly increasing their balance sheet in line with nominal GDP uh to kind of maintain kind of a persistent percentage of nominal GDP, roughly speaking. Um or or uh like a persistent uh percentage of say total bank deposits, uh kind of a proxy for for broad money supply.

[00:03:30]>> [snorts] >> Um and that's roughly what they're doing.

[00:03:32]They're in a gradual print scenario.

[00:03:35]Uh which um you know, we're running $2 deficits.

[00:03:39]Uh those are going to keep you know, maintaining and growing as far as the eye can see. Nothing stops that train.

[00:03:46]Uh the central bank will monetize a portion of them where necessary to keep liquidity in the banking system, keep liquidating the Treasury market, and all this. And all of that is just kind of this this persistent background um debasement inflation. Um and when, you know, outside of the Iran war, we'd be in a gradual print scenario. Now, the Iran war comes in, and the only challenge that it potentially does is it does increase the odds of a bigger stimulus or a bigger print scenario because it whenever you have crisis, uh it increases the odds that something breaks, and therefore there's a response. Uh so, for example, if you if the Strait is closed for a long period of time, and you have acute energy shortages in creditor nations that hold a lot of Treasuries, and they sell Treasuries to buy $200 oil, for example, um you could have the Fed potentially have to increase its monthly Treasury purchases uh to accommodate the selling from energy-starved creditor nations.

[00:04:47]Um that's still not my base case yet, but every month that it goes by, kind of like if you you know, if you ask me, what is probably going to happen in 2026 in January, I'd assign a certain number. And if you asked me, you know, here in March or April, now that there's a war going on, now that there's an acute energy shortage globally, um I don't have a precise number, but that number is higher than it would have been in January. That that that that that we So, a gradual print is still my base case, but we have increased the right tail risk of some of these bigger print scenarios because we've increased the risk of uh financial disruptions due to creditor nations being energy-starved. I think for the most part, it takes the form of of a bunch of crises, not just one big one. Uh if you have something like total war, or like a nuclear bomb gets dropped or something, I mean, then you can enter kind of all-at-once territory.

[00:05:39]Uh but for the most part, these things tend to happen in phases.

[00:05:42]Um but the US, I mean, we mentioned before how by in many metrics, the late '90s and and 2000 were kind of like the peak US uh uh in terms of disproportionate power to the rest of the world. You kind of map out what happens since then. I mean, 9/11 happened in 2001. Uh then all these wars, the war on terror. I mean, I think Brown University estimated we spent something like 8 trillion on the war on terror. Uh you know, some of it went to good use getting Osama bin Laden, went to good use, but um a lot of that, like especially the the whole portion on Iraq that had nothing to do with 9/11. Um we did the uh the Patriot Act. Uh which is a lot of that still in place.

[00:06:19]So, we kind of permanently lost some rights as American citizens. Um uh then we had the global financial crisis in 2007-2008 and and into 2009.

[00:06:29]Uh and so that uh you know, that kind of impaired a lot of people's kind of trust in the system.

[00:06:36]Um especially when you get banks bailed out more so than homeowners, kind of selective bailouts. We had the rise of the Tea Party on the right and Occupy Wall Street on the left. Um then we went through a pretty pretty politically polarized time for a while.

[00:06:50]Uh then we had COVID, you know, not just in US but globally. Uh and major disputes around how to handle that and all the stimulus that got poured out and not evenly.

[00:07:00]Um you know, if you do the numbers, there's something like $50,000 per American household in in uh stimulus.

[00:07:08]And if you like ask the average American household, did you get 50,000? They're like, "No." It's like, "Well, someone did." Right? You you might have gotten 10,000 in stimulus checks and child care tax credits and all this.

[00:07:18]But there were there were companies that had no impairment that got half million-dollar PPP loans that turned into grants that just dropped to the wealthy business owners' bottom line.

[00:07:27]Uh either I mean, there are companies running software, like software companies or investment companies that said, "Oh, no, we're impaired. We need money."

[00:07:34]And uh yeah, they just they just got stimulus checks that were an order of magnitude bigger than the average American.

[00:07:40]Um and then we go forward and you know, Russia invades Ukraine.

[00:07:45]Uh and then we you know, [snorts] we attack Iran and we're just in a a more kinetic environment now. Um American kind of military might is challenged in terms of its ability to keep key key trade routes open or not.

[00:07:59]Um things like the invention of the the hypersonic missile challenges the aircraft carrier as kind of the dominant other than nukes is kind of the dominant you know, conventional for uh force projection. And now one-way drones and things like that uh further in in practice challenge whether that technology is still the number one thing to have uh to to project force. So, I I I think we've had just a number of of crises along the way and along that way especially as you have the global financial crisis in the aftermath and you have the peak in American demographics. So, you have a kind of a bloated entitlement system and a healthcare crisis, you know, how many people are overweight, how many people have uh you know, just just kind of lifelong medical expenses that give us by far the the highest healthcare cost in the world per capita.

[00:08:47]Uh we're just quite burdened. Um and when you have very high public debt, that uh kind of puts us into like a fiscally dominant fiscal spiral situation.

[00:08:57]Uh not really in the fast sense, but in the in the slow burn sense. It just kind of year after year it's kind of keeps accumulating, adding up. Um where we kind of reach the point for the first time in a long time where we're paying more on interest expense than on military.

[00:09:11]Which is generally you know, when you when you have an empire and for decades you have more military expenditures than interest expense, but then it kind of rolls over, that's not really a good sign for an empire.

[00:09:23]Um and so I I think it's I think it's more punctuated by a series of crises than any one crisis. Lyn Alden's base case isn't a sudden crash. It's a slow gradual print system. Not 2020 and 12s.

[00:09:36]Sach Khandi, Enduri, Nitesh Kurre.

[00:09:40]20 style stimulus, but continuous liquidity expansion through trillion-dollar deficits, quiet central bank support, and ongoing currency debasement just to keep the system stable. That's exactly what we're seeing now with rising debt and repeated interventions. The risk comes when geopolitical stress, like the Iran situation, adds pressure to an already fragile system. Energy shocks or bond market stress could turn gradual liquidity into rapid money printing.

[00:10:02]Alden sees not one crisis, but multiple shocks stacking over time, similar to 2008 and COVID, but worse. So, the key question is simple. What actually survives when debt costs start exceeding the system's ability to manage them? And then people also wondered, well, okay, why didn't Bitcoin sell off? It's usually a risk-on asset. Why didn't it sell off amid the crisis? It's like, well, it already had the opposite problem. It already sold off a ton in late 2025 and early 2026. All that fast money is already out of this ecosystem.

[00:10:29]The coins are held by pretty strong hands. Um and so, there's not a lot of money that is still there to get out. Uh and so, it actually it holds up surprisingly well. I mean, who would have thought, okay, the US attacks Iran, we have the biggest energy shortage in the world, and Bitcoin outperforms gold for a month. Who who would have thought?

[00:10:48]But it's like when you when you get very overbought in one and very oversold in the other, things can happen. And similarly, like people were like, oh, does this mean Bitcoin is a safe haven asset? My view is no.

[00:10:58]It just means the fast money was already out. Um and so, and that's part of why I hold both. I they go through their own cycles. Um uh and so, I I mean, I'm I'm still structurally long-term bullish on precious metals and Bitcoin. Uh and they kind of move to their own drum, and you just have to be careful of overbought, over sentiment periods of time, in my view. It seems like there's still some some activity in this in the financial realm around um around the the Bitcoin crypto space. And so, I'm curious if you're keeping an eye on that and what you're seeing there.

[00:11:37]>> [snorts] >> Uh, good set of questions. Um, so I would I would separate temporary hype from structural adoption. Um, you know, the the president attending a Bitcoin conference uh, was good for the price that year, but really it's about structural global adoption. So, I mean I by by many metrics it wasn't even as as hyped as 2017 was uh, when that happened. Um, or even in 2021. Um, uh, his appearance in 2024 at the conference. Um, uh, and I mean since then I mean the Trump family's been very much in in kind of crypto even like meme and kind of scam type stuff. Um, uh, and I think that's I mean that's kind of on brand.

[00:12:18]Um, uh, so I viewed it less as bullish for Bitcoin and more kind of it was a signal that it's it's bullish for deregulation of the space. So, the prior administration and Gary Gensler had kind of an adversarial approach. Um, and even even for the spot Bitcoin ETFs to allow to exist they had to get sued. The SEC had to get sued because they were kind of viewed to be capricious in their like arguments against it. Um, they were also doing kind of like regulation through enforcement. They were kind of not giving clear guidelines for what a crypto security has to do to have a clear path forward, but then there was but then when they try things they would potentially get sued um, by the SEC. Uh, so you had you went from kind of an adversarial environment to kind of a sort of a I mean some like a golden age of fraud environment. It's almost like the pendulum flows around. It kind of opened the doors to the meme coins and kind of kind of grift. Um, I I have had I've had a view for a while I separate um, Bitcoin and stable coins from kind of the rest of the space. I think that that broader crypto uh, is is kind of stagnating going forward. I mean, it has ups and downs, but I think it's it's it's generally structurally stagnating.

[00:13:32]And I think the areas of opportunity, I still think Bitcoin uh, is going to be a larger network. I I I don't think the $2 trillion market cap that it reached was the peak. Um, I I think it'll go higher because I think there's a demand for a decentralized ledger backed by energy uh, and kind of a a portable store value uh, and permissionless payments. I think that there's a lot of demand for that.

[00:13:55]Um, uh, and there's self-reinforcing network effects, you know, kind of like how when you have simple mail transfer protocol or TCP/IP or Ethernet or USB, when you have a software or hardware protocol, these things tend to be very self-reinforcing. It's a winner-take-all or winner-take-most market. And I think Bitcoin is basically the protocol of of value in that sense. Um, stablecoins, uh, so the broader topic of tokenization starts with dollars. So so uh, you know, stablecoins have been around since 2014.

[00:14:24]Uh, I've been bullish on those uh, and they they the market cap keeps growing because people want dollars and it's kind of like a stablecoin compresses the overhead cost of having an offshore bank account. Anyone with a smartphone now has the equivalent of an offshore bank account uh, with stablecoins.

[00:14:42]Downside, of course, is that because they're centralized, they can be sanctioned uh, at any time. Um, but for if you're in a country where it's not a risk uh, and you want dollars for working capital, um, you know, those are useful it's a useful technology. Bitcoin is already reacting to rising macro pressure. It briefly slipped below $74,000 after weeks of tight consolidation, wiping billions from the market before stabilizing again. On the surface, it looks like normal volatility, but structurally it shows how sensitive crypto still is to geopolitical stress and headlines like the US-Iran tensions. Technically, Bitcoin is stuck between strong support near $71,000, $72,000 and resistance around $75,000, $76,000 with buyers still struggling to break higher.

[00:15:23]Prediction markets now show mixed expectations with limited odds of 80k and a growing chance of a deeper pullback first. So the question is is this just a healthy reset or the start of a bigger correction? And do you think the market is still bullish or already shifting into caution mode? For more daily dose crypto news, check out these two awesome videos on your screen. Click now and we will see you on the next video.