Mike Alfred speaks

Today on Supply Shock, Pete Rizzo sits down with Mike Alfred (Alpine Fox founder; board member at IREN) to parse the market’s next leg and why he thinks most people are underpositioned.

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Alfred’s base case: Bitcoin rises because fiat is being printed across currencies, and BTC issuance is capped. 

He expects Q4 to be strong but not final — his working model stretches the cycle into 2026 (even ’27) thanks to ETFs, GAAP accounting clarity, and treasury buyers. 

If there’s no retail mania or “$300K blow-off” by December, he’s not calling top.

Still, Alfred shared a reality check for treasury companies: MSTR’s success may be impossible to recreate. 

New “BTC treasury” names must show real operating flywheels that work when capital markets are shut. Some opportunities may however lie in harder-to-control foreign markets.

And what would a Bitcoin podcast in 2025 be without a take on the Core vs. Knots rivalry?

Here’s what Alfred, a professional investor who has underwritten Bitcoin for eight years, has to say: “The reason why I like [Bitcoin] is it's fundamentally anti-fragile. So I think the biggest mistake you can make as an allocator in the space is to read too much news. If you've underwritten correctly, the news is effectively irrelevant because it's going to fix itself because it's a self-fixing platform. It's like an organic living thing.”

“And so there'll be arguments about quantum computing. There'll be arguments about NFTs on Bitcoin. There'll be arguments about Knots vs. Core. There'll be all these things. And in my view, five years from now, we'll look back and it'll largely all be noise because if I'm correct about the way Bitcoin's structured from a decentralization standpoint and from an immutability standpoint, it's not going to matter.”

Full episode on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and X.

• Slowly and then: Luxembourg’s sovereign wealth fund is planning to allocate 1% of its investment portfolio to bitcoin (about $8 million). 

• Square rolls out a Bitcoin wallet for merchants.

• ICYMI: Arthur Hayes writes that Bitcoin’s four-year cycle is dead, thanks in part to Trump and Xi.