Ivan on Tech analyzes Bitcoin's dip below $82K amid a wave of cybersecurity hacks and broader AI market concerns
Ivan on Tech delivers a solo market commentary session covering Bitcoin's price action, a major cybersecurity event, AI industry profitability signals, gold's long-term threat from nuclear fusion, and Chamath Palihapitiya's prediction that Bitcoin will eventually be hacked to zero.
Summary
Ivan on Tech hosts a live stream analyzing Bitcoin's pullback below $82K, attributing it to a wave of simultaneous cybersecurity breaches — including PHP, GitLab, Railway, Node.js, and LiteLLM — that he describes as a "Black October" event causing broad de-risking from tech assets. He argues that Meta's strong earnings and the monetization of its Muse AI project provide a confidence boost for the broader AI industry, which faces growing concern about whether massive data center investments will generate sustainable returns. Ivan also covers a nuclear fusion startup claiming a pathway to producing gold in a lab, which he frames as a fundamental long-term threat to gold's scarcity value — contrasting it with Bitcoin, which he says can be upgraded to quantum resistance. He addresses Chamath Palihapitiya's claim that Bitcoin is "capped" and will eventually be hacked to zero, pushing back on the quantum threat framing while agreeing that Bitcoin urgently needs quantum-resistant cryptography. Throughout, Ivan emphasizes risk management, the importance of owning assets in an AI-driven economy, and the mechanics of his Bulmania investment community.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Bitcoin Sell-Off and the "Black October" Cybersecurity Wave
Bitcoin is down and below $82K. There is a new wave of FUD, a new wave of concerns, and today it centers on cybersecurity. People are very worried about what is being called "Black October" — within just 24 hours, PHP got hacked, and as most people know, the majority of the internet still runs on PHP. Next, GitLab got hacked. Railway, which is a major platform for hosting servers, got hacked. Node.js got hacked. LiteLLM got hacked. This is having an impact on everything related to technology, Bitcoin included, because when you look at all of these different companies getting hacked — literally 70% of internet websites affected — and when you look at crypto exchanges, when you look at everything related to crypto, it's obviously a massive exposure. All the security systems in centralized exchanges, all the security systems in how custody works, how custodians work, but also self-custody with Ledger and everything else — it's all a big question mark, because AI is being used to crack these systems as well.
Despite all of this, Bitcoin is still holding above $80K. But there is a big de-risking happening where people just want to take a step back from tech — a bit of a step back — because there is a lot going on and it's happening very fast. Just during the last 24 hours, so many things happened it's very difficult to keep track of. This would normally be like ten years' worth of news before AI, but now with AI, everything is happening at the same time. Everything gets hacked at the same time.
It's interesting that even Japan's Sanae Takaichi told everyone to update their PHP version. That was not in my bingo card — that the Sanae Takaichi of Japan said, "Hey guys, it's time to upgrade your PHP version." I don't think I would ever have predicted that kind of security announcement. Normally it's some tech geek here and there telling you to upgrade. But here, the Sanae Takaichi of Japan, Takaichi Sanae, came out and said: "Regarding PHP, the PHP security team has issued a warning about two critical vulnerabilities. Please check if your publicly available websites use PHP and prepare to apply the patch." Even Japan's Sanae Takaichi is your sysadmin now — patching PHP for you, telling you to patch your PHP. Very chaotic 24 hours. Extremely chaotic.
Meta's AI Earnings and the Question of AI Profitability
The good news is that the AI industry seems to be okay, because Meta did report earnings. I think that's why overall we're kind of holding on here — because the AI bubble concerns have been calmed down by SpaceX, by Meta, by all kinds of other smaller AI companies. The demand is big. The demand is still big. You have Mark Zuckerberg saying that Muse AI, which is Facebook's number one AI project right now, is the most prioritized AI project. He's saying it could generate higher revenue per user than Meta's family of apps. This is very positive.
Meta is the signal for the whole AI industry, because everyone else in AI — whether it's Nvidia, whether it's SpaceX — they don't actually have profitability. You have problems with OpenAI, you have problems with Anthropic. So the big question is: is AI profitable when you look at the end consumer? Not when you look at chip sales, because chip sales happen because people are investing in future revenue. The buildout is happening, yes. We know that chip manufacturers make a lot of money. They're very profitable right now. But the AI industry as a whole — there's a big question mark. Is it sustainable? Will all of these hundreds of billions invested in chips get a nice return on investment?
With Facebook and their Muse AI project, the AI industry is getting a bit of a confidence boost, because they are monetizing the end product of AI. They're not only doing infrastructure. Anyone can do infra nowadays. If you have any kind of data center and you try to make it AI, it's like Core Scientific — they started as a crypto miner and then transitioned into a data center for AI. That's a clear business case, but it still doesn't answer whether AI as a whole is sustainable, because it's just data center. With Facebook, it is addressing whether AI as a whole is sustainable.
Cybersecurity Stocks Performing Well
If you are in Bulmania, you know we've been speaking a lot about cybersecurity during the last few months — maybe the last four months or so. And cybersecurity right now is performing very well. CrowdStrike has been in a bull trend for quite some time and got a very nice pump with all of this chaos. It's been in a bull trend since April — a fantastic bull trend. Then Palo Alto — that one is in a bad trend, so it's better to be in CrowdStrike if you have to choose. We want to be in bullish assets. Zscaler — bull trend continuation to the upside. Avoid the bear trend ones. Palo Alto, avoid. But Zscaler is bullish. Cloudflare — very, very good, nice continuation. So stay in bull assets. There are many, many cybersecurity tickers that are freaking bullish. You see fantastic performance. If you are in Bulmania, you know it from Jason's market analysis. It's a very important industry, and as we see this rise of AI, it's going to get crazy with all of this.
Risk Management and the NASDAQ Trend Signal
Looking at what's happening currently with the stock market — the futures are going to open a bit lower than they closed yesterday. NASDAQ is also looking to open a bit lower. Watch out for the bear flip. Should NASDAQ flip bearish, then for us the AI bubble narrative is going to get very loud, and we really need to be managing risk heavily.
We're in a bull trend right now — we're bullish. In a bear trend, we're risk-off, and we get an early signal when it's time to be risk-off. How low can the stock market go in case it goes bear? Basically the 200 Moving Average. This is the long-term support. We often come back and touch it. That's the downside. Sometimes we don't go all the way there — for example, it went bear trend here but didn't go all the way down — but it's better to still be risk-off when it's bear and then become risk-on when it's bull, instead of praying and begging that it's going to go up again. We're not going to pray and beg. Should we go bear trend on NASDAQ, we need to be careful, and then should it go bull again, we're going to be bullish again. This way, the downside is capped and the upside is theoretically uncapped.
Sometimes there are fake-outs. You could argue that back in April there was a small fake-out. But it's fine, because there's just no way to know. When the charts look like that, there's no way to know. We're not fortune tellers. We don't have a crystal ball. For all we know, it just went bear trend and can very well go to the 200 Moving Average. No one knows the future, but we need to play the cards, protect capital, and then when it goes bull again, we can be bullish again. Ride to Valhalla. There's no way NASDAQ is going to go to Valhalla without going bull again. That's the plan.
This is why the recovery table matters, guys. If you drop 5%, you need 5.3% to recover. If you drop 10%, you need 11%. If you drop 50%, you need a 100% pump to recover. If you drop 80%, you need a 400% pump to recover. So why is this so important? Losing money in the market is quite expensive. You lose 20% — to recover, you need a 25% pump. You lose 30% — to recover, you need 42%. That's why we play the market in a way where the downside is capped and the upside is theoretically uncapped.
Bitcoin's Current Position
In terms of Bitcoin, let's see how the week closes. We're far away from the bear. Anything that happens here is mega bullish anyway. The mega bullish scenario is if we close above the May high. Should we not do it, we could go into the 70s — 79, 77. It's just going to take longer. That's the problem. It's going to take longer. Bouncing here would be ideal. It would be a sign of strength. Should we go down here, it could be more weeks until recovery — maybe until the midterms, as one scenario. At the end, we don't have a crystal ball. We just follow the trend, and the trend is bullish.
In my humble opinion, the time to be bear was last October. This October is the time to be bullish. And at the end of the day, you look at the chart — in September we were at $74K. The trend is bullish. Imagine we go up like this and then pull back. The pleb is going to be very depressed, annoyed, and frustrated that the markets are a scam. Exactly like we saw before — pump, a bit of retrace. Classic, classic. So we execute. We have clear strategies, clear rules. That's also why in Bulmania the mechanical rules are so nice — they give you clear strategies, clear rules, no matter what happens. We act. We don't get emotional.
Nuclear Fusion Startup Claims Pathway to Producing Gold
Turning the page — gold now has its own quantum-level FUD, which is that potentially you can now make gold very soon in a lab. This is nuclear fusion. Here's what one company is saying:
Nuclear Fusion Startup Presenter: "Over the last four years, we've been quietly building the foundational technologies for fusion in downtown San Francisco. And now we're bringing it all together in our first reactor, which we're making available to our first partners in 2027 for medical isotope production and materials qualification. First, we melt lithium and evaporate it onto a solid plate. This layer of lithium can be saturated with hydrogen isotopes and used as a target. Then we ionize deuterium and accelerate those ions through an electric field into the target, creating fusion. Using this simple architecture, we can scale at an unprecedented rate, doubling the fusion power density that we get every month over the next year. We chose this architecture because it works. In the 1980s, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Lab operated a similar reactor for over 25,000 hours at high fusion power density. Why revisit this? Because demand for radiopharmaceuticals has gone exponential, with the most successful treatments serving tens of thousands of patients per year. Our first generation of commercial reactors will transform fusion from an experiment to an industry, developing critical supply chains and allowing us to test the materials necessary for operation of fusion power plants. And that's just the start. Fertilizers to feed half of humanity, semiconductors, and most of our modern medicines came from the ability to design molecules. And now we're going a step further, kicking off a revolution in scalable transmutation. Our recent experiments have shown production of rare medical isotopes, tritium to power fusion reactors, and even validated our scalable pathway for co-production of electricity and gold. This is nuclear fusion for medicine, for materials, and for energy."
So basically what he's saying is they're going to make gold. He spoke about nuclear fusion — fantastic. But as he said at the end: last week they enriched isotopes in the world's most powerful plasma centrifuge, beating the Soviet record that stood for 40 years — basically turning mercury into real, stable gold. Real stable gold. Now they're building a fusion reactor in San Francisco to achieve record power density.
What I'm reading here, guys, is that gold is potentially singing its last song. This is going to be an exponential development. Currently the progress has been slow during the last few years — there have been reactors that were able to create gold particles for like one nanosecond and then they disappear, and it's been very expensive. But with AI knowledge, with AI recursive learning, these guys are almost there. It's going to go faster and faster.
There is no quantum protection for gold. This is a quantum-level threat to gold — like what we have with quantum and Bitcoin, where some new tech development can change the scarcity of Bitcoin. In Bitcoin, yes, it's going to be super hard to make it quantum-proof. The progress is very slow. There are many hard decisions. But Bitcoin is still software that can be upgraded and protected. Gold — how are you going to protect gold? You cannot protect gold.
Also, you have asteroids. Elon Musk with his little rocket, popping off to mine asteroids for gold. It's going to go very fast. We are now at the beginning of exponential growth in intelligence, in knowledge, and it's obviously going to happen very, very fast. Just look at what's happening now with cybersecurity — everything is getting wrecked so fast in ways that no one could have imagined just a year ago. If you extrapolate this growth, it's going to get quite intense. And crypto we can protect. Gold — what are you going to protect?
Chamath Palihapitiya Says Bitcoin Will Eventually Go to Zero
Now, Chamath Palihapitiya has a different opinion. Many people got very wrecked in SPACs — you guys remember the SPAC era. Now he's saying Bitcoin is going to get hacked and go to zero. Listen to this exchange:
Interviewer: All right. So I'll kick it off. OpenAI solves 722 math problems — none of them reported encryption. I'm assuming that encryption was to a significant degree correct if it was pointed in that direction. What's your view on crypto, given the meteoric rise of super intelligence here? Are we safe or are we not?
Chamath Palihapitiya: I think it's capped. I think that traditional crypto lacks the fungibility to have all forms of buyers. The buying pool is really retail, then institutionals, and then central banks — and retail lacks the fungibility to be owned by central banks. So it's capped from that perspective. Then it's capped because there are enough leaks around who owns what that now create security risks. I think France is the best example, where I think the French government forced publication of who owned what crypto assets and you had just a complete flurry of kidnappings and all kinds of really bad things. And then the third is around AI — where if you believe that recursive self-improvement is pointed towards cryptographic hacks, the most obvious thing to point it to would be Satoshi's wallet, to break SHA-256, and just drain the wallet, then go short, and then tell people that you did it. So you'd make the money twice. All those things I think are realistic reasons why it's capped and there's an upper bound. And so it's incumbent on these efforts to migrate to quantum-secure, quantum-resistant cryptographic mechanisms — which, as you can see in the Bitcoin community, is basically impossible, because it's a bunch of people that can't even agree on where to meet, let alone what time the meeting starts. So I think crypto's a bit lost in the woods here.
Interviewer: Do you think Bitcoin is cooked?
Chamath Palihapitiya: I just think it's capped, and then I think eventually it gets hacked and then it goes to zero.
Interviewer: Do you own Bitcoin? Are you willing to say?
Chamath Palihapitiya: Through a company called Digital Currency Group. So I had this very long-term investment in Bitcoin.
Big mistake. Never say Bitcoin is going to go to zero. It has never played out well for anyone. But let's go through some of the things he said. Now that Bitcoin is a bit sideways for two weeks, these arguments feel heavy. Whenever Bitcoin pumps and has a nice green candle — like we had here during three weeks — you understand that these arguments start looking very weak. So number one: show me the chart, I'll tell you the news. He does not publish when candles are going up, only when going down. This is very important. If the candle is up, the same guy Chamath — what will he be saying? He's going to be saying all the other stuff. As soon as you have a bit of down consolidation, now everyone is smart with the bear takes.
The pundits — the non-professionals in the space who don't trade crypto all the time — it's very interesting that when things are green, they're bullish. They find ways to be bullish, because there's always a reason to be bullish. When the candle is red, the pundit is going to be bearish. The candle creates the news. You understand?
Now, in terms of the quantum argument — there he's correct. Bitcoin needs to become quantum-resistant ASAP. I'm the number one person to say that. We've been one of the earliest people to say it in crypto — that Bitcoin needs to focus on quantum. It's not FUD. Adam Back has been saying it's FUD. It's not FUD. It's very important. It's not FUD.
What else did he say — privacy? That's also a big thing. That's why ETFs have become big. You don't want to be holding your private key if you're in France, guys. You need to be very careful.
AI Credit Default Swaps and Systemic Risk
Looking at the FUD from Matt Levine on Bloomberg — it's actually interesting. You do have more and more confirmations that the revenue in AI is real, but the market is still a bit concerned because credit default swaps — basically insurance for these companies not going bankrupt — that insurance is getting more and more expensive.
Companies are borrowing enormous sums to build AI data centers. Those loans get repaid only if companies can generate massive, sustained revenue from renting the chips and capacity. That's the big question. And that's why Meta's confident report with Muse AI is a good sign — because there is a use case for AI that can pay for all of this. But still, it's a risk. We don't know if they'll be able to pay. What's going to happen?
The risk is systematic. If one tenant fails, the data center owner can re-lease to someone else. If the whole boom underdelivers, almost every data center loan is in trouble all at once. Everyone is already long this risk through stocks, private credit, bonds, insurance performance, pensions. So when investors want insurance via credit default swaps, the natural sellers are also long the same risk. They charge a lot, or they simply will not sell. Result: CDS volumes and spreads on AI-linked names have exploded. Weekly trading in credit default swaps on Oracle, SpaceX, Alphabet, Amazon, and others jumped from under $2 billion in July to more than $9 billion in September.
So there is a concern rising. It's going to be interesting to see how this evolves as we get more data about actual monetization from consumer AI — such as Muse — because theoretically this should calm all these concerns and the demand for insurance should go down once you have real money coming in from people paying for AI. And then there's also the question of how good these data centers actually are. AI may have a lot of real demand, but at the same time — is it a good data center? Is it a good GPU? Did they invest in a good way? Which GPU did they put in? What's happening with power? What's the price of electricity? These are all separate questions. There are many ways to invest in a data center. So that is the risk in the overall stock market — and of course also a risk for crypto, because should the stock market fall, crypto is going to be taken with it.
All of this is theory. All of this is infotainment. We look at the chart, and the charts for S&P are bullish.
Altcoin Strategy: Finding Bull Trend Assets
In terms of Bitcoin, we're far away from the bear. The mega bullish scenario is closing above the May high. Should we not do it, we could go into the 70s. It's just going to take longer.
On altcoins — can you check Pengu? Pengu is now weak. It is in bull trend, but look how weak it is. When this happens, stop losses get hit, and we're out of the trade. When do we get back into Pengu? Number one — you don't have to get back into Pengu. That's another important thing. There are many other charts that look better, whether it's Celestia, whether it's others. You want to be in strong charts. Pengu is going to look strong again when we're above the blue line.
Sometimes it goes bullish and then collapses. It can happen. We don't have a crystal ball. Sometimes it goes bull and then all kinds of news happen — people get concerned, and with Abstract shutting down, for example — and then the stop loss gets hit. You lose a small percent of your portfolio. Small, small percent. You respect the stop loss. That's number one. Number two, you either enter back when we go above that level, or there is likely other stuff that is more bullish.
For example, Monero has been doing very well. We've been thinking about rotation from Zcash to Monero — we discussed this on Monday in the Bulmania stream. Monero is very bullish. Monero went to a new cycle high. Zcash is struggling. It is in a bearish trend. We don't hold bear assets. Even if we love Zcash, I don't want to be in a bear asset, because technically this could go lower. It can revisit previous levels and continue the bull market. But for us, what's the point? When you have a privacy coin — Monero — with the same privacy, the same narrative, everything, but it's in a bull trend and going to new highs? This week we discussed this already on Monday, and it's already 10% up since then, and 33% since the bull flip.
How do you choose runners among hundreds of cryptos? What I like is when there is not too much resistance. It's a new bull trend and there's not too much resistance ahead. For example, if you can get above a certain level and the next resistance is way, way up — that's what you want. Look at bull trend, look at whether there's not too much resistance, and then you have good risk-reward.
But at the end of the day, currently you don't even need a runner. If you are bullish in a bull trend and bearish in a bear trend, you don't even have to go to all-time highs. That's the best thing. The risk-reward is so nice in these assets that have fallen so much — for them just to go back to a big resistance level is already 150%. And then you can already take profit if you want. You don't have to ride it all the way back. You can leave a bit and ride all the way, but there's no need. You can just ride it back to the first major resistance. All of the bag holders who held from the top need a full recovery. You don't need a full recovery. You can ride it just to the support-turned-resistance. To go to one of these levels is almost a 10x, and it's not even all-time high. That's the best thing — it's not even all-time high.
Vibe Coding Is Not a Path to Wealth Without an Audience
Ivan, what are your top two ideas for something cool to vibe code? I don't think vibe coding is going to save you. People think, "Oh, I just need to vibe code something and I will be rich." Anyone can vibe code. A monkey can vibe code nowadays. Anyone can vibe code.
You need to figure out — if you make something, how are people going to use it? How are they going to know about it? No one cares about your app. You make some vibe code, no one cares. I can see you vibe coded it. I can see it took you like a day. Don't worry about vibe coding. It's too easy. You need to do the hard stuff. For example — can you have a following? Can you have a community? Because if you have a community, someone is going to check it. Someone's going to take a look. That's the hard thing. That's an asset. What kind of assets do you have? Having a closed subscription is not an asset. Anyone has it. Anyone can build it.
If you have a following, some kind of marketing channel — because that's hard — then you can think about vibe coding something. Because then if you can do something where someone sees it and it has some value, okay. But vibe coding on its own — there's no value in that. You understand what you vibe code? There's no value in that.
Also, if you are not an engineer and you're just vibe coding, you're going to make your app a big security problem. You don't know how the back end works. You don't know how keys should be stored. You have no clue. If you are not an engineer, whatever you vibe code is also a big fat security problem. You need to tell AI how to do the back end — which routes should be public, which should not be public, what are the permissions, what is the auth. So yeah, vibe coding is a waste of time if no one knows you. It is what it is.
If someone knows you, okay, then you can do something that's needed. The number one problem now is attention. There is an infinite number of apps on the App Store. There's an infinite number of songs with AI. There's an infinite number of AI videos. There's an infinite number of AI apps someone coded. Who is going to care about what you just put out? If you have some kind of community, they're going to care. And maybe it's good. But you need to understand the problem first.
Just as an example — we were using an external course platform which cost us money and had bugs. We just used AI to build our own course platform in Bulmania. It's very nice. It loads fast. It has Discord login integrated. We can update your Discord badge when you pass the course, so I know who has done the course and who hasn't. When someone asks a question, I can see whether they've done the course or not. That was the requirement. The actual building of it — AI is so good nowadays it can build it in basically one minute. But the thinking behind it — what does it need to do, how does it need to load, how does it integrate with Discord, how does it sync status — that's the work. That's the requirement. Once you have the requirement, you give it to AI and one minute later it's done.
So yeah, vibe coding — there's no value in the code itself. The value is in the requirement, the audience, and the problem you're solving. Anyone can vibe code. You understand? Anyone can vibe code.
Do I hold any leverage trades? Currently I have no leverage. We're just in the early stages of the bull market. The recovery in some of these coins is going to be fantastic. For example, if TIA returns to some kind of level — fantastic. In this early stage, you don't need leverage. Just going back to previous levels is almost 200% in some of these assets. With leverage, number one, you need it in case you don't have capital and want to trade with more than you have. I don't really have that issue. And just looking at spot — the altcoins that are now going bull trend, the recovery is fantastic. No leverage needed.