The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 282, titled:
The Astrology of Bitcoin
With Chris Brennan and guest Robert Weinstein
Episode originally released on December 6, 2020
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Andrea Johnson
Transcription released September 9, 2021
Copyright © 2021 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode, I’m gonna be talking with astrologer Robert Weinstein about the astrology of Bitcoin. Today is Saturday, December 5, 2020, starting at 2:42 PM in Denver, Colorado, and this is the 282nd episode of the show. So hey, Robert, thanks for joining me.
ROBERT WEINSTEIN: Oh, it’s an honor to be here, Chris. Thanks for inviting me.
CB: Yeah, this is an episode that I’ve been wanting to do for a while. We first started talking about it last summer. You had written an article titled “The Astrology of Bitcoin” last year for The Mountain Astrologer magazine that was really good, and so I knew you would be a good person for this topic for a while. But then part of the genesis of it was that just a few days ago, at the end of November, there was a major lunar eclipse that took place in Sagittarius, and that day Bitcoin reached an all-time–a new, all-time high of I think over $19,000 per Bitcoin or something like that, right?
RW: Correct. Yes, the previous all-time high was $19.5K and it just barely broke above that. I think it went up to $19.7K or $19.8K for a few hours.
CB: Yeah, so that got me thinking again about this topic that some astrologers get really into and get really excited about, but I’ve never had any extensive coverage on, on the podcast so far. But just what is Bitcoin? And can astrology be used in order to study Bitcoin, and especially to study fluctuations in the price of Bitcoin, like with that significant correlation that just occurred at the end of November? And I know you’re somebody that has been studying Bitcoin for a while and part of the thesis of your article in The Mountain Astrologer magazine was that, indeed, you can study price fluctuations in Bitcoin through astrology as an additional means of doing that.
So that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. I want to introduce you, then introduce Bitcoin, and talk a little bit about that too for people not familiar with it, and then get into some of the basics of it, and then maybe some correlations you’ve seen since you’ve been studying it over the past several years show how it works, and then perhaps talk a little bit about the future. Does that sound good to you?
RW: Sounds good.
CB: All right, cool. You’ve been studying astrology for I think over 20 years now, and your background is primarily in Chinese medicine and medical astrology, in addition to your work in financial astrology, right?
RW: Yeah, that’s correct. Yes, I studied acupuncture here in Seattle from 1998 to 2002. And I’ve been a licensed acupuncturist since 2003, a Chinese medicine practitioner and a Qigong instructor, and was really into just kind of general astrology, Jungian psychological astrology, more of the modern evolutionary astrology for many years. And then I started getting interested in medical astrology as well because it was a natural dovetail with my work in Chinese medicine, but I started noticing financial correlations in the stock market.
I read a great interview with the noted financial astrologer Ray Merriman in The Mountain Astrologer. I didn’t know much about financial astrology before that, and I started reading more about financial astrology and became very interested in it. And then I found that there was actually a lot of crossover with medical astrology and financial astrology. It doesn’t necessarily seem like there would be a crossover, but really there’s a lot of similarities in terms of the diagnosis and kind of prognostication or prognosis. You’re really diagnosing energy patterns in both cases. And so, I started getting more into financial astrology and looking into that.
CB: Nice. The previous episode I did on financial astrology was with Ray Merriman, in Episode 76 of The Astrology Podcast. And that’s an interesting thing because it’s kind of like this year, one of the positive out of many negative things that have happened as a result of the pandemic is that it’s been a unique and interesting opportunity to apply the astrology, because you have a somewhat objective data set to apply it to as a standard to see if the astrology is actually correlating with anything.
And so, I’ve shared on the forecast episodes, for example, some of these correlations between the three Jupiter-Pluto conjunctions this year and the three sort of waves of COVID in the United States over the past several months and how impressively that’s lined up. So that’s been interesting to me to have something objective to compare the astrology to, to demonstrate that the correlations are there.
And financial astrology is another one of those areas where it’s interesting to me because you have an objective data set to compare it to, and you can also sometimes make predictions and basically either you’re right or you’re wrong. So it’s much different than just a psychological application of astrology, right?
RW: Totally. Yeah, and that’s the thing that got me really interested in financial astrology. I mean, when I first got into astrology, I was on kind of the New Age spiritual trip and I wanted to learn more about self-realization through astrology, and I did that for many years and I still do that and astrology is great for that. But as I’ve gotten a little older, I became more interested in the practical applications of astrology, using it to help people who are going through medical problems and to understand our constitutional tendencies for health and wellness and illness and disease, which I think medical astrology can be very profound for; and the practical application of that can be very profound. And with financial astrology, it’s almost as close to a mathematical proof really that we’re ever going to get for astrology.
And while you and I may not really be that concerned with trying to convince the skeptics–I mean, we know that astrology works and we know the power of it, we also maybe know its limitations–but it’s always great to have some objective data set that matches the astrological correlations because I think that that’s very helpful for astrology as a profession.
And so, I find some astrologers tend to ‘poo-poo’ financial astrology, and in some corners it may be considered a black sheep of the family because it’s being used for material gain in some way perhaps and not for some higher spiritual purpose. But I think financial astrology can really convert people who otherwise wouldn’t be open to astrology, and in that way I think it’s very helpful for astrology as a profession.
CB: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So for those watching the video version, here’s just an example of that. For example, this diagram that Kyle from ArchetypalExplorer.com put together for me using his astrology software is just showing, on the bottom-half, the three peaks of the three exact Jupiter-Pluto conjunctions this year–which happened in early April, late July, and mid-November–and just showing how well that sort of lines up with the three major bumps or major waves in COVID, the third of which we’re experiencing right now, here in late November and early December.
So you’ve got some diagrams and some graphs sort of similar to that just in terms of financial things like Bitcoin. And the value of Bitcoin fluctuates similarly and goes up and down. And you can sort of follow that or plot that on a graph and sometimes use that or overlay that with the astrology in order to track certain movements, upwards or downwards, at different points in time essentially, right?
RW: Yeah, it’s pretty amazing really. It’s traditionally called the ‘price action’, right? So you can study the astrological correlations to the price action and that’s something that I’ve been doing very closely for the past three-and-a-half years, as well as doing some back-testing–what we call back-testing–and looking back at the aspects and correlating them to the price action. And what we found is that you can see the planetary energies actually play out in the price charts of, in this case, Bitcoin, the asset.
The thing that’s interesting about Bitcoin, I mean, there’s a lot of financial astrologers doing great work for stocks and commodities and gold. Stock markets are very complex. You’re talking about thousands of different companies and corporations all over the world that are influenced by so many different influences. And it’s very hard to predict the stock market, some financial astrologers are better than others at it.
But with Bitcoin, we have kind of a unique opportunity because Bitcoin is the dominant force in the cryptocurrency markets, so it’s one asset that really dominates the market in this case; it dominates the market capitalization. And in fact, because it’s the very first cryptocurrency, its chart kind of correlates in some ways not only just to the Bitcoin price action, but to the price action of the entire cryptocurrency market.
CB: Interesting. Okay, so it’s like an emerging whole market, the broader idea of not just Bitcoin, but other similar cryptocurrencies as well. And we’ll get into explaining for those that aren’t familiar what that means here shortly.
RW: It’s amazing. I mean, there’s hundreds of cryptocurrencies that are being traded everyday on tens of different international exchanges, billions of dollars are exchanged every day in the trading of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
CB: Sure. So following let’s say financial astrology and following the stock market and attempting to predict fluctuations in that is something that astrologers have been doing for a long time now. And there’s astrologers like Ray Merriman or a number of other financial astrologers that specialize in that, and that’s a whole sort of field unto itself. But this is kind of a somewhat new thing, following Bitcoin in particular, as a new form of currency and something that carries monetary value.
RW: Yeah, and that’s one of the things that’s so interesting and I talk about this a lot. Bringing that ancient art of astrology to the most cutting-edge financial technology is, I find, something very interesting and very fun actually doing that. And so, it just goes to the timeless nature of astrology really. I mean, this ancient art still has relevance today to help us understand financial markets of many different types, including cryptocurrencies.
And one thing that I found is that not only astrology can help us understand Bitcoin better–by looking at the natal chart and by looking at the transits and the progressions–but I found personally that Bitcoin has taught me more about astrology perhaps than any book or teacher because you can really see the price action: how it corresponds to the planetary aspects, and the ingresses, and the Full Moons, and Mercury retrogrades.
Robert Hand once said you’ll never learn astrology from a book. He said you don’t know astrology until you’ve felt the planets in your bones, through the transits to your own chart and others. And when you’re in financial markets, let me tell you, you can feel the aspects; if you get it wrong, you lose money and it hurts. But even if you’re not trading, just watching how it plays out, it’s a fascinating study, and I think it’s a good way for people to learn astrology in some ways for very various different reasons. Number one, there is a financial reward if you get it right, but also because of that very clear feedback. As they say, the numbers don’t lie.
CB: Yeah, and I appreciate in your article about this in The Mountain Astrologer a year ago, you were very open about talking about your successes in predicting that you would see some astrological alignment coming up and how it connected to the chart for Bitcoin, and you would have an expectation about whether that indicated a fluctuation going up or down and make a prediction about that in your newsletters. And you were very open about saying sometimes when you got certain ones right, but also sometimes when you got certain ones wrong and then learning from that feedback and that having some investment in it and actually losing money or gaining money, helping to sharpen your skills as an astrologer.
RW: Yeah, when you have skin in the game, as they say, the stakes are a little bit higher. If we’re doing Jungian psychological astrology, there’s a lot more room for sort of error. Sometimes you’ll make guesses about someone’s character and a lot of times they’ll be right and sometimes they’ll be wrong or you make predictions. But in financial astrology, certainly the margin of error is a little bit less and that actually makes it a sharper tool for learning astrology, if that makes any sense.
CB: Yeah. Well, and it’s one of the criticisms that skeptics sometimes have about astrology. They’ll say that with psychological astrology or character-based astrology that astrological predictions or statements are so broad that they can be applied to anybody, and everybody just thinks that they work due to confirmation bias. But this is one area where that is definitely not the case, where either you’re right or you’re wrong. And so, just a circle back, I wanted to share…
RW: It will show you your confirmation bias.
CB: Yeah, if you have confirmation bias. So here’s the image, for those watching the video version, of just the planetary alignments calendar that we put out I think back in October. Well, we released it actually a year ago, but this is the graphic that I showed in October, just showing on the 30th of November that lunar eclipse that occurred at the very end of the month. And then of course that day, we then get The New York Times article titled, “Bitcoin Hits New Record, This Time With Less Talk of a Bubble.”
RW: Yes.
CB: And it just shows that price fluctuation in the last peak that occurred, what was it? In late 2017? In December of 2017?
RW: December of 2017. I think we have a graphic for that too. There was a lot going on in December of 2017. And there’s also a lot going on astrologically, as we know, both just in the general mundane astrological aspects of this December, as well as in the Bitcoin chart as well. We found that Bitcoin really likes Full Moons in general and it can like eclipses, and we found that North Node eclipses tend to be quite favorable in general for Bitcoin and other markets. Now South Node eclipses are a little bit different. We have to be much more careful there, so we really discriminate on the basis of which node is being activated in the eclipse. But there’s two other major things going on in the Bitcoin chart aside from the eclipse, and one is that Bitcoin is about to have its 12-year cycle Jupiter return, so I think that that’s also a major factor in this new all-time high.
CB: Yeah, so let’s back up and let’s introduce this to our audience and first talk about what is Bitcoin and when it originated. So take us back, let’s say, 12 years. First, let’s define what is Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency.
RW: Well, Bitcoin is essentially digital money. And as I’ve spoken to you before about Uranus in Taurus being a kind of a technological revolution in finance and potentially disruptive a force in how we think about money, many people think it is the next iteration of money. If we look back historically of course money started as shells and trinkets and so forth and evolved into silver and gold coinage, which later in the more modern times became the paper money that was backed by gold.
And then we got rid of the gold standard. It became backed by the full faith and credit of the government, and then of course we had credit cards and money started to become digital. So Bitcoin is really the next iteration of money as just pure digital, existing on the internet realm, and it could become the first global internet money that transcends national boundaries, national currencies, and so forth and so on.
CB: Okay, it’s like a digital currency basically that is entirely based on the value that’s sort of attributed to it. It’s not something that exists out there like a physical thing–like let’s say gold or a diamond or something like that–but instead, it’s a purely digital currency.
RW: Well, this is a fascinating subject, Chris. This is such a complex subject about what money is, what value is, right? And what Bitcoin is, is actually a hotly-debated subject, to be honest. There’s several different opinions on what Bitcoin is, so that’s a complex subject, I just want to say that.
CB: Okay.
RW: Some people say cryptocurrencies are basically a new asset class, right? So kind of like stocks and commodities, but they’re their own thing. The question of what gives Bitcoin value is a very good point, Chris, and a lot of people have dismissed Bitcoin in the past because they say, “Well, what is it? It’s not backed by anything. It exists on the internet. It’s based on faith alone.”
And what I’ve always told people is, I mean, gold has no intrinsic value of its own either. It’s a shiny, pretty metal. Of course, it does have some industrial uses, but that’s not really what gives it its value. What gives the US dollar its value is basically the full faith and credit of the United States government. So all money, all value is based on a collective belief system, and so, in that way, Bitcoin is not any different from the US dollar or gold.
And this is just my own personal opinion of course. I think that that’s a big confusing issue for many people to kind of wrap their heads around because all units of value. What’s the difference between a one dollar bill and a hundred dollar bill essentially? They’re both exactly the same piece of paper; it’s only an idea that creates the difference. That being said, we’ll all take the hundred dollar bill over the one dollar bill and that’s because we’re all invested in that consensus reality.
And so, Bitcoin is really no different than that. And that’s what I think people have really been missing over the years, which is that it’s just a consensus reality. What gives Bitcoin value is that people have faith in it; I mean, there are some concrete things that give it value. People like the fact that it’s not controlled by a bank or a corporation. People like the fact that it’s based on a hardcore mathematical software protocol that’s never been hacked by the top hackers in the world, so it does have value based on the mathematical cryptography of Bitcoin. And also, the energy that’s used to create it also gives it a certain amount of value.
And so, essentially, one of the arguments for Bitcoin is that it’s–what’s the word that we’d look for here? It is a shared unit of value, it’s a store of value, so different from a currency, which is more a medium. A currency is a unit of exchange and a store of value. Bitcoin so far really isn’t that much of a unit of exchange. It’s a little too clumsy to be used as a payment system right now. Now that may change in the future, but essentially it’s being used more like a ‘Digital Gold 2.0’. The main argument for Bitcoin right now is it’s more like a ‘Gold 2.0’ for the modern world. I hope that that makes sense.
CB: I think scarcity is another element because there’s only a certain number of Bitcoins that will ever exist in the world, and maybe we can get into why that is. I wanted to mention really quickly, there was a talk that I was watching that was recommended to me by my editor–who I want to give a shout-out to, Stephen Koppock, who is into Bitcoin–by Andreas Antonopoulos.
RW: Oh, yeah.
CB: He was talking about how money is speech. And that was like part of the central thesis of his talk is that all money is speech and that it conveys value that is attributed to it, but it also communicates or transfers something between individuals. And that really made me think of the ancient associations–the mercantile associations–with the planet Mercury that run through the astrological tradition, which is something you can go back and read in Ptolemy or especially in Vettius Valens, just the associations of money, at least with commerce and things, with Mercury, as well as speech. But maybe that’s way too philosophical and abstract of a route for us to go down right now. Why don’t we try to frame this by going back to the history, to the founding of this? Bitcoin was introduced in the year 2008 and 2009, correct?
RW: Yes. I mean, Bitcoin, the very first Bitcoin, was created in January–I believe it was January 3, 2009.
CB: And so, that’s what’s interesting, and this is one of the reasons why astrologers get interested and excited about this. Because it’s a digital thing that was created on January 3, and we know when the first Bitcoin was created, that means we kind of have a birth chart for Bitcoin basically, right?
RW: Well, as you had mentioned earlier when we talked, there are several possible charts for Bitcoin. Of course, there was the white paper that was a few months before that which is kind of putting the concept of Bitcoin out into the world; we can think of that maybe more as like the conception perhaps. But the actual birth, I think the most commonly-accepted chart for Bitcoin is the ‘Genesis Block’, what’s known as the ‘Genesis Block of Bitcoin’, and that was the first Bitcoin ever created on the software protocol of the blockchain, and that was timestamped, luckily for astrologers, for 6:15 PM Greenwich Mean Time. So we have an exact date and time for Bitcoin, for the Bitcoin chart, what we don’t have is a known location. And there are several possible ideas about where the location is, but we don’t know for sure.
CB: And this is partially because the founder of Bitcoin is anonymous and decided to put this out into the world anonymously. And so, some of the origins, both of their background, whoever that is, as well as some of the origins of Bitcoin, although we can see traces of it, are a bit mysterious. But that’s one of the limitations–nobody knows ultimately where the founder of Bitcoin was located when they mined or created the first Bitcoin. We just know the time and the date, which was January 3, 2009 at 6:15 PM Greenwich Mean Time, basically.
RW: Yeah, I mean, you can’t make this stuff up. I mean, it’s really a great mystery novel. One of the great mysteries of the 21st century is who created Bitcoin. He’s known only by the pseudonym ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’, and he’s widely considered to be an expert in cryptography. And so, he covered all of his tracks that he ever left in any type of emails or internet activity or transactions of any kind, and essentially nobody’s ever been able to figure out who he was, or some people believe it may have been a group of people.
CB: Right. There were like a few steps along the way that are sort of documented, where they were using this pseudonym, where they first published. Well, the first thing they did was they registered the Bitcoin.org website, and the date for that that I found was August 18, 2008. I didn’t check the time, so this is not a timed chart, and I also don’t know the location. What I thought was interesting was I remember the set of eclipses that were happening that summer, where there was a solar eclipse in Leo and then there was a lunar eclipse in Aquarius, which would have been just a couple of days before the founding of this website. So they must have been starting to get it together at this point and they registered the Bitcoin.org website on August 18, 2008.
Then a few months later, they published that paper which outlined basically the concept of Bitcoin and the sort of revolutionary concept underlying the technology, and that paper was published on October 31, 2008. What was the main thing in terms of outlining the technology? And what is the ‘blockchain’? How can we explain that to people?
RW: I’ll do my best, Chris.
CB: Okay.
RW: I’m certainly not an expert. I don’t consider myself an expert on the blockchain technology. I mean, the blockchain is essentially a digitized ledger system. The big innovation was the decentralized nature of it, that it’s run on multiple computer systems around the world and there’s no one controlling entity, so that’s known as a decentralized structure. Otherwise, it’s essentially just a distributed ledger software program, not that different from an Excel spreadsheet. The really big innovation was the decentralized nature of it and having the miners sort of solve these complex cryptographic problems that would give permission on the transaction system and they get rewarded in Bitcoin.
CB: Right, so it’s a currency, but unlike other currencies, it’s not controlled by a government. So it’s completely decentralized and not under the control of any one person, that’s part of the innovation.
RW: Yes, not under the control of any one entity: a corporation, bank. There’s many different mining operations and none of them has any majority control over the system. So the blockchain itself is an immutable ledger. Every transaction that’s ever been recorded is on the blockchain–you can see it on the blockchain–so that was one of the technological innovations that Satoshi Nakamoto made.
Blockchains are being used by companies and corporations now as well, but it’s different because those are centralized. They are controlled by a single entity and that’s very different. It’s a very important point and that’s very different from what Bitcoin is and most of the other cryptocurrencies are because of the decentralized and distributed ledger system, and that makes them invulnerable to a hacking attack. The only thing that could really crash Bitcoin was if one entity tried to take 51% control over the mining process, and at this point, with Bitcoin in the 19,000s, that would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, so it’s pretty much beyond the reach of anybody except the biggest governments in the world.
CB: Okay, so the paper was published in late October and then eventually this anonymous founder, Satoshi, created his system and created in mind, so to speak, the first Bitcoin on January 3, 2009. And so, there’s different charts that astrologers use based on different speculations.
RW: It’s important to mention that one of those innovations of the blockchain was to enable peer-to-peer transmission of value by completely sidestepping the global financial system.
CB: Right, because this was also coming out of the global financial collapse that had just happened in the banking system, that just happened in 2008 and leading into 2009, and Satoshi embedded a message in the first Bitcoin creation that referred to some of those events.
RW: Yes, and another one of his ideas was to create an inflation-proof store of value that couldn’t be manipulated by central banks. And that’s a very important concept because what we’re seeing right now with central banks around the world is this idea of quantitative easing, which is ‘magical’ money thinking and really manipulating currencies. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it can create lots of different inflationary problems in the future. And Bitcoin is one of the things it’s supposed to prevent against; it’s supposed to be inflation-proof essentially because it does have that limited number; only 21 million Bitcoin will ever be created.
CB: Right, so it’s between now, and what, like 2140? There’s like a set time frame for how many Bitcoins will ever be created, and it’s something like 21 million, and already 18 million of them have been created.
RW: And every four years, the circulating supply gets reduced. Not the circulating supply, but the amount of new Bitcoin is reduced every four years, an event that’s known as a ‘miner reward halving’, and we just had one in May of 2020. And that’s another reason I think that we’re seeing these new, all-time high prices in Bitcoin; it’s because the amount of new Bitcoin being created is shrinking while the interest and demand in Bitcoin is slowly rising.
CB: Okay, and maybe we should talk about what mining is because that’s how Bitcoins are created. Because I was on Reddit in like 2009 and 2010 and it tended to be more tech-focused back then, so I sort of was aware of some of this and thought about making a computer to mine Bitcoin early on. And I bought and traded some of them, but was too broke at that time in my life to set up a major rig to mine a bunch of them.
But all you have to do is have a computer–a decently strong computer, like a gaming computer–that has a GPU and that can run mathematical processes. And what happens is you get the Bitcoin client and then you can run it, and if you run it for a certain amount of time, it has some complex mathematical sort of formulas that your computer can attempt to crack. And it will keep trying over and over again until, eventually, if it tries enough times, it will crack one of those codes. And if your computer successfully does that then you’ll get some Bitcoins as a result of that is like the short version of that. Is that more or less accurate, do you think?
RW: Yeah. I mean, people can’t do that on their own personal computers anymore because it requires too much computing power at this point.
CB: Right.
RW: You have to have supercomputing power. You actually have to have a very specialized mining rig. Yeah, it’s not DIY. It was back then when you were talking about it, but it’s not anymore. But your essential point is correct. The miners solve the cryptographic problem that allows the transactions to be anonymous and encrypted, and they compete against each other to solve those cryptography problems, and the first computer to solve it gets rewarded in Bitcoin.
CB: Yeah, so just to take it back to that time frame, that’s how it was originally, where anybody could download the program and could run it and try to mine Bitcoin just by having your computer run these numbers over and over again until eventually it gets one, ideally; although there’s people around the world doing the same thing, so everybody’s competing. But part of the process of that is the computer’s running those numbers. It’s also doing it in a distributed way to keep track of the ledger around the world. So they’re actually doing something that contributes to the overall functioning of the system and propagates it in a way, right?
RW: That’s exactly correct, yes.
CB: Okay, so you used to be able to do that if you just had a gaming PC, but then the Bitcoin codes that the computers had to crack kept getting increasingly more and more complex, right?
RW: That’s exactly what happened, yes, and takes more and more energy to do so. And that is one of the criticisms of Bitcoin is the energy usage component. By the way, people can do it on their home computer systems for certain other cryptocurrencies, I’m not sure exactly which ones right now. But there are other cryptocurrencies that you can still set up mining on your home computer system as long as you have a very sophisticated rig.
CB: Sure. Yeah, so it started out that way with just individual computers and then it became people had to have multiple computers. And now, it’s actually something where there’s entire warehouses out there in different countries where they have thousands of computers that are all running the Bitcoin mining programs at the same time, and they’re trying to mine Bitcoin, because now it’s become something really valuable. And so, there’s huge million-dollar investments or maybe even billion-dollar, I don’t know, investments trying to get more and more Bitcoins while it’s still possible, since there’s still three million left to mine or something like that.
RW: I believe that’s correct. Yes, that’s an accurate characterization of the mining situation.
CB: Okay. So initially, in let’s say 2009-2010, Bitcoin didn’t have any value, but people started trading it for different things. And I know one of the early trades was somebody traded like 10,000 Bitcoins or something for a couple of pizzas from a pizza place or something, right?
RW: That’s a very famous story, yeah. I mean, those Bitcoins would be worth in the billions of dollars now, so I’m sure that person is having some regret; that was a very expensive pizza dinner.
CB: Yeah, but it was also one of the ways that it started to contain actual value, just by people starting to use it to trade things.
RW: Yeah.
CB: And eventually, that built up and it started actually rising in value and going up and fluctuating to be worth a few dollars and then ten dollars, and then a hundred. And then eventually, the recent peak was, what did we say? $19,000 per Bitcoin?
RW: Just shy of $20,000, yeah. It really gained a cult following among tech nerds. And I know one of my friends said, “Yeah, that’s just a bunch of nerd money, you know,” and kind of laughed it off; this was years ago. But of course, the nerds usually do have their revenge, so nobody’s calling it ‘nerd money’ anymore. But it did originally start within the cypherpunk movement in the earlier part of the 21st century and did gain kind of a cult following among gamers and techies and so forth.
CB: Yeah, and I remember part of the appeal of Bitcoin early on was the anonymous nature of it. And so, some websites got set up, like the Silk Road website, in order to sell drugs and other illicit stuff and be able to use Bitcoin anonymously to basically have financial transactions. That’s an interesting story because I was just catching up and reviewing some of that recently, and it turns out that we have the a birth time and a birth chart for the founder of the Silk Road website, who eventually was arrested; and he was sentenced to like two lifetime sentences in prison, which is kind of a sad story.
RW: Yeah.
CB: But if anybody wanted to study that piece of the early history of Bitcoin that’s kind of an interesting side note about how it initially gained some value as a currency.
RW: Ross Ulbricht, I believe, is the founder of Silk Road. I could be wrong about the name, but I think that that’s him. And of course, Bitcoin did gain a notorious or a sort of infamous notoriety as being used for surreptitious, dark web activity, and I think that that was unfortunate really. And I think what held Bitcoin back for many years was that people associated it with Silk Road and with the dark web and underground drug deals and so forth like that. And that was back in the ‘Wild West’ days of Bitcoin, and I think it’s a very different thing today.
CB: Yeah, definitely.
RW: By the way, it’s an interesting point about the anonymity of it; it does allow anonymous transactions. So for example, if we wanted to do a transaction but we didn’t know each other, we could send each other Bitcoin and we would not have to know each other’s identity. However, if the FBI or the CIA wanted to find out about that transaction, it is on the blockchain, so an organization of law enforcement does have the means to figure out who did the transactions in most cases. So it is anonymous to a point, in that it does allow for anonymous peer-to-peer money transactions, but it’s not anonymous in the sense that nobody could ever figure out who the parties to the transaction were.
CB: Right, because technically that’s part of the blockchain, that all transactions that have ever occurred are actually technically public because they’re part of the entire system.
RW: Yes, and each transaction would have a signature for the wallet delivery for where the Bitcoin came from and where it went to. And some type of law enforcement agency with the means to figure that out could link the wallet to the person, unless the person went to extraordinary means to keep the wallet anonymous and that would require some specialized skill sets and knowledge that most people don’t have.
CB: Yeah.
RW: Eventually, you’d have to cash the Bitcoin out somewhere. And where do you do that? Somebody could give you cash for the Bitcoin and that would be an anonymous transaction too, but that requires a lot of trust, so there are ways to do it. There are other cryptocurrencies that are much more anonymous, like Monero, and some of the newer ones. Monero is probably the most well-known one. I think maybe Zcash is one of them, I could be wrong. But there’s a couple of cryptocurrencies that are really designed to be specifically anonymous, and those are of a much higher level of encryption and anonymity that even law enforcement can’t necessarily track down the transactions.
CB: Right. And so, Bitcoin wasn’t the first. There were other digital currencies and different ideas before Bitcoin, but it was one of the first ones, or the first one to solve, through introducing the blockchain technology, the issue of multiple payments coming through at the same time and how to avoid that or some specific issues.
RW: Oh, the ‘double-spending’ problem.
CB: Right.
RW: That’s the one of the problems that Bitcoin solved, right? And that has to do with how the blockchain is set up and how the mining system sets up. Because if any one of the miners tries to double-spend–basically, put the same Bitcoin in two different places–then all the other miners will reject the transaction, so that’s an important feature of the Bitcoin blockchain.
CB: Okay, so once Bitcoin then was launched there were a series of other cryptocurrencies that followed and used similar technology to imitate it or sometimes to try to improve upon what Bitcoin did. And now, there’s hundreds of those, right?
RW: There’s hundreds of them, yeah. ‘Smart contracts’ is the new technological breakthrough of cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum. And Chainlink is another one that I like a lot. It has a great inception chart, by the way, and that’s another cryptocurrency that we’ve been doing an astro-analysis on, and we really think that’s a promising project in smart contract technology.
Yeah, the smart contract is kind of the main competition, right? Bitcoin is basically trying to digitalize finance and financial transactions, and what smart contracts are trying to do is really digitalize almost all types of human commerce and commercial activity and transactions. So it could be real estate, could be legal contracts, could be very complex types of business deals and transactions and so forth like that, so it’s kind of the next iteration of cryptocurrencies.
I mean, cryptocurrencies, it’s kind of a misnomer in a way; I mean, they are based on cryptography. I think ‘digital assets’ in some ways is maybe a better term for them for the modern age. By the way, I could recommend a book by Chris Burniske–he’s written several books about cryptocurrency, investing and so forth–also, Nathaniel Popper, The New York Times journalist, has written a great book about Bitcoin–it’s a little out of date at this point–but those are two authors. Chris Burniske is considered to be one of the top experts on cryptocurrencies in the world from an investment and trading perspective.
As you mentioned, Andreas Antonopoulos is considered to be kind of a Bitcoin guru. Also, someone you can google on YouTube; he’s got some great talks about Bitcoin. So if some of your listeners and followers are interested in pursuing this subject deeper, I recommend listening to talks by Andreas Antonopoulos and reading books by those authors. Also Tom Lee of Fundstrat has been for many years a big proponent of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency investing as well.
CB: And I just remembered that we meant to make a statement at the beginning that neither of us are like financial advisors, so we’re not trying to give financial advice in this episode necessarily. What’s the best way to frame that?
RW: Yeah, I put that in our notes somewhere, I don’t have it in front of me, but essentially, neither me or Chris are financial advisors. And when we get into the more astrological aspects of this, I just want to say that any of the techniques that we’re using or talking about on this show, we’re not gonna take any responsibility or liability for any investment decisions or trading decisions that you might make based on this astrological information. Basically, we’re not giving any financial advice on this show today.
CB: Thank you. Okay, so let’s back it up. Sorry for the long detours. I’m just trying to ease in those of our audience who aren’t familiar or for whom this is a new topic into the whole thing. Let’s get into the chart of Bitcoin, and let’s finish that initial thing.
So we talked about this anonymous guy, Satoshi, starting the website over the summer after that eclipse and then eventually releasing the white paper that outlined the revolutionary math and innovations and technology underlying Bitcoin. And then he actually did it on January 3 of 2009 and basically created the first Bitcoin. We don’t have the location. You said there’s four or five possible locations that have been speculated for the location, right?
RW: Yes, that’s correct. When I got really interested in Bitcoin, which was in the summer of 2017, I kind of fell down the rabbit hole, as people say. And you’ll find that it’s just an enormously fascinating and complex subject and it’s very easy to get obsessed with, and I know I’m not the only one who became obsessed with it.
CB: An academic name Omari–I’m forgetting his last name–asked why some astrologers do get so into this, and I thought that was an interesting question. It seems like it’s partially because it’s something that has to do with a technology that’s very much about the future and that the full implications of it might not be fully clear now, but it could be something that changes the world in a major way. Is that part of why astrologers get so into this?
RW: Well, it’s not just astrologers who get obsessed with Bitcoin. So when we look at the Bitcoin chart, we see that Mars-Pluto-Sun stellium–which certainly would be obsessive, have an obsessive characteristic–so I think it’s kind of inherent in the nature of Bitcoin.
CB: That’s a good point.
RW: There’s some obsessive quality about it, that once you know about it and you start reading about it, it can easily become an obsession. As I mentioned to you earlier when we talked, there’s a huge following of Bitcoin around the world and especially on Twitter. There’s technical analysts, financial analysts such as myself, indeed, who follow every movement in the posting price charts, and astrological correlations in my case. And people really follow this thing very closely and are very obsessed with it: astrologers as well as non-astrologers, people in finance, people who are trading it. It’s fascinating to study it and to track it, and I think that does have to do with the qualities of the natal chart that you posted.
CB: Yeah, I’ll go ahead and describe this chart because we know for sure that the first Bitcoin was created on this day. So we know the planetary positions and the aspects are more or less correct, we’re just not entirely sure about the houses and the location.
RW: Oh, yeah, so to answer your question, my research indicates there’s about four or five people. It’s generally accepted that there’s about four or five people in the world who have the overlapping skill sets of software engineering and cryptographics to have created Bitcoin, Craig Wright is one of them. He’s from Australia, so some people use a Sydney, Australia chart. That’s pretty much been debunked. I mean, it’s kind of funny. Craig Wright is widely disliked in the cryptocurrency community, actually ‘despised’ would be a better word, so it would be very ironic if he was the creator of it. And then I know one of them was in Dublin; it was an Irishman.
The Genesis Block does have that snippet of information from the Financial Times of London imprinted in it, so we know he was an English speaker, probably either British or lived somewhere or originated somewhere within the Commonwealth of Great Britain, which could be many different countries, so it doesn’t really tell us the location, but Dublin is one, London is one, Tokyo. Because the pseudonym is Satoshi Nakamoto, people give some credence to the idea that the person could have been Japanese. So those are pretty much the top guesses for the location.
But in the forecast system that I use, I just don’t use an Ascendant or the houses because it’s really a guess. Rectification is not one of my personal strong suits as an astrologer, I haven’t really tried to rectify it, but maybe you and I could work on that, Chris. You’re probably better at it than I am.
CB: Yeah, it would be a fun project to attempt to rectify. It’s hard not knowing for sure that it could be anywhere in the world, and we’ll have to keep that in mind. I’ll set this for London. I’m getting a sense that that’s the most commonly-used one, even though it’s entirely speculative. But just to remind people, since we don’t know, you should be really careful.
And that’s a tricky thing. One of the biggest hurdles I’ve ever had in getting into financial astrology is you often don’t know the date or time or sometimes location for certain inception charts, which is really crucial for astrology. It’s also one of the issues that’s frustrating about the anonymity of the founders; we have no access point for even approaching them astrologically.
RW: I’ll tell you something, I have a location for the founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, and that hasn’t made the predictions more accurate for Ethereum. But the other cryptocurrencies, in many ways, just follow the overall Bitcoin chart and price action, so that’s more of a separate complex subject.
CB: And it’s actually a good example of how sometimes when you start something and it creates a foundation chart for whatever you create at that time, sometimes that thing then takes on a life of its own that’s entirely outside of whoever created it, especially something like this where we know that Bitcoins are gonna be continually created until, what, 2140. So certainly long after the founder, if they’re still alive, is dead, this thing is still gonna be out there affecting the world in different ways.
So here’s the chart for the creation of the first Bitcoin on January 3, 2009 at 6:15 PM. Just setting it for London. One of the interesting things about this chart right away that we see is there’s a stellium of planets in Capricorn, where Pluto is at 1 degree of Capricorn, Mars at 5, the Sun at 13, and then Jupiter at 29.33 Capricorn. Then it has Mercury at 2 degrees of Aquarius, the North Node at 9 degrees of Aquarius, Neptune at 22 degrees of Aquarius. Then in the following sign, Venus is at 0 Pisces, Uranus is at 19 Pisces and it’s very closely opposite to Saturn at 21 Virgo; so there’s a pretty close Saturn-Uranus opposition in this chart. The Moon–and this is a little tricky, because the Moon can move up to 13 degrees during the course of a day, so this could be off. But at least at this time in this chart, it’s at 4 degrees of Aries.
RW: Well, with the timestamp, it’s pretty confirmed.
CB: So we know that the Moon is there because we know it’s, I guess, that exact time. But we don’t know–yeah, I guess you’re right. So the Moon position is definitely correct.
RW: The Moon position is correct. No matter what location you use, you’re still gonna get the Moon at 4 degrees as long as you use the 6:15 Greenwich Mean Time.
CB: Got it, good point. Okay, so it’s just the Ascendant and the houses that we don’t know because we’re not fully certain about the location.
RW: Yeah, and that’s interesting too. I just might mention that a lot of people have asked me about Vedic astrology and Jyotish, which I have a great respect for, but their forecast system is based on the dashas, and it’s really essential to have the accurate Ascendant. And so, it’s, I believe, not as accurate as the Western system for cases such as Bitcoin.
CB: Yeah, and even in ancient Western astrology, there’s some techniques that I’d like to be able to apply to this chart, like zodiacal releasing. But without a location and without houses, it becomes very speculative.
RW: Yeah.
CB: But there’s other techniques that are not as dependent on houses, like transits, and that turns out to be one of the primary predictive techniques that you have had success looking at this chart with.
RW: Excellent success, yes.
CB: But before we go into that, let’s just talk about some of the other distinctive features of this chart. One of the things that I saw and noticed right away as soon as I pulled up this chart is it’s happening in this whole period of January of 2009, which was very distinctive in my memory, because one of the things that’s interesting about it is that it was a few weeks later that Barack Obama was elected to his first term in office. And one of the things that this chart reminded me of was that Saturn-Uranus opposition that was happening, and I think it was going exact around the time that he was elected in November of 2008.
RW: That’s right. And that correlated, by the way, to the collapse of the Lehman Brothers Bank in the financial crisis of 2008.
CB: Yeah, so it’s like we’ve got two major mundane outer planet transit combinations that had been happening over that time frame. One of them was the Saturn-Uranus opposition and the instability and the major shifts and changes and unexpected developments that were happening as a result of that. I remember one of the things that was distinctive about Obama’s first campaign was that one of his slogans was “Change,” and that was very tied in with, I felt like at the time, that Saturn-Uranus opposition. So regardless of one’s political views and whether he delivered on that or not, I think at least we can acknowledge that him running on that campaign or slogan ended up getting keyed into something that was going on in collective psyche at the time, and I think it was very much tied into that Saturn-Uranus opposition. The other…
RW: Yeah–oh, sorry, go ahead.
CB: No, go ahead.
RW: Oh, well, the other thing was that it’s just after Pluto’s ingress into Capricorn, which of course was also connected to the 2008 financial crisis and kind of a new era in finance that was correlated with many different features, especially the quantitative easing by central banks to stem the financial crisis of 2008. But I think also it’s something notable for Bitcoin as a kind of a disruptive new technology for a new era as associated with Pluto’s ingress into Capricorn, the sign of business and markets and commerce and finance.
CB: Yeah, definitely. So here’s the Saturn-Uranus opposition going exact on November 4, which I believe was Election Day. And then we see later that month Pluto ingressing into Capricorn in November of 2008. And just the entire worldwide economic system was in free fall at that point ever since, what was it? September of 2008?
RW: Yeah, that’s right. I believe it was September of 2008 when things started falling apart, yeah.
CB: Okay. So yeah, astrologers often associate the economic collapse that happened at that time especially with that Pluto ingress into Capricorn and then some of the instability and major changes with the Saturn-Uranus opposition at the same time. So it’s interesting then from that perspective that Bitcoin partially comes out of that time frame, but also gets some of the essence or the quality of that moment kind of embedded in its very birth chart.
RW: Totally. Yes, I agree with your observations.
CB: Okay, so what are some of the other distinctive things about this chart, just in and of itself?
RW: Sure.
CB: Yeah, what are some of the other things?
RW: Well, I mean, I think this is a strong chart. And one of the things in 2017, when I started researching Bitcoin, was let’s look at the natal chart and let’s look at what this thing is; let’s try to understand it a little bit better. And what we see in the Genesis Block chart is a stellium of Pluto, Mars and the Sun in Capricorn, and there’s a fierceness to this thing, whatever it is. If it was a person, it would be a warrior; it would be battle-ready. It’s tough. It’s tenacious. It’s ruthless. I liken it to The Terminator. It’s not something that can be easily stopped. It’s a force to be reckoned with.
That was kind of my initial hit when immediately looking at the chart. I was just kind of taken aback by it for a minute, to be honest, and I thought, wow, it’s going to win, it wants to win. It’s highly competitive, and it will absolutely push everything out of its way until its obstacles are overcome and its goals are achieved. We’ve seen in medical astrology that Mars-Pluto aspects really relate to extreme stamina, physical strength, and endurance, and I think we can make a correspondence to that in financial astrology. It’s just something that’s very tough.
The other thing I noticed about the natal chart was it has three planets that are exalted. Venus is exalted in Pisces here; that’s good from a financial standpoint. Even though Pisces isn’t really a money sign, Venus is a money planet, it does often indicate wealth and the good things in life; and so that’s a strong value proposition. It’s in a tight sextile with Pluto, and I think that’s a wealth aspect in financial astrology; it indicates a powerful potential for value and wealth. Also, Mars is exalted in Capricorn and does very well in markets, business, and competition. Mars is complaining. Capricorn Mars is competitive in the realm of finance and money and markets and business, so I think that’s a good placement for Bitcoin.
Jupiter’s debilitated in Capricorn. That’s maybe a minor problem, but hasn’t seemed to be too much of an issue. And Mercury also is exalted, at least in modern astrology. That would be an interesting show, Chris. I’ve always wondered–just to go on a short tangent–when was Mercury decided to be exalted in Aquarius and how that happened. That’s more modern astrology, right? Hellenistic astrologers don’t consider that an exaltation.
CB: Yeah, that’s something that I think just came about sometime in the past hundred years, I think in some of the New Age astrology where the sign of Aquarius started being attributed these additional properties of being this positive, upcoming age of enlightenment and peace and everything else, and some of this stuff with Mercury I think ended up getting tied into that. But yeah, I’ll have to do an episode on that at some point.
RW: It’s an interesting subject. I know there’s actually quite a bit of a debate about that, but either way, we could say that Mercury does very well in Aquarius. The cold, hard, logical analysis of Aquarius is very compatible with the planetary principle of Mercury. It’s a good communicator. Martin Luther King, Jr. had Mercury in Aquarius, one of the greatest orators of all time. So we can say it’s a good placement, whether it’s exalted or not. Some other things, as you pointed out, of course, is the opposition between Uranus and Saturn.
By the way, before I say that the stellium in Capricorn is probably the most important in terms of tracking the price action. The transits to that stellium are highly, highly active and very sensitive points in the chart in terms of the price movement. So that’s where you definitely want to build your whole forecast, around that stellium. And then, secondarily, the Venus position is very active. We think that when Jupiter hits Pisces–we’ll talk about this later in the show–but when Jupiter hits that 0 degrees Pisces and conjuncts the Bitcoin natal Venus, we think that that could be a very interesting and favorable time for Bitcoin, but we have noticed that that’s also very active point.
And then the opposition between Uranus and Saturn is very active. And we see that trines and sextiles to that position usually indicate favorable price action that moves up, and we see that oftentimes squares and oppositions to either to Uranus and Saturn–so making T-squares–tend to create very volatile, wild swings in the price.
CB: Yeah, Saturn-Uranus opposition really reminds me of just a thing in astrology itself. The keyword I think of when I see that is ‘volatility’. And it’s interesting that that’s become one of the main things that Bitcoin, for better or worse, is also associated with, just its volatility and the ability to swing wildly up or swing wildly down.
RW: Yes, it’s one of the most volatile aspects on Earth, and that’s one of the reasons that people like to trade it because traders love volatility. The more movement, the better because that gives you more opportunity to capitalize. But it’s also more dangerous and risky because it means you can get easily chopped up by the price action in the short term and lose money on short-term trading. In the long term, we’ve seen that Bitcoin has just pretty much consistently moved up over the last 5 to 10 years since its inception, but it is inherently unstable.
CB: What tracker do you use to follow it? I think you gave me one recently, and I forget what it was, the price of Bitcoin.
RW: Yeah, I mean, the most commonly-used one is a TradingView. That’s a website that has price charts for every asset on Earth for pretty much every market: from stocks and commodities to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and various other features. I mean, you can look at Bitcoin volatility. You can look at Bitcoin dominance versus ALTs. You can look at gold and silver ratios. You can look at the NASDAQ. You can look at the Dow Jones. You can look at individual stocks. So that’s the pro-trading website that most financial traders and investors are going to use for tracking price movements for Bitcoin and pretty much every other market. It’s a free website, but if you pay, you can use more features on it.
CB: Okay, so here–for those watching the video version–just to show you the change over time and how steady Bitcoin was for a long time years ago, in the early periods. And it fluctuated, but relative to now, it didn’t go as high or as low, necessarily.
RW: Well, it did actually, percentage-wise.
CB: Okay.
RW: It did actually. The thing is when you’re looking at it on this long-term chart, the fluctuations just don’t register because the prices are so much higher now, but the volatility was the same.
CB: Okay, so is this similar to what we’re looking at here.
RW: So for instance, a $50 move to a thousand dollars isn’t going to show up on this chart back in 2016.
CB: Got it. Right, that makes sense. But here we can at least see over the past three years some of those great trends upwards and downwards in terms of it being worth $20,000–or $19,000 at the height, in like 2017; or now, in late November or early December of 2020 versus back when it was worth $400 or something like that in 2016.
RW: Yes.
CB: Okay. All right, so anything else we need to mention about the birth chart itself and just some of the combinations? I think it’s really interesting how Jupiter was so close to changing signs. And one of the things that I ran into as another date–even though there’s a timestamp for when the first Bitcoin was mined on the 3rd of January 2009–it looks like it wasn’t until three days later that Satoshi released the software for mining and for trading Bitcoin, on the 9th of January; and by that time, already just six days later, Jupiter had actually moved into Aquarius. Which is kind of interesting and just gives you an idea of how close Jupiter was to changing signs and moving from 29 Capricorn when the first Bitcoin was mined to moving into Aquarius just six days later.
RW: Yeah, that’s interesting. I haven’t really studied the Bitcoin client release chart. But yeah, it is cuspy. Jupiter is really on the cusp there of Capricorn-Aquarius, so it may have changed signs within a day or two of the inception chart.
CB: Yeah, that would be interesting to look at by secondary progression, where one day equals a year. And then there was one other chart I found that was relevant, which was the first Bitcoin transaction. Looks like it took place when Satoshi sent some Bitcoins to the first person outside of himself on January 12, 2009.
RW: That’s interesting, yeah.
CB: I just wanted to mention those as some other dates, since with most businesses, you run into an issue with financial and business astrology of there being different charts that are maybe relevant to different things, even if our primary chart that we’re focused on perhaps is the first Bitcoin itself being created.
RW: Yeah, exactly. And I think you talked a lot about that in your United States chart episode where there were so many different choices. And in many things, there’s not always a clear birthday, but I think the January 3 chart, we’re lucky that we have it. I mean, I really consider that the birthday, so I think that is probably the best one to use in terms of financial forecasting.
CB: Definitely. And just to animate the chart, looks like it was two days later, by January 5, Jupiter had moved into Aquarius. so that is a fast-moving Jupiter, and it is definitely a Jupiter that was right on the cusp there.
RW: The first transaction chart is definitely a chart of interest that I should study a little bit more. That would be interesting too because–can you put that first transaction chart up again there?
CB: Yeah.
RW: Looks like the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction may be almost exact on the inception of the natal Jupiter of that chart.
CB: Yeah.
RW: It’ll be close either way. It’ll be close in all of the charts.
CB: Yeah, because the one of the things that raises for me is even though they’re in different signs, Mercury and Jupiter are in the sky closely-conjunct within 3 degrees. So the Bitcoin chart itself has a pretty close Mercury-Jupiter conjunction in it.
RW: That’s true, that’s true, and that’s a very favorable aspect in astrology in general, and it usually indicates something that’s forward-thinking, open-minded, and very expansive and visionary, especially in Aquarius: something that could make a visionary plan that makes a contribution to the greater collective good of humanity. So that’s just another symbolism we can think about with Bitcoin.
CB: Yeah, and let’s come back to that also when we talk about the future and about that Jupiter-Saturn conjunction that’s about to take place later in December very close to that degree, in the first degrees of Aquarius.
RW: Yeah, that’s almost about to happen now. And one other feature of the natal chart was the Mars-Moon square that I think is interesting for financial traders because we really consider Bitcoin to be exceptionally moody, and you can see this in the sentiment and you can really see this on Twitter. There’s even a thing that people call “Crypto Twitter’. The cryptocurrency community really connects with Twitter, and Jack Dorsey himself, of course the founder and CEO of Twitter, is a huge Bitcoin fanatic himself.
But you can really gauge the sentiment on Twitter, and the sentiment changes wildly whether it’s up and down. And we could say that Bitcoin is kind of bitchy, with this Moon-Mars square. It has a tendency to be really irritable and moody, and it can be up one day and everybody’s sailing on a new high, and then immediately, the rug gets pulled and it falls $3,000 and everybody gets very glum and depressed, so that seems to be one thing you can see in the natal chart that also seems to relate to the collective community following of Bitcoin itself. The chart not only represents Bitcoin, but it sort of represents the collective: all of the various traders and investors and holders of Bitcoin as well.
CB: That’s interesting. Yeah, the Moon-Mars square, especially if it was a day chart, depending on the location, would tend to be more of a tense, difficult aspect if we’re talking about a natal chart. That could be somebody that’s prone to anger or angry outbursts or impetuousness or rash actions.
RW: Yes, rash and impulsive.
CB: Impulsive, that’s a good one. There’s an underlying sort of intensity to it that’s amplified by the fact that Pluto is right there at the same time, so that there’s the Mars-Pluto conjunction, but that means there’s also a Moon-Pluto square, which would intensify some of those same themes. There’s a slight mitigation though that’s actually worth mentioning from a traditional standpoint, which is that because the Moon is in Aries, there’s actually reception between the Moon and Mars.
So that square is not as detrimental–if this was a birth chart–as it could be, but there’s a major silver lining that allows potentially the native to make the best out of that; whereas somebody else, if they didn’t have that reception, would experience it as more of a hardship and as a negative thing than it might be otherwise.
RW: Yeah, that’s interesting. I’m not that knowledgeable on receptions but that’s interesting. I don’t know if Mars exalted plays any role in that either. Certainly, it’s really a square from Pluto and Mars to the Moon and that’s tough stuff. I mean, if that was a person, we could say that this person would probably have some emotional problems, very obsessive emotional tendencies.
CB: Sure.
RW: And that may be reflected, again, in the obsessive following and the people who are very obsessed with Bitcoin and follow its every movement to the moment and every fluctuation in the price. I mean, you’ve got these guys on Twitter–I’m kind of one of them–but you’ve got these really big, well-known technical analysts accounts. They have upwards of 100,000 followers and they post the Bitcoin price charts everyday and make forecasts long-term and short-term for its movement, and there’s many of them. So Bitcoin does inspire this obsessive following, and I think that could correspond to that Pluto-Moon potentially.
CB: Interesting. Okay, so let’s move into talking about some of when you started getting into Bitcoin and started applying astrology to it. What were some of the notable correlations that you did find? You wanted to start studying fluctuations, and that’s something we should say from the outset with financial astrology in general.
Financial astrology is really designed to be able to identify periods where there’s a turn and there’s a major change or a major fluctuation and the value of something goes up or goes down. Astrology is pretty good at helping to identify those important turning points, but it’s not as good at identifying exact numbers, like it’s gonna be worth this much on ‘x’ date. Is that correct? Would you say that’s an accurate statement to make?
RW: Yeah, we use financial astrology, at least in my version of it, in the cryptocurrency markets to identify the main trends, the main yearly trends. We’re looking for yearly tops and bottoms in the market. We’re kind of looking to enhance our overall timing if we’re doing a short-term trade or short-to-mid-term trades. We don’t want to be buying the top and we don’t want to be selling the bottom, especially after that big parabolic rally to $20,000 in December of 2017 and then the crash down to $3,000 subsequently, which we’ll talk more about. We wanted to sort of devise a system that would protect us from getting caught up in the fervor when it’s running really hot and buying when we should be selling, and selling when we should be buying.
So we wanted to try to create something that would help our timing sequence for short-term trades, but we also wanted to see if we could gauge the long-term trajectory of this thing for the more long-term investing strategies as well, so essentially looking for both long- and short- and mid-term trends. But the main thing of the system is looking at the yearly price movements, looking to sell yearly rallies, and looking to buy opportunities on the relative yearly low points or the yearly low points.
CB: Okay, and for those not familiar with trading, if you had bought Bitcoin in 2016 when it was worth, what was it worth in 2016? Like a hundred dollars or a few hundred dollars?
RW: Like three, four, or five hundred dollars, I think. I’d have to go back and look at the price chart, but 2016, it started moving up again. It bottomed out in 2014 and ‘15 around $200, and then it started going up to, I think, a thousand dollars again. Yeah, if you click on the full-featured chart there, you’ll get a much more dynamic chart. I don’t know if you can click on that feature, and you’ll be able to kind of move the chart around a little bit more. Actually with your cursor you should be able to change it by toggling. Oh, we probably should have gone over this beforehand.
CB: Right.
RW: Anyway, it’s not that important. But yeah, we can see the price there. Okay, it was in 2012; it was about $74. It had a little peak there. If you go to that little peak there, we can see that was around a thousand dollars. Okay, so that was in November of 2013, and then it kind of went into a long bear market for a couple years.
CB: So let’s imagine somebody buys one Bitcoin in November of 2013 for $1,000, right?
RW: Yeah.
CB: So you take that and then you move forward. And then let’s say we hit this huge peak and suddenly the value of Bitcoin goes up and more and more, people are buying it. And suddenly, by December of 2017, it’s worth, what, $19,000?
RW: Yeah, let me see. You’re on a monthly chart there. You wanna see if you can change that to like a daily or a weekly chart. Yeah, there you go. So now you can see the daily high. Because those are different time frames, they’ll give you different prices. So yeah, it went up to 19,500 on the daily chart.
CB: So if they had bought it in 2013 for a thousand dollars, they could have sold it in 2017 for $19,000.
RW: Yeah, for 19-times the price that they bought it at. That’s if they didn’t get shaken out in the two-to-three-year bear market where the price collapsed back down to like $200.
CB: Okay, so if they had sold it, they would have made $18,000. But then the trick is knowing when it’s going to go up and down and knowing how high it’s going to go and when to sell or when to buy.
RW: Yeah, and that’s what astrology can help us with. And you actually identified a crucial point there. The financial astrology doesn’t actually tell us much about the actual price levels, it gives us date ranges for highs and lows. So as Ray Merriman has said, we trade time not price. A lot of price forecasting techniques have price targets and they trade price targets, they have buy targets and sell targets, but we have dates for sales and dates for buys. So we can combine that with a traditional technical analysis to try to get a little bit of both. And that’s where things get really interesting with using financial astrology because we can use the timing to help us refine when we sell.
And we want to sell the top, but that’s very, very hard to do. Even the most experienced and skilled traders can’t necessarily sell the exact top. Really, the goal is more to kind of average in on the bottoms and try to basically get in around a good price and then average out on the tops and make sure that you’re not leaving a lot of money on the table. So you don’t sell it all at once and then it continues up way past where you sold it, right?
CB: Right.
RW: So you sell a little bit and you see, okay, maybe it continues going up, and then sell a little bit more; and then the astrological technique can give us a range of dates where we can see, okay, well, we think it’s going to top out in this range. And sometimes we’ve been extremely accurate on that and other times we haven’t. So even the astrology is not going to be 100% accurate.
CB: Right, so there’s different things that we can look at in terms of mundane transits that are happening in the world in general. So we talked about, for example, Pluto moving into Capricorn, and shortly after the time of that ingress, just the global financial collapse that occurred and the worldwide recession. But then there’s also other outer planet ingresses that are major and very slow, for example, Uranus going through Taurus.
I know a lot of astrologers are talking about that because Taurus can traditionally be associated with some material or financial things in astrology, and Uranus is often associated with major changes or radical changes or advancements or new technologies and things like that. And so, when astrologers combine those two things something like Bitcoin is often thought of immediately as a major shift in terms of money and financial things. So that was something you’ve focused on a lot over the past few years, right?
RW: Over the past few years, yeah. And I think a lot of astrologers have become obsessed with the Capricorn stellium and have forgotten to pay attention to Uranus in Taurus. And I think that Uranus in Taurus is one of the most paradoxical, conflicting planetary sign placements of all time because Taurus represents stability, and indeed, represents the status quo itself, and Uranus represents the complete opposite of stability and a total disruption of the status quo.
CB: Right.
RW: And I did a study about this. Of course the last time that Uranus was in Taurus was in the 1930s, and it was another time where we saw a massive economic crisis of the Great Depression, we saw the environmental catastrophe of the Dust Bowl, and we also saw the major political and cultural disruptions of the rise of fascism in Europe. And in the United States, thankfully, we had the New Deal, which was also a disruption of the political order at the time. And I think some of the things we’ve seen with Donald Trump being such a disrupter of every possible political tradition really correlates with Uranus in Taurus. And I haven’t seen enough astrologers talking about that, so I just wanted to mention that.
In terms of financial astrology, Taurus represents kind of how we think about money and it is a wealth sign. And so, the ingress of Uranus into Taurus I think did kind of give us a lot of information that a big disruption of global finance was coming, and indeed, how we think about money. I think this is really the age of cryptocurrencies. It got on the map really right around the time that Uranus ingressed into Taurus.
And I mean, the all-time high in December 2017 was about roughly four or five months before Uranus’ first ingress into Taurus, and we saw worldwide headlines about Bitcoin. The whole year of 2017 was a massive rally for Bitcoin, and that’s when people started really paying attention to cryptocurrencies. And that was basically when Uranus was in the last degrees of Aries and already that energy of Uranus in Taurus was starting to come through, so it actually started even before Uranus went into Taurus. The first ingress, again, I think that really also corresponded to the rise of Donald Trump and this global disruption of the political order that he is associated with.
CB: And I think that you also mentioned, which I thought was a really good point, how Jupiter in the Bitcoin chart is at 29 degrees of Capricorn. So as soon as Uranus started getting to–which it did I think in 2017–the later degrees, like 28 degrees of Aries before it had gone into Taurus, it was already squaring that Jupiter in the Bitcoin chart pretty closely.
RW: Yes, and I was in real-time tracking those transits. The direct transits correlated to price rallies, sudden but short-lasting because of Uranus, right? The retrograde square actually was very unfavorable, but that correlated with two other issues, which was that we had the third Saturn conjunction to the Bitcoin natal Mars. And also, at the same time, the South Node made its entry into Capricorn as well and that also conjuncted the Bitcoin natal Jupiter at the same time of the retro Uranus square, and that actually correlated to a collapse. That was kind of the final straw of the 2018 bear market where Bitcoin collapsed from $6,000 to $3,000 in November and December. And the South Node played a very interesting role there. And of course, at that time, Uranus was also square the South Node, so there was a lot going on.
There were also those crazy back-to-back Venus-Mercury retrogrades, so there’s a lot to talk about there. But the square of Uranus to Jupiter was very active; it did activate a lot of price action, and that’s two points actually: one is that the retrograde transits tend to be less favorable. Not in every case though, but in most cases, the retrograde aspects, even of the benefics, tend to be less favorable and less noteworthy in the price action; whereas the direct ones tend to be quite powerful.
The other one is that our research indicates the importance of the transiting South Node in financial astrology, which should have implications for every realm of astrology. That is something that’s not talked about–not written about, not talked about. Maybe we could do a show on the South Node, transits of the nodes, both of course the South and the North Node. But we’ll talk more about that when we talk more about the price correlations, but that was very active, that Uranus square to the Bitcoin Jupiter.
CB: Yeah, so that already started happening. I’m just animating the chart and looking at when–because I was trying to initially see when Uranus went into Taurus for the first time.
RW: Oh, I remember it well because I had made a prediction on that. It was May 15, 2018.
CB: Right.
RW: I remember it well. I had made a very important prediction on it, and it was an epic fail, Chris. It was a total disaster. So we could talk about that too, but we should actually go back to what you asked me before. When I first started looking at Bitcoin astrology, and we looked at the natal chart of course first, and my analysis was that, “Holy crap, this is an incredibly powerful chart that has a lot of potential.” And I knew immediately when I looked at it within about five minutes that I wanted to put a lot of my money into this thing; I mean, I really did, I could say that.
And I immediately saw when I looked at it that Jupiter and Mars were gonna make a series of sextiles to the stellium in Capricorn, and I told all my friends to invest in it; that a big rally was coming. And sure enough, my first really big call for Bitcoin was that I actually several months in advance called the big December rally. I didn’t know it was going to go to a new all-time high of $20,000, but I did tell my friends that there was going to be a really big rally, and sure enough there was. But what we did was, first, we wanted to look backwards. We wanted to look at and see, number one, if there was an important event in the Bitcoin life and did that correspond to something astrologically that really made sense. And of course, the most notorious event in the Bitcoin life cycle at that time was what’s known as the infamous hacking of the Mt. Gox Exchange.
So at that time, it was 2014, and there was only one major cryptocurrency exchange, and that was called Mt. Gox. And pretty much most of the Bitcoin in the world was stored on Mt. Gox, and if you wanted to buy and sell Bitcoin that was the place that you went to. Well, sure enough, the guy who managed it was a Frenchman; he was living in Tokyo, I believe. And when you read the history of it, he was completely inept and did not take the correct security precautions. And sure enough, hackers made their way into the exchange and at the time made off with something like half-a-billion dollars worth of Bitcoin. So a lot of people lost a lot of money in that episode, and he tried to cover it up and hide it, which I think is really significant, as will be revealed with the astrology.
And this made headlines all around the world and not good ones. People really lost faith in Bitcoin, and there was no way to get your money back because of the blockchain. It’s not a bank. You can’t go and say, “Oh, there was fraud. My account was hacked. I’d like to file a complaint and get my money back.” There’s no fraud protection for Bitcoin and on that exchange. So people lost an enormous amount of money and Bitcoin almost died.
So we went back and we looked at the astrology and what we found was that Pluto was almost exactly conjunct the Bitcoin Sun. You can put up this chart if you have it available. I think it’s March and April. Or you can do the transits on the Bitcoin chart, March and April of 2014, and you’ll see that sure enough, that Pluto had made its way to about 13 degrees Capricorn and was sitting almost right on top of the Bitcoin Sun. Well, what would be the symbolism for a transit of Pluto to your natal Sun? Of course, Pluto is associated with breakdown, destruction, and death. Pluto is really a process, right?
It’s a really complex five- or six-step process that is associated with breakdown, decay, death, destruction, and then, typically, rebirth, regeneration, and evolution to a higher state of consciousness. And that’s exactly what we saw in terms of Bitcoin. The hacking event almost destroyed Bitcoin, but what came out of it…
CB: The price tanked after it had been hacked, right?
RW: Yeah, the price collapsed and people really lost faith in it because it seemed like it was so vulnerable to being attacked.
CB: So it was like a ‘little death’ of Bitcoin for a while.
RW: It was a death. Yeah, it was the death of Bitcoin. It fell off the radar, the price collapsed, and it kind of went into hibernation for a few years and people just kind of lost interest in it.
CB: Pluto wasn’t just transiting the Sun, it was stationing on top of the Sun, it looks like in April of 2014. So the Bitcoin Sun is 13 degrees and 30 minutes of Capricorn, and Pluto’s stationed at 13 degrees and 34 minutes of Capricorn on April 15-April 16 of 2014.
RW: Yeah, and I found that correlation to be pretty mind-blowing. That was the first thing I looked at, and I knew right away, again, okay, this chart is looking to be pretty accurate here.
CB: This is funny because of course any astrologer around in the early-to-middle part of the last decade remembers what astrologers were focused on during that time period, and it was the Uranus-Pluto square because Uranus was also simultaneously at about 13.24, 13.20. Yeah, Uranus exactly squared…
RW: Oh, yeah, I completely forgot about that. I completely forgot about that square from Uranus. I was so fascinated by this exact conjunction of Pluto that that’s what stuck in my memory.
CB: So Uranus squared–it looks like a few days later–exact at 13.30 Aries, squaring the Sun at 13.30 Capricorn by April 20 or so. But look, also opposite to that is Mars–because there was a Mars retrograde that year–and transiting Mars went retrograde, and it came up to 13.30 Libra by the end of April. So it completed a transiting T-square of those three planets, which are pretty heavy-duty planets, all hitting the Bitcoin Sun, but there’s a slight silver lining, which is Jupiter is at 13 Cancer at the same exact time, also opposing that Sun. So that’s some pretty heavy transits to be happening all to the Sun of the Bitcoin chart pretty much simultaneously.
RW: Yeah, that’s a Grand Square, really.
CB: Yeah, it’s a perfect storm of difficult aspects. So the hackers stole tons of Bitcoins, the price of Bitcoin dropped, everybody lost faith in it. And that was the primary place where everybody bought Bitcoins at the time. It had like 70% of the market or something like that. But then you said in the aftermath of that there were other exchanges that started to proliferate that had better security and other things like that, and Bitcoin eventually, within a few years, rebounded.
RW: Yeah, well, in typical Plutonian fashion, a regeneration occurred. There was a hardcore group of people that didn’t lose faith in Bitcoin and that just realized that the problem wasn’t with Bitcoin itself, it was just simply with the exchange of the Mt. Gox and how it had been structured and managed and run. And so, creative people saw a big opening and a whole new generation of much more advanced, technologically-advanced, cryptocurrency exchanges started rising up with much more advanced security features. And to this day, the security continues to evolve on the exchanges for Bitcoin.
And security of Bitcoin is a complex subject as well, but essentially it rose from the ashes of the Mt. Gox debacle. And after a two-to-three-year bit bear market–which by the way correlated to a series of three Saturn squares at 0 degrees Sagittarius to the natal Bitcoin Venus–the price basically flatlined for like a year or more; and there was just really no activity during that time and people sort of forgot about it, but it came roaring back. I believe it was in 2016 that the price action started to sort of get interesting again. It actually took all the way up until about January, maybe January of–I can’t remember exactly, Chris. But I think it was January 2017 the price came back to $1,000 per Bitcoin.
So it had hit $1,000 just before the Mt. Gox hack, which made it very attractive to hackers all of a sudden. So probably what happened was all the top hackers in the world decided to focus their attention on this one exchange, so it took about three years for it. And Bitcoin has gone through this several times where the price makes a big peak and then collapses all the way down 90% again.
CB: Here it is. In November of 2013, it looks like it was above a thousand dollars. But then you can see, yeah, this drop and then it’s just low for a while after 2014.
RW: Yeah, that’s exactly correct. Yeah, you can see that. And then you can see in 2016 on your chart that it starts trending up again.
CB: Right. And I don’t want to pick favorites, especially since I haven’t researched this as much as you or pretty much literally anybody else in the astrological community, but one of the things that’s interesting I just want to throw out there is that Sun would be more important hypothetically if the Ascendant was in Leo in whatever the location was when the first Bitcoin was mined. So that’s kind of interesting that that was such a pivotal and initially negative, but then eventually transformative moment in the history of Bitcoin. And certainly, the Sun is gonna be pivotal no matter what chart we’re looking at, so we have to be careful about jumping to conclusions, but it’s just an interesting point.
RW: Totally. Yeah, it would be great to know the lord of the Ascendant in this chart; that would give us a whole other level of information for sure.
CB: Yeah.
RW: And I think there’s a convincing case to be made for the Leo rising chart and you’ve just made it more convincing. But certainly, a Pluto-Sun direct conjunction–Pluto transiting the natal Sun–is a once-in-a-lifetime transit in and of itself whether the Sun was the lord of the Ascendant, but certainly it’s interesting to think about it.
CB: And that brings us to–it doesn’t fully bring us, but recent times–since it has that stellium in Capricorn, we would then assume any major outer planet transits through Capricorn are going to be important. And of course, there was a major one that started in December of 2017 when Saturn moved into Capricorn, right?
RW: Yeah, so we did that back-testing and we found the Pluto-Sun correspondence to the Mt. Gox hack, and then we looked at the Saturn square to the Bitcoin natal Venus was the aftermath of that, and that correlated to the price. I didn’t do an exhaustive back-testing where I looked at every top and bottom and tried to correlate it, I just started doing real-time beta testing, essentially.
And what was going on in the previous all-time high of 2017–I don’t know if you can put one of those price graphic charts up. There’s one in particular I sent you that has that December 2017 one that might be a good one to look at. I can kind of do a little play-by-play on the astrological sequence that happened.
CB: Sure. Let me put it up and I’ll cycle through them, and you can let me know when I have–is this the one you’re looking for?
RW: There’s actually another one that’s more specific to that top. It’s a little bit more–right there. There we go.
CB: That one?
RW: Yes.
CB: Okay.
RW: So what happened in 2017 initially was we had a series of sextiles from Neptune to the Bitcoin natal Sun. Now Neptune is kind of a funny planet in financial astrology because it has nothing to do with the material world or money at all. But I think it’s interesting, in the sextile to the natal Sun, what I correlated to that was, again, a restoration of faith in Bitcoin. I mean, one of the ways we can look at Neptune is ‘faith’, and that also, somehow, some way, maybe, we don’t know, Bitcoin was part of some larger, divine, unfolding plan of some type. But we did see that in general kind of before the dates of this graphic, but just laying the groundwork for what happened.
And we had a huge rally in August of 2017. We don’t have a graphic for that, but Neptune was in a partile/sextile at the 13th degree from Pisces for the entire month of August. We had that total solar eclipse of the Sun; of course it was visible from the United States. And that was interesting because it was in a Grand Trine, I believe, if my memory is correct, with Uranus and Saturn.
CB: You’re talking about the Great American Eclipse in, what, August of 2017?
RW: Yes, that’s correct.
CB: Okay.
RW: But it emphasized the trine between Uranus and Saturn, which is a kind of a balance between the past and the future, new technological innovations that are taking old concepts of Saturn and making them in new ways; but they’re not in that hard aspect, so it’s not in a tense conflict. It’s a really great time for taking the best from the past and combining it with a new innovative vision; the best of the past of Saturn and traditional approaches to finance and merging them together with new technological innovations represented by Uranus.
So that was something that was in effect, and I believe that the solar eclipse activated that trine. And in fact, it was in a partile trine with Uranus, but overall it was in a wider Grand Trine with Saturn as well; and that’s when we saw a massive rally in Bitcoin, and that’s really when I started to get interested in Bitcoin too. And again, here we see a North Node eclipse really adding energy and greed actually. Frankly, the North Node, as we know, can indicate greed.
And the other interesting feature of that chart is that Mercury is retrograde for a big part of that month, and Bitcoin rallied from about $2,000 to $5,000 in August. And interestingly enough, the Neptune sextile to the Bitcoin Sun left its partile degree–I think it was retrograde. That was one example of the retrograde aspect that actually ended up being quite favorable. I believe it went to the 12th degree of Neptune, and at the same time, Mercury changed directions from retrograde to direct, if I’m correct; I might be mixing it up here.
And interestingly, what happened within a day or two of Mercury changing directions was that China announced this total ban on Bitcoin, and the price dropped $3,000 and lost over 50% of its value in like a 48-to-72-hour period. So that was a really good illustration of many different features. You had an eclipse, you had a Mercury retrograde changing directions playing a role, you had a partile aspect to the Bitcoin Sun that went off the degree, and a lot happened during that month of August, so that was a very fascinating month.
And you see how complex it is really, how many factors you really have to look at if you’re gonna try to track the price and make a future forecast. People try to oversimplify it and ask me all the time, “Well, what about Mercury retrograde?” or “What about this Full Moon?” I mean, really you have to look at all the different factors that are in play. So Bitcoin lost about half of its value there, but it quickly returned. It didn’t take too long; it took about eight weeks for it to start going back up to the $5,000 range. And I’m sorry, now if you could throw that graphic back up there.
CB: Here it is.
RW: So here, what happened was that Jupiter entered Scorpio and that was a massive change in the price. It entered Scorpio, I believe, roughly on October 10. And all of a sudden, you can see that it makes a trine to the Bitcoin–I don’t know if you can do a dual screen, but it makes a trine to the Bitcoin Venus, it makes a sextile to the Bitcoin natal Pluto, and it starts to make a sextile also to the Bitcoin Mars and Sun.
CB: Here we go. So Jupiter goes, in mid-October, into Scorpio, and we see it trining the Venus, which in the Bitcoin chart is at 0 Pisces.
RW: Right.
CB: And what were the other transits?
RW: Well, it also starts to immediately sextile the whole stellium in Capricorn, essentially. And if you throw that price chart back up there, you can see this is what we were talking about earlier in the discussion, where you can see how Jupiter’s effect starts to really affect the price literally day by day. This is a daily chart. So each of these are called ‘price candles’. Each of these bars indicates a 24-hour period of the price.
CB: Okay.
RW: Immediately you can see. Look at the difference. Look at what happens when Jupiter enters Scorpio there.
CB: Right.
RW: It’s at about $4,000 at that point; it makes the trine to the Bitcoin Venus. And a couple weeks later, or a week or two later, it makes a sextile to the Bitcoin Pluto, and the price starts moving up quite dramatically when it starts making a sextile to the Bitcoin natal Mars, right? So the Jupiter-Mars sextile is confidence, adventure, ready for action, reporting for duty, right? All of a sudden, it’s a huge boost. If you were doing a personal reading just as an example, it would be a huge boost in confidence and energy and vitality.
So in financial astrology, we just translate that into market confidence; all of a sudden, the asset gains an enormous amount of market confidence. And I don’t think I put this in the graphic, but then Mars entered Scorpio a bit later and we had that Mars-Jupiter conjunction actually that took place in Scorpio. And so, both Mars and Jupiter ended up making important sextiles in the Bitcoin natal chart and that correlated precisely to the all-time high, so this is a mind-blowing correlation.
Now the whole time I think it’s also important to mention that Neptune was still sextile to the Bitcoin Sun at that time, so there was still an outer planet activity that was important. The outer planet activity gives you kind of the bigger picture, which we said was, faith, faith and confidence. Jupiter and Mars I’m seeing more as confidence, whereas Neptune I’m translating more as faith. I’m not saying it was just Jupiter and Mars by itself that correlated to that all-time high, but of course in any huge, big wealth rally, probably you’re gonna see some big Jupiter involvement.
So that was my first Bitcoin forecast and people were quite astounded. This was actually before I was on Twitter; I just had a private newsletter to a few cryptocurrency and astrology geek friends. But people were quite astounded that we could use astrology to gauge the price. Oh, just leave that chart up for a second if you could, Chris. I want to point out some really interesting stuff that happened after that.
Now this is really interesting. Here I have these blue lines on the chart that signify the exact period. I believe it gave it a 1-degree orb of Jupiter’s exact conjunction to the Bitcoin Sun, so you can see the price peaked right within that range. What happened then was, once again, Mercury was retrograde interestingly enough during this parabolic run-up, and so that gave us a clue that we were vulnerable to a reversal when Mercury changed directions. I consider Mercury in this type of financial astrology to give us an indication of market sentiment.
But then the bigger picture was that Saturn entered Capricorn on the Winter Solstice of December 17 and immediately made a conjunction. Initially, it made a sextile to Bitcoin Venus, so we didn’t see the price move down that much. But then when it made a conjunction to Bitcoin Pluto, we lost already a 25% decline in the price there that I highlighted in my notation.
CB: That in and of itself is just a great correlation. Even if we’re just looking at outer planets transiting through signs, we can see from the time Jupiter goes into Scorpio in early October just this pretty steady upward climb, all the way up until it hits its high point in December, when, as you said, transiting Jupiter at 13 Scorpio sextiles the Bitcoin Sun at 13 Capricorn and it peaks. But then Saturn moved into Capricorn, changed signs, moved from Sagittarius where it had been going through there for like three years, moved into Capricorn for three years on December 20, and that’s where we have that stellium of four planets in the Bitcoin chart; and then we start seeing this downward trend shortly after that ingress.
RW: Yeah, I mean, it’s remarkable. Again, if your mind isn’t blown by these correlations then I’m not sure what to tell you because this is about as close as you’re ever gonna see for a mathematical proof of astrological theory. Jupiter represents expansion and wealth, Saturn represents contraction, and often, fear. Now Saturn represents a lot of other things too: hard work, discipline, focus, and success. I often tell people Saturn can be your worst enemy or your best friend depending on multiple factors in your chart, right?
I’m not saying Jupiter is good and Saturn is bad. We’ll see as we study the three-year period of Saturn in Capricorn–it’s a fascinating story–that potentially Saturn is actually helping Bitcoin. But initially, on the ingress of December 2017, what happens is fear hits the market and we get an immediate collapse. If you could throw that chart back up there, we’ll see what happened on the exact conjunction, the first of three exact conjunctions of Bitcoin–excuse me, of Saturn to the Bitcoin natal Mars, which was partile between February 1 and February 10. Once again, in early January, I made a prediction that Bitcoin would have a huge sell-off in that 10-day date range, and in fact the low came on February 6 and 7; and so, we saw another exact correlation within a 10-day date range.
And what would you think astrologically of Saturn conjoining your natal Mars? I mean, it wouldn’t necessarily be bad, but you probably wouldn’t be looking forward to it. And it probably wouldn’t feel very good because your confidence would be potentially at a 29-year low point. Your physical vitality might be weakened. Your overall mood might be somewhat depressed. You would feel limited. You would feel thwarted and have a lot of obstacles to achieving your goals. Just a sort of nod to the financial astrology way of looking at it, you translate that into financial astrology and essentially say it was a loss of confidence in the market.
Now there were some other things going on in January. Once again, we had an eclipse on January 31. It was a very important South Node eclipse and that also added some energy to the sell-off as well. In fact, what triggered the sell-off was that January 31 eclipse. But essentially, Saturn conjoined Mars, that was a ‘goodbye Bitcoin rally, hello, reality, cryptocurrencies are not ready for the mainstream yet’.
And if you want to throw up that 2018 chart, we can see the three conjunctions of Saturn to the Bitcoin Mars corresponded here to a year-long–actually more than a year-long bear market for cryptocurrencies. Once again, similar in some ways to the Mt. Gox situation, we had a loss of faith in the market, a loss of confidence in Bitcoin, and we saw headlines around the world that Bitcoin is dead and that cryptocurrencies were just a Ponzi scheme or a pyramid scheme or this kind of thing like that, and a lot of negative press. There was a 90% loss in value and people said that Bitcoin is dead.
Well, this whole time I was telling people, no, it’s not. This is the time you actually want to be buying Bitcoin. It’s gonna come back; it’s come back from the dead already four or five times. This thing is the Terminator. I assure you that it’s gonna survive this, and it’s gonna come back and hit $20,000 again; especially, we told people to buy Bitcoin actually on the conjunction of Bitcoin to the natal Sun, but first let’s just look at this chart for a minute.
We see here in June of 2018 that Saturn made the second conjunction to the Bitcoin Sun. And again, we got a new yearly low point in the price exactly in a 10-day date range–10- or 14-day date range–to that exact conjunction, which was I believe was June 20-30. I don’t know, something like that; it was the exact quartile conjunction.
The third conjunction of Saturn to the Bitcoin natal Mars also corresponded roughly, although it came outside the partile conjunction. We also had Mars conjunct the Bitcoin Venus. We had that Mercury-retro/Venus-retro with Mercury-retro back to back. And it’s not in the notes there, but that’s when we also had the retrograde Jupiter square to the Bitcoin natal Uranus, and we also had the South Node conjunct the Bitcoin natal Jupiter. Okay, I know this is a little technical, but you can see what happened with the that combination of factors was another price collapse.
CB: So this is around November of 2018?
RW: Yeah.
CB: Okay.
RW: What we call in financial markets a ‘support area’. It had hit $6,000 here in June, it had hit $6,000 here again in November, and so that became a support level, but that collapsed under the weight of those multiple aspect series. And Bitcoin went to a new low here, which is in December of 2018, and I did give you a graphic for that one as well. No, not that one. Wait, hold on.
CB: I have some other ones thrown in here.
RW: Just a little slower. Let me just see and we’ll pick out the right one.
CB: Is this it?
RW: No, no, that’s later. Yes, right here. Okay, so here’s that period here in November where we had all of those different aspects. And what happened here was that Saturn actually hit, and this was a surprise, Chris. I mean, it actually kind of screwed up my forecast at the time, but it was a really important thing to look at. And an Italian financial astrologer pointed this out to me actually that Saturn hit the exact midpoint between the Bitcoin Mars and Sun, and that’s when we got this bear market low point in the price. It was between Mars and the Bitcoin Sun and that was actually the worst position of Saturn the whole time. And that’s actually the last low, so it’s never gone back to that $3,000 level since Saturn was at the midpoint between the Bitcoin natal Mars and the Bitcoin natal Sun.
Now I actually thought that the conjunction of Saturn to the natal Sun was going to be worse, and so I didn’t buy the midpoint in December, but it was close enough; the interesting thing is that it didn’t go lower on the exact conjunction of Saturn to the Bitcoin Sun. So that was really interesting for people who like those midpoints; it just shows you how powerful that midpoint is. I mean, the planets are already so close together.
CB: Although it’s interesting that it did kind of stay depressed in that Saturn conjunction with the Sun, which looks like it was around January of 2019.
RW: Yeah.
CB: This doesn’t fully show the peaks, because it doesn’t show the previous peak in late 2017, but it’s almost like the midway point between the…
RW: We do have a chart for that. There’s another graphic that has both of those peaks.
CB: Okay, let me see if I can find that.
RW: There.
CB: Is it this?
RW: No, the one before.
CB: This?
RW: No, there’s even another one, I believe. Hold on, wait a second. No. Okay, sorry just right there. Right there, that was it. Yeah, here you see the big–oh, no, no that’s not the, okay. Well, this is the same one we were looking at.
CB: Sure.
RW: Yeah, I don’t have a chart for the whole schematic, maybe not. I thought there was one.
CB: But the point at least is–let’s look at the chart.
RW: That was about the halfway point of Saturn’s transit through Capricorn.
CB: Yeah, which is almost a necessity since the Bitcoin Sun is halfway through Capricorn natally at 13 degrees of Capricorn; that’s just really striking. So just to go back through the whole sequence, it’s like October of 2017, Jupiter ingresses into Scorpio and you see that dramatic rise and that keeps going up and up and up, and then Jupiter sextiles the Sun eventually.
But then we see Saturn creep into Capricorn, and we see it move into Capricorn right on the solstice, or right around the time of the solstice, around December 20, around December 21, and then you start to see that decline happen; and Saturn would transit through Capricorn for the next three years until this coming month of December of 2020 where it’s finally gonna leave. But right around the halfway point, when Saturn was transiting through that sign, Saturn would have hit the Sun. Yeah, that’s like halfway through Saturn transiting through Capricorn, and the price is consistently depressed through that period for the most part, right?
RW: I’m sorry, until when?
CB: Just around the middle period of Saturn being about halfway through Capricorn, there has been this period during this three-year transit of Saturn going through Capricorn. It started with Bitcoin at a high at the beginning, in late 2017, then Saturn went into Capricorn and it started lowering and being depressed during that three-year period. And now, we’re about to come out of it, and we’ve just seen it hit a new all-time high.
RW: Yeah. Obviously, there’s a couple other features in there; when Jupiter entered Capricorn, we saw a lot of change. And when Uranus entered Taurus, if you go back to that price chart, we can see what happened when Uranus entered Taurus for the second time. So the Bitcoin price was essentially depressed the entire time that Saturn was between the Bitcoin Pluto and the Bitcoin Sun.
CB: Okay.
RW: Now there was a secondary transit of Saturn to the Bitcoin Sun again later in 2019 and we got another dip on that one. We also saw the South Node was important there. Wait a minute. Let’s go back to that earlier chart, the earlier graphic that we were just looking at before. Yeah, so I think this is right here one of the most fascinating correlations here. This is November 2018 to about July 2019, right? I mean, this was where we started to see just incredibly tight correlations between the aspects here.
So you’ve got that third Saturn conjunction to the Bitcoin Mars. Bitcoin is basically dead between November 2018 and March 2019. And this is where Saturn is in that midpoint between the Bitcoin Mars and the Sun, which is exactly what you would expect with Saturn. Saturn is about fear and contraction, right?
CB: Yeah.
RW: It’s not a wealth planet. And so, what we saw was a bear market under the influence of this Saturn aspect. However, what happened was that after Saturn moved off of the Bitcoin natal Sun, about two months later, Uranus had re-entered Taurus for good. And we can start to see right away that Uranus made a trine to the Bitcoin natal Pluto in March of 2019, or I believe it was maybe early April. If you look really closely at the price chart, Chris, you can see that. Look at that candle there, that large green candle there that really stands out.
CB: This one?
RW: Yeah, that was exactly the trine from Uranus to the Bitcoin Pluto–a sudden powerful change in the price.
CB: Right, and it’s shortly after that ingress. That’s really great. I like that you wrote about that in your article because the first ingress, which was a the previous year in May of 2018, everyone expected to be more tied in with major shifts in cryptocurrency with Uranus going into Taurus, but it ended up not, and you considered that to be a major misstep, initially. But then a year later, when Uranus entered Taurus for the final time, where it would stay for the greater part of the next decade basically, there started to be major shifts in Bitcoin.
RW: Yeah, well, Uranus’ first entry into Taurus was in, as we looked at earlier, May 15, 2018. And I had had a string of very successful predictions at that time. I had a free newsletter at that time because I was essentially beta testing the forecast system, and I also had started to have a growing following on Twitter. And after a string of very successful forecasts, I made a big forecast that Uranus was going to sextile the Bitcoin natal Venus and trine the Bitcoin Pluto, and we were gonna have a huge rally in the spring of 2018, ushering in this new era of financial technology, of cryptocurrencies with Uranus in Taurus. And hilariously, nothing happened.
In fact, the price went down, I looked like a complete idiot, and it was a somewhat humiliating and definitely humbling experience where I learned to be a little bit more cautious and to realize that sometimes I’m going to get calls wrong, and that astrology isn’t always 100% accurate, and that you have to be careful. And what we learned also is that there’s a really big difference between an initial ingress into a sign and when a planet, or especially an outer planet, is gonna move into that sign for good, which is what happened in 2019. The other problem was that Saturn was still incredibly strong in the Bitcoin chart in 2018, regardless of Uranus’ position.
CB: Still sort of holding it back or depressing it through the constraining symbolism of Saturn, which is a pretty straightforward signification of Saturn.
RW: Yes, exactly. That’s exactly right. But what was interesting was we saw a flurry of articles in the mainstream press about astrology and cryptocurrencies. I don’t know if you noticed that but there were several. In fact, there was some former NFL star who turned into an astrologer telling everybody that cryptocurrencies were going to explode. It was kind of interesting, it was a bit unusual; even mainstream financial press, like Yahoo’s MarketWatch, had a couple of financial astrology things. And the irony is that it was an epic fail, but then ultimately it did prove to be correct in the end, when Uranus did finally enter Taurus again in 2019.
CB: Okay, so here’s the first ingress, just for those watching the video version. In May of 2018, we see Uranus move from 29 Aries and for the first time move into 0 degrees of Taurus, but then that didn’t end up coinciding with the major shift. We see Saturn still transiting down there at 8 degrees of Capricorn conjoining the Bitcoin Mars and the Bitcoin Sun at 5 Capricorn and 13 Capricorn. But then if we jump forward to just under one year later–so what was it? March of 2019?
RW: It was March of 2019. Initially, Mercury was retrograde. We didn’t see much happen on the initial ingress; it wasn’t until it hit 1 degree and Mercury went direct. It’s like I remember all of these transits; it’s almost encyclopedic. So the sextile of Uranus to the Bitcoin Venus didn’t really do much, but when it hit that 1-degree trine to the Bitcoin natal Pluto then we saw that huge green candle. It was like a thousand-dollar move in the price that had been flat for months and it caught everybody’s attention. I mean, all of a sudden, everybody got super interested in Bitcoin again, literally within a week or two, maybe three, of Uranus entering Taurus. So we knew that Uranus entering Taurus was a rebirth, it was a regeneration of cryptocurrencies after that colossal crash from the all-time high.
CB: Right.
RW: And if you go back to that chart, you can see what happened between the trine of Uranus to Bitcoin Pluto, and we see this huge green candle. Yeah, this one. Look at this one. And then it makes a trine to the Bitcoin natal Mars for almost all of June. There were a couple of other aspects there, but essentially we got a new multi-year high of $13,000. Now that was like a 400% gain just from January, where Saturn was conjunct the Bitcoin natal Sun, and we bought that. This was my first big success as an analyst, but also as a trader.
Because I’ll be honest with you, I actually lost a bunch of money in 2018, particularly on that bad Uranus ingress call. I lost several thousand dollars of my own money; not only did I look like a fool on Twitter. However, I bought a lot of Bitcoin on the conjunction to the Bitcoin natal Sun on the theory that it would rally on the trine from Uranus, and sure enough, I was right, and we got about a 400% rally from $3,500 to a $13,000 high.
Now I wasn’t able to sell all of it at the exact top–I mean, that’s impossible to do–but essentially that was one of the most profitable trades I’ve ever done in my life, and it also is just a mind-blowing correlation. Because if you go and look at the transit, it corresponded exactly to the partile, almost exact to the minute transit of that trine from Uranus to the Bitcoin natal Mars, and that was a sudden, exciting boost of market confidence, right?
CB: Right. Yeah, that…
RW: However–sorry, go ahead.
CB: No, go ahead. What was the ‘however’?
RW: However, that also didn’t last because we had another conjunction of Saturn to the Bitcoin natal Sun. And I told everybody that it wouldn’t last, and we sold the high in June and July, and we sat and we waited for several months for Saturn and the South Node to come back to that conjunction with the natal Sun again. I think that’s on one of the price charts I sent you. Again, you can see that Uranus gave a sudden, exciting kind of blast of energy into the price and the market sentiment, but as soon as Uranus kind of went off that and Saturn started retrograding back towards the natal Sun, the price started collapsing again.
CB: I’m having trouble finding–I’ve got most of this. So through 2019, I’ve got the chart.
RW: Yeah, let’s just go through those a little bit more slowly, so I can see them. There’s one in there that shows it. Oh, okay, yeah, so this is…
CB: Is this it?
RW: Let me see here.
CB: This is more 2020.
RW: Let me see. Let me just look at the other ones I sent you, sorry. Not that one. Those are yours. Okay, wait–here. Oh, no, okay that’s 2017. I think there’s one more. This one, no. Okay, one more.
CB: ‘18. That’s the last one.
RW: Okay.
CB: Let me look through the emails.
RW: No, that’s okay.
CB: The idea that Saturn basically being halfway through Capricorn and conjoining the Sun around that time, the Bitcoin Sun, seems like a relatively straightforward call about that being maybe the middle point in the depression of the value of the thing.
RW: Yeah, and for really technical astrologers this is why I said earlier to you personally that you can learn a lot about astrology from watching this too, and here’s an example of that. So the second conjunction of Saturn to the Bitcoin Sun was partile but not exact. Actually it’s stationed partile on the Bitcoin Sun but not exact to the minute; like it didn’t get all the way up to the minute, you know what I mean? So the second one never went technically exact. Now that turned out…
CB: What time frame?
RW: What’s that?
CB: When?
RW: That was like September 20-something, 2019.
CB: Okay, here it is. So September 2019.
RW: Yeah, if you toggle it back, you’ll see it stations at 13-degrees-54, and the Bitcoin natal Sun up is 13.30, right? So it got within about 24 minutes, but it turned out that that actually made quite a difference. The price didn’t go down as much as it did that first time as it did in January. But then what happened is you can see the South Node is right behind it. And the South Node then made an exact conjunction to the Bitcoin natal Sun, and then the price collapsed a bit more, so it was like a double one-two punch.
And we’ve really found that the transiting South Node, just its symbolism suggests, is an energy drain. And so, it sucks away life’s energy, vitality, and wealth in this case, and it really cut the Bitcoin Sun down to size there. And then we got a mini four-month bear market that culminated. Of course, the South Node also signifies that the eclipse pattern was also very close on that stellium.
CB: Okay.
RW: So then we had an interesting period in December because Jupiter entered Capricorn, which we thought would be quite favorable. However, the South Node and a solar eclipse conjuncted the Bitcoin natal Mars, and I’ll show you on the price chart what happened there; we do have a price chart for that. You just had it.
CB: And just really quickly, there’s that eclipse you were talking about.
RW: Yeah. Now this was very confusing. We couldn’t make a forecast, right? Because on one hand, you’ve got Jupiter, which says price goes up, and on the other hand, you’ve got South Node and an eclipse that says the price is gonna potentially go down. And what happened is that that was kind of the last gasp of the bear market and that was really the last low point that we had. And I think it was somewhere around $6,000 and that was just about a year ago because that was on Christmas Day, that eclipse.
And it just goes to show you how damaging a South Node eclipse is. If you have a direct hit of a South Node eclipse on one of your natal planets–I’m just gonna give a shout-out to one of my teachers, Judith Hill, who has talked about this quite a bit in her medical astrology–it’s a very dangerous time for health, and we see that translates quite well into financial astrology. Even though Jupiter was there, you would have thought that Jupiter would have offset that, but Jupiter itself was eclipsed, and Jupiter itself was conjunct the South Node. And by the way, I think that this was giving us a warning for the pandemic and the crisis that was to come. As we know the effect of eclipses can be very long-lasting.
CB: Right.
RW: And of course, there were a million signatures and so many astrologers have pointed them out, but one thing was that Jupiter was eclipsed by a solar eclipse, debilitated in Capricorn, and conjunct the South Node. And so, it lost its protective ability and its prosperity and its good fortune and good luck, but the thing is that we didn’t know it until February and March. So the actual effect of the eclipse–along with the Saturn-Pluto, Saturn-Jupiter, and so many other aspects–but that was one thing that I thought was notable.
CB: Yeah.
RW: And if we look at the Bitcoin price chart, we can see exactly in the price action how that correlated with the Bitcoin price action.
CB: And I like that you were mentioning the South Node just because it also ties into one of its ancient meanings in Hellenistic astrology, which is just the idea of decrease or a lessening of things, and that might be why that becomes relevant when it comes up in transits in the Bitcoin chart due to that symbolism.
RW: And I personally tend to use the more traditional kind of Vedic and Hellenistic interpretations of the nodes. Personally, myself, I find them more useful in financial astrology, which is essentially that the South Node sucks energy away and the North Node adds energy. And the North Node can be good for financial gain and success and wealth, but as we know, sometimes it adds too much energy. The South Node isn’t necessarily bad. The South Node can be quite spiritual, I believe.
CB: You’re not looking at the ‘past lives’ of Bitcoin or something like that through the South Node?
RW: Well, no. I mean, more of the traditional Vedic interpretation of the South Node, which is that it’s more like Neptune. It’s terrible for the material gain and the material world, but it can actually be through loss you gain spiritual consciousness, I believe kind of sums up the Jyotish. I don’t know if that’s consistent with the Hellenistic.
It does represent loss, and a loss of energy and wealth. And it’s a loss of material standing, right? It’s terrible for fame and fortune and success, but through renunciation of those things, you can gain a type of spiritual mastery. And that’s kind of how I see the South Node. I don’t know specifically how that pertains to financial astrology. In financial astrology, it’s good if you’re looking for a buy point; it’s good if you’re looking for an entry into the market.
CB: Yeah, I was just joking with you about the ‘past life’ of Bitcoin. I don’t know what that would look like. Is this the chart you wanted to look at with the price chart?
RW: No, not that one yet. We’ll get to that for the future; that has to do with my future projections. No, one more, one more. One more, one more. Let me see here. Here, here we go. You can see the Christmas eclipse conjunct the Bitcoin natal Mars. No, no, not there.
CB: Oh, sorry.
RW: No, down at the bottom, on the bottom-left.
CB: Oh, there it is.
RW: Yeah, yeah, right here. So this is really interesting because even though Jupiter was conjunct the Bitcoin natal Mars, which you would think would have been a huge boost to confidence, wasn’t. Because Jupiter was eclipsed and afflicted by the South Node and the same eclipse and affliction to the Bitcoin natal Mars, we ended up getting a yearly low here. Now I did not forecast this and I was actually a bit surprised, so this is one of the things that we found that was interesting and surprising. And actually if you were to kind of zoom in on that and look at the actual dates, you could see that the eclipse was on December 25, the actual low came about a week before the eclipse, and then you had a secondary low a week after the eclipse.
And you can see the whole effect of the eclipse there in the price action was pretty bad; that was the lowest point it had hit since the previous January, and again, was kind of worrisome for the market. People were wondering what’s going on, what happened after it rallied so strongly.
CB: That’s funny to me. I just wanted to interject because I remember in the year ahead forecast–or maybe it was the December forecast. I remember me and Austin–when he and Kelly were out visiting to do those forecasts here in the studio–we were arguing about the auspiciousness or lack of auspiciousness of that Jupiter eclipse. And I remember Austin arguing very strongly for it not being an auspicious eclipse, while I was trying to not fully downplay that, but maybe frame it in a little bit more positive way; and that was definitely an argument that Austin ended up winning in the long run.
RW: Yeah, I mean, it was interesting because I think it was a fake-out. The stock market continued up for another–I forget–I think about eight weeks after that. And I was just kind of shaking my head. I was like Jupiter is eclipsed, afflicted by the South Node, and debilitated in Capricorn, and we got a new all-time high in the stock market; man, I was just like thinking something’s wrong here. But I think it played out in a much more long-term fashion, which just goes to show you how the eclipses can be very complex and hard to gauge exactly their orb of influence in terms of the time. Now Jupiter did…
CB: Yeah…
RW: Sorry, go ahead.
CB: And they also just have that long-term, six-month impact since that’s the frame. An eclipse happens and it’s sort of in effect for six months; the next eclipse eventually doesn’t happen until six months later.
RW: Right, right. Yeah, and the solar eclipses, again, Judith Hill always says that’s a very difficult time. You have to be very careful with your health when you get that in your chart specifically, especially the South Node ones. I mean, it’s hard to see South Node ones as being auspicious, but what happened here was a couple of things in January and February. Apparently, the effect of the eclipse seemingly wore off there for a bit and Jupiter made a conjunction to the Bitcoin Sun. Uranus stationed right around mid-January there; you can see the price starts to move up when Uranus stations direct and starts trining the Bitcoin natal Mars. And when Jupiter conjuncts the Bitcoin Sun and makes a sextile to the Bitcoin Uranus, we get a nice rally here in February and stock markets rallying to a new all-time high and it looks like everything’s going well.
And then of course what happened in February, which will go down in financial astrology infamy, was that Venus, debilitated in Aries, made a series of squares to the stellium in Capricorn and everything started falling apart across global markets. And then all hell broke loose and we got a market crash essentially by the time we were in mid-March.
CB: Which is interesting in terms of the Bitcoin chart because of course one of the things that happened was Mars went into Capricorn in mid-February of 2020, so it started transiting and hitting that stellium along with the rest of the planets transiting through Capricorn this year.
RW: Right. Thank you for pointing that out. Yeah, I forgot about that transit of Mars. And also, as we’ll see in March, what we got was that Saturn made its first conjunction to the Bitcoin natal Jupiter, first partile conjunction. But yeah, Mars in Capricorn, malefics in Capricorn, as we can see, are bad for Bitcoin, and benefics in Capricorn are good for Bitcoin, so that’s a pretty tight correlation that we can say has been holding up quite well.
CB: Looks like by the end of March, Mars hit Jupiter, the Bitcoin Jupiter as well. And let’s see, so just going back to your chart in terms of when the lows were, because obviously the entire world economy just crashed.
RW: Yeah, what happened in March, for listeners who might not understand exactly what happened, there was a global liquidity crunch. So stocks started plummeting and investors and traders, anyone who was a margin trader in particular, including large financial institutions–which means they were making trades on lended money–had margin calls; which means a bank’s gonna liquidate your position unless you can come up with some money within a very short period of time. This created a cascading global market liquidity crunch. And so, assets that had nothing to do with the pandemic or the crisis or even not involved in the stock market at all, like cryptocurrencies, started crashing as investors started liquidating any asset that was in profit to cover other margin calls and just to go to cash for safety.
And this by the way correlated almost to the day–another one of those correlations almost to the day of Saturn conjunct the Bitcoin natal Jupiter, right? Jupiter, once again, is a point of wealth, prosperity, good fortune, and luck, and your ability to be expansive. Saturn–it’s inherent symbol is scythe, right? I’m not sure if I’m pronouncing that right. It’s kind of a reaper, and so its job is to kind of prune away any excess growth in the garden, potentially, for future growth and abundance.
But what happens when Saturn conjoins Jupiter here is that we get an enormous contraction. I think it was the biggest one-day drop in Bitcoin history, and you can see that again on my price chart. You’ll see a giant red candle, which just indicates a massive collapse in the price on the price chart.
CB: Yeah, so in the chart that we’re looking at we can see that that transiting Saturn reached 29 degrees of Capricorn and 33 minutes and exactly conjoined the position of Jupiter in the Bitcoin chart at 29.33 Capricorn on March 16. Do you know how close that was to the largest one-day drop?
RW: Yeah, I believe that drop came right around March 12 or 13.
CB: Okay, well that would be pretty exact then. If that’s true that would be a really great correlation then having that exact transit of Saturn to Jupiter.
RW: Yeah, and you can see there were two lows within about a four- or five-day period, each one of these bars being a single day. So it wasn’t just on one exact day, but it was over the range of a couple of days. But you can see these massive red candles being a massive drop, essentially as soon as Saturn went partile. And that’s a really important point. These aspects are most powerful when they’re partile.
CB: Okay. So yeah, that’s another good lesson, which again, just learning astrology or teaching astrology, astrologers know that the exact aspects can tend to coincide with the focal point of a transit, and we can see that sometimes happening here very closely, being reflected in the price or the value of Bitcoin.
RW: Yeah, but in the bigger scheme of things, for like 2018, Saturn was in essentially a 5- or 6-degree orb the entire time from the Bitcoin Mars and Sun; and so, that’s when we saw that Bitcoin bear market. So there are definitely orbs for the bigger picture, but for the exact transits the partile aspect is very powerful for the exact yearly low and high points.
CB: Yeah, it looks on this chart March 12-ish was when the low was, so that’s really, really close to that exact Saturn transit to the Bitcoin Jupiter. That’s impressive.
RW: Yes.
CB: Okay, so back to the chart. But after that point, it started rebounding eventually.
RW: Yes, and all the markets have essentially been running up ever since then; I mean, every chart for every market. Yeah, this is a good chart right here for this. I mean, every chart for the stock market looks like this chart; this isn’t totally unique to Bitcoin, which is very interesting. I mean, with so much havoc being reeked astrologically, why are markets continuing to rally I think is a question a lot of financial astrologers have been asking; and one of those things I think is Uranus in Taurus just kind of turning markets and finance upside down a bit.
And I think Jupiter-Pluto has also been making some really big winners, but some really big losers, right? I think stock markets, particularly tech stocks like Amazon and Zoom and anything that has to do with conducting your business and your life at home have been doing really well; whereas so many small businesses and restaurants and clubs and so forth have been completely going out of business. So I think Jupiter-Pluto has made for extreme financial conditions and this extreme disconnect between Wall Street and finance and Main Street, what’s happening in the real economy.
But looking at the Bitcoin chart here–actually if you can just zoom out for a minute, Chris, I want to just point out this. 2020 has been one of those things where I think it’s been a little hard to make those really exact correlations between those partile conjunctions and trines and so forth to the peaks and valleys of the price action. In this case, one of the things I see for 2020 is, number one, the South Node left Capricorn and the eclipse pattern left Cancer/Capricorn in May, and I think that was a huge favorable for Bitcoin.
The other thing is that Uranus made that third and final exact trine to the Bitcoin Mars, which again, just a refresh was the aspect that we had a huge rally on in May, June, and July of 2019. And that happened right after the crash, so that brought it back up to about the $10,000-range there in April and May. And then what happened is that Uranus fell into this kind of ‘sweet spot’ midpoint area in making trines to both the Bitcoin Mars and Sun essentially for pretty much the rest of 2020. And you can see you got a peak there with my red little arrow there; that was the Uranus station.
CB: This is the red arrow right here?
RW: Yeah. We got a relative top there. That was an important day because we had Uranus station, we had Mercury cazimi, and Mars with dignity in Aries was trine the Sun with dignity in Leo, and we got a market top there. Then Uranus went retrograde and things kind of went south for a little bit. And we didn’t really know Uranus was retrograde, Mars was retrograde; we thought that might slow momentum down and it actually did for a while. But what we found was that Jupiter started making sextiles to the Bitcoin natal Uranus and trines to the Bitcoin Saturn, right?
CB: Mm-hmm.
RW: So Jupiter started aspecting that opposition between the natal Uranus and Saturn that we talked about, and all of a sudden, it started to take off. And now we’re approaching the Bitcoin 12-year cycle Jupiter return.
CB: Right.
RW: And that kind of brings us to where we are now in the present, to this new all-time high that we got, as you pointed out, on the November 30 Full Moon eclipse in Gemini, which interestingly wasn’t really an active point in the Bitcoin natal chart; it was like 8 degrees Gemini. It was actually making an inconjunct to the stellium. Maybe it was making a wide trine to the Bitcoin Mercury. I mean, it wasn’t a super active transiting, but it was a North Node eclipse in a sign of technology and information, and we got a top there, so that was interesting.
CB: Yeah, something to note or perhaps try to account for in the future as things progress to figure out why perhaps that was acting as a sensitive point. So here it is. It looks like it was at, what, 8 degrees of Gemini?
RW: Yeah, I mean, there were some other transits there as well. I believe Venus is–let me see if you have that. It’s November 30, okay. So if you look at Venus, actually Venus is sextiling the Bitcoin Sun, and so that was a nice aspect that might have been favorable in some way as well. But we don’t know if we have a yearly top yet, see that’s the thing.
CB: Right.
RW: We could still go higher on the Bitcoin Jupiter return, but we have a very interesting situation coming up now in the next couple weeks because the historic 20-year cycle of the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction initially starts at 29 degrees Capricorn; and that is of course the Bitcoin natal Jupiter, which is the wealth point for Bitcoin. And I mean, this has obviously never happened before because it’s been 29 years since Saturn was at this position and I don’t know if it will ever happen again.
Will there ever be another Jupiter-Saturn conjunction at 29 degrees Capricorn? Obviously not in our lifetimes, maybe not even in the Bitcoin lifetime. So we can say this is a rare, once-in-a-lifetime event, so it’s hard to make any predictions on that. But our initial hit is that maybe the Saturn conjunction initially might depress the price, whereas immediately behind it the Jupiter return could cause a new all-time high to take place.
What makes it even more complicated is that we have the December 14 South Node eclipsing in Capricorn, solar eclipse in Capricorn–excuse me, in Sagittarius, which a South Node eclipse, Mercury eclipsed and afflicted doesn’t look particularly favorable, so that’s a problematic aspect there. Venus in Scorpio is actually gonna be making some nice aspects to Jupiter, Pluto, and Saturn, so that’s kind of a favorable. So we’ve got a real mixed picture for December for Bitcoin. It’s really hard to say exactly what happens with the combination; it’s such a schizophrenic aspect, the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in general.
CB: That’s tricky just because of the previous history of having that exact Saturn conjunction to Jupiter coincide with a low, which is expected since Saturn tends to be contraction. But then having transiting Jupiter conjoin that same almost simultaneously, you would normally think of as a growth aspect, so you’re getting sort of conflicting indications there.
So I don’t want to focus too much on calling things in the immediate future because I’d like this episode to be out for a while, but as we start to turn and wrap this up in talking about the future, obviously one of the big things that’s coming up that’s not just for Bitcoin but for the world in general of course is the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in early Aquarius that’s taking place in December. And it’s interesting that that’s kind of hitting an interesting part of the Bitcoin chart, very close to the natal Jupiter as well as the natal Mercury.
RW: I mean, that indicates that there’s a historic shift that’s taking place and that cryptocurrencies are gonna be part of that new cycle for the collective humanity and finance in Aquarius. And of course, Uranus in Taurus is fulfilling this prophecy of this disruption of global finance, disruption of the banking system. I mean, if there was ever a system that needed disruption, I would say the global financial system was in need of it. And it is fulfilling its promise of a technological revolution in finance and cryptocurrencies of course are one big part of that.
I mean, there’s others with just digital payment systems and internet commerce, I mean, there’s so many different aspects of it, but we really believe that Bitcoin could become the first global internet money of the future that transcends national boundaries and transcends national currencies and could become a positive uniting factor for international commerce.
I mean, Jack Dorsey of Square said that it’s almost impossible to do international commerce through traditional payment platforms because there’s so many problems with different banking regulations in different countries and currency conversions, and he said it’s incredibly complex to do internet transactions internationally. But we know now that these huge internet companies are international, and what we really need is a global internet money, and Bitcoin may be that internet money of the future.
CB: Yeah, one of the interesting things that Antonopoulos mentioned in passing that I thought was really interesting is perhaps connected with this Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in Aquarius and that being in an Air sign ruled by Saturn and some of the associations of Air signs with technology and communication and exchange, and of course it also being the Saturn return of the internet. But one of the things he mentioned in passing–in addition to associating money with speech and as something that’s like transferred value between people–he said in the past money has been required to have ownership. It sort of required personhood; it was something that was transferred between people. But Bitcoin is something that could also be transferred between non-people or between computers or machines or what have you because it’s an entirely digital currency.
And some of that I thought was kind of interesting in terms of some of the long-term, let’s say, century outlook when we’re talking about things like whether the emergence of AI, of artificial intelligence, is something that’s possible or whether it’s on the horizon or not and other things like that, since we’re still in the very early days of the computer age and the internet age and everything else.
RW: Yeah, I mean that’s really interesting. And there are some new cryptocurrencies, like Ethereum, that we talked about and some other ones that are involved in smart contracts. And of course, those contracts can be run, like you said, from one computer to another or from one corporation to another and don’t necessarily have to involve humans; and that somehow sounds very typically Aquarian.
I think it’s gonna be really interesting, this Saturn-Jupiter conjunction. I mean, I think Saturn in Aquarius could indicate that there’s a continuing collective hardship for humanity in the aftermath of the pandemic. And a lot of experts are saying the vaccine’s not gonna solve all our problems and this is gonna continue playing out. Whereas, on the other hand, Jupiter may be opening up completely new avenues of human creativity, expression, and connectivity through avenues like Zoom, what we’re doing now, and internet activity, and what we saw with NORWAC, with the first remote astrology conference. I think it was the first time NORWAC had ever done that, and they got three times more attendees than they ever had before.
So I think Jupiter is gonna expand certain areas of human connectivity while Saturn continues to make us have some collective difficulties and challenges that we have to face and overcome. And I’m sure Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are gonna be one of those things that really expands with Jupiter in Aquarius as well.
And I think we can see the story of what I emphasized before of Saturn entering Capricorn and that massive drop in the Bitcoin price, and over the course of this three-year period of Saturn really testing Bitcoin and seeing what it was made of, and really hardening it and maturing cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin to the point now where we’re seeing this massive institutional acceptance of cryptocurrencies with PayPal announcing Bitcoin and cryptocurrency payment wallets and platforms. And the Dow Jones Industrial Average just the other day said that we’re gonna be seeing a cryptocurrency index fund on the Dow Jones, one of the biggest stock exchanges in the world.
So this is a really great lesson I think for astrologers because we tend to fall into the trap of seeing Saturn as bad, and it was bad in that it crashed the Bitcoin price and held it down for a couple of years. But there was a bigger picture, there was a bigger process in play where Saturn was actually doing something, and we forget that a lot of times with Saturn because it feels bad. But Saturn also indicates success, and in this case, acceptance by traditional institutions.
CB: Yeah, that makes sense.
RW: So there’s like a larger arc to the story than just the price action itself.
CB: Yeah, it’s almost behaving more like a day chart Saturn, which, just again, goes back to the whole underlying problem of needing to rectify the chart. But in some of these transits that we’re talking about, day chart Saturns in birth charts tend to be like a setback or an obstacle, but it becomes a surmountable difficulty. It’s the cliché, ‘what doesn’t kill you make you makes you stronger’ type thing that is like a setback, but then eventually you build on it and you come back stronger from the setback than you were before as opposed to something that just knocks you down and you can’t get back up, which is more of a night chart Saturn-type transit.
The other thing that’s relevant here is the question of the extent to which it’s talked about by astrologers that the Bitcoin chart–because it was the first one that used this approach, using the blockchain technology and it spawned so many imitators and so many other types of cryptocurrency–the extent to which the chart almost acts as a chart representing other cryptocurrencies in general. And if that’s true, then this Jupiter-Saturn conjunction taking place so close to the Mercury of the Bitcoin chart is relevant in terms of the proliferation and something broader about cryptocurrencies in our world in general, and perhaps the underlying additional applications of the blockchain technology to other things outside of currencies.
RW: Yeah, that’s an interesting point. There’s hundreds of cryptocurrency projects, some of them may fail; in fact, most of them may fail. A lot of them have been trying to challenge Bitcoin, but none of them has been successful. But some of them will be successful and some of them may eventually overtake Bitcoin itself as well, so that’s a possibility. We have what we call the ‘MySpace’ problem, right?
CB: Right.
RW: Being the first doesn’t always mean you’re gonna have the most longevity. So yeah, the Bitcoin chart actually is predictive for the entire cryptocurrency market to some degree. We’ve been trying to do some techniques on some of the other cryptocurrencies; sometimes they follow their own charts, sometimes they follow the Bitcoin chart. There’s also a chart, a financial chart, that you can look at that shows Bitcoin’s relationship to the other cryptocurrencies, so it’s actually quite complex.
But cryptocurrencies in general, it’s not just Bitcoin. And Ethereum is actually doing very well right now, and they’re launching a huge, new Ethereum 2.0 scaling project to really make smart contract technology a big part of the future, and so that certainly could play a role in the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in Aquarius. Of course, Aquarius can be associated with new technologies and innovations and the future, so I think that cryptocurrencies are gonna be playing a big role for certain over the next couple of years. And if you want to look at that1 long-term price chart of Bitcoin, this might be a good segue to look at some of the future aspects that I was talking about that I think astrologers might want to pay attention to.
CB: Sure. Is this the chart?
RW: Yeah, this is called a ‘logarithmic price analysis’ here. And you can see the long-term price trends and how it looks on the logarithmic chart; essentially, it took three years for Bitcoin to get back to that 19.5K price point. And we’ve got two really interesting conjunctions–excuse me, two really interesting aspects coming up in 2021 and also 2022, but I’ve just highlighted the 2021 date range here on the chart.
So in May, Jupiter is gonna make its first ingress into Pisces, so we do have to be a little careful that we don’t have that same problem we had with Uranus’ first ingress into Taurus. But Jupiter’s ingress into Pisces will conjunct the Bitcoin natal Venus, something to take note of; the conjunction of the two benefics is going to be one of the most favorable aspects in financial astrology. We always love to see any kind of combination of Jupiter and Venus together.
And I might add both of them will have dignity; which is also interesting, as Venus is exalted in the natal chart, and Jupiter will have dignity by rulership. So this could produce some interesting fireworks here. Jupiter will also sextile Pluto, by the way, even on just this first ingress. So that’s a dynamite combination that we’re looking at.
CB: Pay attention to, just in passing, what Mars is doing during that time though, in terms of just comparing dual transits, like we were doing back in 2014.
RW: Yeah.
CB: Yeah, yeah. Okay, so…
RW: Sorry, I see. Yeah, so Mars is actually in Cancer opposing, so that’s an unfavorable, but it’s a more short-term influence there. It’s only fleeting for a couple days.
CB: Yeah.
RW: But certainly, it is something to be aware of. We don’t like to see oppositions from malefics.
CB: And this is a quick one because Jupiter will actually station there at, what? 2 degrees?
RW: 2 degrees, yeah. 2 degrees and then it will retrograde back. However, during that same period of time, what’s more noteworthy is looking at Uranus. Uranus is in the 13th degree and making the first of three trines to the Bitcoin Sun.
CB: Nice, okay.
RW: Now this is a very, very important series in 2021 and culminating in 2022. If you go back to that price chart for a second, this is one of the biggest favorables of the short Bitcoin life cycle, so this combination of Jupiter and Uranus could be highly, highly favorable for Bitcoin. Of course, we can’t say for sure and the aspects themselves don’t tell us the price range. However, if we look at the Bitcoin long-term price projection logarithmic chart, if it sort of just maintains its trajectory in this ascending channel, it’s likely to get up into that 30,000-, 40,000-, 50,000-range during that period of time.
Now if it went completely crazy on this Uranus series of transits here, and again, made a third touch to the top of the channel then you would be looking at a $250–excuse me, $250,000 price per Bitcoin, and there are some very well-respected, very smart financial analysts who believe that that is not completely impossible. So while we’re not making any concrete prediction that Bitcoin is gonna go to any specific price, we do believe that this favorable series of Jupiter and Uranus in 2020 is one. And then of course Uranus is going to make another ingress into Pisces in January of 2022.
CB: Jupiter.
RW: Sorry, Jupiter into Pisces, and then just a month or two later, Uranus will make its third trine to the Bitcoin Sun. And I think that there’s some chance that there’s some type of culmination in a Bitcoin price in a long-term, multi-year Bitcoin bull market rally there, so those are some transits and dates we’re looking at.
And then a little bit more long-term, I think the one thing that astrologers want to be a little bit concerned with would be Pluto’s conjunction to the Bitcoin natal Sun–excuse me, I’m sorry, to the Bitcoin natal Jupiter the following year in 2023. Now that is an aspect that potentially, if we see an extreme market rally–and Bitcoin is known for extreme rallies–then that could indicate a market bust; that could indicate a bust cycle. When Pluto hits the 29th degree or 28th–we’ll give it a 1-degree orb–then that breakdown and destruction of the wealth and prosperity and luck of the Bitcoin natal Jupiter could come into play.
The last really major transit we saw of Pluto in the chart was that conjunction to the natal Sun. Now it has been in a trine to Bitcoin natal Saturn recently and that seems to have actually broken down the market price structure, the whole mining system, and built it up stronger now as well. So Pluto has actually been kind of in the background doing some things there. But Pluto’s conjunction to the Bitcoin Jupiter would be something where we could maybe see another epic market meltdown and crash at that time.
CB: Yeah, that’s interesting.
RW: And then we could maybe see a whole other destruction and rebirth cycle that could come out of that.
CB: It’s interesting that happens in 2023, right before Pluto goes into Aquarius, in such an epoch-defining of shift of Pluto going into Aquarius in the same way that it was such a major worldwide shift when Pluto went into Capricorn back in the 2008 time frame, and we had the whole global financial meltdown. It’s interesting that the Bitcoin chart will get such a significant transit of Pluto to Jupiter right before or around the same time as that shift.
RW: Yes, so that is really interesting. That’s something I hadn’t really thought about that much. And these long-term forecast predictions are very speculative, but yeah, that does indicate that the historic shift of Pluto into Aquarius has also a very profound implications for Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Perhaps another cryptocurrency eclipses Bitcoin at that time. This is already five or six times that Bitcoin has had a thousand-percent gain followed by a 90% collapse. So it wouldn’t surprise anyone to see another cycle of that play out, but long-term investors want to be on the safe side of that one.
CB: Yeah, that volatility in that Saturn-Uranus opposition built into the Bitcoin chart itself, that actually reminds me that this year, we got a little preview of it last year but it never went exact–or I should say earlier in 2020–which was Saturn, when it dipped into Aquarius for that initial preview. That started the square with Uranus, and socially, we saw that with a lot of the different protests and stuff, especially in the United States. But then we’re gonna get the first exact hits of Saturn square Uranus and that’s gonna be basically the first time, one of the first times, that we’ve had a hard aspect between Saturn and Uranus since the inception of Bitcoin, right?
RW: Yes, so that was the opposition and now we’ve got the waning square. And last time we had a waning square was 1977, I believe.
CB: Okay.
RW: A waning square.
CB: Yeah, so that’s kind of interesting and notable.
RW: Well, that’s the dominant aspect of next year…
CB: Right, 2021.
RW: …the three series of squares between Uranus and Saturn. And during that time, Saturn will actually be conjunct the Bitcoin North Node.
CB: Yeah, the North Node is around 9 degrees of Aquarius and Saturn will get up there. It looks like it squares from 7 Aquarius to 7 Taurus in February. So mid-February is the first square. It’ll be interesting to see to what extent that might coincide with some volatility or other things like that.
It’s interesting that we’re also only about a third of the way, or maybe halfway this year through Uranus transiting through Taurus. So to whatever extent that is coinciding with some revolutions in terms of currencies, we haven’t even gotten through the majority of that yet. We’re really still only seeing a part of perhaps what is to come or what that’s gonna look like by the time we’re on the way out of that or on the other end of that later in the decade.
RW: Right. And that’s an interesting point actually. I believe Ray Merriman, the noted financial astrologer who’s been on your show, said that the first part of Taurus is famous for–let me see if I have this right. I can’t remember if it’s Uranus in Taurus, but Uranus in a sign–I think it was Uranus in the first-half of a sign is famous for bull markets, whereas Uranus in the second-half of the sign is famous for bear markets. So there’s a boom-and-a-bust cycle with Uranus’ transit through a sign and the corresponding markets to that sign. So maybe the second-half of Uranus’ transit in Taurus would be potentially, if he’s correct on that, less favorable.
CB: Yeah, that’s something I’d love to look into historically.
RW: It’s just interesting just on that point of Uranus in Taurus. Of course, that also corresponded to the Great Depression almost the entire time that Uranus was in Taurus in the previous time. At least in the 1930s and early ‘40s that was a very, very challenging and difficult time for the world.
CB: Okay. All right, well, I’m trying to think if there’s any major things that we meant to touch on, but I think we’ve covered just about everything. I did want to mention really quickly how people can follow you or how people can get in touch with you and follow your work on Bitcoin or other areas of astrology.
RW: Sure. In the great tradition of Satoshi Nakamoto, I have my own pseudonym on Twitter. I’m known as Crypto Damus, my handle is @AstroCryptoGuru, and I’m one of the leading financial analysts for Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies astrological, bringing the power of ancient financial astrology techniques to the modern cryptocurrency markets. So you can follow me there on Twitter @AstroCryptoGuru.
Also, you can go to my personal website, which is SourcePointAstrology.com. And I have a financial page there which kind of has all of my activities, current activities listed. I have a Patreon group also where we do a really, really specific analysis for Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and also just general financial astrology stuff as well on my Patreon group.
I’m gonna be speaking at ISAR by the way, Chris–I think you’ll be there too in 2021–and I’m gonna be of course lecturing on the astrology of Bitcoin. I’m so really looking forward to it. And of course we’re all hoping that happens in person, so a big shout-out for ISAR and everybody out there who’s listening. I hope that you’ll come to the ISAR 2021.
I’m also launching a financial astrology course, mainly for cryptocurrency traders, in late February of 2021, but I don’t have the information on that yet. I’m also gonna be launching a website called AstroCryptoReport.com and that’s gonna be going live in January of 2021, but that’s not up yet. Most of the information though is on www.SourcePointAstrology.com. You can find all of the relevant information for my financial astrology and also medical astrology too. I do a lot of medical astrology readings as well.
CB: Brilliant. Well, yeah, at some point, I’d like to have you back to talk about some of your work on medical astrology, since I know that’s a whole other half of your practice that you do at the same time.
RW: Well, you can see in my chart I’m a double-Gemini, Moon and rising. And someone once said to me, “Oh, boy, you’ve got two sets of twins.” And I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it made a lot of sense, so I always kind of like to have two things, right? On one hand, I’m an astrologer, on the other hand, I’ve been an acupuncturist, a Chinese medicine practitioner, so that’s one set of twins. And then even within astrology itself, I have the medical astrology persona and the financial astrology persona and those are another set of twins. So I can’t remember who said that but it was a very accurate depiction of the double-Gemini.
CB: Yeah, I like that. The dual nature of Gemini is a common thing, and having either two careers or two sides of things is pretty common, so that’s a pretty good example of that.
RW: And I have to have two websites for everything now.
CB: Yeah, well, thanks a lot for joining me for this, I really appreciate it. We covered a lot of ground. I’m actually surprised at how much we got through during this time. Is there anything that we forgot to mention that we’re gonna kick ourselves for not mentioning later?
RW: That’s a good question. I was looking over my notes here and this is a good thing to end on actually. We talked about this in our private conversation: the four things that could crash Bitcoin. I was able to come up with four possible things. I mean, people are always asking me, “Is Bitcoin for real? Is it really safe to put my money in there? Is this thing just gonna crash?” And I think at this point, after Saturn’s transit through Capricorn, there’s only four things: one would be another major hacking attack–like the Mt. Gox episode back in 2014–at one of the major exchanges, like Coinbase or Binance. There’s never been a major hacking attack. There’s been a lot of smaller ones since the Mt. Gox problem, so if there was a real big security lapse that would be a huge problem.
Of course, another global stock market crash could be a problem if that bled over into cryptocurrencies. Third would be fraud allegations concerning the notorious cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex and it’s stable coin called ‘US Dollar Tether’; there’s already been a lot of news about the potential that they’ve been manipulating the price of Bitcoin. And then the fourth would be what’s called a ‘51% attack’ if anybody tried to take over a majority stake in Bitcoin mining, which would be enormously expensive. Nobody could do it, not even Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, but it is theoretically possible. So one of those things might correlate to that Pluto conjunction to the Bitcoin natal Jupiter. I mean, it’s within the realm of possibilities, so it’s something that I wanted to throw out there.
CB: Yeah, well, that’s a good point and maybe a good point to close on that I always realized about pretty much any area or any application of astrology. It’s not sufficient just to be good at one or the other, but you actually have to be really good at both the astrology, and in this instance, your knowledge of Bitcoin and your knowledge of trading and finance in order to really excel at it or get the most out of it. In the same way that if you’re trying to do medical astrology, you can’t just be good at astrology, but not really know much about the human body.
You actually have to be well-educated and trained on both in order to know the full range of possibilities and in order to be able to combine them effectively. So maybe that’s a point that’s worth emphasizing here is that if this is an area that somebody wants to go into they’ve got to really do their research and become well-trained and good, both individually, on their own, in order to combine them perhaps the most effectively.
RW: Well, that’s a great point, Chris, and thanks for bringing that up, seriously. Because when I first started doing this, I would say I was a good astrologer, I was a competent astrologer. I had experience trading the stock market, but I didn’t know anything about technical analysis of financial markets, like using technical indicators like relative strength index, what we call the MACD, the moving averages, these kinds of things that financial analysts are fluent in. It’s a whole other language just like astrology, so I spent the last three years studying technical analysis.
And so, what I’ve done, and Ray Merriman and other financial astrologers do this too–this is really essential–astrology is essentially just another financial indicator that you want to combine. When I realized I was just trying to do this with astrology alone, it’s impossible. You also have to understand financial analysis or what they call technical analysis of financial markets and being able to read price charts, like what we showed in the graphics; those bars, those candle patterns mean something. I didn’t use any of the technical indicators on those charts, but there’s hundreds of technical indicators that all tell you something very important about what the price is doing. And so, what we do is we really just use the astrological factors as another technical indicator to help us understand the price movement of the assets. So that’s a great point. It took me three years of studying the technical analysis, and I’m still really just a beginner at that.
CB: Yeah, well, it’s something hopefully where we’ve encouraged people and shown them some of the possibilities of what is possible and some of the correlations that are interesting. So perhaps there will be some people that get excited about that and decide to take that project on as one of the interesting things that you can do either for personal interest and development and growth financially or for the purpose of just how interesting it is from just an astrological standpoint, studying that and having some sort of objective measurement to compare the astrology to and some of the possibilities with that that are applicable to many other fields and many other areas of society and history and culture and everything else.
RW: Right. I mean, astrology is just a language at the end of the day. I mean, that’s how I see it, of course astrologers can argue about this. But it’s a language, it’s a language of life, and it’s also a study of energy patterns and pattern recognition. And technical analysis of markets is also a study of energy patterns and pattern recognition, and of course medical astrology is also a study of energy patterns, so they all have that in common.
And by the way, I forgot to plug my newsletter report. We do have a subscription report for Bitcoin analysis that we did in 2018 that was a free report and we beta-tested our system, and we went to live subscription, paid subscription in 2018. I think we’re the longest-running paid subscription service for financial astrology for cryptocurrency, focusing on Bitcoin in particular.
And I put out a monthly report at the beginning of the month, every month, with short- and long-range forecasts for cryptocurrency markets, and also occasionally add in a lot of stuff. Our December issue had a big section on the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction and what that means culturally, politically, economically, and so forth. So if you’re interested in that you can email me at AstroCryptoReport@gmail.com.
CB: Brilliant, awesome. Well, thanks a lot for joining me today, I really appreciate it.
RW: Chris, it’s been a pleasure. And we talked for a long time here, I hope you got some usable stuff. And it’s been great connecting with you, I’m such a great fan of you and your show, and I hope your listeners appreciated this one.
CB: Definitely. All right, thanks everybody for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast. Thanks to all the patrons for supporting it. And I guess that’s it for this episode, so we’ll see you again next time.
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