— Rome, Italy. August 30 2026.
Today’s piece departs from my foundational base of sound, risk-hedged income operations and focuses on the notion of extrapolating from a premise held with high conviction and speculating in highly leveraged, asymmetric payoff opportunities.
Specifically, using intelligent leverage to gain exposure to plays with limited downside and massive upside based on a working axiom. Placing a tiny % of the book’s working capital in places which have the potential to return up to 49x.
Working Axiom: The Price Of Bitcoin Is Between $117,000-$296,000 By The End Of 2028.
To state the obvious— I make no guarantees as I could easily be wrong I’m not trying to convince you to accept that blindly as true, it’s simply a working premise. If you don’t accept it, of course the below trades make no sense for you. Tune in next episode.
I will lay out my logic and then provide the trades in detail. Each trade has a defined downside. Two of which have a max payoff of 49x and one is left uncapped for a technically unlimited upside over the life of the contract.
The Logic Behind The Premise
In brief: The US fiscal situation is the writing on the wall. Interest on the debt is now one of the largest line items in the federal budget and every dollar borrowed to cover that interest bill compounds against itself the following year. There's no politically available path to closing the gap via spending cuts at the scale required.
That leaves one lever: debasement. Real rates will be held below inflation for long enough that the debt shrinks in real terms. The same playbook every over-indebted sovereign has run historically.
Once you accept that premise, the interesting question stops being "should I own an inflation hedge?" and becomes "how much intelligent leverage should I apply to it?" That's a different exercise from investing. This piece is about speculating. It assumes the premise rather than argues for it and asks : given this holds, what's the most efficient way to press it?
Modelling Bitcoin’s Price
Two ways.
1/Cost of production — the same as producing any commodity, yet with BTC the supply curve is literally programmed to adapt to its cost of production making it uniquely suited to model its price.
At time of writing, the midpoint cost of production is $43,536 which does not include the required return rate for miners.
For brevity’s sake, extrapolating the production costs and allowing for miner’s acceptable rate of return post-haling (April 2028) puts the cost of production at circa $117,000-150,000.
*Think about it in terms of the offshore oil services trade where the cost of new vessels was juxtaposed against shipbuilder’s required IRR’s to estimate the necessary day rates needed before new drill ships would be built.
2/ Reverse engineering its network effect — a property that has a mathematical formula known as Metcalfe’s law: The value of a network is equal to the square of the number of network users or V=n^2.
However BTC is an expanding network, not static, so it’s necessary to calculate the growth of that network which follows the V=n^3 cubic power expansion form.
Bottom line. The theoretical value of the network when growth is considered = V=n^6
Cutting to the chase, this suggests a 2028 value of $270,438 —$296,871.
*Theory only - Past numbers no guarantee of future performance and the BTC network relies on user adoption growth.
I’ve written 6 in depth articles on the BTC thesis in The Royalty King. All this is to explain the working premise. If/once accepted, the next logical question is how to position intelligently for maximum upside without the risk of ruin.
The free version ends here.
The trades themselves: strikes, entries, sizing, and full payoff math are for paid subscribers only. Below I share my positioning: 3 trades, each with a known, capped downside. Two have max upsides of 49x. One is left uncapped.
Small slice of capital, asymmetric shot at a decade-defining move.
If you’re convicted on the premise, this is the part that matters.
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