Author：WJ  （Twitter @BC1LWJ）

Many people are wondering if the fundamental story and value proposition of Bitcoin have changed now that the short-term correlation between Bitcoin and US stocks (S&P 500) is at an all-time high, with the fractal similarity between the two price K-lines even dropping to the minute level.

When we look back, the long-term correlation between Bitcoin and the S&P 500 has generally remained between -15 to 15, with a mean correlation close to zero, or no correlation. However, the two had a very high correlation for a length of time amid the liquidity crisis in financial markets prompted by the breakout of the Covid-19 in 2020.  In fact, not only Bitcoin, but also bonds, commodities, and gold, all had much greater correlations with equities during this time, which is due to liquidity migration, which causes financial asset correlations to rise dramatically.

For liquidity migration, let us refer to the Exter pyramid model, a model proposed by the late John Exter, vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which organizes financial assets according to the risk and corresponding liquidity.

The model indicates that the higher an asset's return, the higher its risk, and the less liquid it is, the closer it is to the top of the liquidity pyramid. The lower the asset return, the lower the risk, and the higher the liquidity, the closer it is to the bottom of the liquidity pyramid. The bottom of the pyramid narrows as the supply of assets becomes more difficult to increase as they get closer to the lower levels.

The current strong correlation between Bitcoin and US stocks is the outcome of the pyramid's top-down liquidity migration. Although the Fed has not yet begun tapering, market expectations of liquidity tightening (rate hikes and tapering) have accelerated the downward migration of liquidity as investors sell risky assets at the top of the pyramid (commodities, stocks, bonds, bitcoin) and acquire bottom-of-the-pyramid assets (fiat and gold) to preserve wealth and liquidity.

This will lead to a negative feedback spiral down, sell risky assets - risky assets fall - investors passively deleverage - risky assets fall further, the liquidity migration The process of liquidity migration is the process of falling financial assets and deleveraging, a process in which the correlation between the two is reinforced by the large number of quantitative robots that arbitrage volatility.

We don't know how long this association will endure, but it is likely to lessen over time, regardless of how long the current liquidity crisis in financial markets continues. To better demonstrate this idea, consider two categories of bitcoin investors. The first is old money, which uses fiat currency as the primary currency and is primarily comprised of short-term bitcoin holders. One form is new money, which uses bitcoin as its principal and is held by the majority of long-term bitcoin investors.

Old money, with fiat currency at the bottom of the liquidity pyramid, follows the traditional liquidity pyramid model, positioning bitcoin as a risky asset at the same level of the liquidity pyramid as stocks and bonds. It's worth noting that gold's position at the bottom of the liquidity pyramid has been lost in name only, and fiat currency has become the de facto bottom.

New Money follows the liquidity pyramid paradigm of bitcoin's underlying narrative and value proposition, using bitcoin as the liquidity basis. In fact, prior to the emergence of fiat-backed stablecoins, cryptocurrency (Altcoin) disk liquidity was based on bitcoin (excluding USDC and USDT, which are not essentially native assets in the crypto space), and bitcoin has always been the liquidity pyramid base in crypto finance (excluding USDC and USDT, which are not essentially native assets in the crypto space). Bitcoin is the sole ultimate liquidity floor in terms of liquidity migration in the crypto-financial realm because the trading pairs were all Bitcoin.

Returning to the liquidity pyramid of traditional finance, the positioning of bitcoin is also differentiated, and those old money that positions bitcoin as belonging to the same layer of risky assets as bonds and stocks are gradually being released and reduced in the process of liquidity migration, and their share of bitcoin holders is getting bottomed out until their liquidity decays to the point where their impact on the fiat price of bitcoin is insignificant, i.e. the correlation between the two returns to its long-term mean, which is when it returns to uncorrelated. Once this irrelevance returns, even if the liquidity crisis in traditional finance persists, even if it is so severe that a liquidity financial crisis breaks out, the migration of old money liquidity no longer poses a significant impact on bitcoin.

This can also be seen in Bitcoin's on-chain data, as the percentage of BTC held for more than a year continues to set new all-time highs in terms of current long-term holdings of Bitcoin, which now exceed 65.5%. Although these gradually transforming long-term holders are not necessarily all new money with bitcoin at the bottom of the liquidity pyramid, it is foreseeable that the liquidity decay of old money is significant, and with the high turnover rate brought about by the sharp drop in bitcoin prices, bitcoin held by old money will be further transferred to new money, which also confirming the adage that every bear market decline in an asset helps him find the true owner. And the owner of bitcoin is the strong hand-holder who uses bitcoin as the asset at the bottom of the liquidity pyramid.

Returning to the liquidity pyramid model as a risk stratification model for financial assets, assets gain security through top-down levels, increasing liquidity, and absolute security is the main need for the bottom asset. Bitcoin, as the safest asset in the world today, has every chance of leaping from the risky asset layer to the bottom liquidity layer in the future, and the bottom layer of the liquidity pyramid will only be possible with absolute asset security, and it will only be possible to sustain this top-heavy inverted pyramid liquidity structure of the entire financial system with absolute asset security. The construction concept of employing fiat currency at the bottom of the liquidity pyramid will surely face dramatic collapse following the forced demonetization of gold.

The bottom of the liquidity pyramid has two core security requirements: no credit risk (no dependence on counterparties) and no devaluation risk (preservation of wealth).

Current fiat currencies simply cannot meet either of these two conditions. Fiat currencies are credit currencies, issued based on the balance sheet extension of the central bank, and if your wealth is a liability on someone else's balance sheet, you can only pray that the entity issuing the debt will not collapse or freeze your assets in one direction, but as seen in the current Russia-Ukraine conflict, this risk is inevitable, even at the sovereign level Credit assets held can be frozen by the issuer because of geopolitical issues.

The central bank's declared goal, on the other hand, is inflation; the original definition of inflation was an increase in the issuance of money, not a rise in commodity prices; the former is the cause, and the latter is the effect; modern economics' nomenclature with the result instead of the cause is a cover-up. The result of inflation is currency devaluation, let us use the original meaning of inflation, that is, the degree of currency increase to see the degree of risk of fiat currency devaluation, even if the world's hardest fiat currency assets today, the broad currency growth rate of the last 30 years has reached 6%-7% per annum, this number alone may not be significant, let us calculate from the perspective of compound interest, this average annual growth rate means that you hold This average annual growth rate means that the currency you hold will depreciate by half every 10-12 years, and with a lifetime savings time of 50 years, the lifetime depreciation of your savings will be 97%.

Of course, you can argue that you will not hold cash, you will choose to put cash into money market funds, bonds, or stocks, but this belongs to the investment is not savings, the nature of investment is that you have to take greater risk, investment returns are derived from the risk premium, even if you beat inflation through investment, you also took the additional risk that could have been brought by savings when there is no income at all. This is the embarrassing situation of value storage in contemporary society. Due to the lack of a stable means of storing value that can be brought about by an inflation-resistant savable currency, people can only take on additional unnecessary risk by disguising their financial investments as savings.

This is precisely the issue caused by the lack of a bottom layer of the liquidity pyramid that can be used as a store of value and wealth protection, and in the absence of this layer, the competition between Bitcoin and Fiat currency at the bottom of the liquidity pyramid is a kind of misaligned competition and descending strike. The liquidity edifice's bottom is already empty, and Bitcoin only needs to take advantage of the void to enter, most likely with a sluggish inflow at first and then a rapid leap afterwards. Human society's progress is not a smooth linear process, but rather a non-linear leapfrogging process, and we can easily imagine Bitcoin making such a downward leap in the liquidity pyramid.

In fact, the narrative and demand for bitcoin as the bottom asset of the liquidity pyramid will be further enhanced in the future due to the increased uncertainty in the External world. In fact, in some countries where fiat currencies have collapsed due to high inflation, such as Venezuela, bitcoin has become the de facto bottom asset of the liquidity pyramid, and the only option for ordinary people is to land on bitcoin as a lifeboat for wealth storage. In addition, the increasingly stringent controls on cross-border capital flow in today's world increased taxation and inflation in sovereign countries, and the outbreak of geopolitical threats, all provide strong drivers for bitcoin to enter the bottom tier of the liquidity pyramid.

The future is promising and Bitcoin will live up to its holder.

作者：Author：WJ  （Twitter @BC1LWJ）

当下，比特币和美股（标普500）的短期相关性达到前所未有的高点，两者价格K线的分形相似度甚至可以缩小到分钟级别，很多人不禁困惑，是不是比特币的底层叙事和价值主张已经发生改变？

回顾历史，比特币和标普500的长期相关性一般保持在-15至15之间，相关性均值接近零，也就是不相关，但是在2020新冠疫情爆发引发的金融市场流动性危机持续期间，两者却有了一段时间内相当高的相关性。其实这期间不仅仅是比特币，甚至债券、大宗商品和黄金都和股票之间发生了显著提高的相关性，这其实是流动性迁移导致的，在流动迁移发生期间，金融资产的相关性会大幅升高。

有关流动性迁移，让我们参考下exter金字塔模型，这是一个由已故的纽约联邦储备银行副主席John Exter提出的，根据风险和相应的流动性组织金融资产的模型。

模型显示， 资产越是靠近流动性金字塔上层，资产回报越高，风险越高，流动性越小。资产越是靠近流动性金字塔下层，资产回报越低，风险越低，流动性越高。金字塔的底部变窄，因为越是靠近下层的资产就越难增加供应。

当下比特币和美股的高度相关性其实就是金字塔自上而下的流动性迁移导致的，虽然美联储还没有开始缩表，但是由于通胀一直高位徘徊，短期内看不到缓解的趋势，市场对流动性紧缩（加息和缩表）的预期已经打满，这种紧缩预期加速了流动性向下迁移，投资者出售金字塔高位的风险资产（大宗商品，股票，债券，比特币），获取金字塔底部资产（法币和黄金）来保住财富和流动性。

这将导致一个负反馈的螺旋下跌，卖出风险资产——风险资产下跌——投资者被动去杠杆——风险资产进一步下跌，流动性迁移的过程就是金融资产的下跌和去杠杆的过程，这一过程中两者的相关性更是由于大量量化机器人对波动性的套利而强化。

这种相关性将持续多久我们不得而知，但是可以预见的是，不管当下金融市场的流动性危机是否持续，这种相关性将会逐步减弱。为了更好的说明这一点，我们将比特币的投资者中分成两种类型，一种是老钱，以法定货币为本位，大多是比特币的短期持有者。一种是新钱，以比特币为本位，大多是比特币长期持有者。

老钱以法币为流动性金字塔底层，遵循传统的流动性金字塔模型，将比特币定位在流动性金字塔中同属股票和债券的那一层的风险资产，这里需要注意的一点是在黄金被强制去货币化属性后，其在金字塔底部的位置已经名存实亡，法币成为事实上流动性金字塔底层。

新钱以比特币为流动性底层，遵循比特币底层叙事和价值主张的流动性金字塔模型，事实上，比特币一直是加密金融里的流动性金字塔底层（不包括USDC和USDT，因为本质而言这两者不属于加密空间的原生资产），在法币背书的稳定币出现之前，加密货币（Altcoin）盘口流动性交易对都是比特币，所以单就加密金融空间的流动性迁移而言，比特币才是唯一的最终的流动性底层。

回到传统金融的流动性金字塔上，对比特币的定位也是区别化的，那些将比特币定位在属于和债券股票同一层风险资产的老钱，正在逐步在流动性迁移的过程中释放和减少，其在比特币持有者中所占的比例越来越底，直到其流动性衰竭到对比特币的法币价格的影响不显著，也就是两者的相关性回归长期均值的时候，也就是回归到不相关。一旦这种不相关的状态回归，即使传统金融的流动性危机持续，甚至严重到爆发流动性金融危机，老钱的流动性迁移也不再对比特币构成显著影响。

从比特币的链上数据也可以看到这一点，从目前的长期持有比特币来看，持仓超过一年的BTC占比持续刷新有史以来的最高值，目前已经超过65.5%。虽然这些逐渐转化的长期持有者不一定都是以比特币为流动性金字塔底层的新钱，但是可以预见老钱的流动性衰竭是显著的，随着比特币价格大幅下跌带来的高换手率，老钱持有的比特币将进一步向新钱转移，这也应证了一句话，资产的每一次熊市下跌，都有助于他找到真正的主人。而比特币的主人就是以比特币为流动性金字塔底层资产的强手holder。

再回到流动性金字塔模型上，作为金融资产的风险分层模型，资产通过自上而下层层增加安全性从而提高流动性，其对底层资产的核心诉求就是绝对的安全，比特币作为当今世界最安全的资产，未来将完全有可能从风险资产层向下跃迁到底部流动性层，流动型金字塔的底层也只有在绝对安全的资产的支撑下，才有可能稳定支撑整个金融体系这种头重脚轻的倒金字塔流动性构造。在黄金被强制去货币后，以法币这种软通货作为流动性金字塔底层的构造模式无疑将面临极端奔溃的风险。

流动性金字塔底层资产有两个核心的安全诉求：一是没有信用风险（不依赖对手方），二是没有贬值风险（保住财富）。

当前的法币根本无法满足这两个条件中的任意一个，法币是信用货币，基于中央银行的资产负债表扩展发行，如果你的财富是别人资产负债表上的负债的时候，你只能祈祷这个发行债务的实体不会倒闭或者单向冻结你的资产，但是从本次俄乌冲突看，这种风险是不可避免的，即使是主权国家级别持有的信用资产，也可以因为地缘政治问题而被发行方冻结。

另外一方面，中央银行公开的目标就是通胀，通货膨胀的本义是货币的增发，因为通货就是货币，而不是商品价格的上涨，前者是因，后者是果，现代经济学用结果替代原因的命名方式着实有掩耳盗铃之嫌。通胀的结果就是货币贬值，让我们用通胀的本义也就是货币增发的程度来看下法币贬值的风险程度，即使以当今世界最硬的法币资产美元来看，其广义货币最近30年的年均增速也达到6%-7%的区间，单看这个数字可能并不显著，让我们从复利的角度来计算下，这个年均增速就意味着你持有的货币将每隔10-12年贬值一半，以人的有生之年储蓄时间长达50年计算，你储蓄一生的贬值幅度将达到97%。

当然你可以辩解，你不会持有现金，你会选择将现金投入货币市场基金、债券或者股票，但是这属于投资不是储蓄，投资的本质是你要承担更大的风险，投资的收益都是来源于风险溢价，即使你通过投资跑赢了通胀，你也承担了本可以通过储蓄带来收益的时候完全没有的额外风险。这就是当代社会价值存储的囧境，由于缺少可以抗通胀的可储蓄货币带来的稳定价值储存手段，人们只能通过变相将金融投资储蓄化来承担额外的不必要的风险。

而这正是由于流动性金字塔中用作价值储存和财富保护的底层缺失带来的问题，而面对这一层的缺失，比特币和法币在流动性金字塔底层的竞争其实是一种错位竞争和降维打击，流动性大厦的底部已经空虚，而比特币只需要趁虚而入，可能首先是缓慢的流入，然后是突然的跃迁。人类社会的演进不是平滑的线性过程，而是跃迁的非线性过程，而我们完全可以憧憬比特币在流动性金字塔中具有这样的下沉跃迁能力。

事实上，比特币作为流动性金字塔的底层资产的叙事和诉求，未来还将因为外部世界的不确定性增加而进一步增强，其实在部分因为高通胀而导致法币奔溃的国家，比如委内瑞拉等，比特币已经成为事实上的流动性金字塔底层资产，普通人民唯有选择登陆比特币作为财富储存的救生船，另外随着当今世界跨境资本流动管控的日益严厉，主权国家税收和通胀的加剧，地缘政治的威胁的爆发，都为比特币进入流动性金字塔的底层资产提供了强大的驱动力。

未来可期，比特币将不负holder。