The oldest coins on the network have seen everything.

The Mature ones remember the last euphoria. The Old and the Ancient slept through crashes that ended careers. The Lazarus cohort predates almost everyone reading this.

Between them they hold nearly 43% of all supply, which makes them the most honest witnesses we have.

Recently, they warned at the top. Now they’re warning again, but in a very different way.

Below us sits one price level that would put more ancient supply under pressure than at any point in history, and we are closer to it than you think.

Let’s get into it.

Key insights

• Peak Conviction: Long-term holders now command a share of supply we have almost never witnessed before in Bitcoin’s history.

• Old Money Revealed: A unique lens on the network’s most ancient coins, and the loud signal they just sent.

• The Loss Regime: A historically rare metric is climbing fast, and 50% has always meant one thing.

• Uncharted Pain Thresholds: We are approaching an unprecedented level where the worst holder loss regime in history would begin.

A Wall of Diamond Hands

Long-term holders now sit on 16.61 million of the 20.05 million coins in existence, which pushes their dominance to over 82% of circulating supply.

In absolute terms this is a fresh all-time high, and in percentage terms it is beaten only by a fraction of a percent from December 2023. By any reasonable measure, this is the highest concentration of conviction the network has ever carried.

View live in OCM Studio: LTH Supply Composition

This is not a random quirk of the data. It is a pattern we tend to see roughly 6-9 months after a market peak, and it has shown up in every single cycle so far. When we look at the 60-day change in long-term holder supply, the biggest spikes reliably begin to fire around 6 months after the price top.

View live in OCM Studio: LTH 60-Day Net Change

The mechanism behind it is pretty self-explanatory. Remember that a coin is only labelled long-term once it has sat still for 155 days. The short-term holders who bought the very top are now bag holders, and instead of capitulating, they are gritting their teeth and holding through the drawdown.

As the clock ticks past that 155-day mark, those coins mature and quietly reclassify into the long-term holder cohort. In other words, today’s diamond hands are very often yesterday’s top buyers, seasoned by pain and unwilling to sell at a loss.

It is a beautifully counterintuitive truth: the strongest hands in the market are frequently built from the weakest ones, forged by nothing more sophisticated than the refusal to crystallise a mistake.

Introducing: Old Money

Here I want to introduce a unique view on the Supply Distribution dashboard, one I have called Old Money. It isolates the coins almost nobody is watching, and it is about to reframe everything we just spoke about above.

Continue reading with OCM Premium

You have been reading the free preview of this article. The full analysis continues with 12 more sections, charts and takeaways. Read the full article or see OCM Premium plans.