Quote of the week:
"Narratives any time anything happens in Bitcoin:
Altcoiners: See Maxis, your coin sucks
Interventionists: Change the rules
Sidechainers: We can fix this problem
Austrians: The incentives are fine
Maximalists: This is good for BTC
Plebs: Stay humble, stack sats"
---Jimmy Song
🧡Bitcoin news:
➡️ Last week it was all about 'high fees'. Only a week ago, median fees were over 500 sats/VByte. They're now under 25 sats/VByte and appear to still be falling.
BRC-20 token standard = meme coins = straight dogshit.
Tons of people are reporting BRC-20 tokens disappearing from their wallets. Play stupid games…
Meanwhile, Bitcoin is still working. Nothing fundamental about Bitcoin has changed. Bitcoin is still secure, immutable, decentralized, scarce, and produces a new block every 10 minutes.
BRC-20s are a negative sum game for the degens minting and trading. However, it indirectly funds Bitcoin miners and encourages exchanges and companies to more rapidly adopt Lightning.
To sum it up:
1) Bitcoin proves once again invulnerable
2) The knuckleheads get poorer (have less Bitcoin ) - Bitcoin mines get more fund
3) Bitcoin L2s are improving: Lightning and Bitcoin become more adopted, as last week was an incentive for devs to improve L2s (Lightning, Liquid, etc.)
We can do this all day, every day.
Remember:
You can send $10,000,000,000 worth of Bitcoin
Anywhere around the world.
24/7/365 days a year
Without permission or counterparty risk
➡️ 20% of Bitcoin hashrate is still in China. 19 months after China banned Bitcoin, Chinese citizens continue to buy Bitcoin.
➡️ Bitcoin stopped working TWICE in its history 1st in 2010 2nd in 2013
➡️HRF (Human Rights Foundation) gifts 16.5 BTC (~$455,000) via its Bitcoin Development Fund to support 12 projects worldwide.
The Human Rights Foundation keeps shoveling funds to help Bitcoin adoption, ask yourself why that is.
The grants focus on improving Bitcoin scaling, privacy, decentralization, global education, censorship-resistant communication, and community-building efforts, with areas of focus including Africa and Asia.
➡️US Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr: "Your bank account could be frozen because of your politics. That is why I oppose CBDCs. That’s also why I support Bitcoin.
At the moment two leading Presidential Candidates support Bitcoin
• Robert F Kennedy Jr - Dem
• Ron DeSantis - Rep
➡️ Liechtenstein Betting on Bitcoin: „The prime minister of Liechtenstein Daniel Risch said in an interview the Principality is open to investing some of its $2.4B government funds in Bitcoin“
➡️ Bull Bitcoin Launches No KYC Bitcoin Purchases with Cash or Debit. "The fastest, most secure, and cheapest no-KYC method to buy Bitcoin that Canada has ever seen. No ID, credit check, or bank account is required to buy Bitcoin."
➡️ Turkey and Argentina lead the way in Bitcoin/CrYpTo ownership.
Why? Rampant inflation destroying everyone's savings lead to people adopting a system without this issue... Who would have thought? Bitcoin
CPI in Turkey is over 50%, while in Argentina it's over 100%. People are desperate.
➡️ Texas becomes the 1st State, Texas House & Senate have passed House Bill 591, to recognize that Bitcoin mining data centers using formerly flared gas mitigate 63% of carbon emissions.
➡️Bitcoin supply held on exchanges has fallen to 5.84% – the lowest point in the past five and a half years. Roughly 1.1 million BTC has left custodial services since the peak in March 2020, when 3.2 million BTC were sitting on exchange wallets. Approximately ~2 million BTC is still in exchange wallets.
➡️ On average, the US Dollar loses 92% of its value relative to Bitcoin every four years.
➡️Marathon (miner) partners with Zero Two, backed by Abu Dhabi's $853 billion sovereign wealth fund, to create the Middle East's first large-scale immersion Bitcoin mining operation.
💸Traditional Finance / Macro:
Banks:
👉🏽Deposits at JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America & Wells Fargo have shrunk by $465 Billion Year-Over-Year; More than twice the total of 4,000 small regional banks.
The reality is that deposits are leaving ALL banks. Regional AND large banks.
👉🏽Fed emergency bank loans rise to $92.4bn from $81.1bn the prior week as loans from the Bank Term Funding Program (BTFP) rose to a fresh record $83.1bn, while borrowings from Fed’s discount window slightly rose to $9.3bn. But the Fed says banks are very resilient, right....right?
🌐Macro/Geopolitics:
👉🏽U.S. CPI inflation rate falls to 4.9%, which continues the disinflationary trend. If you use the 1980 version of the CPI formula, inflation is actually ~13%.
In the Netherlands, inflation remains sticky as the April CPI came in at 5.2%
Consumer expectations for Eurozone inflation rose "significantly" in March --bolstering the case of ECB officials who say rate hikes may need to persist beyond the summer. Inflation 3 years ahead is seen at 2.9%, further above the 2% goal.
👉🏽The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office on Friday added more urgency to the fight over the debt limit, now saying there is a "significant risk" the U.S. will default on its debt "at some point in the first two weeks of June."
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen previously stated: "As every Treasury secretary has known, the only option that leaves our economy in good shape is raising the debt ceiling. Congress must stand behind the basic principle that America pays its bills and that we're not a deadbeat country."
Let me translate:
"As every Treasury secretary has known" = It is an unavoidable fact of life you can't argue with that
"The only option... is raising the debt ceiling" = We need more debt to keep the system from collapsing under the weight of previous debt.
By the way a quick reminder:
Janet Yellen received $7.2 million from banks for a handful of Zoom calls in 2020-21 when much of the nation was locked down & commerce was halted by politicians.
Maybe, just maybe, stop spending $120 billion every week? Maybe allow Congress to cut spending and tell Biden to begin shutting down the government? Just a thought.
U.S. Interest payment is now equal to Defense spending and 30% of the debt has to be refinanced in the next 12 months at today's higher rates!
The debt physically can't be paid back. It's a mathematical impossibility. Eventually, the mainstream will realize this and come to terms that the Fed will utilize its only option; --> To print!
Either they pay off the debt by print, devaluing the dollar...or they don't and foreign holders of US treasuries offload, also causing the dollar to devalue.
Stanley Druckenmiller speaks, I listen.
I quote Druckenmiller on America's Debt Crisis:
"It's Like Watching A Horror Movie Unfold".
“The worst economic outcomes tend to follow too easily engineered asset bubbles”. “I’m sitting here staring in the face of the biggest and broadest asset bubble, forget that I’ve ever seen, but that I’ve ever studied.”
"When you have free money, people do stupid things. When you have free money for 11 years, people do really stupid things. So there's stuff under the hood, it's starting to emerge. ... I would assume there are a lot more bodies coming."
You know the playbook: High sovereign debt levels = financial repression and capital controls.
I have used multiple sources. All credit to them.
My savings account: Bitcoin
The tool I recommend for setting up a Bitcoin savings plan: @relai npub1sqzr42dj8vx32yd5jcvvl3ytux45kl0etgf6y2ymjvmd7lqmuwmqk9vk7v app is especially suited for beginners or people that want to invest in Bitcoin with an automated investment plan once a week or monthly. Hence a DCA, Dollar cost Average Strategy. Check out my tutorial post & video for more info.
Get your Bitcoin out of exchanges. Save them on a hardware wallet, run your own node... be your own bank. Not your keys, not your coins. It's that simple.
