I'm basically a cold plunge maxi now.

Summarizing 2023: A subset of events for the year.

-China's economic re-opening stagnated. Had the first negative foreign direct investment flow in over two decades. And yet simultaneously, China surpasses Japan as world's biggest auto exporter. Huge gap between domestic consumption and export prowess.

-There was a US banking crisis involving a duration mismatch rather than a credit event. Resulted in some of the largest bank failures in American history, and the collapse of the 167-year old global systematically important bank, Credit Suisse. Liquidity was provided to the market and stocks went up toward all-time highs.

-The United States ran enormous deficits, resulting in one of the biggest divides between monetary policy and fiscal policy on record. Amid the deficits, consensus outlooks for a recession go largely contradicted, as some industries boom while others stagnate.

-Russia's invasion of Ukraine drags on. Russia's Prigozhin launches a rebellion, captures Rostov-on-Don and pushes hard toward Moscow, but then calls it off and agrees to leave. Prigozhin dies in a plane crash two months later, attributed to a bomb on board.

-A coup in Niger effectively pushes out France's presence from the country, and more broadly sheds light on France's ongoing presence in many African nations including with the CFA Franc.

-Israel suffers its worst terrorist attack in decades by Hamas, and responds with orders of magnitude more force on Gaza including major civilian casualties, and this war remains ongoing. Global public attention shifts from Ukraine/Russia to Gaza/Israel, and widely polarizes people across the world.

-The first recorded instance of space combat occurred as Israel intercepted a missile from Yemen in low Earth orbit. Yes, Earth's first known instance of non-test space combat was initiated not from within the United States, Russia, or China, but from Houthi rebels in Yemen.

-The first self-identified anarcho-capitalist candidate becomes head of state for a country, and for a G20 country no less. Calls for ending Argentina's central bank, after decades of uncontrolled fiscal monetization, inflation, and economic stagnation. If Argentina dollarizes, it would be the biggest country so far to do so.

-The Suez Canal is effectively closed over dangers posed to ships from Yemen. This impacts global shipping costs and energy, but likely hurts Egypt the most.

-Multiple other conflicts persist, including Myanmar's bloody civil war. Despite enormous casualties, these types of conflicts go largely ignored by the world because they don't materially affect the macroeconomy or bring major powers into potential conflict.

-The US federal government brings attention to UFOs/UAPs with multiple hearings, commissions, etc. But nobody really gives a shit. The public is like, "With all this going on, can we save the aliens topic until next year? Thanks."

What would it look like, if an emergent money was being monetized?

Often when I talk with academics or other high-IQ critics of bitcoin, it’s the volatility and seemingly speculative aspect of it that turns them off. It’s almost distasteful to them. They can get behind the idea of global open-source payments and so forth, “but that’s not why people buy it” they’ll say. “They buy it because they’re speculating. It’s too volatile for its own good.” Some aspect of them dislikes it in principle, almost *because* one can make money from it.

But a new decentralized money, including its own unit of account and liquidity, doesn’t just emerge as a multi-trillion dollar-equivalent network out of the box. In order to go from zero to trillions in market capitalization and liquidity, it needs upside volatility. And with upside volatility comes speculation, leverage, and downside volatility. Cycle after cycle, it’s priced like an option. At first it’s like a 0.1% chance that it succeeds in the long run. And then in the next cycle it’s like 1%. And then in the next cycle it’s like 5%, and so forth. So, early capital allocators that have seen a thing or two and know the high failure rate of new ideas will say, “This’ll probably fail, but if it doesn’t, both the investment gains and the macro implications will be enormous.” And then 15 years into it with a few more cycles under its belt, the probability of success looks less like a distant moonshot and more like a real possibility, and then eventually starts to look like the base case. In the beginning the question is, “how will this succeed?” and at later stages the question becomes, “what risks could prevent this from continuing to succeed?”

The process of buying bitcoin is often a speculative process at first, but then as people learn more, they often view it differently. Those that really want speculation will then continue down the pipeline of altcoins- there’s always some shiny new object to try to speculate on. On the other hand, those who begin viewing bitcoin as money, start to view it as a defensive or risk-off act to hold a piece of this liquid and globally decentralized network of value. One would feel too financially exposed not to.

OP_VAULT fixes this