I blinked twice today, finished a newsletter, and it's already 2pm. WTF?! I hope time won't pass this quick in Riga. I want to enjoy #bh2023 🙈

The profits (which are about $5/book) from the first 1,000 copies of Broken Money are going to the HRF Bitcoin Development Fund.

I think I will put the profits from copies 2,000-5,000 into making a slick animated YouTube video about the history of money and banking and the emergence of Bitcoin (basically the 30-minute summary of Broken Money). Kind of like Dalio’s “How the Economic Machine Works” video.

A popular 500 page finance book can reach tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. But an equivalent video, while not as deep, has the potential to reach millions as a different part of the knowledge funnel.

Because, I dunno. Fuck profits I guess. The rest of my business covers profits; the book is for a different purpose.

Stay hard in the #bitcoin bear market

Egypt is one of the handful of countries joining BRICS next year.

Friends and family here who don’t normally talk about finance are talking about it a lot. They see it as a pathway to escape the yoke of the dollar and American imperialism. They ask if this could mean the downfall of the dollar, and so forth.

I’ve been writing about long term de-dollarization for the past 3-4 years, and of course Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent freezing of Russian reserves accelerated it around the margins. I touch on de-dollarization in Broken Money too, in the “Heavy is the Head That Wears the Crown” chapter.

But like most things, people got overly excited by this process. Popular gold analysts were calling for a gold-backed BRICS currency announcement here in August, which of course never came.

Some major BRICS countries don’t even really like each other, like India and China. This will be a stepwise piece by piece process of closer financial and trade integration. Over time, countries can swap currencies rather than go through dollar rails.

It’s an important geopolitical process, but beware of people hyping it up too much or making something out of it that it is not.

Remember when Kevin O Leary told us all that we didn’t know what we were doing?

Then he went all in on FTX and found himself as someone else’s unsecured creditor lol 😂

Sure bro. We were the ones who didn’t know what we were doing lol 😂

Someone I know in Egypt has a co-worker that was recently arrested for being a “black market” dollar dealer.

Authorities don’t mind if you own dollar accounts in Egyptian banks. But they don’t like you withdrawing them. They want to be able to fractionally reserve them, rehypothecate them, etc.

Unlike Argentina, Nigeria, Lebanon, Turkey, and many other countries, stablecoins are not popular in Egypt for dollar exposure. A common reason cited is they don’t like the intangibility of them. Same for bitcoin. But black market dollars are commonly traded for, albeit with legal risk.

too much information

Will be interesting to see where it goes