Morning morning,

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last note and I apologize. It’s definitely not because there’s nothing going on…it’s quite the opposite. The world feels extremely volatile these days and every day there’s a new headline or two.

Gone are the days of casually jotting down ideas throughout the week, sitting down for a nice writing session late Thursday, then waking up early Friday to finish and hit publish. By the time Thursday rolls around now, the world has already changed twice.

We’ve got war escalation, major breakthroughs in AI, growing quantum anxiety, historic space launches, Epstein files back in the headlines, a potential $1.75 trillion IPO, and plenty more. Making investment decisions is getting harder. Making life decisions might be even harder. Complexity feels like it’s at all-time highs.

It really does feel like we’re living through the fourth turning. The powers that be are scrambling to retain control, while the algorithms do an excellent job keeping the masses distracted.

While we wait for the inevitable lethal doses of liquidity injections, let’s fade the noise and focus on bitcoin.

While it doesn’t appear Elon is mining asteroids any time soon, he certainly has ambitions to set up a base on the moon.

David Friedberg mentioned on the last all in podcast that he believes the moon could end up being the next industrial frontier for humanity. He says that if we can get to the moon then it has an abundance of material that we can mine, process and manufacture into goods, and the cost to ship back to Earth is 0. He says that it will cost less to move processed ore, precious metals from the moon to a specific point on earth than to ship it via any conventional method. Watch the entire clip above for his reasoning — really cool.

Apologies to all of my goldbug friends and readers. But it’s hard to think about bitcoin’s upside without thinking about gold’s downside. You can’t be too angry at me, you are clearly king, but beware, bitcoin is coming for the crown.

The upside in bitcoin is still completely misunderstood.

Not in the short term. Not in the “will it bounce next month” sense. I mean in the bigger picture, multi-year, monetary asset sense. Because if Bitcoin continues to work, keeps producing blocks, and eventually implements a quantum-proof solution, then I think the path toward replacing gold as the world’s primary non-sovereign store of value becomes much clearer.

And if that happens, the upside from here is still absolutely massive.

What’s interesting is that the argument is becoming less about Bitcoin and more about gold.

Gold’s long-term scarcity is not nearly as untouchable as people want to believe.

If you’re bullish on human ingenuity, on AI, on accelerating science, on robotics, on reusable rockets, on cheaper access to space, on humanity’s ability to solve hard engineering problems, then you should at least be open to the idea that gold’s scarcity premium is not eternal. Maybe not this year, maybe not in five years, maybe not even in ten. But on a long enough timeline, it becomes harder and harder to believe that humanity’s ultimate store of value will be a metal whose main edge is that it has historically been hard to find and expensive to extract.

That assumption starts to look weaker in a world where technological progress is compressing time.

Bitcoin is the opposite.

Bitcoin’s weakness is obvious. It is right there in front of you. Quantum is the final boss. It is real and it should be taken seriously. However, technical problems can be solved over time by smart people with strong incentives.

Like Morgan Stanley for instance who just launched their bitcoin ETF this week. Even in a bear market, it was their best day of trading for any ETF in history for the investment bank.

I think it’s safe to say that if needed, there is a line up of infinite resources from them, BlackRock, where IBIT is the company’s most profitable ETF, Strategy, Coinbase, and other companies with vast technical resources and infinitely sized war chests to go with their vested interest.

If needed…

Just yesterday, Bitcoin developer Avihu Levy introduces "Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Transactions Without Softforks”

Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Transactions Without Softforks

Unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to dig into this paper yet, and judging by the abstract displayed above, I don’t think it really matters. Way too technical for me. But from what I’ve been able to gather from reading all the tweets and coordinating with LLMs, it looks like in the event a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) appeared, this paper shows a practical way to create safe Bitcoin transactions with no change to the Bitcoin protocol.

Also this week, a top Bitcoin dev and CTO of Lightning Labs, Olaoluwa Osuntokun conceptualized a clever “proof” (called a zk-STARK) that lets you prove “this is my bitcoin from my normal wallet seed” without ever showing your seed. In a real quantum emergency, Bitcoin could do a quick “emergency upgrade” that blocks the old vulnerable way of spending. It’s important because with this proof, you can safely move your coins to new quantum-safe addresses, even if your wallet is from 2012. It doesn’t solve everything, but it means Bitcoin doesn’t have to freeze or burn millions of BTC during a crisis.

While advances in quantum technology are moving fast, Bitcoin defenses are moving even faster.

Click above for an amazing in depth review of where things are and why Bitcoin is going to make it.

Or don’t! I mean, you can just trust that the devs are going to figure it out or whatever. But if you really did believe, with every bone in your body, that Bitcoin will remain decentralized and secure forever, then you either have as much bitcoin as you can possibly have, or you don’t have enough bitcoin.

Gold’s problem, on the other hand, cannot be patched. Gold looks great today, but I think its long-term future as humanity’s primary store of value is much more limited than most people realize. Its whole monetary case depends on scarcity holding up forever, and I’m not convinced that survives a world of accelerating technological progress.

That’s the trade.

Bitcoin does not need to be perfect today. It simply just needs to survive. It needs to keep producing blocks. It needs to adapt. It needs to remain credible long enough for the world to realize that a digitally native, fixed-supply bearer asset makes more sense than dragging bars of metal into the future and pretending that’s the final form of money.

And if Bitcoin does that, it will take gold’s mantle. Not overnight. Not in a straight line. But it’s inevitable.

The numbers here are still nuts.

Gold’s market cap is still over 23x larger than Bitcoin. So when people say bitcoin has already had its move, I honestly think they are missing the point. If bitcoin merely becomes a credible digital replacement for gold, you are still talking about a huge repricing from here. And that says nothing about the other potential use cases around collateral, settlement, and balance sheet adoption.

If you want to wait until quantum is fully solved then that is also an option. But you will be paying up for certainty — you won’t be buying BTC at $70k, or $126k…it will be much higher at that point. The possibility that Bitcoin makes it through this phase and comes out stronger on the other side is exactly why the upside still exists. That’s why I think it can make sense to have some exposure in your portfolio today, even if you’re concerned about the likelihood of Bitcoin’s future.

To me, the bet is very simple:

If humanity keeps advancing, gold’s long-term scarcity premium comes under pressure.

If humanity keeps advancing, Bitcoin’s technical vulnerabilities get solved.

Asymmetry.

Bitcoin has already taken its beating, down more than 50% from the highs to the local lows. I’m not going to speculate too confidently on whether the exact bottom is in, because nobody knows. However, this is probably a very reasonable window for people with no exposure, or not enough, to start accumulating.

That’s it for today folks. Have a fantastic weekend.

Good morning!

Apologies but my promise to “write more” in 2026 is not going as planned. I went down a seemingly never-ending rabbit hole on quantum computing and the risks it presents to Bitcoin this quarter and it took a lot of thinking/writing time. Hope you enjoyed last week’s novel but if you didn’t get a chance to read it and want to read my opinion on this fascinating topic, you can check it out here: Quantum Could Be Bullish for Bitcoin.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming, for now.

We have this saying around the office that felt particularly relevant given the current state of things: no chill. It comes up often enough to be a thing because there’s always something. Rarely a dull moment. Well, the last two weeks? No chill. No chill at all.

I’m not going to pretend I have some expert military opinion on every technical reason why the Iran situation matters. On the surface, it doesn’t look great and seems like it could become a drawn-out conflict that throws a wrench into global prosperity. But what do I know.

When I’m lacking sufficient knowledge on an important macro event, I tend to radically simplify things to help me make decisions or formulate an opinion. The best way to explain that process is to relate it to how I play poker — which is not great, but I am a winning player on the margins.

There’s a saying in poker made popular by the 1998 movie Rounders: “If you can't spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker.”

When I’m at a table, I’m not trying to outplay everyone equally. I don’t use much math or statistics. I don’t look at solvers or play game theory optimal (GTO). I’m mostly a feels player.

That makes table assessment much easier for me. I’m not looking for players making technical mistakes, that’s way too hard. I’m looking for the players who can least afford to lose a big pot. The ones playing a little tighter, a little more nervous, a little more aware that one bad hand really hurts.

That’s where I can apply pressure and hopefully find an edge.

Now that you know that, you’ll have an advantage playing in our upcoming poker tournament after our inaugural golf event!

Join us on June 8th at Glen Abbey for The Bitcoin Open! We still have some early bird tickets available for our readers this week.

That’s how I think about markets and geopolitics right now.

When the world gets shaky, pressure doesn’t hit every asset, country, or “safe haven” the same way. It hits the places where confidence matters most. The places that depend on the perception of stability, prosperity, and momentum.

That’s why this moment feels bigger than just another ugly headline out of the Middle East.

You can’t spend decades turning the Gulf into a magnet for global wealth, building Dubai and Abu Dhabi from the sand into luxury hubs, financial centers, and safe havens for capital, and then have serious regional instability show up without consequences. Even if those cities remain functional and resilient, the perception of invulnerability gets tested immediately.

And once perception gets tested, capital starts asking harder questions.

That alone is enough for me to slow down, and zoom out.

Even some of the smartest macro minds in the world have spent the last year talking about leaving the West, diversifying jurisdictional risk, and moving toward places like the UAE. Ray Dalio was probably the most prominent example of that shift.

His broader thesis for why he moved his life and assets toward the UAE made sense. But this week is a reminder that no jurisdiction is bulletproof, no matter how sophisticated, wealthy, or well-positioned it looks on paper. Even investors who correctly identified the West’s decline may have underestimated how quickly geopolitical risk elsewhere can reprice the alternative.

And that brings me to gold.

There was a noticeable lack of victory laps from goldbugs this week.

War headlines. Oil ripping higher. Fear back on the menu. The kind of environment they’ve been dreaming about for years.

And yet Bitcoin has held up much better, while gold and silver have looked a lot less heroic in the moments that actually matter.

I find it fascinating that gold is known as this ultimate safe-haven asset, but when you actually need to use it, the impracticalities start shining brightest.

What do you actually do with a meaningful amount of physical gold?

The wealthiest goldbugs I know don’t even live in the same country as their gold.

Maybe I’m too much a product of the digital age, but when it comes to individual sovereignty, gold makes less and less sense to me in a world where bitcoin exists. In a pre-BTC world, sure, maybe gold was the best available answer. Maybe the price of gold would have to be so high that carrying a portable amount would finally make sense. But agh, even then. If it were that valuable, there would be so much more supply coming onto the market that it still doesn’t really work. I don’t know. I just really don’t get it.

Then I hear how hard it can be to actually sell physical gold when the market is volatile, especially in size. And then I see things like this:

I honestly don’t know what to say other than: L-M-A-O.

What good is a safe haven if you can’t easily monetize it when volatility spikes and everyone suddenly cares about liquidity?

Maybe gold just works better on a screen as a ticker than it does in your hands as treasure.

Bitcoin doesn’t have that problem.

It trades around the clock. It is global. It is portable. It is liquid. It can be moved in minutes, sold in seconds, and stored without needing a vault, a broker, or a middleman “taking a look” at it before deciding what they’d pay if they were buying in the first place.

That doesn’t mean Bitcoin is perfectly stable or that it goes up every time the world gets ugly. It doesn’t. But it increasingly feels like the one hard asset built for the kind of world we actually live in.

A world where capital moves instantly.
A world where borders matter again.
A world where confidence can crack overnight.
A world where access and liquidity matter just as much as scarcity.

Bitcoin shines when it matters.

And that, to me, is becoming harder and harder to ignore.

Every bear market I’ve been through has its own flavour of fear to which we refer to as FUD. Bitcoin’s energy usage, government bans, the “better coin,” and some trappings of quantum risk. This crypto winter is all about the latter and I saw it coming a mile away. Up until this point, it was largely considered FUD and easy to ignore. But over the last year or so, there’s been an acceleration in progress and it’s no longer something to dismiss. In fact, it’s something that, in my opinion, needs to be addressed as soon as possible.

Quick note: this one ran longer than my usual weekly. The ideas that pushed me to write it don’t really show up until later, but I think the road to get there matters if you’ll bear with me.

With the way AI is hyper-accelerating, it’s only logical that the market has started to price in significant discoveries that can shorten time horizons to build a Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computer (CRQC).

Quantum research is also attracting nation-state funding which is helping to speed up progress. Recent breakthroughs are making the horizon feel closer. Google’s Willow chip, announced in late 2024, marked a turning point by demonstrating scalable quantum error correction. Then, in October 2025, Google ran their new Quantum Echoes algorithm on Willow, achieving verifiable quantum advantage: a physics simulation ran 13,000 times faster than the best classical supercomputer, with results published in Nature and potential applications in molecular modeling for drug discovery or materials science.

Other players like IonQ, Quantinuum, and D-Wave have followed with advances in logical qubits, hybrid systems, and cryogenic controls in early 2026. These steps don’t mean a cryptographically relevant machine is around the corner. Many experts still place that timeline roughly 10–20+ years away, but the level of certainty around those estimates is low. It could be later…or it could arrive sooner. They do, however, explain why nation-states and investors are pouring billions in now, compressing timelines faster than many expected.

Quantum risk to Bitcoin isn’t new. Developers and researchers have discussed it for more than a decade. There are a number of mitigation path suggestions but the governance issues are more challenging. Before this cycle (if we’re talking in 4-year cycles) the topic only surfaced to us normies when markets were weak and fear found oxygen. The topic has produced a predictable divide between those who dismiss the risk entirely, and those who treat it as an imminent existential threat. Reality sits somewhere in between. What I find fascinating about this situation is unlike any other existential risk that I can think of, this one comes with a very early warning and multiple paths to a solution.

Today’s quantum machines remain largely experimental. They are noisy, unstable, and far from the scale required to threaten modern cryptography. Most experts peg a cryptographically relevant quantum computer capable of breaking widely used digital signatures at 10-20 years or more away. However, timelines compress when incentives rise. Artificial intelligence is accelerating research. Governments are investing heavily. Breakthroughs rarely arrive on schedule but preparation does not require panic, it requires foresight.

I found this interview fascinating and easily digestible.

Worth a watch/listen to get an expert view on progress and timelines. However, some argue timelines to a CRQC are more like 5-10 years out, with progress moving faster than even experts expected.

For a bit of boots on the ground context, this is my third crypto winter, bear market, whatever you want to call it, since I started working in this space professionally. I personally did not give quantum FUD any credence in 2018 or 2022 but I started getting concerned that it would become a strong narrative this cycle, around late 2024, early 2025. I’ll admit, I’m not a quantum physicist, so my concerns were very surface level but it became pretty clear to me that this was going to be a thing. And honestly, I was quite frustrated that there was a lack of coverage and there was mostly silence from the folks I follow in Bitcoin. In fact, in the last year I met a few influential OGs and developers and made the mistake of bringing up quantum risk. I was met with immediate dismissal of the idea and found their attitude slightly disconcerting. They had zero concerns, thought it was total bullsh**, but didn’t really give me any explanation why they were so confident.

It wasn’t until Nic Carter started pounding the table on quantum risk to bitcoin that I started feeling better about my stack. Albeit, his essays were very technical (for me at least) and hard to fully understand, but the message hit home. We have a real problem on our hands. I noticed that his venture firm Castle Island invested in Project Eleven, a startup focused on mitigating the potential threat of quantum computing to Bitcoin, and my initial thought was that he’s just spooking the market because he’s talking his book. While digging into Project Eleven I saw that someone I knew who has had a lot of success in this space joined the team and I reached out. After meeting him, and then their founder Alex Pruden, we decided to invest in their Series A. If you’re not worried at all about quantum, that’s fine, because I’m very confident now that you’re going to be safe, but if you think it’s total BS, sitting down with these guys for an hour will undoubtedly change your mind or at least convince you to be open-minded.

I guess what I’m trying to explain is that I’ve come around full-circle from being very concerned, to sleeping well at night knowing that there are many people way smarter than me working on proposals well in advance of any real threat. That matters, because if enough people believe the threat is real, damage can occur even in the absence of one.

Much of the anxiety stems from a misunderstanding of what quantum computing could and could not do.

Bitcoin’s core properties remain intact:

• The 21 million supply cap is not at risk.
It is enforced by consensus across the network. Quantum cannot create counterfeit or new bitcoin.

• Coins sent to an address that has never been spent from remain protected.
The critical information needed to attack them has never been revealed.

• Mining would likely remain stable.
Even if quantum machines offered a temporary advantage, Bitcoin’s difficulty adjustment would neutralize it automatically.

The real exposure lies elsewhere. In Bitcoin’s early years, and whenever users reuse addresses, information is revealed that could theoretically be exploited by sufficiently advanced quantum machines. Project Eleven’s Bitcoin Risq List tracker puts the potentially exposed supply at nearly 7 million BTC, including many dormant or presumed-lost coins and an estimated one million tied to Satoshi-era mining. That is a large enough bounty to draw serious attention if quantum capabilities ever get there. At the same time, some researchers argue the portion that could realistically be stolen and moved quickly may be far smaller (thousands of BTC, not millions, since cracking scattered outputs could take enormous time and compute even with powerful quantum machines).

There is also a strategic dimension that rarely makes it into the louder quantum debates. A machine capable of breaking modern cryptography would almost certainly emerge first inside a nation-state research program, not a private lab. A good example of this: during World War II, the Allies guarded their ability to decrypt Germany’s Enigma traffic so carefully that intelligence was sometimes withheld to avoid revealing the capability. A state that achieved cryptographically relevant quantum computing would face similar incentives. Quiet surveillance and intelligence advantage may be worth far more than seizing coins on a public ledger. That doesn’t eliminate the risk but it suggests the first use of such technology may be hidden rather than spectacular.

If you’re worried about the way you custody your bitcoin, the good news is that modern wallets already generate fresh addresses when you spend. Your remaining balance is quietly sent to a new destination, hiding the relevant information again. The old lock is discarded; a new one, never seen before, takes its place. In practice, you’re likely already displaying the safest possible behavior without thinking about it. If you want additional peace of mind, you can easily move your coins to a new address and accomplish the same goal. Security hygiene, not cryptographic wizardry, is the real first line of defense.

So what does this actually mean for the market?

All of this preamble is not why I decided to write this letter. The concern on most investors’ minds is a massive sell off. I suspect any movement from a Satoshi-related wallet would send the market into a tizzy. There are undoubtedly many hardcore bitcoiners who are not concerned about the implications of potentially 5%+ of the network coming back online, because they believe in bitcoin’s immutability (which I will argue would still be very much intact as long as there was consensus on a solution). But I think the majority of people who hold bitcoin would prefer not to sit through a devastating collapse in value from a massive supply unlock from unscrupulous techno-pirates.

I’m here to paint the picture that if there is a major change due to threats from advancements in quantum computing that the supply shock could very well be in the other direction. Bitcoin, in its migration to post-quantum cryptography, may end up burning or freezing some or all of the legacy, quantum vulnerable BTC from the supply.

Fortunately, the OGs and developers I mentioned I had met above don’t actually contribute anything material to Bitcoin. Bitcoin core developers are in fact, not sitting idle. In the last 12 months the conversation has quietly matured. In February 2026, BIP-360, a proposal introducing a new output type designed to enable quantum-resistant upgrades, was merged into the official BIP repository. FYI, a BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal) is the formal process developers use to suggest and coordinate upgrades to the network.

BIP-360 is considered a conservative step: laying the groundwork for future post-quantum signature schemes while preserving Bitcoin’s existing structure. The approach is simple: prepare early, migrate gradually, and avoid disruption. Users who want maximum protection can move first. Institutions and custodians will likely follow. Over time, vulnerable formats can fade out organically. No emergency fork or sudden upheaval necessary. Just the same evolutionary pattern Bitcoin has followed for fifteen years: voluntary adoption driven by incentives. After thinking about this risk for some time now, I land in a simple place: we should move early. Not because the threat is imminent. But because preparedness is cheaper than emergency coordination. The hardest part is not the math. It is the coordination.

As we’ve previously discussed, if quantum capabilities ever advance far enough, a meaningful portion of Bitcoin’s supply could become vulnerable. Under this new proposal, the network might face a choice: allow vulnerable coins to be claimed under existing rules, or consider extreme defensive measures such as freezing or burning coins to prevent exploitation. Allowing claims would preserve strict immutability, the idea that history cannot be altered, but would in all likelihood destabilize markets and challenge expectations around digital property rights. Burning vulnerable coins would protect the network and prevent opportunistic extraction, but would raise philosophical questions about precedent and protocol intervention.

At first glance, even I struggled with this conundrum. Bitcoin is immutable. Rules are rules. Code is law. But immutability doesn’t mean immobility. Bitcoin has evolved repeatedly. Security rules have tightened. Signature formats have changed. Privacy improvements have been introduced. None of these changes weakened trust. They strengthened it. Immutability does not mean refusing to adapt when underlying assumptions change. It means changes occur through consensus rather than authority.

For investors, that distinction matters greatly.

Bitcoin’s integrity does not depend on never changing. It depends on changing very carefully, transparently, and with overwhelming agreement from a decentralized pool of network participants. If defensive measures were ever necessary, they would not represent a failure of the system. They would represent a sort of miracle of defense and self-preservation.

Now imagine the market implications. Bitcoin’s scarcity narrative has always been simple: there will only ever be 21 million coins. But not all coins circulate. Millions are lost. Others remain dormant. Some may never move again. If vulnerable outputs were permanently removed from circulation rather than claimed, coins long assumed lost would become provably inaccessible. Supply would harden. This would not be akin to a halving. It’s not monetary policy in any stretch of the imagination. It would be a tremendous boost in scarcity reinforced by security evolution. In markets where price is driven by marginal supply, even a small structural reduction can have outsized effects. Bitcoin has historically responded violently to far smaller changes in available supply.

The mere possibility of such an outcome could influence valuation models, custody practices, and institutional allocation decisions long before any technical action like a burn occurs. Bitcoin could face a moment where its security upgrade simultaneously strengthens its scarcity narrative. If the network moves toward this direction — a structural reduction in circulating supply, my bet is that it will feel like a monumental supply shock, eclipsing Bitcoin’s first halving in 2012, when the reward dropped from 50 to 25 BTC and kicked off a massive bull run on scarcity alone.

Okay, here’s the part of the essay where I risk losing any bit of credibility I had in the first place.

Bitcoin’s earliest coins including those mined by Satoshi used formats that expose more information than modern standards. At the time, this was practical as the network was essentially experimental. Quantum wasn’t really a thing yet and threats were mostly academic. There were real adversaries to contend with (governments, hackers, etc.) and simplicity was prioritized. But viewed through today’s lens, those early outputs represent one of the largest dormant bounties in financial history. If quantum computing ever threatened Bitcoin’s security model, the reward embedded in those coins would be a honeypot large enough to mobilize global research, defensive coordination, and rapid migration to new security standards. Not because anyone ordered it but because incentives demanded it. While Satoshi never wrote about quantum attacks specifically, in 2010 while discussing cryptographic risk, he noted that if a core hash function were ever broken, the community could agree on the last honest state and transition forward. The principle was clear: Bitcoin was designed to survive the evolution of cryptography. Not by freezing in time, but by coordinating when necessary.

I wonder, did Satoshi leave those early coins exposed to create a future incentive? Did he or she design a system where incentives drive collective action in moments of stress? Bitcoin does not rely on trust, it relies on aligned incentives. Tin foil hat off for now. But the incentive structure is really fascinating to me.

Quantum computing is often framed as a threat to bitcoin (little “b” since we’re referring to the price of bitcoin in this essay, not the network). In reality, it is a stress test of digital trust. Bitcoin’s supply cap remains secure. Modern wallet practices already mitigate most risks. Migration paths are emerging and some would say they’re already present. What quantum ultimately tests is not the network’s mathematics. It tests its capacity to coordinate, adapt, and preserve trust without a central authority.

In my opinion, Bitcoin’s greatest challenge is not technical. It will be philosophical.

And like every challenge it has faced before, the outcome will not be decided by decree, but by the incentives and choices of the people who rely on it.

If quantum ever arrives, Bitcoin will not break. It will evolve.

And the market will be watching every step of the way.

Bitcoin was built to survive the test of time. The more it is tested, the harder it becomes.

No doubt, the threats will evolve. How could they not when the network was built to challenge the most powerful institutions on earth?

Quantum computing may arrive slowly or all at once.

Bitcoin will endure, not because its code never changed, but because its incentives, its community, and its purpose proved stronger than any single technological threat.

Stack when it hurts most, friends.

Below are several sources that shaped my thinking on this topic.

• Project Eleven’s Bitcoin Risq List (exposed supply tracker)

• BIP-360 proposal

• Nic Carter on quantum risk: Murmurations II (his pieces from late 2025/early 2026)

• CoinShares Quantum Threat Report (Feb 2026)

• Bitcoin core dev Matt Corallo interview with Laura Shin

• Alex Pruden interview with Unchained

• Satoshi’s 2010 comments on cryptographic risk (e.g., hash function breaks and community transition)

Good morning,

I’m back in Toronto, freezing. Picked up the flu on the flight home from Saint Lucia last weekend — a warm welcome back to winter and, I suppose, karma for being away so much. Thankfully I had already put a dent in this piece before leaving, because not much has changed in the world of Bitcoin. Everywhere else, however, everything seems to be happening all at once.

I’m going to take a step back from musing on the “SaaS-Pocalypse,” the Blue Owl Capital debacle and potential ramifications on the credit market, this US war with Iran that was supposed to start yesterday, the day before, and the day before that…the Epstein stuff. It is all way too much to keep track of but it seems like something big is brewing. Stay tuned to the end where I dish out some podcasts that I thought were at helpful, if not just entertaining, that I enjoyed on these various hot topics.

It’s not that I don’t care about this stuff, it’s more that bitcoin does not care about this stuff, at all, and that’s what we’re mostly here for.

I read this really interesting article by the eclectic, previous hedge fund manager Hugh Hendry the other day. And while I don’t necessarily agree with him on a lot of things, and since I’ve been tracking him over the last few years, he’s not been that accurate, he did have a cool way of describing things. You can find his essay here.

bitcoin is not here to save the world. its here because the world learned the hard way that modern money only works by cheating. cheating time. cheating pain. cheating death. we built systems that survive by bending, by socialising loss, by pretending tomorrow can always carry what today can’t. and it mostly worked. worked well enough that america never failed, markets never cleared, and catastrophe was deferred again and again.

but in doing so, we quietly erased something that used to matter. the idea that there should exist at least one asset that doesn’t bend. one thing that refuses discretion. one thing that doesn’t care who’s in power, who’s desperate, or who’s about to break. bitcoin is not an improvement on the system. it is a provocation aimed at it.

a hard object thrown into an elastic world to see what happens.

As of this morning, Bitcoin is trading in the $60Ks after briefly dipping toward $65K yesterday, roughly 48% below last year’s peak above $126K. The charts don’t look great. Sentiment is ugly. The “it’s over” crowd is back. If you’ve been here before, you know the rhythm: despair returns right on schedule. Classic cycle behavior. And yet beneath the volatility, something far more important is taking shape.

We are entering a period of genuine technological abundance. AI is collapsing marginal costs across entire industries in real time — software development, customer support, research, content generation, logistics, and even elements of consulting. Task-level productivity gains of 15–50% are no longer theoretical; they’re showing up inside actual workflows. This is a supply shock. Goods and services get cheaper. Output expands. Living standards, in theory, should rise.

But transitions like this are never smooth.

Take it from the host of the Moonshots podcast, Peter Diamandis. This article he published on X the other day was pretty eye opening and a good resource if you want to get caught up on the latest in AI.

This would be even more hilarious if AI wasn’t about to turn the world on its head.

Companies aren’t waiting for perfect automation to arrive. They’re acting in anticipation. Hiring freezes, headcount reductions, and workflow restructuring are happening now. Entry-level and mid-tier white-collar roles are already under pressure, and younger workers entering the workforce are feeling it first. Surveys increasingly show workers fearing permanent job displacement. And yet headline unemployment remains relatively tame. That mismatch is the key. Displacement happens quickly. New roles appear slowly. Demand doesn’t collapse because people stop wanting things — it collapses when paychecks disappear.

As Hendry pointed out, modern fiat systems are not designed to let this process play out naturally. They are designed to absorb shock. They bend to survive. In 1929, gold was abandoned. In 2008, losses were socialized. In 2020, money was printed while the global economy shut down. Elasticity isn’t a flaw in the system — it is the system.

As AI disruption continues to pressure employment and demand, the response will feel familiar: fiscal transfers (UBI, expanded social support, retraining programs, deficit spending. If social instability rises, support expands. This elasticity preserves stability and buys time. But it comes at a cost. This time around, it will not show up in the CPI number, it will show up in asset prices. The burden shifts toward those holding cash and wages, while asset holders float upward. The system maintains legitimacy. Fairness erodes.

I don’t even like the idea of a tsunami hitting but a supersonic one?

Thankfully, bitcoin stands apart as the hard object in an elastic world (H/T, Hugh). It does not bend under pressure. It does not expand when politically convenient. Its supply is fixed at 21 million. Issuance is programmatic. There is no discretion, no committee, no emergency lever to pull. Gold supply expands when prices rise and new deposits become economical. Fiat expands whenever stress appears. Bitcoin does neither. In a world built on elasticity, rigidity becomes an advantage.

Cycles exist to test conviction. Every drawdown feels final. Every downturn convinces participants it’s over. Lower prices don’t smooth pain, they concentrate it. Bitcoin compresses decades of traditional market suffering into violent four-year cycles. Most participants bleed out early. A smaller group studies, builds conviction, and becomes hardened. Smart capital accumulates quietly amid the wreckage. In the short term, markets price human temperament more than mathematics. The math, however, does not cheat: fixed supply meets expanding liquidity in a world increasingly dependent on monetary elasticity.

The real question isn’t whether scarcity matters. It’s who stays seated long enough for it to matter the most.

If you step back, the positioning becomes clearer. Bitcoin remains the asymmetric hedge against a system that must expand to survive. Around it, productive land and real estate, energy and power infrastructure, defense and security technologies, and robotics with genuine moats all sit downstream of the same forces. AI creates abundance. Abundance forces policy elasticity. Elasticity accelerates currency debasement. Debasement strengthens the case for scarce assets. The more the system bends, the more scarcity matters.

When the system bends, the scarce endure, and the patient inherits the future.

Weekly Podcast Recommendations

I also highly recommend you read The Price of Tomorrow - such a great read by our friend Jeff Booth.

This one is more fun than educational.

Nerd out on this one.

Really good.

I landed back from El Salvador on Wednesday. Sun, surf, optimism…straight into freezing temperatures, 4ft snowbanks, and absolute chaos.

Perfect timing.

By Thursday, hell broke loose. Bitcoin and the rest of the market slid to levels I honestly couldn’t have imagined just weeks ago. And what’s wild is that after more than 8 years of living and breathing this market, I still catch myself thinking, “maybe this time is different.”

You’d think I’d know better by now. Clearly not.

The four-year cycle seems to be alive and well. Painfully so. And while it hasn’t been great for my personal account, it’s actually healthy for the market. Necessary, even.

Truthfully, we needed bitcoin to get dragged back to “value town.” At $100k, momentum stalled. New buyers weren’t coming in, and it was hard to blame them. Why buy something you don’t fully understand when it’s been hovering around the same all-time high for months? The only way that was changing was if bitcoin pulled a late-2017 move and ripped from $100k to $200k+ in short order.

That would’ve brought in a tidal wave of FOMO buyers…and probably wrecked them by the new year making the eventual bear market more painful.

Instead, all our late-cycle hopium was taken out back and shot on 10/10/2025. The largest crypto flash crash in history.

Roughly $20 billion in leverage wiped out. Liquidations that were ~10x larger than FTX and nearly 20x bigger than the COVID crash. Bitcoin fell from ~$117k to ~$105k in short order. Alts were absolutely annihilated. Millions of traders lost everything. Liquid funds got destroyed. Market makers blew up.

Looking back, it was always going to take time for the industry to digest that kind of event. And honestly, I think it still is in the digestion phase. We haven’t really seen any of the bodies float to the surface yet, and I suspect we will.

Side note: I just realized my wedding is on 10/10 this year. Let’s hope that date ages better in my personal life than it did for crypto 😬

Yesterday was one of the busiest days I’ve had in years. Easily 100 calls. Clients, partners, friends, everyone trying to make sense of what’s happening.

And after it all, I had a moment to reflect.

I think I got a little too comfortable last year. I could feel it in my work. Bitcoin at $100k had my foot slightly off the gas. This market has a way of humbling you when you least expect it.

Oddly enough…I missed this.

This volatility is what crypto is. This is where the real work gets done. Now that I’m back in the cold, it’s time to grind.

I’m not going to pretend I know what caused this move or whether this is the bottom. I don’t. Anyone telling you they do is lying. What I can say is that it’s refreshing to see real, individual buyers stepping in again, something we haven’t seen in a long time.

At these levels, bitcoin is mouth-watering for anyone with a long-term view and an iron stomach.

There’s a reason the phrase “HODL” exists and underpins this market. Sometimes you really do just have to close your eyes, hit the buy button, and live with the discomfort. And when it works out…they’ll tell you you got lucky.

Now, on quantum.

I’ve been thinking about quantum risk to bitcoin for a while. At first, I dismissed it like every other cycle’s FUD. Then I started paying closer attention.

Late last year, Satstreet invested in Project Eleven, an incredible team building quantum-related solutions for the digital asset space.

Since then, I’ve had countless conversations with core developers and some very serious Bitcoin engineers.

Here’s where I’ve landed: quantum risk to Bitcoin is real, but it’s likely 10+ years away. And importantly, the community is already on it.

Coinbase and Strategy have set up working groups focused specifically on Bitcoin and quantum security. There are multiple proposals on the table that look promising. I even spoke with a developer yesterday who told me Bitcoin could become quantum-resistant today if it absolutely had to — but because the threat is still far out, it makes sense to get the solution right rather than rush it.

Here’s Michael Saylor announcing their global effort to develop quantum-resistant upgrades for BTC on their earnings call yesterday.

That gave me a lot of comfort.

Once quantum risk is effectively taken off the table — and it really does feel like the brightest minds in the space are rallying around this now — I genuinely don’t see anything structural holding bitcoin back.

So, are we at the bottom? Maybe. Maybe not.

I’m not calling a bottom, particularly with Trump’s Fed Chair pick Kevin Warsh, who has been openly critical of QE. Still, this feels familiar. Front-load the correction, reset positioning, and then make sure financial conditions are far more supportive as the midterms approach. Voters tend to overlook inflation when asset prices are rising. Feeling wealthier has always been a powerful political tailwind.

This month or quarter might be messy. But zoom out.

Bitcoin is roughly 50% off the highs. If you liked it at $100k, you have to find the will, and the way, to start chipping away around here with a long-term mindset. That’s how this game has always been played. I still think we could have an amazing year.

So, stay frosty out there my friends. Grind mode activated. Stack sats when it hurts — that’s when the best opportunities show up (and when the real winners separate from the crowd).

Buenos Dias. Oh man where to even begin. Friends, fans, readers, haters, I really don’t know where to start. Is it the World Economic Forum and how the world is literally shifting from beneath us with no vote? Or is it the fact that my colleague and MD of Satstreet El Salvador sat down with President Nayib Bukele the other night?

Or does it all just jive together? Who knows. But what I do know is things are moving fast, and it feels like we’re in the later innings of the Fourth Turning. If you haven’t read the book—it’s kind of too late. We’re in it now. The world has changed, and if you’re reading this, you’re either going to come out the other side prosperous, or somewhere in the middle with the rest of the West.

I’m writing this from El Salvador as the sun sets over the beach just steps from my place. It’s hard to be salty down here other than after a day at the beach. I understand that Ontario is the polar opposite vortex.

Sorry for rubbing it in! Please don’t unsubscribe — the weather will turn eventually and you might miss these rants at some point…and maybe I’ll have to put up a paywall by the time you want to come back if bitcoin lags any longer!

Anyway…

Let’s give it up to the gold bugs—seriously, congratulations. We’re in the same boat, thinking the same way. Except our boat wouldn’t sink if we’re moving any serious amount of capital.

But what a run. Gold’s been on fire sitting just shy of $5k this morning while I’m noticing a familiar rotation to silver, copper, platinum, palladium, and whatever else lights up the periodic table.

Watching folks lose their minds over bitcoin’s choppy price action lately has been…informative. A few months of BTC underperformance and suddenly all that ironclad conviction looks way more conditional than advertised. This is exactly what boring markets do to you — they test patience, not theses. Feeling uncomfortable? Go buy a gold coin and call the top for us. Then we can get back to regular programming.

Gold’s market cap exploding like this — pushing toward $35 trillion territory — opens the door wide for bitcoin to climb to levels most of us couldn’t imagine just 12 months ago. The catch-up trade will be brilliant when it kicks in.

We’re already seeing early signs: precious metals investors quietly shaving bits off their gold and silver bars to diversify into bitcoin. Scarcity recognizes scarcity.

Wow, I used to post these every time the US debt was out of control. You can see in a bunch of my letters. This is the first time I’ve seen this! I can’t even screenshot the fact that the US is near $39T in debt without a government popup about fraud. Wild. As much as I want to stay here and riff on this I’ll move on.

The one thing that jumped out to me watching Davos this week is that the people who usually pretend everything is fine are not pretending anymore. The message underneath all the polished panels and soundbites is pretty clear: things are breaking, and they know it.

Not “might break.” Not “are under pressure.” Breaking.

When you’ve got senior leadership standing on a WEF stage openly saying globalization failed the West, that’s not some fringe opinion anymore…that’s the system admitting the experiment didn’t work as advertised. Don’t fight what these folks are telling you.

Offshoring everything. Hollowing out domestic industry. Becoming dependent on rivals for energy, medicine, chips, and manufacturing. It looked efficient on a spreadsheet. It looked great for margins. But now, it looks terrible for sovereignty under this new paradigm.

The shift happening now isn’t ideological, it’s pragmatic. Borders matter again. Supply chains matter again. Political independence suddenly looks a lot more valuable than cheap labor.

That alone tells you we’re not heading back to the world we had from 1995–2019. That chapter is closed.(¯\(ツ)/¯)

Then you’ve got Larry Fink, not quite the rebel, acknowledging something even more important (and very obvious): people don’t trust institutions anymore.

I’m surprised he didn’t fall through the stage as the foundation of the world he sits atop is crumbling.

What he meant was, once trust erodes, the policies don’t matter nearly as much. You can have the smartest economists, the biggest balance sheets, the cleanest slides — if people stop believing you’re acting in their interest, the social contract starts to fray fast.

Populism isn’t a bug. It’s the output of institutional failure. And all these weirdos in Davos know it.

I don’t even want to get into Carney… this guy. Apparently one of the only leaders in history to get a standing ovation after his WEF speech — for selling us out, being the poster boy for the New World Order, turning his back on our neighbor for communist China. Honestly, it was a pretty sick speech…if you had no idea what it all meant you might toss your elbows up with pride. That’s not how I saw it.

Anyway.

This is where Ray Dalio’s lens becomes useful.

His argument is simple but uncomfortable: the global monetary order itself is changing. Fiat currencies and government debt are no longer being treated as unquestioned stores of value by central banks. When that happens, the consequences ripple everywhere.

That’s why gold quietly had one of its strongest years while everyone was focused on tech stocks. That’s why US markets underperformed globally. And that’s why capital flows are starting to matter just as much as trade flows.

Trade wars don’t exist in isolation. They create capital wars. And capital moves fast when confidence cracks

The key takeaway isn’t “buy gold” or “sell stocks.” It’s that the old assumptions are no longer safe. The idea that government debt is automatically risk-free. That reserve currencies are permanent. That central banks can always clean things up without consequences.

History says otherwise. Dalio has spent decades studying what happens next. It’s rarely linear. It’s usually volatile.

And then you’ve got the other side of everything: Trump openly telling us the stock market will double.

At first glance, that sounds completely at odds with Dalio’s warning. But it actually fits the same framework.

Exploding debt and weaker currencies have a way of pushing prices higher without fixing anything underneath. Markets can rally not because conditions are improving, but because the money measuring them is rapidly deteriorating. Both things can be true at the same time.

And that’s really the message coming out of Davos: globalization is retreating, trust in institutions is fraying, the monetary order is under strain, and politics and markets are colliding again in a very real way.

If nothing else, it’s a reminder to stay alert. The rules are changing. Volatility isn’t a phase, it’s a feature of transition periods like this.

No one can predict what the world will look like from here. If someone says they can, run. In a few years, the world will not look like it does today. And positioning yourself accordingly matters more than pretending this is just another news cycle.

In a world of abundance, scarcity matters most.

Bitcoin was literally built for this sh**.

Have a nice weekend.

Woah, just realized this is my first post of the big ’26. Happy New Year to all of you. One of my many goals this year is to write more than I did last year so I guess that starts now. Coming to you live from El Salvador where I’ve been stationed and loving life since the beginning of the month. It truly is an incredible place.

Last week, we had the second annual Max & Stacy Golf Invitational which exceeded expectations.

While we didn’t come close to winning the golf tournament, Jon took down the poker tournament — Satstreet had 3/9 at the final table — couldn’t be more proud. And Jon took it down with the Doyle Brunson!

Alright, I don’t want to rub it in anymore as I know Toronto was hit with a massive snow storm yesterday so I won’t show you a picture of me writing this as I’m enjoying a coffee watching the sunrise on the beach 🤫

Okay, back to business.

Did you guys see Jerome Powell’s video message this week? I heard someone say it looked like a hostage video, which is both funny, and true. He had the subtle look of a man who knows every sentence is being dissected by politicians, markets, prosecutors, and millions of asset owners around the world. I have to admit I kind of feel bad for the guy. He’s under serious pressure.

And that pressure just got louder. Federal prosecutors have now opened a criminal investigation into Powell. Whether anything ultimately comes of it is almost beside the point. The most powerful central banker in the world is no longer untouchable. Institutional credibility is cracking, and when that happens, people start paying much closer attention to what they own versus what they’re being promised.

Check it out.

Powell’s getting hit from all sides as political pressure around monetary policy continues to build. There’s a growing push for easier financial conditions, especially as markets are ripping and the tech elite have sold US and China the AI promise land. They’re all in. They can see 5-6% + GDP through their rose coloured lenses. And all the while rising asset prices create a wealth effect, boost confidence, and make the economy feel healthier, regardless of what the underlying fundamentals say. It’s a self recursive loop and in today’s system, asset inflation has effectively become the new stimulus. Markets go up, people feel better. Markets stall, pressure builds. And the Federal Reserve sits right in the middle of it with very few levers to pull.

Adding fuel to the fire, CPI came in lower than expected on Tuesday. While economists will argue over the exact implications, the takeaway is simple: inflation isn’t accelerating the way policymakers feared. That gives central banks more room to justify easing financial conditions. Markets immediately read this as supportive for risk assets, and the response was predictable. Lower inflation plus political pressure to ease almost always points in one direction → moar moula.

So here we are. THE central banker under legal and political scrutiny. A growing narrative that financial conditions are “too tight.” Inflation data that makes easing easier to defend. And a market that has been trained for over a decade to expect support whenever things get uncomfortable. The outcome isn’t hard to predict. Liquidity will find its way back into the system. And when it does, it won’t flow evenly. It will flow into assets.

That’s the real dividing line in modern economics now. Not income. Not intelligence. Not effort. Ownership.

People who own scarce assets benefit when money gets cheaper. People who hold cash get diluted. This isn’t ideology, it’s math. Wages don’t keep up. Savings don’t keep up. But assets reprice. Stocks, real estate, commodities, businesses, and bitcoin all act as escape valves in a system that requires constant expansion to function. Cash has always been trash but it’s New Delhi style trash right now.

Stole this from Arthur Hayes recent essay.

“Bitcoin (gold) and dollar liquidity (white) bottomed around the same time. As dollar liquidity rapidly increases for the reasons described above, Bitcoin will follow. Forget about 2025 and Bitcoin’s underperformance; the liquidity didn’t support our crypto portfolios. But let’s not draw the wrong conclusions from Bitcoin’s 2025 underperformance. It was as it always is, a liquidity story.”

I mean this is exactly what bitcoin was built for.

Bitcoin wasn’t built for stable times. It wasn’t designed for calm, predictable monetary policy. It was built for a world where trust in institutions erodes, where money is politicized, where policy is reactive, and where the measuring stick keeps getting weaker. It was built for a system that has to print, has to stimulate, and has to inflate assets to keep the machine running.

When even the Fed Chair isn’t insulated from legal and political pressure, it becomes obvious that monetary policy isn’t purely technocratic anymore. It’s narrative-driven. It’s about optics, confidence, and keeping the system moving without breaking. And when stability becomes the priority, asset inflation becomes the tool.

Bitcoin doesn’t need trust in people. It doesn’t care who’s in office. It doesn’t depend on CPI prints, political pressure, or public confidence in central bankers. It runs on code, not credibility.

But owning bitcoin isn’t easy. And it’s not supposed to be.

If holding Bitcoin felt chill in any way, the opportunity would already be gone. Nobody struggles to hold BTC when it’s all green candles. The real test is in the drawdowns and the chop. The moments where price goes from $126k to $80k and your mind starts working against you. Especially if you’ve been around before, telling yourself in the midst of the bear that once BTC get’s back above ____ you’re done. After living through a few drawdowns the feeling pulls on your soul as soon as things start to get dicey.

Then you watch something like this ^ and you snap out of it, you buy more because “there’s blood in the streets.” Then it keeps going down and your fears start to compound. Then a scary narrative comes out and you become crippled with anxiety. Thinking about all the cool shi** you could’ve done or bought if you just didn’t get so greedy.

Lol sorry to put you through that. TGIF!

But seriously, that emotional difficulty is the filter. It shakes out the tourists, the over-levered, and the people who invested money they actually needed. The harder it feels to hold, the more upside is usually still ahead. Markets don’t hand out generational returns for free. They make you earn them.

Bitcoin isn’t a test of intelligence.
It’s a test of patience.

The people who survive the volatility are either the ones who sized their exposure properly and understood what they were buying, or forgot they had it. Bitcoin isn’t meant to be your emergency fund. It’s meant to be your long-term escape hatch. When you buy it with a 10+ year mindset with an amount of fiat that you don’t immediately need, the emotional experience changes completely. You stop caring about every dip. You stop obsessing over headlines. You let time do the heavy lifting.

Bitcoin wasn’t built for comfort.
It was built for chaos.

It was built for politicized money, eroding trust, asset inflation, and a system that survives by expanding. It was built for a world where the safest move isn’t trusting institutions to “get it right,” but owning something that doesn’t depend on them at all.

If it was easy, everyone would do it.
And if everyone did it, the opportunity wouldn’t exist.

Bitcoin was built for this.

Good morning!

Hope you had a wonderful Christmas if you were celebrating — and if not, I hope you still managed to unplug a bit and spend some time with family and friends. I’ve somehow managed to dodge most of the winter weather here in Toronto, and I plan to keep that streak alive when I head back to El Salvador next week for a handful of events that should be pretty special.

Speaking of El Salvador, our MD of Satstreet SV, George McBride, and the legend Max Keiser recently hopped on a helicopter straight from the golf course to Max’s restaurant and recorded an interview along the way. It’s exactly as unfiltered as it sounds and I think it’s worth a watch if you’re interested in what we’re doing down there.

I wasn’t originally planning a final note before year-end, but as 2025 draws to a close it feels like a moment worth pausing on — not for a victory lap, but for context.

Because a lot of what happened this year wasn’t random. It was the predictable outcome of incentives and policy choices that have been compounding for a long time. Most people only noticed once the effects hit price charts.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: Bitcoin did not reach $200K in 2025. I never explicitly predicted it, but I thought it was within reach. I was genuinely surprised we topped out around $126K and didn’t at least test $150K.

Price, though, is only part of the story.

What I did feel confident about at the start of the year was that 2025 would bring constructive policy progress, especially regulatory clarity in the US, and that capital would flow toward the assets best positioned to benefit from it.

That’s why I stayed almost exclusively in BTC. I remain very comfortable with that choice.

Even though Bitcoin made new highs this year, 2025 didn’t feel like a bull market. In many ways, it felt closer to 2018 or 2019 than it did to 2017 or 2021. Yes, it was a record year for Satstreet and our related entities, but the character of the flows was entirely different.

Almost everything we saw came from corporates and institutions. Very little speculative retail. No frenzy, no mania, no tourists, no panic selling — just steady, deliberate accumulation.

To me, that’s not disappointing. It’s foundational.

We also saw a clear bifurcation: bitcoin pulling away from the rest of crypto. That separation matters enormously for what comes next.

One thing I got plainly wrong: I repeatedly said I expected bitcoin to outperform gold this year. It didn’t. Gold led the “debasement trade” convincingly. That’s on me.

But the why is more interesting than the scorecard.

Gold moving first isn’t a rejection of bitcoin, it’s exactly how conservative capital behaves when trust begins to erode. It reaches for the familiar before it reaches for the new. Gold is the early warning. Bitcoin tends to follow once the realization hardens that the underlying problems aren’t being solved, only managed.

In other words, I may have been early, but the sequence is textbook for an environment of falling rates, ballooning deficits, creeping policy risk, and midterm elections coming soon.

At the start of the year, the real question wasn’t whether inflation would magically disappear or whether growth would suddenly reaccelerate. It was whether policymakers had any appetite for restraint. Whether there was a willingness to accept short-term pain in exchange for long-term stability. And once again, the answer was no. Not even with Elon at the helm.

There was no appetite for austerity, no tolerance for recession, and no political will to let markets clear on their own. The moment things wobbled, the playbook was familiar: support growth, protect asset prices, and push the consequences further down the road.

Rates didn’t come down because the system was suddenly healthy. They came down because staying tight became untenable. Debt servicing costs were rising too quickly. Growth was too fragile. And deficits quietly drifted into territory that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, let alone debated seriously.

We’re no longer in a traditional growth cycle. We’re in a debt-management cycle. Once you view markets through that lens, much of the “confusion” disappears.

You can feel the next phase beginning to emerge — not just in markets, but in politics.

Recent chatter out of California about the billionaire wealth tax is one small but telling example. When a sitting member of Congress floats redefining private property as provisional, it’s less about whether that specific bill passes and more about the direction of travel. To be honest, it’s what worries me most about Canada also…

Amazing dunk by David Friedberg…worth the read 🏀

Whether any specific proposal passes is almost beside the point. Again, it’s the direction of travel is what matters.

When debt burdens become uncomfortable and growth can’t carry the load, governments don’t suddenly discover discipline. They look for new definitions. New categories. New justifications for accessing capital that already exists. History is very clear on this.

This is precisely the environment bitcoin was built for — not because it’s “anti-government,” but because it’s neutral and outside the reach of discretionary rule changes.

The surge in precious metals this year underscores the same trend. Gold and silver don’t rip higher in a vacuum, especially on the way down in rates. It signals capital seeking scarcity and credibility as Treasuries quietly lose appeal.

That move isn’t bearish for bitcoin. It’s deeply bullish. As the chart shows, BTC still has enormous ground to cover as capital continues migrating toward hard, credible assets.

Gold can absorb hundreds of billions with barely a shrug. Bitcoin absorbing even a fraction of that flow reprices dramatically. The asymmetry is profound.

It’s also why bitcoin isn’t merely “digital gold.” Gold preserves wealth. Bitcoin can re-price it entirely…

Gold is heavy, slow, hard to verify at scale, and increasingly political in a world of borders and capital controls. Bitcoin is weightless, infinitely divisible, instantly verifiable, and native to the global digital economy.

Gold shines when people are scared. Bitcoin shines when people conclude the system won’t be fixed.

Equities today aren’t expensive because earnings are extraordinary. They’re expensive because expectations have been pulled forward and discounted into a future that feels increasingly uncertain. As rates fall and Treasuries stop compensating for inflation risk, capital doesn’t want more duration — it wants scarcity.

Bitcoin has a habit of sniffing out stress before it shows up on the front page. Every cycle has a moment where something breaks, liquidity tightens briefly, and then policy responds aggressively. Bitcoin often struggles into that moment, and then becomes the strongest performer coming out of it.

If that pattern holds, the setup for 2026 is quietly forming right now.

I don’t expect straight lines next year, and I certainly don’t expect sudden fiscal discipline. What I do expect is growing resolution: that debt won’t be paid down, that 3% inflation is the new “low,” that rates aren’t returning to some higher normal, and that scarce hard assets aren’t a temporary trade — they are the trade.

If 2025 was the year of quiet positioning and patience, 2026 feels like the year bitcoin finally sheds the last of its speculative baggage and starts behaving like the core macro asset it has been becoming.

And historically, when that shift happens, bitcoin doesn’t just outperform. It leads.

See you in the new year.

I’m getting that feeling again. I could be wrong as I have been many times before, but I feel like 2026 has all the trappings to be a monumentally strong year for bitcoin, the broader crypto market, and risk assets. It feels like we can chop around these depressing levels of $90K (definitely not more depressing than the weather I’ve just come back to) into the end of the year as holidays are typically slow, but I’m very excited for Q1 and 2026.

And when I try to put my finger on why next year feels so interesting, a big part of it comes back to policy. There are a few things lining up at once, but monetary policy is the starting point. The next Fed Chair is going to matter more than usual, and Kevin Hassett is now a 74% favourite for the role. If that plays out, the tone at the Fed should shift meaningfully. Hassett is a dove. He’s openly pro-crypto (previously worked as an advisor for Coinbase). And he’s ideological enough that if he thinks the US needs 2% interest rates to “win the future,” my bet is that he’ll take us there fast.

And if the US goes to something like 2%? That’s when the real fireworks start.

There’s roughly $8 trillion sitting in money-market funds right now (and growing), and here’s where things get interesting. If Hassett walks in and signals that he will be taking rates down toward 2% and starts hinting that 3% inflation is the new target, that entire pile of cash becomes uninvestable overnight. Real yields go negative. It’s brutal math. And when that happens, capital doesn’t slowly “rebalance,” it scrambles for anything that won’t lose to inflation.

We’ve seen this movie before. After 2008, when the Fed signaled they were comfortable running things hot, over a trillion dollars rotated out of cash in 18 months. Same setup here, except the numbers are much bigger. And it’s not like this is some fringe idea, Reuters literally said back in September that the recent cuts were “a signal that 3% is the new 2%.” Inflation is sitting at ~2.8% PCE anyway, so Hassett doesn’t even need some giant framework overhaul. He can just normalize it.

Markets are already pricing terminal rates basically at 3%. So the second money-market yields roll over? That $8T becomes vulnerable and starts getting FOMO. I’m not saying that all of it has to go but we have to assume that a good chunk of it has to go somewhere. And historically, in environments where inflation expectations drift higher and rates drift lower, liquidity piles into anything with real scarcity, growth optionality, or political tailwinds. Bitcoin usually moves early because it’s the cleanest liquidity barometer in the world — but this isn’t just about bitcoin. This is about a full-market rotation.

The point is simple: pair 2% rates with a soft 3% inflation target and cash becomes toxic. Nobody wants to sit in an asset that’s guaranteed to lose purchasing power. And once the outflows start, they don’t stop.

The second piece of the story that Powell didn’t even touch on at this weeks FOMC meeting: the impact AI has on jobs. Whether people want to accept it or not, AI is going to hit the labour market harder in 2026 than at any point before. Productivity booms do not translate into broad-based employment booms, at least not right away. That means the government is going to need a pressure valve. Some form of UBI…tariff dividend checks has already been floated as the new name for something the market might deem scary like UBI. Essentially a “cash for calm” program becomes highly likely heading into the midterms. Washington wants people happy, stable, and spending money. And happiness programs all have one thing in common:

It’s actually pretty sad and depressing to think about. The other day I read an article about the realities of coming out of University/College with little to no prospects of getting a job in a field that’s relevant to what you went to school for. Nice, found it:

It’s worth a read you can click the headline.

The truth is, it’s going to get a lot worse and it will move upstream to jobs of all sorts as robotics become more prevalent. Right now you have a better shot at being hired by Mark Zuckerberg to build out his data centers than you do getting hired at Meta as a software engineer. In 2026 it will be a problem too big to ignore and the government will need to find a way to plug the gap.

Jensen does a great job painting a positive future outlook on jobs in his recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Click below for the clip but I’ll also post the full podcast in my weekly recommendations below. It’s a must watch/listen!

Then there’s housing which is arguably the most politically combustible issue in America right now. The long end of the curve remains high, which leaves the housing market frozen. Buyers can’t buy, sellers can’t sell, affordability is wrecked, and the demographic that everyone needs — young families — is stuck on the sidelines. That won’t fly in an election year. Expect incentives, subsidies, loan-guarantee schemes…anything that juices demand and gets the housing conveyor belt moving again. Translation: more stimulus.

And this is all happening against a political backdrop that’s way more precarious than the headlines suggest.

If the midterms were held today, Republicans would likely lose. Trump would walk into 2026 as a lame-duck president with no ability to pass anything meaningful. And if that happens, 2028 is the Democrats’ to lose — and their policy direction is already clear. Look at Zohran Mamdani’s socialist playbook in NYC: aggressive redistribution, housing intervention, populist messaging. That’s the future of the Democratic Party. And if Republicans don’t course-correct fast, that’s the macro regime we enter and then we all have to move to El Salvador.

So what does this all mean?

It means Republicans have no choice but to go full send. Pull every lever. Stimulate everything. Cut rates. Float trial balloons about new inflation targets. Unlock housing. Keep consumers flush enough to stay happy. Basically: they have to turn the money printer back on, turbo, or they risk losing the country for a decade.

The setup...

If Hassett takes the chair…
If money-market yields collapse…
If $8 trillion needs a new home…
If UBI-lite programs emerge…
If Republicans flood the system with happy pills to avoid disaster…

Then 2026 should be an amazing year for asset holders. Albeit, I’m sure there will be some nauseating bumps along the way as usual…

Weekly Podcast Recommendations

Alright guys, I’m back. Apologies that it has been a few weeks since I’ve put something out — honestly, I didn’t expect to get so many messages asking when I’ll be back or if I’m still alive but here we are and appreciate the concern 🙏. I’ve been in El Salvador for the last while…what was supposed to be a much shorter trip ended up being a much longer trip (thanks to my fiance for being so understanding). No, it’s not because I wanted to leave Toronto when the weather was still in the double digits and miss as much of winter as possible. No, it’s not because the steak here in El Salvador is amazing and it’s 30 degrees and sunny everyday (although both helps). It’s because El Salvador is one of those rare places where you fly in thinking you’ll split your days between meetings and catching up on work, and then you just get dragged into all the momentum.

There’s too much happening here, and the contrast against back home is too sharp to ignore.

So please be assured, I have not been hiding out with bitcoin down massively from the highs. See, everyone in North America feels like they’re waiting for the next shoe to drop — the Fed, tariffs, deficits, midterms, whatever the flavour of uncertainty is this week. But here in El Salvador, in a country that the world spent decades writing off, it feels like you’ve stepped into a different macro environment altogether. The energy is the opposite of everywhere else. It’s not cautious. It’s not anxious. It’s not confused. It’s building, expanding, and moving forward while the rest of the world feels stuck in a loop of political and economic noise.

When I wrote “El Salvador: From Dangerous to Dream Destination” earlier this year, I thought I had captured this trajectory fairly well. Looking back, I undershot it. That became even more obvious last week when Satstreet ended up in the largest newspaper in the country. George McBride, our Managing Director of Satstreet El Salvador standing next to our logo, under a headline about the great work we’re doing here. You don’t get that kind of visibility because of hype. You get it because the flows are real. Investors are coming. Deals are happening. Capital is moving into this country at a pace nobody would have believed just a few years ago.

And the numbers back it up in a truly impressive way. In 2019, El Salvador had 2.9 million international visitors. In 2024, it hit 3.9 million. Tourism revenue has nearly doubled in five years, from $1.76 billion to $3.41 billion. The average daily spend per tourist jumped from $107 to $153. For a country of 6.4 million people, that’s transformative. Almost one tourist for every resident. And for the first time ever, El Salvador is attracting more international arrivals than Costa Rica — a country that has had a multi-decade head start in tourism branding. This isn’t luck. It’s strategy. It’s security. It’s execution.

This was a picture taken from the San Miguel Carnival on Saturday where there was a record ~2 million people in attendance enjoying the celebration, in peace.

Surf City alone has become a case study in how to rebuild a country’s international image. Hosting global surf competitions, positioning itself as a Pacific surf capital… it’s brilliant. But what’s more impressive is that 80% of visitors are now staying overnight, which means people aren’t just passing through, they’re engaging with the country. They feel safe. They see the opportunity. They come back. And the government is already projecting another record year in 2025 (4m+ visitors).

But what has stood out the most on this trip has been the seriousness of the entrepreneurs and investors who are now building here. I’ve been in meetings with founders working on real-world asset (RWA) tokenization, infrastructure financing, bitcoin-native credit structures, and business models that simply wouldn’t get off the ground in Canada or the US. The conversations aren’t hypothetical — they’re funded, they’re being executed, and it’s all happening now.

What’s making this possible is the regulatory clarity the country has put in place. The National Commission of Digital Assets (CNAD) deserves credit here. They’ve built a framework that gives builders an actual path to issue digital assets backed by real cash flows or real infrastructure. It’s clean, it’s understandable, and it’s attracting the right kind of projects — the kind that would get bogged down for years elsewhere. You can feel the impact on the ground. The pipeline forming here is real, and it’s drawing in people who want to build substantial, long-term businesses rather than chase trends.

And if you want to understand this shift firsthand — the builders, the capital, the momentum — the perfect moment to come down is in April for the Digital Asset Summit (DAS). It’s shaping up to be one of the most important events in the global crypto calendar, and it’s exactly the kind of forum where you can see the country’s strategy up close, meet the people driving it, and understand why so much serious capital is paying attention.

I also want to highlight the work happening at the Bitcoin Office under Stacy Herbert. You really feel its impact when you’re here. The country is attracting a very high caliber of people across critical industries like AI and healthcare…founders, engineers, operators, and investors who aren’t here to “check things out,” but to genuinely explore building in a place that’s aligned with them.

Bitcoin Histórico, the event the Bitcoin Office organized, was actually the reason I came down on this trip. It was a curated, and extremely high-quality gathering — the kind of room where you don’t have to sift through noise because everyone there is already serious. Events like that compound over time. They create gravitational pull. And you can see it happening here: El Salvador is starting to function like a real hub, not because of marketing or hype, but because the right people are choosing to show up.

Here’s the view, pre- “conference” at the Presidential Palace. Looked way cooler at night.

But the real story isn’t just the Bitcoin bet or the surfing beaches. It’s geopolitical.

For the first time in decades, Washington is looking south again, and it’s moving fast. In October 2025 the US Treasury quietly bought $20 billion in Argentine pesos to keep a key ally afloat. Military exercises involving 25 countries just wrapped up in the Pacific. New trade frameworks are being inked from Ecuador to Guatemala. Latin America suddenly matters again — for energy, for manufacturing, for the simple fact that most migrants crossing into the United States start their journey somewhere on this continent. And sitting right in the middle of the new chessboard is El Salvador.

A country of 6.4 million people has somehow become one of Washington’s most reliable partners in the hemisphere. Nayib Bukele gets invited to the White House, signs nuclear cooperation deals, and, in what might be the most unprecedented migration agreement in modern history, agrees to take not just Salvadoran deportees but anyone the US wants to send, housing them in the infamous CECOT mega-prison for a modest fee. In a region full of chaos, El Salvador has become the rare “anti-chaos” jurisdiction: stable, aligned, unmistakably pro-American.

Yet walk through San Salvador’s boulevards and you’ll spot the other player too. Chinese restaurants keep popping up. New BYD dealerships gleam under the tropical sun. Construction sites for a national stadium, a pier at La Libertad, a giant water park in Surf City, all stamped with the quiet red logo of Beijing-backed firms. Trade tells the same story: in the first five months of 2025 alone, El Salvador imported more than $800 million in Chinese machinery, textiles, and electronics. The old diplomatic switch from Taiwan to Beijing in 2018 is still paying dividends in infrastructure, in soft-power scholarships, in visas that make it easy for Chinese managers and technicians to set up shop.

Two superpowers, one tiny country. Most nations in this position get squeezed. El Salvador is getting courted.

When both Washington and Beijing decide you’re worth their time, the tailwinds are ferocious. Capital flows in. Concessions get offered. A leader who plays the game well can extract things like debt relief, investment packages, and diplomatic cover that bigger countries can only dream of. That’s the quiet privilege El Salvador enjoys right now. A front-row seat to the new Great Game, with the best surf in Central America as a bonus. I, for one, am glad to be here watching it unfold.

And all of this is happening at the same time that North America feels more chaotic than ever. Canada continues to punish capital with tax policies that push out the exact people it needs to keep. The US can’t afford a recession in the middle of an AI arms race, so it’s leaning deeper into deficit spending. Everyone is improvising. Everyone is reacting. Everyone is trying to keep a system from wobbling off its axis.

El Salvador is one of the only countries playing offense. Not just with bitcoin, but with policy clarity, tourism, security, investment strategy, and long-term nation building.

De acuerdo.

It’s funny, because people think El Salvador is selling Bitcoin. But what they’re really selling is certainty. And in a world where economic certainty is disappearing, that becomes incredibly valuable. You can feel it in the investors flying in. You can see it in the cranes going up along the coast. You can measure it in the tourism numbers. You can track it in the tokenized capital inflows coming next.

Most people won’t understand how big this moment is until years from now. By then, it’ll be obvious. By then, every country will be trying to replicate this playbook. But right now, this very moment, is the inflection point.

I wanted to get this out before I fly to the Bahamas in a couple of days (I know, I know). The world is getting noisier. El Salvador is getting clearer. And for the investors paying attention, the next decade will be defined not by what you invest in, but by where you invest from.

Más por venir.
Hasta la próxima.

I’m still recovering from the Jays losing the World Series. Absolutely devastating. It’s one of those reminders of what it means to be Canadian these days: full of hope, riding high on potential, and somehow still ending up disappointed.

And just as the sting started to fade, Ottawa rolled out a new budget that felt like déjà vu. Big promises, massive spending, and zero accountability. A record-breaking stimulus package dressed up as “investing in Canadians,” but let’s be honest, most of it will get wasted.

We’re not building; we’re buying time. And the result is obvious: a much weaker Canadian dollar.

Now, if you think that’s just a Canadian problem, look south.

Self-proclaimed socialist Zohran Mamdani just became the new mayor of New York City by running on one simple message: everything should be free. Free housing, free healthcare, free transit, free childcare. A modern socialist platform that apparently sells better than ever.

The reaction in D.C. was immediate. Every Democratic strategist saw the same thing: this plays. Polymarket already has the Dems favoured to win the 2026 midterms. Momentum is shifting, and fast.

That means Republicans have a choice: either pull out all the stops, or lose. And in this era, “pulling out all the stops” doesn’t mean cutting spending; it means outspending the other guy. Promise more, spend more, print more.

Fiscal discipline doesn’t win elections anymore. Free stuff does.

But nothing’s actually free. Someone always pays. And it will be the same people who were cheering for the handouts. They’ll get their “free” stuff, and pay for it later through inflation and a currency that buys less every year. They’ll own nothing and be “happy.”

History shows us how this story usually ends. When nations drown themselves in debt to buy social peace, the result is always the same: a self-reinforcing cycle where the empire eats itself.

1. The government can no longer borrow enough to service its debts.

2. It prints more money to fill the gap, debasing the currency and driving inflation.

3. Living standards fall, feeding resentment and political extremism.

4. Economic instability crushes productivity, and society fractures over how to divide what’s left.

5. Populists rise promising order, but usually deliver more chaos.

That’s the playbook. We’ve seen it before in Rome, in Weimar, in the late stages of every overextended empire. Each time, the same thing happens: the middle class gets hollowed out, the currency dies slowly, and those holding scarce assets rise from the ashes even richer.

That’s the irony. In trying to buy equality, governments end up engineering the exact opposite. When everything becomes a promise, the only things of value are what can’t be printed: hard assets, property, bitcoin, and freedom itself.

Meanwhile, the Fed looks completely trapped. Powell can talk tough, but the data’s screaming slowdown.

US home sales are on track for their worst year since the mid-1990s. Only 28 out of every 1,000 homes changed hands this year, according to Redfin. It’s the lowest turnover in decades. That’s not a “soft landing.” That’s frozen credit and a middle class stuck in place.

Powell might try to hold rates high a little longer, maybe even to make Trump’s job harder, but unemployment is ticking up, housing is dead, and liquidity is drying up fast. The government is shut down, the economy is slowing, and he’s out of time.

Whether Powell decides to cut in December or not, his term as Fed Chair is coming to an end, and Trump will almost certainly replace him with an ultra-dove. That means rate cuts, QE (or whatever they want to call it this time), and the full embrace of fiscal dominance.

So, zooming out, we’re heading straight into a perfect storm:

• Fiscal policy goes full socialist.

• Monetary policy goes full dove.

• Inflation comes roaring back, not in essentials, but in assets and lifestyle.

That’s the new world order: “free everything” for the masses, and massive upside for the few holding scarce assets. If the middle class was on life support, we just pulled the plug.

But here’s where it gets more interesting.

We’re moving toward a world that looks more like Ready Player One than real life. AI and automation are eating everything. Delivery bots, self-driving cars and trucks, virtual teachers, AI therapists; everything commoditized, everything instant, everything cheap. The average person won’t “work” in the old sense. They’ll receive digital credits, swipe stablecoins, and have cheap fast food delivered to their door by a robot.

And on the surface, it’ll feel like abundance. But it’s not real abundance. It’s dependence — soft totalitarianism wrapped in convenience.

The only true escape will be owning something outside the system. A savings vehicle that doesn’t rely on government permission, corporate servers, or inflationary money.

That’s Bitcoin’s role in the next chapter.

In a world where your income is algorithmic, your “assets” live in the cloud, and your wallet is programmable by policy, Bitcoin becomes the anchor. It will be the way people preserve autonomy, dignity, and optionality. It’s not just the asset of the wealthy anymore. It’s the savings account for those that want to be free.

So yes, governments will keep promising handouts. But those promises come with a cost. And when the bill arrives, the only people insulated will be the ones holding what can’t be printed.

I’ll be at the Economic Club of Canada event with Pierre this afternoon. I’ll report back next week if there’s anything worth noting from his remarks.

Until then, remember: in a world built on free, the scarcest thing left will be freedom itself.

Happy Halloween and World Series Weekend!

Writer’s block is no joke, folks. I’ve been working on three separate docs for weeks now and haven’t been able to string together anything I thought was worth your valuable time. The Jays haven’t made it any easier — the games this week… wow. As a true fan, I’m at a loss for words and don’t think I even fully appreciate how incredible it is that we’re back at home with two chances to win the World Series. The city needs this. Canada needs this. It’s about to be one expensive weekend.

For the sake of starting fresh I’m going to leave everything that happened over the last few weeks in the past. Speaking of a reset, the only thing worth highlighting was what happened on 10/10/2025 — no, not my last newsletter — the largest crypto flash crash in history that followed it. That Friday afternoon, after a surprise Trump tweet about China tariffs, $20 billion in leverage was wiped out. The liquidation cascade was roughly 10x bigger than the FTX collapse and nearly 20x bigger than the covid crash. BTC fell from $117k to ~$105k in short order, and alts got decimated. Millions of traders lost everything, liquid funds were wrecked, market makers blew up…it was bad.

It was a very dark day for crypto and showed just how much leverage was still in the system. But if you weren’t on leverage, and you held assets you have real conviction in, you were largely unaffected — and if you had the stomach to buy that dip, you were greatly rewarded.

The main story this week was the Fed announcing a 25bps rate cut (as expected) on Wednesday. The BOC went first, but the press conference that followed was so bleak I don’t even want to go there.

TLDR (click below to watch Tiff Macklem use his hands to explain how f’d we are if we can’t make a hard pivot soon):

We’ll see what the highly anticipated 2025 budget looks like next week, but I don’t have high hopes. Actually, I do have some hope that if the Liberals can’t get enough support for their budget, we’ll be back to the voting booths within 12 months. I give that a pretty good chance.

Okay, back to the economy in the driver’s seat. Powell tried to sound tough Wednesday, but you could feel the political undercurrent in every word. The December verbiage about whether they might cut again could’ve been viewed as a warning shot — a subtle “reopen the government or no rate cut” message to the administration. From my vantage point, Powell seemed to be protecting himself politically — making sure that if things go wrong later, he can say he warned everyone or wasn’t at fault. The market didn’t love it at first; it’s rare for Powell to comment on market pricing so directly, and when he does, it’s usually because something’s breaking behind the scenes.

Every day, we’re seeing more headlines about layoffs. Finance, tech, consulting, the sectors that carried the recovery are slashing headcount. The interesting part is that the industries shedding these jobs en masse are crushing it.

Amazon laying off thousands of workers and then beating earnings so hard that the stock gained hundreds of billions in value tells you everything you need to know about what AI is going to do to society. Even when it’s not AI literally taking people’s jobs, it’s the cover that lets companies cut waste and boost efficiencies. It’s why corporate profits are up while payrolls are shrinking, and why the Fed’s playbook for managing employment cycles feels completely outdated.

That’s why rate cuts aren’t just appropriate — they’re necessary. The more hawkish the Fed stays, the worse it gets for the parts of the economy that actually build things. Rates need to come down meaningfully so companies can hire, expand, and fund projects — homebuilding, infrastructure, manufacturing. Cutting rates works in the short term because it gives these industries breathing room to produce.

The big risk is that we wake up in a year or two with a “strong” economy, low inflation, and 5–6% unemployment. Where do those come from? Not from keeping money expensive. You can’t sustain an economy where only capital owners win while the middle is hollowed out.

They’re going to cut in December. And the bigger story isn’t the cuts themselves, it’s what Powell said about the balance sheet. A few weeks ago, no one expected QT to end this soon. Now he’s openly talking about the next phase being balance sheet growth. That’s liquidity positive, period. Even if the purchases are short-term bills, the Treasury’s still skewing issuance toward the front end, which has the same effect as QE — removing duration from the market.

Even if they don’t cut in December, Powell’s gone in May, and everyone knows it. His replacement will be picked to play ball with the administration, not fight it. Between the politics, the liquidity tailwinds, and a Fed terrified of breaking the labor market, it’s hard to make a bear case for BTC right now.

But even with all of that, I’d say this is the worst level of investor sentiment I’ve seen in crypto since the FTX collapse. We’re only down 15% from the all-time highs we hit in August, and yet the timeline reads like it’s 2022 all over again. I don’t know these people IRL, but man — they’ve got to chill out.

Can we please just take a second and appreciate what Bitcoin is? It’s not the loonie, it’s not the US dollar, and it’s definitely not any other fiat currency that can be printed at will. Gold? Sure, in spirit, but comparing gold to Bitcoin is like comparing leaves to Charmin toilet paper after food poisoning abroad. They both get the job done, but one is way better than the other.

It’s time to take a step back and really appreciate what Bitcoin does — and why the world needs it now more than ever.

At its core, bitcoin isn’t just pristine collateral — it’s the apex asset in a world built on liabilities. It doesn’t need a balance sheet, a bank, or a border. You either have it or you don’t. Bitcoin is everywhere and nowhere at once — owned by no one, accessible to everyone. When the global economy runs on promises, bitcoin is the only thing that is what it says it is.

That’s what makes this such a rare moment. While governments are openly choosing to debase, most investors are still playing defense, sitting in cash, chasing yield, and hoping to outpace inflation. Others are scrambling for the next hot trade in AI, quantum, or rare earths, while some are just straight-up gambling. It’s financial nihilism. Meanwhile, the best-performing asset of all time, the only one that lets you park your capital and get back to living your life, is sitting right in front of them, fifteen percent off its highs, patiently waiting to be accumulated.

Bitcoin will ultimately supersede gold’s $30 trillion store-of-value market because it does what gold never could: it’s digital, censorship-resistant, seizure-resistant, and absolutely scarce. It’s programmable, portable wealth — a bearer instrument for the digital age. As the dollar weakens and liquidity comes roaring back, the smartest move anyone can make is quietly stacking the one asset governments can’t print.

It kind of reminds me of this Jays run. Baseball is a long season — 162 games. You don’t get here by luck or by chasing short-term streaks. The Jays have home field advantage because they showed up every day, played through the noise, and didn’t get rattled when things went cold. They earned it.

Bitcoin’s story isn’t all that different. It’s had its slumps and its critics, but over the long season, no one even comes close. Through every crash, every cycle, and every headline calling it dead, it just keeps performing. It’s the most consistent asset on earth — the best-performing of all time.

The lesson in both is simple: consistency beats hype. Show up, stay patient, and the scoreboard takes care of itself.

Weekly Podcast Recommendations

Speaking of innings, how about these Toronto Blue Jays? I’m a massive Jays fan. Baseball was my sport growing up. I splurged on Game 1 tickets and the atmosphere was absolutely electric. I told myself I’d do one game per series, so I just grabbed tickets for Game 2 while my eyes were still blurry this morning. Let’s go!!!

Anyway, I need to start off by shaking you all a bit. Over 1,500 of you read this every week, and it’s way too quiet out there. Did anyone even notice bitcoin broke its previous all-time high on Monday? We sliced through $126Kk (nearly $177k CAD) like butter and it was crickets at the desk from the retail (HNWI) side. I’ll go on record saying it was the quietest all-time high I’ve ever seen — zero euphoria.

The corporate and institutional side of the desk? Different story. Q4 has been gangbusters for that book. But I’m not surprised, this cycle has been largely institutionally driven. BlackRock came onto the scene last year and absolutely crushed it. Their BTC ETF just passed 800,000 BTC and is now their most profitable ETF. Retail’s nibbling, sure, but they’re not making a dent compared to the sovereign wealth funds and institutions quietly getting their exposure through this vehicle.

While not the biggest ticket, this week Luxembourg invested 1% of their sovereign wealth fund into bitcoin ETFs (click the headline to read the article).

“Some might argue that we’re committing too little too late; others will point out the volatility and speculative nature of the investment,” Bob Kieffer, Luxembourg’s director of the treasury, said in a post on LinkedIn. “Yet, given the FSIL’s particular profile and mission, the fund’s management board concluded that a 1% allocation strikes the right balance, while sending a clear message about Bitcoin’s long-term potential.”

These are serious flows into BTC, but quiet ones. If the market were truly “over,” $110K wouldn’t have held at the end of September. That push to fresh all-time highs in just a few days was an impressive bid — and it wasn’t Saylor in the order books. This is the new narrative on everyone’s mind: the debasement trade.

You might feel like you’re crushing it in the S&P 500, but you’re actually getting crushed by a shiny gold rock. Even the Nasdaq is underperforming gold now that it’s ripped past $4k. In BTC terms, everything’s been taken out to the woodshed.

Something’s happening. I suspect the hardest monetary assets are telling us the future before it arrives. I always joke about gold, but it’s impossible to ignore that it’s the best-performing asset this year — and the second-best? Bitcoin. It’s the first time in history both assets are leading the pack, one and two. Are you paying attention anon?

So why is all of this happening?

Because the world is finally waking up to the fact that governments are, in simple terms, broke. Not just “carrying too much debt” broke — I mean objectively bankrupt. The math stopped working years ago, and the only play left is to debase.

JP Morgan’s research team summed it up well last week. When they asked clients why they were rotating into Bitcoin and gold, the answers were pretty consistent: the world feels like it’s burning, inflation clearly isn’t under control, deficits keep ballooning just to service old debt, the Fed’s no longer acting independently, fiat money looks stranger the more you think about it, and global confidence in the dollar is quietly eroding.

The conversations I’m having at the desk sound pretty similar. Clients with meaningful Bitcoin and risk-asset exposure, many of whom expect some kind of blow-off top later this quarter or early Q1, are wrestling with the same question: if they do sell, what do they even rotate into?

It’s a tough question. Bonds are trash, cash is flaming garbage, and equities are just leveraged inflation trades. There’s nowhere else to hide. Downside from here? Maybe $80K. Upside over the next 5–10 years? $1 million or more. That kind of asymmetry is absurd. Unless you need the money, I can’t think of anything better than BTC or maybe gold to store wealth. Gold could hit $10k+ in the same timeframe. And the higher gold goes, the more room bitcoin has to run.

Last time I posted this chart, gold’s market cap was around $24T. It’s added trillions in just a few months and is up 50% YTD. Bitcoin’s sitting at $2.4T and climbing.

And as Dan pointed out this week, every $100 gold goes up adds the same dollar value to global market cap as Bitcoin going up by roughly $35,000. Please, let that sink in.

On top of that, investors are understandably hesitant to hold cash, and the indices don’t look much better. The S&P is basically the Mag7, and the Qs are frothy as hell. The smartest money on the Street is debating whether we’re in 1998 or 1999 — hedging against a blow-off top next year. What’s harder is that no one knows what the world even looks like in five years.

AI is already reshaping everything. If we crack AGI in the next five years, the world, and markets, will look completely unrecognizable. How do you make long-term bets when even the smartest people can’t model what comes next? Time will tell, but eventually it’ll be consensus that the only predictable constant is that there will only ever be 21 million BTC.

Nice to see crypto pioneer Nick Szabo back online — perfectly timed.

Depending on how you look at it, retail’s absence is both good and bad. It’s bad because institutional money is front-running the very people who need bitcoin the most. But it’s good because once retail does show up — and they will — that’s when the cycle ends. That’s when you take some chips off the table and buy yourself a better quality of life.

So how do you know when we’re close? People start calling for $1M Bitcoin. They’ll say the four-year cycle is dead (I’m already seeing this). Your friends and family will start asking if they should buy. That’s when you know we’re getting close.

This interview with legendary macro trader Paul Tudor Jones was all the rage this week.

But here’s the thing…it’s not 1999.

Back then, the U.S. was running a surplus. The Fed was raising rates. There was no QE. Markets were driven by private sector optimism, not trillion-dollar deficits and government life support. Today, everything runs on fiscal stimulus and debt monetization. Liquidity is endless, and every policy move sends waves through global markets.

And in 1999, there was no Bitcoin, no social media, no smartphones. In 2025, everyone carries an escape valve in their pocket.

This doesn’t feel like 1999…it feels like something much bigger.

At some point, narratives stop being forecasts and start being facts. The debasement trade isn’t a theme anymore — it’s the environment. Governments are drowning in debt, gold and Bitcoin are leading all major assets, and money itself has become the variable, not the constant.

So what do you do in a world like that? You pick your constant.

Bitcoin is the only one that fits the bill. It’s global, neutral, and scarce. It doesn’t care who’s in office or what acronym the Fed invents next. It’s the one thing that can’t be debased by design — and that’s exactly why capital keeps flowing in quietly, relentlessly, and in size.

The smartest investors in the world can’t define what the next decade looks like, but they all agree on one thing: they want exposure to scarcity.

That, right there, is the new narrative.

Weekly Podcast Recommendations

A few notables on X are screaming about this thing called which apparently, it’s the reason bitcoin is about to “go to the moon, bro.” STRC is a new product from Michael Saylor’s company Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy). You might’ve seen the tweets: “when STRC hits $100, Bitcoin goes brrr.” It was kind of the meme of the week for those in the corners of X, but underneath the hype, there’s something worth understanding.

I thought it would be helpful to put together a quick note for you all to share my learnings after going down the rabbit hole in between Jays games this past weekend.

Stretch (STRC) is a variable-rate preferred stock (basically a hybrid between debt and equity — that pays a floating monthly dividend). Think of it as investors lending money to the company in exchange for steady yield and priority over common shareholders — they get paid first, but don’t get voting rights or the upside if the stock rips. It trades around $100 and currently offers an effective yield of about 10.3%. The dividend adjusts depending on short-term market rates to keep the price near par. It’s Saylor’s way of creating yield-backed Bitcoin exposure without touching the banking system. Is this a stroke of genius or something that will end badly…let’s keep going.

Saylor’s goal here is simple: keep buying Bitcoin without having to sell MSTR shares or issue more convertible debt. STRC lets him raise capital directly from yield-hungry investors and redeploy it into Bitcoin. He’s basically building his own BTC-backed credit system inside his company. He even called STRC their “iPhone moment.”

To really understand how this fits into Saylor’s structure, here’s where STRC sits in Strategy’s capital stack.

Click pic below to hear Saylor explain STRC.

The reason for all of the noise last week was because Robinhood just listed STRC, making it available to millions of retail accounts and giving birth to what CT is calling the “flywheel.” Preferred shares have historically been an institutional product. Now anyone can earn ~10% on something that’s indirectly tied to Bitcoin’s balance sheet — and that got Crypto Twitter’s imagination running wild.

The “flywheel” narrative that’s spreading across X goes something like this: people buy STRC → Strategy raises new capital → Saylor uses it to buy more Bitcoin → Bitcoin’s price goes up → everyone feels richer and buys more STRC → repeat.

It’s a self-reinforcing loop that, *if it scales*, creates real new demand for BTC. If Strategy raised $1 billion through STRC, that’s equivalent to roughly 22 days of new BTC supply at $100K/BTC. That’s not game-changing by itself, but when you’re dealing with an asset that only adds 450 coins a day, every marginal buyer matters.

As someone who’s been in crypto for 8 years (next Friday) I think it’s important to be very skeptical. STRC isn’t treasuries, it’s not a money market fund, and it’s definitely not risk-free. Holders are lending money to Strategy, a company whose balance sheet is almost entirely bitcoin. If BTC has a blow off top style correction like we’ve seen in every previous cycle (say, 70%+), the Strategy’s credit profile would shift dramatically. And that “near-par” design around $100 that Michael Saylor spoke so eloquently about in the clip above? It’s totally engineered and definitely not guaranteed.

But even with that risk, the yield gap versus traditional assets is striking.

The reality is, STRC sits somewhere between a corporate bond and a crypto-backed yield product. It’s innovative, yes, but it’s still a bet on Saylor’s ability to manage a levered bitcoin balance sheet.

And while all of these new structures — from ETFs to Saylor’s preferreds — are clever ways of deepening bitcoin’s integration into traditional finance, they also add layers of complexity and counterparty risk. The whole point of bitcoin is that you can hold it directly, move it instantly, and access liquidity without permission. Every time a new wrapper is created, you gain convenience but lose some sovereignty. Owning BTC outright is still the purest form of protection against volatility, dilution, and someone else’s balance sheet.

So, objectively speaking: STRC is a smart piece of financial engineering, not a magic button that sends Bitcoin to the moon. It’s another step in the evolution of “bitcoin finance,” the blending of corporate balance sheets, traditional yield instruments, and decentralized assets.

Whether this becomes a lasting innovation or just another speculative moment, it’s undeniably creative…and it captures where we are in the cycle: yield hunger meeting bitcoin.

A quick note before I wrap this up:

I don’t own any STRC, don’t plan to, and this isn’t investment advice. I just spent the weekend digging into it and figured it’d be useful to share my notes — partly for my own understanding, partly because it feels like one of those subtle inflection points where TradFi meets bitcoin in a new (and maybe dangerous) way.

It’s Saylor doing what Saylor does best — using the system to buy more BTC — and the market proving once again that if you give people yield, they’ll find a way to show up.

Good morning,

I skipped last week (sales team golf outing at Glen Abbey, testing the course for our inaugural industry tournament on June 8, 2026…stay tuned 😎 — pic included for proof, and because my hat hair wasn’t so bad). But Q4 didn’t wait for me to get my swing back. Bitcoin ripped through $120K to open the quarter, right as the U.S. government officially shut down.

The timing couldn’t have been more poetic. While I was trying to figure out my slice, Washington was shutting off the lights. And as it turns out, UPtober was destined to tee off with fireworks.

Government shutdowns aren’t exactly rare. Since 1976, there have been 22 funding gaps and 10 full shutdowns, the longest running 35 days back in 2018–2019. Most of the time, markets shrugged. Workers got furloughed, parks closed, IOUs went out, and eventually Congress got it together. It was political theater more than an existential crisis.

But this one feels different. Aside from the fact that literally everything is happening at once, US credibility is waning, and the left and right can’t see eye to eye on anything. Debt-to-GDP is already north of 120%. Interest expense now exceeds the defense budget. And instead of even pretending to debate fiscal restraint, the ideas being floated are things like $1K-$2K rebate checks (stimmys) funded by tariffs and promises that “we’ll grow our way out of debt.” In other words: the same broken playbook, only louder.

This is real and it shouldn’t be discounted.

…& this might just be the best advertisement for BTC ever:

We’ve talked all year about how the US has chosen to inflate its way out of debt rather than confront austerity. So when you hear a bear droning on about “the recession around the corner” or how “markets are too expensive,” but they don’t have a coherent view on AI or debasement…run.

And let’s not forget, Trump isn’t just the President, he’s the self-proclaimed King of Debt. He told us straight to our faces almost a decade ago. Nothing about this should be surprising. They’re going to run it hot.

The other force that makes this cycle so strange — and so powerful — is the AI buildout. This isn’t pets.com. It’s the largest capex binge since WWII: land, power, chips, fabs, data centers, fiber, talent. You don’t pause a global arms race because CPI is 43 bps too high. That’s why the policy choice has already been made: run it hot, backstop the plumbing when it wheezes, and pray that productivity eventually outruns the debt service.

In that world, every shutdown, mini-stimulus, and “emergency” cut simply feeds the same loop: more nominal growth, more deficits, more financial repression…and more demand for scarce assets.

If you’re like me (a veteran round-tripper), you’re probably asking: how does this go bad? Blow-off tops don’t die of old age; they die when something critical stops clearing. In plain English: when the political will to print collides with a hard constraint. Here are a few ways that can happen:

1. The bond market revolts (we are here). Term premiums rise, auctions tail, foreign buyers step back. Treasury has to choose between much higher rates or explicit yield-curve control. Higher rates = liquidity tightens and risk cracks. YCC = dollar weakens and the debasement meme goes mainstream.

2. Inflation re-accelerates from a non-financial shock — a spike in energy or supply-side costs right into the AI buildout. Fiscal stays wide open. You get stagflation: “can’t cut, can’t hike.” That doesn’t kill the market, but it changes leadership. Hard assets, toll-like infra, and Bitcoin absorb the premium.

   

3. A credit event disaster — not regional banks this time — maybe REITs, shadow banks, or a sovereign in need of IMF-style help. Liquidity crunches hit everything…until the policy response overwhelms it. We saw it in 2023: BTC dumped, then ripped 40% when “no counterparty risk” actually meant something.

4. Fourth, political shock. A messy debt-ceiling standoff, shutdowns bleeding past expectations, or populist giveaways that accelerate deficits under patriotic slogans. Ironically, these “shocks” often end up bullish for the debasement trade because markets front-run the bailout.

5. The slow burn: USD hegemony erodes at the margin. More trade invoicing off-dollar, more BTC on sovereign balance sheets, more capital controls in fragile economies. Not exactly a collapse just the neighborhood changing around the dollar.

Which of these marks “the end”? Honestly, I don’t think any of them. Sure, we can get another bear market — but trying to trade Bitcoin in and out is near impossible. The best trade I’ve ever made is doing nothing. I’ve worn the round-tripper hat enough times to know: I’m not selling.

These shocks aren’t the end, they’re inflection points. If we do get a Q4 blow-off, it probably peaks when something breaks — a failed Treasury auction, an energy spike, a credit pocket blowing up. At that moment, policymakers just reach for the next lever — YCC, tariff checks, or some new easing gimmick.

For Bitcoin, the playbook is simple. In debasement, it stair-steps higher as institutions treat it like digital gold with torque. In liquidity crunches, it gets hit first then leads the rebound once the policy put kicks in. The only real headwind would be credible fiscal discipline, and clearly nobody in power has the stomach for that.

Or maybe it’s just the “end” for the dollar? I’m not so sure about that…not in a single headline anyway. Reserve currencies fade, they don’t fall and it’s all relative. The near-term risk isn’t a dollar collapse — it’s Washington quietly rigging the bond market to keep the lights on. Think capped yields, forced demand for Treasuries, and rates held below inflation. That’s how they defend the system. That’s not a bear case for bitcoin. That’s the case.

So yes, we can get a silly Q4 melt-up — shades of Q4 2017, when Bitcoin turned a normal quarter into the most insane 3 months of my career. If it happens, it likely ends on a funding or inflation constraint, followed by a messy shakeout…and then another round of creative policy to keep the lights on.

Have a nice weekend.

Morning folks. Last week was a darker note than usual. I stepped back from the standard market update to dig into where I believe the West is headed. I pulled from the Fourth Turning and other big-cycle theories — like Ray Dalio’s — which all point to the same pattern: every few generations the old order collapses and a new one takes shape. You can feel that energy right now. Institutions are weak, politics are toxic, trust is gone. The reset is already underway.

Before we talk about the Fed cutting rates and all that jazz, I thought it made sense to extend last week’s note since it’s still on my mind. I’ve been thinking deeper since then, and while it’s difficult to make predictions with confidence, I see two broad scenarios.

1. We’re living through a turbulent transition into a technological revolution — far more impactful than the industrial revolution — messy now, and will get messier, but ultimately leading to abundance.

2. The West breaks down further, ending in some kind of ugly revolution that stalls technological progress entirely…and we might need Elon to hurry up and figure out how to get us to Mars.

   

I’m an optimist, so I lean heavily toward scenario one. If that’s the case, you really have to think about what it means for how you live your life right now. First off, focus on your health — don’t die before we figure out how to live forever. Then think about how to position your portfolio if you’re going to be around a lot longer than you expect. Your wealth planner probably is not thinking two or three steps ahead. What does abundance even mean? Extreme wealth for some, and some form of universal basic income for most — in other words, “please don’t revolt, here, take this money.” That sounds like a lot of money printer go brrr, and if so, you might want to think about holding scarce assets that can’t be printed.

“Oh here he goes, tell me how Bitcoin is better than gold.”

Bitcoin is the only truly scarce resource in the world. Everything else can be produced, discovered, or extracted if the price is right. Gold? People will explore harder and farther. Oil? Drill new fields. At the right price, Elon will be mining asteroids.

But you can’t make more Bitcoin. Its supply is fixed, known, and transparent — it’s literally the only asset in the universe where we can say with certainty how much exists. And it’s even scarcer than most people think: of the ~19.7 million BTC mined so far (~94%), an estimated 3–4 million are permanently unrecoverable. Most of those were lost in the early days by miners who never backed up their wallets, coins that haven’t moved in over a decade (including some or all of Satoshi’s ~1.1M), and a smaller share proveably burned or sent to invalid addresses.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and it reminded me of something I first came across in 2021. One of the most beautiful and overlooked outcomes of Bitcoin becoming the backbone of the future monetary system is that it doesn’t just create new wealth — it flips the billionaire class itself. Balaji Srinivasan called this the “Billionaire Flippening.” Back then it sounded almost far-fetched — the idea that Bitcoin’s rise could completely reorder the global wealth rankings and replace today’s elites with a new class born out of conviction and code. But with Bitcoin now around $117K and the next parabolic move feeling close, we’re not there yet — though the timing looks perfect. Let me explain.

Balaji estimated that somewhere between $100K and $1M per BTC, more than half of the world’s billionaires will come from Bitcoin. Think about it. The people who sat on thousands of coins because they believed in this thing when it was laughed at, who refused to sell at $100, $1000 $10K, $50K, even $100K+ because they couldn’t imagine swapping sovereignty for fiat. Many of them come from libertarian roots, values shaped around freedom, transparency, and hard money. When Bitcoin accelerates to $1M — which I think could happen much quicker than most expect — these are the people who will leapfrog into becoming the richest on earth.

And when the richest people in the world are Bitcoiners, everything changes. Political funding changes. Campaign donations stop being controlled by the same aging group of Wall Street insiders and industrial monopolists. They start coming from a younger, globally distributed, digitally native class whose wealth can’t be censored or confiscated. Philanthropy changes too — open-source projects, privacy tools, independent media, energy innovation — all of it suddenly has patrons with endless reserves. Even geopolitics changes. Imagine small countries like El Salvador suddenly holding reserves that put them ahead of oil states, using Bitcoin to fund infrastructure, attract talent, and wield real influence — this is happening right now.

That’s why I call it beautiful. It’s not just that Bitcoin creates new billionaires. It reprograms what it means to be wealthy in the first place. Old money was built on leverage, privilege, and political capture. Bitcoin wealth was built on foresight and conviction — on aligning with a protocol instead of lobbying for favors. The Fourth Turning always brings a reset. This time, Bitcoin ensures that the reset is global, transparent, and impossible to co-opt.

Man, that went off the rails…

Anyway, quick market update. The biggest news this week was the Fed cutting rates by 25 bps. The press conference was a nothing burger, but once it wrapped, markets ripped — the signal was clear: the Fed is on a cutting path. What that path looks like is still up in the air, but for now it looks like another two 25 bps cuts this year.

What I really wanted to talk about this week was this (click through):

The Fed’s new “third mandate” = yield curve control. But I’ll save that for another day because this note is already too long and I’m probably just talking to myself at this point.

One last thing. My friend sent me this chart this morning: ten-year seasonal returns by quarter for Bitcoin. Close to +60% in Q4.

And in case you missed it: yes, this is real. A golden statue of President Trump holding a Bitcoin was installed outside the US Capitol this week.

Weekly Podcast Recommendations

It’s impossible to start this week’s note without acknowledging the shocking assassination of Charlie Kirk and the brazen murder of Iryna Zarutska. I’m not sure if I wish I could take watching those videos back, or if it was important to see how far the West has fallen. Suffice it to say, this week was very depressing, horrifying, and revealing. Personally, aside from the graphic videos, the response from a loud minority who were sympathetic to the killers and even cheered them on made my blood boil. I think that this is the first time in my life I’ve seen and felt evil up close.

I thought about whether or not I should put something out this week, it’s just after 4 this morning and I’m still not sure how to transition into a weekly update but I’ll do my best and start with this — the West is going through a dramatic transition and what we’re witnessing has happened many times throughout history. I believe that the wealth gap has become far too wide and there is a significant group on either side that feel disenfranchised and hopeless which is leading to a tech-enabled kind of revolution that I’m afraid will only get worse.

Whether you agreed with Charlie Kirk or not, it’s yet another stark reminder of the political violence America has witnessed over the past year. Starting with President Trump’s assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania last July, and another at his golf club in September, this year things have escalated.

On April 13, 2025, part of the Pennsylvania Governor’s Residence was set on fire in what has been treated as an assassination attempt. The suspect was arrested and charged with attempted murder, arson, etc..

On June 14, 2025, a shooter attacked the homes of Minnesota state Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband; also state Senator John Hoffman and his wife. Hortman and her husband were killed. Hoffman and his wife were wounded. It is being prosecuted as a politically motivated attack.

And then of course this week Charlie Kirk was killed.

Strauss and Howe’s The Fourth Turning lays out that history moves in cycles — roughly every 80–100 years, societies enter a period of upheaval where institutions decay, the social order fractures, and conflict becomes unavoidable. It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last. These “turnings” are messy, painful, and often violent — but they eventually give way to renewal.

What we’re living through right now feels exactly like that. The signs are everywhere: political assassinations, collapsing trust in government, spiraling debt, cultural extremism, the wealth divide stretching beyond what the center can hold. The internet has poured gasoline on all of it, amplifying division in ways no past turning ever had to contend with.

The hardest part of living in a Fourth Turning is that when you’re inside of it, it feels like the end of the world. But if history is any guide, it’s not the end. It’s the storm before the calm. Out of chaos comes re-ordering. Out of destruction comes rebuilding. Out of violence comes new institutions that fit the next age.

I don’t know what the other side of this turning will look like. I just know that we’re in it — and the people who can keep their heads, their values, and their capital intact will be the ones who get to shape what comes after.

For me, that means two things. First, refusing to look away. As painful as it is, we need to witness these moments with clear eyes. Second, anchoring myself in things I believe will outlast the storm — relationships, principles, and yes, assets that can’t be printed or faked.

We’re likely going to see more chaos. More violence. More “this can’t be real” moments. But remember, history doesn’t end here. It just turns.

Well, this is not how I thought this week’s newsletter would shape up when I started a couple of hours ago…at all…but on the markets side, I’m feeling very bullish. The Fed is about to cut rates next week into a raging hot stock market. Will they go 25 bps or 50 bps is now being discussed as important economic data rolled in this week. We opened the week with massive downward revisions to jobs. The “resilient labor market” story we’ve been fed turned out to be smoke and mirrors. Inflation concerns were dampened — PPI came in better than expected, and CPI was in line with expectations which has the market debating whether the Fed goes 25 or 50 next week but the Street is now expecting 3 rate cuts this year.

I’ll let former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein who was on CNBC yesterday do the talking:

Even in a week this heavy, I can’t help but feel hopeful. The world feels messy, but we’re standing at the edge of breakthroughs that will change everything: AI unlocking new waves of productivity and driving the scientific discoveries that could extend human life, and Bitcoin offering the world a form of money that can’t be corrupted or inflated away.

It’s easy to get lost in the chaos of today, but when I zoom out, I see the seeds of a future that’s brighter, freer, and more abundant than anything humanity has ever known. That’s what keeps me grounded — and excited — no matter how dark the headlines get.

…And hopefully back to my normal style of notes next week.

Good morning! Apologies all, it’s been a couple of weeks since my last note. I had drafts written out but I just couldn’t hit the send button as there was nothing too interesting going on and I didn’t want to be a burden on the last bit of summer.

But I think we can start there. Summer is traditionally super slow and choppy due to lower liquidity. Professional investors and traders are mostly off the desk at their summer house, cottage, or Euromaxxing with their family before the school year. This summer was no different really. Bitcoin ranged between $110k and $120k with brief moments where it shot to the downside and upside making a very brief stop at new all time high mid-August.

The weather is still nice (for now), and market participants might be feeling a bit sluggish, but you can be sure that September comes with a market reset. I can’t tell you whether that’s immediately good or bad for the price of BTC, but I can tell you that we’re back and things should get really interesting from here.

So, let’s level set. The number one question that I’m seeing out there since we dropped sharply after BTC and ETH made new all time highs is “has BTC topped?”. Firstly, 1 BTC = 1 BTC and if you’re thinking of it in fiat terms in this environment than you’re already doing it wrong. Secondly, during the summer months where the market is choppy, people with too much time on their hands make poor decisions (trading…with leverage). It’s mostly those folks that are asking the question without considering the fundamental regime shift that we’re currently travelling through. It’s nice that we’re all long-term intelligent investors here.

Macro is lining up in Bitcoin’s favor: gold at new highs, long-term yields pushing higher, and the political drumbeat getting louder for lower rates and fresh stimulus. This is the stuff Bitcoin was built for. Bears will show you all of these charts and talk about fibonacci’s and head and shoulders and all these sorts of squiggles. I prefer more simple charts like this:

I’ve wrote many letters on bitcoin vs. gold so you know where I stand on why BTC is far superior. For new subscribers you can check out Fool’s Gold or Goldmember if you want to better understand my view. From a price perspective, one indicator that has never failed me is that when gold breaks out, BTC lags for a bit and then rips ahead.

Same with Global M2 vs. BTC. Bitcoin is the macro asset of our time and is the most sensitive to changes in global liquidity. As you can see from the chart below, BTC is lagging as it normally does. If history tells us anything on where we’re headed in the future, we have a lot to look forward to.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s biggest rival — the US dollar — has been bleeding influence. Decades of reckless deficits have already weakened trust, and now the political layer makes it even worse. Under Trump, the US has leaned harder into weaponizing its dominance — unpredictable tariffs, sanctions, and threats that make allies and adversaries alike question whether Treasuries are really “risk-free.”

For a long time, foreign central banks treated Treasuries as the safest place to park reserves. But that faith has cracked. The alternative of choice so far has been the world’s oldest neutral reserve asset: gold. And as the chart shows, for the first time since 1996, foreign central banks now hold more gold than US Treasuries. That’s not just a data point, it’s a regime change.

It also begs a bigger question: does the US even want to be the reserve currency anymore? I think not. For decades, China and other export-driven economies have benefited from America’s role — shipping goods to the US, getting paid in dollars, and then recycling those dollars back into Treasuries. The system worked, but mostly for everyone else.

If the US wants to bring manufacturing back onshore, or tip the balance of trade in its favor, it can’t do it with an overvalued dollar. A strong dollar makes imports cheap and exports uncompetitive. A weaker dollar, on the other hand, boosts US exports and helps drive self-sufficiency. That’s why you’re seeing this quiet shift: America prints, devalues, and slowly backs away from the burdens of reserve currency status.

This shift isn’t just about central bank balance sheets — it’s about trade wars, tariffs, and who sets the rules of globalization. The US–China relationship is the fulcrum here, and it will define how reserve assets are held, valued, and weaponized going forward. We’ll dig deeper into this in future notes.

As you can see from the chart below, investors are starting to understand that we’re heading back to a low-rate environment and that cash is trash.

As the Fed cuts rates more than the market expects, I suspect that we will see this chart roll over.

At the end of the day, gold bugs and bitcoiners are fighting the same fight. Gold is having its moment now, and fair enough — it’s the oldest neutral reserve asset we have. But gold’s been monetizing for thousands of years — bitcoin has only had sixteen.

Bitcoin is scarcer, easier to divide, easier to transfer, easier to secure, and harder to seize. In a world that’s moving digital, those traits matter far more than shiny bars in a vault. Which is why I don’t see this as gold’s victory lap so much as the opening act.

And it’s not just Bitcoiners saying it anymore. Even JPMorgan is calling Bitcoin undervalued compared to gold, with “fair value” at $126,000. That’s before considering Bitcoin’s superior properties or the fact it’s still in the early innings of monetization.

The irony is that Bitcoin is still too small for central banks to buy in size. They can’t yet move billions into it without moving the market against themselves. But that’s also the beauty of it — the bigger bitcoin gets, the more liquidity it attracts. And adoption has followed a very clear path: from hobbyist tinkerers, to individual investors, to wealthy individuals, to family offices, to funds, to corporations, to institutions… and eventually, to nation states.

I’ve personally been buying bitcoin hand over fist the last week or so in the $110K range…Satstreet has also been adding to our treasury. I’ve never been more bullish and as Balaji said in his presentation last week…when bitcoin wins…

As most of you know, I listen to a lot of podcasts. Currently, there’s so much great stuff out there at the intersection of bitcoin, macro, AI, and investing that I think it’s time to bring back the weekly recommendations. The first pod listed below I’ve listened to 3 times at 1x speed…

Weekly Podcast Recommendations

Good morning and happy Friday! What a week. Bitcoin hit a new all-time high, briefly flashing $123,456 before ripping past $124k. Ethereum’s been on a tear too, with treasury companies and ETFs gobbling it up like toilet paper at the start of covid. I went to bed pretty optimistic. Then Thursday morning showed up with a cold shower: a hotter-than-expected PPI print and markets sold off across the board.

Quick refresher on PPI and why the market didn’t like the print: PPI tracks wholesale inflation. A hotter-than-expected print signals rising costs, which can spill into CPI, spook markets, and delay Fed rate cuts. Markets are addicted to the hope of easier money. Add any doubt about rate cuts and “traders” go nuts.

The newly annointed king of ETH makes a good point…

You have to ask yourself: do you actually believe Washington is about to become fiscally disciplined because one monthly wholesale inflation number ran hot? Are politicians suddenly going to cancel vote-buying budgets, pause deficit spending, and stop subsidizing everything that moves? Right. Me neither.

You have to remember that the USG has chosen it’s path. They’re redefining the meaning of the phrase "You have to spend money to make money." Another phrase classic phrase that tracks: “A picture is worth a hundred and forty thousand dollar bitcoin” or something like that.

The day’s second plot twist didn’t help but it was pretty quickly walked back. Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the U.S. wouldn’t be buying more bitcoin for the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and instead they would use the already confiscated bitcoin worth $15-20 billion as their reserve. Markets didn’t like this announcement. However, late afternoon, he walked it back.

This flip-flop underscores the U.S. is still figuring out its Bitcoin strategy, but the fact they’re even debating it signals a seismic shift.

Alright, hopefully you’ve made it this far (probably giving myself too much credit) because the topic I wanted to cover this week is really important: not all Bitcoin exposure is created equal. An ETF gives you price exposure; real Bitcoin gives you property rights. If you want a metaphor you’ll remember: owning a Bitcoin ETF is like having a digital twin of a house you can trade, like owning stock in a property company that tracks the value of your dream home. You’ll benefit if real estate prices rise, but you’ll never get the keys, walk through the front door, or decide what happens to it. With the ETF, you watch from a distance. With real Bitcoin, you live in it. One is a brokerage product. The other is a bearer asset you can move, secure, and use — anytime, anywhere.

A handful of key reasons why I push for the keys:

First, control and portability. Your ETF shares live inside a brokerage account that lives inside a market that runs on a clock. You can’t take an ETF across a border, sign a transaction with it, or settle a payment on a Saturday night. Real BTC settles globally in minutes, 24/7/365. If you need to move value at 2:00 a.m. on a holiday, the chain is open. The exchange is the Bitcoin network.

Second, the counterparty stack. With an ETF you’re relying on the issuer, the custodian, the administrator, the transfer agent, APs/market makers, DTC/clearing, and your broker. Ninety-nine percent of the time that stack works. In stress, frictions appear — halts, spreads blow out, creations/redemptions slow, and you’re gated by market hours. With native BTC, you remove most of that stack. Hold it yourself (properly) or with a qualified custodian like you would with Satstreet. Your settlement finality is cryptographic, not bureaucratic.

Third, fees and drag. ETFs charge a management fee that compounds against you. People wave this away as “only 25 bps,” but compounding is merciless. A simple illustration: on $1,000,000 compounded at 20% for ten years, a 0.25% annual fee leaves you roughly $128,000 lighter than holding the asset directly. That’s before trading commissions and spreads. The higher the return, the bigger the wedge those basis points drive over time.

Fourth, market-hour risk. Bitcoin trades while your broker sleeps. You can wake up to news, want to act, and discover the ETF isn’t tradable for hours — or is halted. In a 24/7 asset, that’s not a feature; it’s a bug. Owning the underlying aligns your liquidity with the thing you’re actually trying to own.

And finally, geopolitical risk. If you’re Canadian, you don’t need me to remind you that this country is not exactly bending over backwards to retain its wealthiest citizens. We’ve already seen creeping tax grabs, retroactive capital gains change proposals, and a growing willingness to target the wealthy for new taxes. And it’s not hypothetical — look back to 2022 and the trucker protest. In a matter of days, bank accounts were frozen without due process. People woke up to find that the “money” they thought they owned was inaccessible because of a political decision. That’s how fast things can change when your assets live inside the system. In times of crisis, governments will reach for whatever levers they can — sometimes including your accounts. Real Bitcoin — properly secured and portable — sidesteps that. An ETF does not.

I’ll be fair as I do have a pretty clear bias in this argument: ETFs serve an important purpose. If you’re constrained by a retirement plan, if your investment committee forbids direct custody, or if you simply won’t take on key management — which can be very risky — an ETF is better than no exposure. It also onboards huge pools of capital — great for price discovery and market depth. But if you can own the asset, the hierarchy is clear: coins > wrapper.

So here’s the practical takeaway if you’re holding ETFs and rethinking things, which thankfully is a growing trend that I hope will continue: start by deciding what portion you truly want as real Bitcoin versus market exposure. If it’s real, convert the wrapper to the thing. Choose your custody path — hardware wallet with a written recovery plan, 2-of-3 multi-sig with a qualified co-signer, or institutional custody like what we offer at Satstreet. Then swap size OTC for low slippage with Satstreet (if you’re reading this and you’re outside of North America, we also have a licensed offshore entity) and take immediate delivery to your address(es) or leave them with us for the time being. There are other very important considerations to make and we specialize in working with you through the whole process — this is what our team has been doing for over 7 years.

So…the message is simple: if you’re going to own it, own it. Get the keys. Because when the locks change overnight, the last thing you want is to realize all you ever had was a claim on the house, not the house itself.

I didn’t write last week. It was the long weekend, and I spent it unplugged at my partner’s cottage - no charts, no headlines, just some good food, golf, and bad signal (is what I told people). It felt great.

But now we’re back.

Yesterday’s events shouldn’t be taken lightly. President Trump signed an executive order allowing cryptocurrencies and other alternative assets to be held inside 401(k) retirement plans. At first, I wasn’t immediately stoked on it — but as my X feed started blowing up, I realized this wasn’t a headline I could just skim past. 401(k)s are the backbone of the American retirement system, with nearly $9 trillion in assets. For decades, they’ve been funneled almost exclusively into stocks and bonds via ETFs and mutual funds, creating not only a structural tailwind for the BlackRocks and Vanguards of the world, but for traditional markets at large: automatic, biweekly paycheck deductions buying S&P 500 index funds regardless of price. That steady flow is one of the quiet reasons the stock market has been so resilient for so long.

Now imagine that same mechanism applied to Bitcoin. Even a 5% allocation across all 401(k) plans would be roughly $450 billion — nearly a quarter of Bitcoin’s current market cap. It wouldn’t come in all at once. It would be a constant, mechanical bid — dripping in every two weeks from millions of paychecks, automatically, without emotion, without hesitation, without waiting for a “good entry.” Price wouldn’t matter. This is the kind of structural flow that can permanently change how an asset trades.

This is the pool of capital we’re talking about.

In other news — and also yesterday — President Trump nominated Stephen Miran to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. The announcement drew significant attention, with some speculating about the role he would fill. Miran was nominated to replace Adriana Kugler, who resigned from the Board effective August 8, 2025. This appointment allows Trump to fill Kugler’s seat for the remainder of her term — a standard move on paper, but a notable one for a president intent on reshaping the Fed’s leadership.

Miran is no anonymous bureaucrat. He’s been publicly supportive of Bitcoin’s role in a modern monetary system, speaking about it not as a speculative plaything but as a legitimate reserve asset in a world of fiscal and monetary instability. Appointing him to the Fed is not symbolic — it’s a signal. It plants someone with a fundamentally different view of money inside the most powerful monetary policy body in the world. It means Bitcoin now has an informed advocate in the room when those policy debates happen. Yesterday was a good day indeed. If you’re interested in hearing some BTC-related remarks Miran made last year, you can click below to jump to the 37:00 mark of this video — and honestly, the whole interview is worth watching.

Yes, this guy was just picked to be on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.

As of today, markets are pricing in a 89.4% probability of a 25 bps cut at the September FOMC meeting.

The political reshaping of the Federal Reserve is intensifying, sending tremors through markets. On August 1, 2025, President Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, after a jarring July jobs report revealed only 73,000 jobs added and slashed prior estimates for May and June 2024 by a massive 258,000 — the largest two-month revision since the COVID crisis. May’s job growth was cut from 144,000 to 19,000, and June’s from 147,000 to 14,000, painting a far weaker labor market than previously thought. Trump, baselessly claiming the numbers were “rigged” to undermine his administration, sent a clear signal: economic data must align with his narrative. The stakes for institutions like the Fed just went up.

Six days later, Trump nominated Stephen Miran. Whispers are growing that Trump is positioning a loyalist to act as a “shadow chair.” Miran — a former Treasury official and current chair of the Council of Economic Advisers — could use his FOMC vote and public platform to amplify Trump’s push for aggressive rate cuts, adding pressure on Chair Jerome Powell, whose term extends to May 2026. The Fed’s independence, already tested by Trump’s first-term attacks and shaped by a 2025 Supreme Court ruling affirming its quasi-private status, now faces a fresh challenge as Trump looks to align monetary policy with his growth-first agenda.

Picture this: if Miran is confirmed before the September 17–18 FOMC meeting — where markets currently see an 89.4% chance of a 25 bps cut — his presence could shift the balance. Dissenters like Chris Waller, who pushed for a cut in July, might rally for a bolder 50 bps move. The Fed pulled a similar surprise in September 2024, delivering a half-point cut after skipping one in July. A repeat of that playbook now, against the backdrop of Trump’s tariff threats and a more politicized Fed, could send shockwaves through bonds, stocks, and the dollar — and mark the start of a new era where monetary policy bends closer to political priorities and market demands.

For Bitcoin, that’s not a problem. It’s a tailwind. An independent asset with no board, no election cycle, and no one to fire becomes more appealing every time the Fed’s credibility erodes. And this week delivered developments that undermine that credibility in historic fashion.

So, put it all together: the biggest retirement savings pool on the planet is now open to Bitcoin. Those flows will be constant, automated, and price-insensitive. A Bitcoin supporter is joining the Fed. Rates could be cut three times in four months. And the central bank is being pulled into the political arena in a way that only strengthens the case for monetary assets outside its control.

If you’ve been waiting for the moment when the system stops resisting Bitcoin and starts working for it, this is it. Consistent inflows. Policy tailwinds. Political tailwinds. Macro tailwinds. The question is no longer if Bitcoin wins — it’s already winning.

Have a nice weekend.