(Any views expressed below are the personal views of the author and should not form the basis for making investment decisions, nor be construed as a recommendation or advice to engage in investment transactions.)
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.
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.
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.
