The Fed under Bernanke, Yellen, and Powell printed $8 trillion from 2008 to 2022 to buy up debt and keep interest rates artificially low. That is not responsible behavior. You cannot artificially create bitcoins. That is why governments hate them.
Here are the fed assets from this buying spree
I can create a lot of things that have no value. And the governments donât have bitcoin because you need a lot of electricity to create them. Funny thing is that you and I could buy bitcoins, just exchanging our hard earned dollar$ for them.
I am considering buying through ETFs . Thereâs more than usual hype about them such as this.
Also a lot of irresponsible printing of money. Here is the growth of the M2 money supply
Bitcoin is not an investment. Itâs not the solution to the problem of government printing money, responsible or not. Itâs a gamble on finding a greater fool in the future.
Still disagree on both, and Iâm not long any BTC. The protocol enforces scarcity, kinda like the Secret Service anti counterfeiting group for USD, but without the politicians printing trillions of new dollars and causing inflation.
Whether or not it trades like a hedge against inflation, or the US dollar, much like gold, just depends on whether people think it will or not.
I agree that BTC is not the solution to government budget deficits. Just because itâs unsuitable as a countryâs currency. And Iâm not talking only from a volatility standpoint. Completely anonymous decentralized currency system seems also hard to reconcile with regulation, oversight, and enforcement.
It does however behave exactly like a speculation vehicle with people trading on geopolitical rumors, celebrity hype, and general FOMO. Iâm not sure if fits the usual greater fool theory though. BTC valuation always far exceed its fundamental value (unlike equities during a bubble market) because it has none to start with.
It may be a hedge vs. inflation and at the same time positively correlated with market stability unlike gold which is usually negatively correlated with market stability. Personally Iâll stick to a less-volatile inflation hedge I understand (TIPS).
lucky or right. Better to be luckyâŚ
The permanent portfolio fans, who advocate holding 1/4 of your assets in gold, are suspicious of TIPS. One of their gurus, Craig Reynolds, famously said.
why buy fire insurance from the arsonist?
If you read zerohedge or other skeptic finance sites around the time the CPI number comes out, youâll see articles about the finagling that is going on.
See this article talking about seasonal adjustments. It was about the PPI and not the CPI, which is used in Tips, but there are similar adjustments there.
And then, reading a little further into the BLS press release we find this surprise: "the decline is attributable to the index for final demand energy, which moved down 1.6 percent."
Which then brings us to the absolute punchline, because in the very next sentence, Bidenâs Bureau of Gaslighting Services writes that "leading the March decline in the index for final demand goods, prices for gasoline decreased 3.6 percent."
Hold on a second, didnât we just show that gas prices - actual, real gas prices, which everyone across the country has to pay - rose by 6% in March?
Yes we did, but what we didnât anticipate is the amount of BS Bidenâs henchmen are willing to shove down our throats. And indeed, to understand how gasoline could possibly drop by 3.6% in a month where it rose over 6% we have to look at the category description, where we find the little trick beloved by propaganda ministries everywhere: "seasonally adjusted."
Thatâs right, as shown in the chart below, according to the BLS, the seasonally-adjusted gas price in March magically dropped by 3.6% even though the unadjusted, as in real, gas price rose by 6.3%, exactly what the AAA also reported in its daily summary of what gas prices across the US truly are.
A clear discussion of blockchains and cryptocurrency.
Crypto is selling off a lot, BTC -10%, ETH -20%. Markets are getting bad in a hurry, not just crypto.
Did everyone suddenly realize itâs not real? 
^^^this^^^ matters more than this >>>
Academics on what moves crypto
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There was a time when people thought that crypto might be a new asset class that was uncorrelated to other assets, but that seems like mostly a mistake. Crypto is a volatile infinite-duration asset; it goes up when risk appetite goes up or when interest rates go down, and down when risk appetite goes down or rates go up.
In that vein, here is a new paper by Austin Adams, Markus Ibert and Gordon Liao, titled âWhat Drives Crypto Asset Prices?â Their answer is, roughly, a combination of (1) risk appetite, (2) interest rates and (3) idiosyncratic demand for crypto
We investigate the factors influencing cryptocurrency returns using a structural vector auto-regressive model. The model uses asset price co-movements to identify the impact of monetary policy and risk sentiment in conventional markets on crypto asset prices, with minimal reverse spillover. Specifically, we decompose daily Bitcoin returns into components reflecting conventional risk premia, monetary policy, and crypto-specific shocksâŚ
Fun comment by a guy who follows the crypto bankruptcies closely:
https://twitter.com/ThomasBraziel/
Someone should create a satirical news outlet like The Onion specifically for the crypto. Imagine headlines like:
âBitcoin Maximalists Declare Gold âToo Heavy to Carry,â Demand Digital Rocksâ
âEthereum Developers Implement New Protocol to âEnd Gas Feesâ⌠Againâ
âNew Crypto Startup Promises to Revolutionize How You Lose Your Moneyâ
âNFT of a JPEG of a Receipt for an NFT Sale Auctioned for $1 Millionâ
FTX bankruptcy is over and people are getting paid.
Under the terms of the Plan, 98% of the creditors of FTX by number will receive approximately 119% of the amount of their allowed claims within 60 days after the effective date of the Plan
and the last few getting paid a bit later, also well. I guess these are âdollarizedâ claims, so I think you get paid in dollars and since crypto did well, the assets were worth more than at the start of the BK. Not sure if thatâs as much as the crypto you thought you owned at FTX would have done.
FTX etc bet on the wrong party/ at the wrong time
This is a hard one for people who claim to be able to read the mind of the stock market
Bitb up 9.76%
Gld down 2.63%
Tsla up 8.62%
DOGE is for those who think BTC is speculative. Weâre officially living in âBack to the Futureâ
