Fire Hydrant of Freedom

This is not a new idea, but certainly a well articulated one, as to what the end game for the sovereign default crisis may be. A corollary of this is that the US govt confiscates Bitcoins from Blackrock etc and gives ETF holders the fiat value. This is why holding real BTC is best, but is complicated for most.

In other important news, CEO of Vanguard got fired. He was against BTC, his clients missed a 50 % move by refusing to offer BTC ETF's.

https://twitter.com/stackhodler/status/1763500294481092952

You mentioned a 90 day waiting period before the big funds can buy in or something like that.  What does that period end?

Around the halving in April. Yesterday Blackrock Quant at a conf recommended a 28 % allocation.

India will be # 3 economy in a year or two, it has the largest population in the world.  Smaller countries like France and UK are Security Council members, almost sounds like a joke these days. Its within 0.2 Trillion of Germany and Japan. The only one objecting is China and interestingly from what I understand in the 50's the Permanent Council membership was offered to India and the strategically dumb PM of India, Nehru said China should take it.

Today the courts ruled against this..

BTC is becoming less volatile now. Other assets are becoming more volatile

Bitcoin has passed all-time highs in fourteen currencies.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1760638270462104048

BTC cope from the ECB. We are at the "then they fight you stage"..

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/blog/date/2024/html/ecb.blog20240222~0929f86e23.en.html

After they published the below, BTC is up 197 %

Factoid on Blackrock. They have 417 ETF's, which took in 10.4 Billion $, of which their BTC ETF took in half, at 5B$. This is one month after go live.
Big giants like BR and Fidelity love ETf's because once they add the BTC ETF to any of their index funds, everyone is buying them and they make billions in fees. As the value of the ETF goes up, their fees go up, so there is a vested interest in making the price go up.

GBTC has a 1.5 % fee, so selling is not useful, because of the potential tax consequences. In time, I suspect they will bring down their fees, or continue to slowly lose customers.

state of the gold vs btc etf. Gold is being demonetized, i.e. people are selling gold etfs/gold to buy BTC. Other data prove this (will post if I find it)

BTC is at an all time high in 23 currencies, most in developing countries. But it reached an ATH in the Japanese Yen a top 4 currency. This is significant.

BTC ETF flows continue to remain high

Great Trump ad..sound on

https://twitter.com/i/status/1756702978285731936

Elections ongoing in Pak at the moment. Imran Khan is in prison, but looks like he won the election. Army does not like that, so the other two parties of Nawaz and Bhutto will form a coalition. Imran stays in prison. The army gets what it wants.
Cartoon says " Never won a war, never lost an election" !

Impressive video on Pizzagate

https://twitter.com/i/status/1756279006402625691

ETF inflows rising. Green bars larger than blue bars. BTC at 47K. If BTC goes over 50K, FOMO starts

The bleeding seems to have stoppoed for now. BR owns 3 Bill $ worth btc in 3 weeks. We have to see if the inflows will continue, I am looking at 50 B + worth of ETF inflows by the end of year.I would expect significant highs by Oct 2024

The chart in purple is crucial to understand. The Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) for any 4 yr period is quite high taken from a purchase at the top or bottom. I think even a 50 % CAGR can do wonders to one's portfolio

GBTC selling has declined sharply from 640 mill/day at peak to 255 mill/day. All the Sam Bankman Fried related FTC selling of GBTC is also complete.

GBTC sales have mostly been Sam Bankman Fried scam, forced sales. These are ending. The surprising thing is that the ETF's are still taking in a lot of BTC. The new supply after the halving is very limited and any purchases will have to be done from existing BTC on exchanges since the hodlers are not selling.

Decentralization usually refers to protocol running by nodes, the risk being that the protocol can be changed. Thats not a concern. There are 10's of thousands of nodes world wide. There is also the concept of game theory, so eg Russia and China are not likely to agree with the US should a govt try to ban BTC etc and vice versa. Infact calculations have been presented that BTC can no longer be banned. Centralization of wealth in BTC is theoretically possible, but very unlikely.  People would need to sell their coin to the ETF's and they might do it for a high price.

In 2024 or 2025, I think sovereign nation states will start purchasing BTC. They typically do that in assets worth a Trill $ or more.

You can see how the coins are distributed here.

https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html

https://cryptopotato.com/bitcoin-etf-vs-buying-btc-directly-whats-better/

Something we havent discussed about is UTXO (Unspent Transaction Outputs) management for those who buy BTC and self custody. Essentially each batch of BTC that one buys is  like a dollar bill, eg 1 $, 5 $, 20$ etc. To spend each $ bill, one needs to pay fees. Thus to spend 26$, one would pay fees 3 times, for each of the $ bills (1, 5, 20) Until recently, the fees were miniscule on the main block chain, but now they are rising such that small dollar denomination purchases cannot be cashed because the fees are higher than the $ bill value.

Currently, its still Ok to cash higher amounts of BTC purchases, say a few thousand $ at a time, but a 10 $ worth BTC purchase would be difficult to cash. But as BTC gets more valuable eg 100,000$ plus, I expect fees to increase, so it becomes necessary to convert your 26$ in 3 different bills to a single bill worth $26, so that the fees are paid only once.

Due to these complexities, I am starting to think that holding BTC in ETF's might be the easier and better option than holding BTC for most people. The price appreciation (minus the fee) is the same, but the risks/complexities of holding BTC are greatly decreased. Holding BTC gives you sovereignty, makes your coins unconfiscatable and ability to cross borders with your money. This may not be important or relevant to most.