Fire Hydrant of Freedom

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.

In the meantime, the BTC ETF's are now the #2 commodity ETF and have surpassed silver ETF. The current downdraft in BTC is temporary after the 100 % + run last year. Its mostly due to GBTC sales, at some point these sales will subside and the bull run continues. As can be seen in the last column 37946 were sold from GBTC and 30,496 were purchased by ETF's. Both BlackRock and Fidelity each hold over 1 Billion in BTC assets.

Another important observation is that from 1/10-1/17 the daily purchases of BTC by BR (25,067 BTC) and Fidelity (20,507) are still increasing and have not yet topped out. Compare this with the 900 BTC which are mined daily (supply) and this too will reduce to 450 BTC mined/day after April. Absolute scarcity is coming this year and in the next several years. Also of note, GBTC sales are trending down, albeit slowly.

The US has only 3 options.
1. Default on debt: Not likely to happen.
2. Cut spending massively. Not going to happen
3. Increase taxes: Wont work, because as taxes increase, capital flees and you end up with less tax revenue.

So the most likely solution is Print Baby Print...printer goes brrr, afterall we own the reserve currency.

Samson Mow CEO of Jan3 a company which focusses on selling nation state adoption, posted some interesting numbers.

900 new BTC are mined daily. In two days BlackRock purchased over 11,000 BTC (13 days worth). If one considers all the ETF's together, he presented stats suggesting that the exchanges which provide these BTC over the counter in many cases have about 1.8 million BTC, the rest are in the hands of hodlers.

What this means is that at current buying rates all these 1.8 million BTC will be drained in about 120 days, just in time for the halving. If this is true, a huge demand shock, combined with a supply shock is coming since holdlers are not going to sell cheaply.

My strong suggestion to holders of BTC is to have a game plan, based on your risk tolerance and time horizon. Once BTC is in the parabolic stage, it is easy to sell early. If your age allows, dont sell everything but hold for one or more cycles, unless you plan to hold on longer for your grand kids.

Prez of maldives has been bribed by the Chinese and is anti-India and pro-ISIS. Muizzu's govt posted derogatory statements about Modi and India. Maldives is completely dependent on India for tourism and when they had drinking water issues, India supplied the drinking water. They have now bitten the hand which feeds them. Modi fired back by posting a picture of his holiday on Indian islands.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1743954214395719999

Soon thereafter, tens of thousands of bookings were cancelled by Indians, and they are now looking at the Indian islands of Lakshdweep and Andamans, which are equally if not more beautiful. I think Maldives is done for, until there is a change in govt.

Jeff Ross Vailshirecap is advising clients as follows

BlackRock or Fidelity are the leaders. You may want to read about the costs of ETF's.

The major benefit of ETF's is that self custody is not required. That allows the benefit of BTC price appreciation without incurring the risk of loss due to poor custody.

Self custody of BTC gives you sovereignty, but the downside is that custody is a bit involved. You have to worry about storing the keys and requires some technical ability. No 1-800-Bitcoin is available in case of error.

https://substack.com/inbox/post/140616320

Enjoy the Big Idea from Cathy Wood, CEO of Ark, she has BTC ETF

https://twitter.com/i/status/1745441714481811886

BTC is taking off in Africa too. Most are focussed only on S America

From X

"$GBTC (1119 shares=1BTC) was trading at a roughly 1% discount day 1

$IBIT (1775 shares=1BTC) was trading at a roughly 2% premium day 1

Trading to chase a fee reduction at this point locked in a net loss in BTC. Not worth it till the gap closes."

Great discussion on BTC and real estate. BTC 164 episode

https://link.chtbl.com/BTC164

First day stats 4.7 Billion, but a lot of cross traffic. GBTC losing some customers, which went to ETF etc.