tl;dr
Infantino must walk. Arthur Hayes never fails to entertain us. A Coldcard update which should prompt you to update your self-custody storage solution.
Market Snap
Market Wrap
CNBC commentator Jim Cramer has announced he has sold all his BTC. You do not get better confirmation that the bottom is already in.
Occasional Series – Football
I have been a season ticket holder at Watford for most of my life, and with good reason.
We were Southern League Second Division champions twice – in 1900 and 1904. We topped that by being Southern League First Division champions in 1915, though that season was disrupted by global events. We were Fourth Division Champions in 1978, only a couple of years after I began my love affair with Vicarage Road. We came second (can you imagine?) in the old First Division in 1982-1983, the year I sat my O-levels. I have been to two FA Cup finals, and who can forget that game when Luther Blissett scored twice with his head to beat Man Utd in the third round of the League Cup in my first year at St. Albans School. And that extraordinary match, battering Southampton (then of the First Division) 7-1 at home in the second leg after losing 4-0 away.
Hats off to Harlow Town too. Having beaten Leicester in a previous round of the FA Cup, Harlow went in at half-time at the Vic 1-0 up. I was sitting just to the left of the managers’ dugout for that game. At thirteen years old I was distraught. Four goals in the first twenty minutes of the second half for Watford should have sealed the deal. At the end of the game, which finished 4-3 (we were simply hanging on for the win, desperately willing the whistle), the Harlow Town fans were magnificent in their support for their team. That was proper football.
At Watford, we broke new ground with our family-friendly approach, our desire to bring diversity to the game (no one can ever forget John Barnes’ flippant and elegant response to the banana thrown at him on the pitch, nor our connection with Elton John), and the pride that is always on display at Vicarage Road. It is a special place, and not just for me. Watching live football at the Vic is one of God’s gifts.
At the other end of the scale are parasites such as Infantino.
May he burn in hell.
Or, even worse, be forced to go to every Luton Town home game from now until eternity.
Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Arthur Hayes
Arthur has published his latest musings on all things AI and crypto:
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/situationship#poll-924580
Arthur’s argument this month is that the AI bubble will burst because lending money to those who are building data centres is the same as lending money to real estate developers, though the market currently rates the hyperscalers as technology-focused companies. The forward multiples of those two beasts are vastly different, implying a massive overvaluation of all AI-related entities.
The central point of that assertion is obvious. Once the bubble bursts (note we are still a long way away from that happening – the blow-off top is yet to come) governments will once again ride to the rescue with insane amounts of money printing, which has the added advantage of lowering the cost of interest payments on the new debt.
It won’t be called QE, but that is what it is: a policy designed to make the rich richer, and the poor poorer. It is as far away from being progressive as one can imagine, though the proponents of fanciful ideas such as MMT fail to understand that, deliberately or otherwise.
You already know where Arthur goes after that:
“Once the authorities sufficiently panic because their AI-created GDP growth is just another run-of-the-mill property bubble, they will print money in sums greater than during the 2008 GFC. This will ultimately drive Bitcoin to one million and beyond.”
Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Coldcard update
It seems that Monday’s missive landed well (https://www.curiouscryptos.com/the-ccc-is-back-we-love-japan-we-do-not-love-coldcard/), with many Coldcard users acting by moving BTC onto exchanges as a short-term custody solution:
Not unreasonably, several readers have been in contact, querying whether a similar issue might arise with their Ledger Nano self-custody. The short answer is almost certainly not – the random number generator used by Ledger to create the seed phrase has been tested to destruction. But – and this is a big but – “almost certainly not” is not good enough for me.
But don’t despair, and don’t throw away your Ledger Nano Flex anytime soon, for the CCC – as ever – is riding to your rescue.
…
On your Ledger Flex, go to settings. Under “Advanced” there is the option to “Set passphrase”. By activating this you are effectively adding a 25th word to your 24-word seed phrase. In the context of entropy, a suitably strong passphrase gives more combinations than all the atoms in several trillion universes. It can never be guessed. Attaching that passphrase to a second PIN which is used to unlock your device allows Ledger Flex to access both sets of accounts.
The next step is to move your BTC and other cryptos to the new wallets whose public addresses are derived from your seed phrase plus the passphrase. This process is managed within Ledger Live. Though seemingly trivial, the usual caveats still apply – always do small test transactions whenever moving cryptos to a new wallet, just to be sure.
That’s your long-term storage concerns sorted.
If you would like the CCC team to hold your hand whilst implementing this security-strategy upgrade, we are always at your service, for no fee.