22nd June 2025 > > Interregnum, Peter Schiff, & Texas.

tl;dr

Interregnum, and a serious one at that. Peter Schiff has shifted. Texas will have its own strategic BTC reserve.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

We don’t yet know how treasuries will react to the US bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites (I wager lower yields). Thin weekend markets show a relatively small 1% drop in value for stocks with about half of that for BTC. Alts have taken a bigger hit. Until there is clarity about this situation, risk assets will trend a touch lower, or sideways at best.

Occasional Series – Interregnum

For personal reasons, the CCC’s publication schedule is going to be less reliable than usual for the next 2-3 weeks. By that, I mean that my team and I will only be interrupting your breakfast a few times at most until the middle of July.

Please look after cryptos in our absence. I know I can trust you to do that.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Peter Schiff

Schiff, a long-term and wrong BTC-sceptic, has made a very interesting comment:

He says “I get Bitcoin” but I find no evidence of that until now. I have always been under the impression that he has been beholden to the Munger belief that BTC is “rat poison squared”.

Now that USD denominated stablecoins are about to dramatically change TradFi in the next year or two, for everyone’s benefit – thus upsetting people like Schiff who are keen on retaining their personal financial hegemony over the great unwashed – his ire is turned against the dollar itself.

I get that. Fiat currencies will always be debased, for Milton Friedman taught us this truism:

“Keep your eye on one thing and one thing only: how much the government is spending. Because that's the true tax. If you're not paying for it in the form of explicit taxes, you're paying for it in the form of inflation or borrowing.

…

His comment that you get the same liquidity whether using gold or fiat USD is just laughably ridiculous.

On the flipside, Schiff is correct to say that gold is a store of value when measured over millennia and, if you choose your dates right, it can be a store of value over centuries. I would point out that neither of those timescales are particularly useful for us as mere mortals. When talking about just decades or years, gold’s volatility matches all other assets. It is also encumbered with no income stream, and the associated storage costs.

Frankly, I wouldn’t buy it, for when the zombie apocalypse descends upon us, carrying a brick of gold around is more likely to get you killed than any other potentially useful outcome you might have been hoping for. But, hey, that is merely a personal opinion, and not financial advice.

Anyways, if you are on Schiff’s side, he is soon to launch his own gold-backed stablecoin:

Which categorically means that Schiff himself is now embracing the crypto revolution. Who knew?

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Texas

Texas is now the third state after Arizona and New Hampshire to pass into law a bill to create a strategic BTC reserve.

This new fund will be managed separately from the state treasury, and has a wide remit of assets that it can buy. Texas Blockchain Council founder and President Lee Bratcher, explains:

"My sense is that it will be in the tens of millions of dollars (of investment into BTC), which, while it sounds significant, is a very modest amount, for a state the size of Texas. It's still early and the comptroller is going to utilize proven investing standards to determine how much to buy, when to purchase, and that's really outside of the hands of anybody except the professionals at the comptroller's office."

In itself this is not a market moving event, but every time a state joins the BTC reserve game, it encourages others to do so too. There is a lengthier list of states that have so far rejected their own BTC reserve than have put into place the legislative means of doing so. Perhaps that balance is starting to shift.