26th January 2024 > > Incontinence, GBTC, & Doom!

tl;dr

Governments’ fiscal incontinence will accelerate crypto adoption. The ongoing sales of GBTC may be more positive than many might think. DOGE and Doom are an unassailable combination that means I will achieve very little for the rest of the day.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

Stock techies are getting very bullish right now across all industry types. Technical analysis is snake oil as you know, but crowd mentality is a real thing. Does stock market enthusiasm suck air out of the crypto sphere?

BTC volatility remains very low, which has its own advantages and disadvantages. Naysayers who point at the 10% or so price reduction from the mid-40s as a cataclysmic event fail to appreciate that such moves are not only normal in the crypto world but are always outdone by frequent 30% or more temporary selloffs that have characterised every previous bull market. Hodlers who DCA take advantage of these minor irritations.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Fiscal incontinence

This is what happens when government spending gets out of hand. The US debt pile of $14 TRILLION can never conceivably be paid back without resorting to tricks such as the Fed minting several coins with a purported notional of a TRILLION dollars each and using them to buy back and cancel outstanding bonds. The US as the issuer of the world’s reserve currency – to the global dismay of despots, autocrats, and anyone else of an illiberal disposition – can get away with it.

Here in the UK, the Bank of England will one day buy zero coupon perps at par from the Treasury to allow the latter to retire the outstanding stock of debt to try to stave off a graph like the one above. But that won’t solve the underlying problem which is that unsustainable fiscal incontinence has become deeply embedded in our politics since 1997 – arguably the rot set in half a decade before then – regardless of the party in charge. We are unlikely to see this facet of our lives change anytime soon, as various pressure groups with high profiles will never allow the faucet wasting our taxpayers’ money to be turned off (*).

There is of course only one solution to this impending disaster, and that solution is the blockchain.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Follow-up

For anyone who was paying attention to yesterday's commentary, I made the claim that I expected 50% of the selling of GBTC to have been recycled into the other nine new-born BTC ETFs. Later the same day, J.P. Morgan sent out a piece saying that close to a third of the funds raised from selling GBTC had been recycled into the new-borns. Counter intuitively that is a more bullish stance than mine, but one must remember that both numbers are merely guesstimates based on incomplete information.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – DOGE

DOGE is one of the original memecoins with which the legendary Elon Musk is forever associated. Various developments have been implemented to give it more gravitas, some of which have been mildly successful. But this news is very exciting to us who were gamers in our teens (those late 70s/early 80s green screen Commodore PETs helped me fine-tune my Space Invaders skills to such a degree that one occasion I finished so many levels I was returned to the starting point, a feat of which I was very proud).

A while back we looked at a one-level reinterpretation of Doom – simply the greatest video game ever produced – using Ordinals on the BTC blockchain.

Doginals have gone a step further.

The full and original version of all ten levels of “Knee-Deep in the Dead” has been inscribed forever more on the blockchain, though it does take a few minutes to load:

https://wonky-ord.dogeord.io/shibescription/02d0c9820dc020acd8128d80955ff5b7fbeb8c80ee229a408dce5fe6573f404bi0

No more productive activity for me today now …

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(*) Jeremy “not my real surname but I don’t wish to make you blush” Hunt has been reported by Bloomberg UK as stating that the fiscal headroom for “Giveaways May Be Limited”.

When exactly was “giveaways” redefined as “I will continue to take away your money at an accelerating pace, but ever so slightly less aggressively than previously planned”?

Answers, as always, on a postcard to CC Towers.