6th January 2022 > > Genesis.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

A hawkish Fed that threatens to accelerate the pace of removing the wholesale transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich (aka quantitative easing) has hit all risk assets and sent bond yields flying.

Bond funds are now 2% down on the year, which is an unfortunate performance for a supposedly safe asset after just three trading days.

BTC and ETH are taking their fair share of the pain.

Occasional Series – The James Webb Space Telescope

Is now more than halfway to its destination, 1mm miles away from the Earth. The most delicate part of the operation – the unfurling of its five-layered sunscreen – has been successfully completed.

Once in position it will start sending infrared images that date from the time of the Dark Ages 13.5bn or so years ago. This is the most extraordinary technological achievement of our time.

Curious Cryptos’ Definition of the Day – The Genesis Block

When our friend Satoshi Nakamoto first created BTC, the network had no utility. He was the only user, and he was the only miner. The very first block of the BTC blockchain (“Genesis Block” or sometimes simply “The Block”) contained a transaction creating 50 BTC (current value $2.25mm) to send to a wallet which has never been accessed including the following message:

"The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks."

This is the hex representation of the Genesis Block:

You can view that very first block on the blockchain here:

https://www.blockchain.com/btc/block/000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f

And the wallet that received the 50 BTC is here:

https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa

The balance on that wallet is now over 68 BTC – people have been contributing small amounts of BTC averaging 0.0075 (approximately $345 as of today) to this wallet since the Genesis as homage to Satoshi Nakamoto. A sacrifice of BTC if you will.

Reserve Treasury Protocols (before they all go to zero)

Reminder – Olympus and Wonderland are, to the best of my knowledge, live viable projects. XEUS, FORT and JADE turned out to be scams, though they are still live scams. Scams are not uncommon in these Wild West fringes of Decentralised Finance (DeFi).

Open positions:

Closed positions: