Good Morning Everyone, Back at it after a week of paragliding! Lets get straight into it. As bitcoin heads toward $47,000 (relative to melting USD shitcoins) i found this video of Russian supreme leader Vladimir Putin of particular interest. The video shows Putin calling a spade a spade, and rightly calling out the end of the USD as a first class reserve asset following the sanctions by the G7 seizing Russian central bank reserves. If you have been paying attention and following along - this is ...
Mar 28, 2022•4 min
Good Morning Everyone, Hope you have all had a great week. Before i get into a few content suggestions for the weekend, i couldn’t leave you for the week without briefly discussing a recent development between the IMF and the Argentinian Government. The short version is that Argentina are in debt to the IMF, and have had a long and contentious relationship since joining in 1956. In this time Argentina have sought and agreed to 21 emergency financial-support programs, most of them lasting fewer t...
Mar 18, 2022•5 min
Good Morning Everyone, In listening to an absolutely fascinating conversation between Peter McCorrmack and Nic Carter , Nic explains something that absolutely blew me away in how he thinks about commodity prices and the true connection of these costs to the humans in the world. He explains: “Commodity price charts; they’re not just numbers on a screen. They’re a measure of human flourishing basically. So if a price of a commodity gets cheaper, humans are flourishing more, and if it gets higher h...
Mar 17, 2022•4 min
Good Morning Everyone, One of the most fundamental dynamics that has underpin the dominance of the US dollar since defaulting (again) in 1971 and the subsequent removal of the peg to gold, that is the removal of any tether to the physical world, is the creation of the PetroDollar system. Alex Gladstein explains this system and the historical account of its formation in his article - The Hidden Costs Of The Petrodollar . As he explains in the article: “In 1974, they sent new Treasury Secretary Wi...
Mar 16, 2022•5 min
Good Morning Everyone, The EU parliament voted yesterday on a bill titled “Cryptocurrencies in the EU: new rules to boost benefits and curb threats”. Included in this bill was a a rule relating to Proof-Of-Work mining which reads: “ 1. Crypto-assets shall be subject to minimum environmental sustainability standards with respect to their consensus mechanism used for validating transactions, before being issued, offered or admitted to trading in the Union. Crypto-assets that are issued, offered or...
Mar 15, 2022•4 min
Good Morning Everyone, I thought i’d keep this theme going on a Friday, and offer a few content suggestions that may be unknown to you and potentially valuable as we go into the weekend or to cue into you playlists for the next week. Instead of recommending three books, articles and pods like i did last week, which seems unlikely you’re going to be able to get through all that, I thought i’d narrow it down a little, and point to one of each which is hopefully a little more digestible - please le...
Mar 10, 2022•49 sec
Good Morning Everyone, Yesterday I wrote about the thesis from Credit Suisse’s Zoltan Pozsar, who is one of the most listened to and respected macro voices around. His thesis is too complex to rehash in detail again here but essentially he postulated that we could be on the cusp of a transition back to a commodity-backed monetary system essentially backstopped by China. This would be the transition of the world order away from a US dominant - US Dollar backed system - and toward a system where t...
Mar 10, 2022•5 min
Good Morning Everyone, As commodities continue to surge in an unprecedented way, Credit Suisse released a paper on Saturday titled Breton Woods III which highlights that we are at a major inflection point as the changes to the world order appear to accelerate. At the heart of this shift is the conflict between Russia and the US, and the actions taken by the US to apply extreme sanctions in response; but it’s important to understand that those events are merely symptoms, and not the cause. The ca...
Mar 09, 2022•7 min
Good Morning Everyone, This morning I just wanted to write to say thank you. Today is the three month anniversary since beginning this letter. Since beginning I have written & recorded every day (Monday - Friday) and have written 63 pieces and recorded over 300 minutes of audio spanning a massive range of topics from the nuance relating to the Bitcoin networks energy usage and it’s proof-of-work consensus mechanism to the societal and geo-political implications of the world order - and every...
Mar 07, 2022•2 min
Good Morning Everyone, I want to spend this morning talking about bonds, which are certainly not something i’m not an expert in. Lets begin at the beginning - According to Investopedia: “A bond is a debt or promise to pay investors interest payments along with the return of invested principal in exchange for buying the bond.” Essentially governments issue bonds as a mechanism to raise capital and to support spending and obligations. In exchange they return an interest payment, commonly referred ...
Mar 07, 2022•6 min
Good Morning Everyone, I feel like I’ve unloaded a ton of information on you guys this week, and particularly the last two letters where fairly deep (and long) so I thought I’d keep it short today, and offer you a few links to content that i believe are super valuable. I did want to frame it appropriately before doing so, and offer my perspective on content, but more specifically books, as there is a profound asymmetry that exists that i think few tend to see. I wrote about this in more detail a...
Mar 04, 2022•2 min
Good Morning Everyone, US Fed Chair, Jerome Powell testified to congress yesterday under the title of “Monetary Policy and The State Of The Economy” . In the hearing he made some very interesting comments specific to “cryptocurrency” that i believe are worth a mention. I’m paraphrasing here- but he was asked if Russia “could” use cryptocurrencies to “get around” sanctions. He responded by saying: “I don’t have any private information on the extent to which that is happening [Russia is using cryp...
Mar 03, 2022•10 min
Good Morning Everyone, The world order is changing fast right in front of our eyes. The implications of the war that has begun are far reaching and constantly evolving. The following quote from Vladimir Lenin captures my sense of the situation: “There are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen.” - Vladimir Lenin The amount of bad information online has honestly never been higher. I’ve seen videos shared apparently from Ukraine, that was actually from a starwars mo...
Mar 02, 2022•9 min
Good Morning Everyone, As financial sanctions, bans and the freezing and confiscation of assets become all the rage amongst politicians and legacy media the world over in response to the Russian conflict, and in an attempt to condemn the actions of Vladimir Putin, it’s hard to cite a more significant series of events to demonstrate how Bitcoin truly fixes this. I really am amazed and completely bamboozled quite frankly, by the fact that so much of the world still fails to recognise the level of ...
Mar 01, 2022•5 min
Good Morning Everyone, As the situation in Europe continues to develop, and world leaders posture and signal to their people about how they intend to act and how righteous they are, rather than allowing our minds to be on the end of the strings of the powerful and our attention to be captured and controlled by the legacy media machine, i want to turn our attention to something far less cortisol inducing being Network effects, or Metcalfe’s Law. Metcalfe’s law named after Robert Metcalfe states t...
Feb 28, 2022•6 min
Good Morning Everyone, As most are probably aware, Russia invaded Ukraine yesterday. The situation is wildly complex and there are myriad potential implications, responses and higher order effects that could transpire as a result. The situation is far too complex for one person to capture in a short letter. I want to focus on a few of the themes i’m thinking about this morning and that i believe are worth paying attention to. First is that very few people want this. War is brutal, and likely res...
Feb 25, 2022•7 min
Good Morning Everyone, When nation states have disagreements and to some extent oppose one another, there are a number of typical actions that can be taken in response as a means to try and assert oneself and desires upon the other and achieve some kind of a resolution. The most severe escalation of these actions is of course being out-right kinetic warfare - ie guns and violence - but there are other forms of war that typically precede this, including (but certainly not limited to) informationa...
Feb 24, 2022•6 min
Good Morning Everyone, I can see the initial etchings of an interesting trend that i believe is worth paying attention to. The trend is of intelligent people that did not understand bitcoin and why the world needs it, but are slowly but surely being awoken to its power and necessity and demonstrating the psychological flexibility to change their mind. Which is a competency I have a ton of respect for, but few demonstrate. One of the most notable people recently is David H Hansson who goes under ...
Feb 23, 2022•5 min
Good Morning Everyone, Power projection is a concept that I have discussed before in depth - but if you are not familiar with it, I suggest reviewing in the letter linked below to have a thorough understanding of the concept and its significance. You can find it here: The concept of power projection was first introduced to me by Jason Lowery who is a member of the US Space Force and is completing his thesis at MIT on Bitcoin. Jason is absolutely brilliant. He has been sharing snippets from his t...
Feb 21, 2022•7 min
Good Morning Everyone, As the situation in Canada sadly continued to escalate over the weekend, with the police initiating violence toward peaceful protestors. The police chief was asked about their intentions for filming the protests and if they planned to use the footage they were accumulating to identify people and actively perusing them following the protest. He responded as follows: “The simple answer is yes. If you are involved in this protest, we will actively look to identify you and fol...
Feb 21, 2022•4 min
Good Morning Everyone, There is a powerful meme that tries to capture the cyclical nature of human behaviour over time and the relationship between prosperity and societal regression, destruction and rebirth. The cycle is as follows: * Hard times create strong men * Strong men create good times * Good times create weak men * Weak men create hard times * …and so the cycle repeats… Hard times create strong men… There are plenty of data points that suggest we have lived through one of, if not the m...
Feb 18, 2022•5 min
Good Morning Everyone, US Congressman Warren Davidson has submitted a bill to Congress to support and protect the right to self-custody your bitcoin and transact peer-to-peer (P2P). This comes in the wake of dictatorial powers being leveraged in Canada against the countries own citizens, and as we witness the ongoing attack on civil liberties in many other countries including Australia and New Zealand all concealed under the disguise of safety. This is an interesting proposal, as ultimately the ...
Feb 16, 2022•3 min
Good Morning Everyone, Yesterday Canadian supreme leader Trudeau invoked the ‘emergencies act’, formerly the ‘war measures act’, in the G7, formerly democratic nation of Canada. The war measures act has only been invoked 3 times in the countries history: * During WW1 * WW2 * 1970 “October Crisis” The Emergencies Act has never been used since being established in 1988, until now. If you want to see the supreme leaders announcement i’ve included it below. I think it’s important to really gain some...
Feb 16, 2022•4 min
Good Morning Everyone, Alex Gladstein shared a great thread after visiting a mining facility in Norway. The KryptoVault facility is located in Hønesfoss, which is about an hours drive from Oslo. The facility harnesses the power of running water (hydro) to generate electricity to power the bitcoin miners, and secure the network. Making the electricity generation almost free, beyond the setup and facility maintenance costs of course. According to the companies website: “In Norway, we have 100% ren...
Feb 15, 2022•3 min
Good Morning Everyone, There is a powerful metaphor that demonstrates the conundrum we find ourselves in when trying to analyze, assess and gain a clear recognition of a system, from inside of that system. It is that, of a fish in water. “Fish don’t know they’re in water. If you tried to explain it, they’d say, “Water? What’s water?” They’re so surrounded by it that it’s impossible to see. They can’t see it until they jump outside of it.” This metaphor is equally applicable to how we perceive mo...
Feb 14, 2022•6 min
Good Morning Everyone, One of the common concerns that you hear from people that do not understand bitcoin and the lightning network - or even know about lightning typically, is that it’s too slow, and that it cannot process enough transactions and that’s why the newer shinier xyz shitcoin is more pretty and exciting, and thus going to change the world. When in actual fact, what you tend to find, is that those individuals are just crippled by the effects of the fiat mind virus, and are a product...
Feb 11, 2022•6 min
Good Morning Everyone, There has been a flood of significant announcements this past 24hrs as bitcoin price relative to the melting USD shitcoin rallies toward $46,000 - an almost 40% increase now from the lows. Perhaps the most significant of them is the Russian Government and Central bank agreeing to recognize bitcoin and crypto as a form of currency. Only last month the Bank of Russia proposed banning crypto mining over concerns it could endanger the countries financial system. Now we’re seei...
Feb 10, 2022•7 min
Good Morning Everyone, The US department of Justice has made its largest financial seizure ever, seizing approximately 94,000 bitcoin in relation the 2016 Bitfinex exchange hack. The original hack resulted in approximately 2000 unauthorized transactions totaling nearly 120,000 bitcoin, worth around $70m US dollars at the time. In a public statement the US DOJ wrote: “Two individuals were arrested this morning in Manhattan for an alleged conspiracy to launder cryptocurrency that was stolen during...
Feb 09, 2022•4 min
Good Morning Everyone, As Bitcoin price ascends back into the mid 40’s (currently $44,074) - up 34% from the lows, KPMG Canada have announced they have added Bitcoin & Ethereum to their balance sheet. It’s unclear as yet how much of each has been acquired and what the actual distribution between the two assets is, but my guess is that it’s a bitcoin-heavy position. KPMG was founded in 1987, and is regarded as one of the major four accounting firms globally. The company employ 236,000 humans,...
Feb 07, 2022•3 min
Good Morning Everyone, The wild and rampant censorship train seems to have well and truly left the station and is gaining momentum. There is an incredible level of pressure being applied to Joe Rogan and his podcast, with Spotify caving to political pressure removing 113 episodes of the podcast so far (jremissing.com). Alongside this, is the extraordinary situation in the city of Ottawa. Following Gofundme’s wild financial censorship of over $10m in donations to the #truckersforfreedomconvoy2022...
Feb 07, 2022•10 min
