It's shade tree bullshit, but My next desire is to see the price take another stab at breaking out of this channel.  Just thought I'd share.  Before BTC gobbles up all the electricity and all of your computers and cell phones turn off.

Your take is correct.

If I am understanding correctly he is basically supposed to pay 50mm to his ex and 50mm to the Kleiman estate.  All the weird implications are just the continued lying dress up act.

The bolded is the magic trick.  Do not fall for it.  They were not finding if he was Satoshi or if he owned bitcoins, but if he defrauded his business partner.

As 50k returns to give us a little kiss i also notice that in the Faketoshi trial:

Defense win on all claims except conversion. Jury awards $100 million to W&K Info Defense on that count. No punitive damages.

I do not know what this means.  But the BSV folks are spinning it as a win. 

I think what this means is they found for the PLAINTIFFS in the amount of 100 million dollars?

But you see, the first letter of my name is capitalized!

As to the spring up we are all hoping for?

We sure aren't seeing much volume.  We are right back to pre spike/crash levels. 

Retail is NOT interested.

We need an OTC desk volume indicator.  One strange thing about Bitcoin is it is ultimately traceable but if a family office buys 1000 BTC from Coinbase's dark pool, AND Coinbase is the custodian.  How would anyone aside from Coinbase and the buyer know it had happened at all.  I could even see some situation in which this would be PREFERABLE to the buyer, although the world we are moving towards (Don't trust. Verify.) is going to want those ledger entries after enough shenanigans happen OFF ledger.

This is also the main reason why I have been grumping at all the idiot monero people acting like BCASHers yelling about how Bitcoin is broken because it is transparent.  I get the sentiment, but I also see Bitcoin's transparency as a feature, not a bug.  It will take time for a lot of people to realize this...

So quickly we go from "December is going to be CRAAAAZY" to:



I think the mistake that gets made is the idea that history repeats itself.  Which, of course, it sort of does, and never does.

The stage is SO different now than it was a few yeas ago.  And it has to be since we are talking about orders of magnitude more value coming in...

I would leave the seat belt on just in case.

You a No Agenda fan?  Just the last few months I have become one...

I think we see some "up" type price action.  Most likely starting tomorrow... but possibly as the week goes on.

It would be difficult to overstate the brilliance of Dahlia Malkhi. She should really be among the probable candidates for Satoshi Nakamoto.  In fact I wonder if the main reason her name has not come up that she is a woman.  Possible.  And a great trick if she happens to be he.  But she is one of the worlds most important researches on distributed systems, and decentralized models for computing, consensus and even finance.

She even wrote a book about the Byzentine Generals problem back in the 90s I think!

But recently she TORE into Ethereum and attacked it fairly strongly:


https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2018/03/02/vulnerable-ethereums-casper-tech-takes-criticism-at-curacao-event/

It's good that not everyone is fooled.

Hmm.  This little surprise Liquid adventure has REALLY had me thinking.  And again it is amazing to me how on point i believe Blockstream is in growing their business model.  They are positioning themselves to be an important player in the future.  They are building what will be a large Bitcoin financial services provider and are WAY ahead of most other folks (Strike, and CashApp are a couple others).

Just thinking about how important decentralized finance service providers are going to be in the very near future.  What we are seeing is the birth of a new MASSIVE business sector.  All the foolishness with "DeFi" and NFTs and all that stuff will be such a joke in the future.  The difference between the DeFi we have seen over the last year and what companies like the above are doing is the difference between people making a thing for a problem that does not exist, and people making the answer to a question most do not yet know they will be asking.

It is equivalent to the difference between ZERO and ONE.

Even those of us with the wherewithal to be our own banks (tm) etc will need various financial services in this new world.

Just ask Bob... not even all of us are going to run our own lightning nodes.  That itself is something that clever people are working out in real time right before our eyes.

Some people can see further into the future than others.  And I have AGAIN underestimated the power that gives.

OK!  Some Liquid impressions and thoughts.

So, today I stumbled across a ridiculous arbitrage opportunity.  Using some android decentralized trustless exchange apps I was able to buy L-TUSD and sell for L-BTC and make a fairly nice little profit.  Rinse and repeat until the liquidity provider had no more to sell.

But this had me doing LBTC and Tether transactions... A LOT of them.  So just some thoughts on Liquid.

++Liquid is FAST!  During dozens transactions from one wallet to another, by the time I switched apps the transaction was both received, AND confirmed.  I never had to wait for just about anything.  This was true for both LBTC and LTUSD moves.

++The privacy is strong.  Here is one of the transactions.  Can you see what I was moving.  From where to where?  The amounts of any of it/  The amounts of the sending UTXOs? NO, No, and No.  You can see some addresses, but you do not know for sure which is the receiving address and which was for change.  As far as I can tell this privacy is Monero Strength (just the CT part, Monero is still MUCH better overall) and no one including Federaion member have ANY idea what I am doing, really. https://blockstream.info/liquid/tx/6a08693544181255b1f079ffd0a5ae5f149aa212fca2d96a3475be3aaf6ae7f3

++Transaction fees are cheap.  But not really much cheaper than the Bitcoin network.  They make these scale.  I was spending about a dime for every transaction.

++Blockstream has broken bitcoin so they can rip off the miner.  Just kidding.  I wanted to turn into a BSV conspiracy theorist for a sec.  BUT Blockstream *is* taking 100% of these fees, and has built a powerful Bitcoin sidechain that might make them some pretty serious money.  They are basically positioning themselves as a modern day payment rail like Visa or Amex.

++The programmibility is quite excellent.  Obviously the "Dex" stuff is trailing ETH and Solana et al a little.  But it IS WORKING. on a pure BTC sidechain... AND it is WAY CHEAPER than those other chains.  AND it does not leave a bunch of useless data on the base BTC chain.

++When doing this activity I had to get used to keeping a teeny little pile of L-SATs behind to act as transaction fees nomatter what asset I was sending.  This is analogous to ETH Gas or Gwei or whatever they call it.  Except it's like 11 cents.

As far as I understand ALL of my trades happened trustlessly on the Liquid blockchain at little to no risk to me whatsoever.  No third parties, or at least a blind distributed federation making it possible.  I really think Liquid is still a sleeper.  And I also think, since it is opersource it will be the foundation that will allow lots of nice competition in the whole "smart contracts / DeFi" world, while making the better tradeoffs.

In fact, I think the ONLY thing ETH has over this is devshare and network effect, which honestly are pretty important.  But the incentive for smart developers to come over from weighty sharding base layer chains, and to develop on a BTC sidechain might be enough to inherit Bitcoin's own network effect, and possibly (I hope) leave all the mistakes like ETH in the dust.  

I lost badly at the little underground poker room I go to from time to time last night... It was a terrible night.  *BUT* this little arbitrage opportunity completely recouped those losses and more.  Hooray for all the ways of being a degen!  Wait did I say *I* did all that above.  I take it back.  It was someone else!

Yeah.  I do NOT eat the fires.  That is one of the most anti-keto and unhealthful foods ever invented.  It's pre-masticated starch fired in seed oils.  I huge blast of (poisonous) calories accompanied by a massive insulin spiking glycemic bomb.

It is pretty much the fastest way to store fat.

But with enough salt they sure do taste good. (Interestingly the salt is also stored because of the metabolic processes this sort of "food" creates along with a lot of water. This ALSO makes you gain weight, as well as raises your BP).

In the same way I am sure heroin injected right into ones arm FEELS good.

All kinds of common foods fit in this category.  Pizza, Fried rice, ice cream, funnel cakes, greasy hamburgers (with big ass buns). And so on.  While trying to LOSE weight all that has to be avoided... but then the harder trick is when to allow ones self the occasional treat  once your have reached your healthy baseline... for me it has to be VERY LITTLE to avoid the slippery slope.

I seriously want to move to ES and start a recording studio in Bitcoin City.

Real good chance I am putting too much faith in Bukele, but he is redeeming an entire generation for me.  Yeah hes playing populist games... but he is also making a lot of great decisions for his country.  People are bitching about "legal tender" and all kinds of other shit... but this guy is sticking his neck out.  Seriously.  And he has a chance to be remembered VERY WELL in  (Central) American History.

As long as he does not either get assassinated, or turns into some despot.

This is a good point I want to sharpen a bit.

I keep talking about retail being missing.  And I should adjust to say that I do not think retail coming back is the "fix".  In fact I am worried that the current bitcoin infrastructure (Traditional Exchanges (coinbase , kraken, et al), Neo exchanges (CashApp, Strike), the Lightning and Liquid networks etc) may be in for a rather rough stress test once the public comes back to big daddy corn.

But the issue is the retail markets are still the price oracle.  I am making a HUGE bet that Bitcoin trading volume is WAY underrepresented by the TRADITIONAL exchanges because they are reporting the Retail SPOT market metrics.

The Neo Exchanges are where Gen Z is buying corn (Yeees, including Robinhood... meh), and the Traditional exchanges are probably in this hidden battle with each other to satisfy a growing OTC trade.

The the illusion is the Retail spot markets... still being led by the old guard are out of whack with what is really happening.

Traditional Exchanges:  Focusing on their OTC desks
Neo Exchanges:  Focusing on the DCA Millennial and under buyer.

In fact the latter is most likely one of the big customers of the former.  And what this means is the market makers have found yet another way to manipulate the markets because the people setting the Price are no longer really the people selling to the masses...

I helped a woman in her 60s at my church get into bitcoin (it was around 10k.. last summer-ish) and I recommended Kraken, Gemini, and CashApp.  She ended up wanting to buy more than she was allowed to at CashApp, but even though that was the case she also ended up doing 90% of her "trading" there simply because it was the easiest to deal with.

The average laser-eyes Gen-Zer is DCAing in at Swan Bitcoin rather than setting up an exchange account at Gemini.

Anyway... what I am trying to figure out now is:

-How much of this weird imbalance it what is causing these swings? 
-How does it flow to a better balance?
-What does that mean will happen.

And only THEN:
-What will happen when retail comes back to bitcoin?
----Where will they be buying?
----What will this stress do to the whole eco-stucture?

And so on...

You make it sound so... erm... delicious? ( yuck!)

The only thing I like from there is the fries.  They got that down to an art for sure.

Price thoughts as of 12/4.


In case you've missed it, we have had a fairly large drawdown in price very quickly over the last 24 hours.  I have been working on some hopium so I can keep deluding myself from proudhon's science.

As I have been saying for some time, retail markets have been very thinly traded during this "cycle".  Retail is more interested in dog coins and NFTs this time around.

Long exchange open interest futures have been rising for a couple of months.  It is natural for these big futures imbalances to get "washed out" from time to time.  And since the majority of futures trading still happens on retail exchanges when the contracts get executed because of price they settle on those exchanges.  This is all done automatically and the sells execute into the retail order books.

Since the order books at retail exchanges CONTINUE to be anemic this can cause a fairly extreme price swing on these retail exchanges.

It is my assertion that bitcoin trade is happening elsewhere than the retail exchanges for the most part.  But these exchanges still act as a price oracle for most other trading.  Prices on a DEX or something like localbitcoins.com are tied to exchange prices.  Coinbase, Finex, Stamp and Kraken often being seen as the metric.  And of course the OTC desks at these entities operate based on that exchanges price.

Because of this I see a high likelihood of this being a STRONG over-correction and expect the price at the exchanges to bounce back as long as we are not entering an extended bear market.  That makes this a bit of a March '20 event, and people taking long positions right now are likely to do well.

I expect that the institutional/family office/hedge fund type traders are lighting up the OTC desks open over the weekend, while the retail volume REMAINS anemic.  I think we should see some good gains early next week as well if my theory is true.

I believe this market is out of balance.  In my opinion, it will remain so until retail volume begins to pick up.  This is NOT because retail volume is all that important.  In fact, it is because retail PRICES are more important than they should be.  These markets are trading differently than any other times in Bitcoin's history  And the current forces with the market and news, and general zeitgeist are continuing to drive the price of Bitcion in a direction it is not natural for it to be going.

One more thought:  People seem to be holding an awful lot of funerals for PlanB.  And I would think his prediction of 100k in 2021, IS indeed likely not to come to pass at THIS point. Particularly with retail poised to sell in December to settle tax bills.  But I would not write off his model entirely yet... It could take a dent here, but pick back up depending on how things go over the next several weeks.  Depending on what happens next this could be a fairly quick V shaped dip.

Or maybe bitcoin is just dead this time...

Pretty nice volume on this (dead cat?) bounce.

I drew this channel a couple weeks ago.. seems to be just about holding up?

This is not the way I imagined the "bear trap" going, I must admit.

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