Weekly Recap - 26.12.2023

🧠Quote(s) of the week:

“On Christmas Day, exactly 15 years ago, Satoshi Nakamoto was still at work perfecting the 1st Bitcoin code. Truly a gift to all mankind.” – Pete Rizzo

“Bitcoin cannot tell lies, nor can it ever be covered up. Lying is the counterfeiting of facts, and truth cannot be counterfeited. The word Truth translates from the Ancient Greek word Aletheia (ἀλήθεια) which meant “unconcealed”—a nearly perfect adjective for digitally native, open-source money. For these reasons, Bitcoin is the truth that will bring an end to the counterfeiting of money.” – Breedlove

“By saving Bitcoin, you are increasing the purchasing power of all other individuals holding Bitcoin around the world. By holding public equities and bonds, you’re perpetually funding the largest corporations and largest governments. It’s an easy choice. Fund the people.” – Joe Burnett

As I said so often. Bitcoin is financial inclusion and financial empowerment. Our current system consolidates power, evident in the 1% owning 43% of global wealth. Bitcoin is promoting inclusivity with its 2.7 billion unbanked potential users worldwide.

🧡Bitcoin news🧡:

Before I start this Weekly Recap – Christmas special I want to wish you, my amazing Crypto Friday follower, a Merry Christmas! Your support has been the greatest gift of all. May your day be filled with joy, laughter, love, and the magic of Christmas. Best Wishes!

➡️For the Dutch plebs, please have a look at the following thread:
“We all know Bitcoin is dead but the #noderunners are snowballing into 2024! In honor to my frens, brothers, sisters, and fam a thread to reflect on 2023..”

The only thing that I can say: What a thread! I’m proud to be a part of this group. On to 2024!
Noderunners!

➡️Bitcoin leaves the rest of the crypto market behind – Financial Times
There is no second best…the narrative is shifting.

➡️Explain Bitcoin to your relative in 55 seconds this Christmas.

➡️Bitcoin Price on Christmas Day:

➡️twitter.com/BitwiseInvest/status/1736755061127020794

Business ware will bring more glory to Bitcoin than any regulation or regulators. Have you noticed how Bitcoin just keeps getting more and more traction and attention? Both from mainstream media, universities, and regulators, but also the financial big boys. This ad is in anticipation of the Bitcoin ETFs and is a great example. There is NO WAY an ETF won’t happen. They (top dogs) are so confident they released an ad.
Fasten your seatbells.

➡️ FOX Business confirmed “the date for final amendments to all” spot Bitcoin ETFs is December 29th. SEC has told issuers that applications that are fully finished and filed by Friday will be considered in the first wave.”

➡️ New Record Bitcoin Hashrate 520,000,000,000,000,000,000x Hashes Per Second.

Let the hash ware begin. Hashrate increasing at this rate indicates a controlling government is expending resources on Bitcoin mining. If I had to guess why Bitcoin’s hash rate is going bonkers.

Nonetheless, all I see is Bitcoin’s robustness. Miner fee revenue is near an all-time high, and so are hashrate and Difficulty. Bitcoin is as safe, secure, and sound as it has ever been. Bitcoin’s security and resilience are unmatched! If you have no clue what I just said.. send me a DM or comment below, and I will send you some study material.

➡️twitter.com/lopp/status/1739137817731530819

Great article on proper long-time cold storage. 

➡️ Last week I wrote a bit on Elizabeth Warren: ‘US Senator Elizabeth Warren introduces bill to crack down on crypto and Warren adds 5 new Senators as co-sponsors to The Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2023.’

Elizabeth Warren and a few eager politicians want to *ban* people from owning or using Bitcoin. Your Brain is an “unhosted wallet” according to Warren and she wants to ban it! Meanwhile, Blackrock, Invesco, Fidelity, et al. want to make investing in Bitcoin easy for anyone by listing it on public market exchanges.
Who do you think wins this one?

Oh, by the way, a co-sponsor of the bill was the American Bankers Association. They helped write the bill. Classic!

➡️Argentina to allow contracts to be agreed in Bitcoin. President Javier Milei says “Bitcoin can eliminate the central bank” Legal tender next? He repealed forced legal tender and legalized currency competition. Not every country has to make Bitcoin legal tender like El Salvador. Each country will have its own unique path, and all roads lead to Bitcoin.

➡️ “Over 70% of all Bitcoin hasn’t moved in the past year. HODLERs certainly aren’t selling their Bitcoin to buy Christmas presents this year.” – CoinBeast

➡️ Russian BitCluster to build a 120 MW Bitcoin mining facility in Ethiopia, aiming to turn the country into a global mining hub.

➡️ SEC tells spot Bitcoin ETF applicants to update submissions by December 29 if they want to be approved in the first wave – Reuters

💸Traditional Finance / Macro:

Week ahead: The markets are wrapping up a busy 2023 with a quiet week.

🏦Banks:
👉🏽”Banks are pocketing real money by borrowing money from the Fed’s newest backstop facility, which charges a lower rate, and then parking it at another unit of the Fed, which pays higher interest. Banks are borrowing record amounts from this new facility.”

“Banks borrowed a record amount from the Federal Reserve’s newest backstop facility in the most recent week as increasing wagers on interest-rate cuts made it a more attractive choice.
Data from the Fed showed an all-time high of $131 billion in borrowing from the Bank Term Funding Program, or BTFP, in the week through Dec. 20. That compares to a previous record of $124 billion, reached in the week ended Dec. 13.”

Regulatory Arbitrage. Arbitraging the Fed itself. No risk. Absolute clown show. Classic bank mindset – making money at the expense of the public.
source: archive.ph/xhUg5

🌎Macro/Geopolitics:

👉🏽 As mentioned in the Bitcoin News segment, President Javier Milei says “Bitcoin can eliminate the central bank” Legal tender next? He repealed forced legal tender and legalized currency competition.
During his campaign, he promised to abandon the Peso and will focus on becoming ‘dollarize’. It’s free competition among currencies, people will have to choose. I think Milei has a plan to go beyond the god-damned Dollar, but can’t talk about it yet for obvious reasons. Good thing people are free to use Bitcoin. We’ll see which currency the market demands…eventually.

I will quote Lyn Alden and Alex Gladstein for more in-depth:
Lyn Alden: “Whenever a country dollarizes, it increases demand for dollars and thus boosts the United States’ ability to print money and run deficits with mitigated inflation. They subsidize us, in other words. That’s the part about dollarization that doesn’t get said out loud too often.

There are about 160 currencies, and each of which is a centralized ledger. When you think about it, the fact that when a country’s currency fails, they must rely on the biggest country’s currency, is rather antiquated tech. If only there was a decentralized ledger alternative.”

Alex Gladstein: “The peso system is truly awful and of course, its users should have dollar access (it’s only fair) — but if Argentina dollarizes it cedes a lot of power to the US and subsidizes our way of life This is precisely why we need a neutral apolitical decentralized global currency.”

Remember most of the world runs on IOUs for dollars… not actual dollars. Deposits in banks are not actual dollars but claims for them. Importantly, the system considers IOUs for dollars as ‘money good’ as the actual cash in your hand.

👉🏽

👉🏽”For all the technical analysts out there: The S&P 500 is now trading with a DAILY RSI of ~81, by far the most overbought level in years. The last time the daily RSI was at 81+? On September 2nd, 2020 the day before the S&P 500 fell 11% in 3 weeks. Since the October 27th low, the S&P 500 is up 16% in 36 trading days. Pullbacks have become nonexistent in this market.” – TKL

👉🏽”The top 10 stocks in the S&P 500 now account for 35% of the ENTIRE index. The last time we saw this level of concentration? In 2001 when the Dot-com bubble busted. The “Magnificent 7″ are now approaching +100% for 2023. Meanwhile, the remaining 493 stocks are still up less than 10%. All while the S&P 500 is up a massive 23% because of these 10 technology stocks. Truly a historic time for markets.” – TKL

To put it down in figures:
2023 Returns…
Magnificent Seven: 75%
S&P 500: +23%
S&P 493 (excluding Mag 7): +12%

Personally, I think this dominance will only grow in 2024.

👉🏽

Nothing really special. We, here in Europe, are the world leaders in regulations and we just had a decade-long, ultra-low interest rates in Europe that created many zombie businesses.

👉🏽 “40% of all student loan holders failed to make payments when they resumed in October. This means that 8.8 million out of 22 million borrowers missed student loan payments. Currently, we have a record $1.6 trillion of outstanding student loans. The average payment is ~$500/month and comes at a time with record low levels of affordability.”- TKL

👉🏽”The new IMF term for the plateauing of trade openness since the financial crisis is “slowbalization”.
(foto)
Source: www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/02/08/charting-globalizations-turn-to-slowbalization-after-global-financial-crisis

👉🏽

I kid you not! 12 days apart!

👉🏽 “On July 7, 1971, Paul Volcker arrived in The Netherlands to tell then President of the Dutch central bank, Jelle Zijlstra, to cancel a request for converting 250 million dollars into gold. Zijlstra said he would not cancel the request because he only held on to dollars as working stock, to which Volcker said: “You are rocking the boat.” Zijlstra replied that if a conversion of 250 million dollars rocks the boat, that boat has already sunk. On August 15, 1971, the US suspended dollar conversion into gold altogether.” – JanGold

For your information: Paul Volcker was an American economist who served as the 12th chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1979 to 1987. BUT!!
Appointed by the Nixon Administration, Volcker served as undersecretary of the Treasury for international monetary affairs from 1969 to 1974.
You could say this was the day the dollar became worthless. Zijlstra & Volcker had a historic behind-the-scenes look at the chaos just before America betrayed the world post-WWII monetary system by eventually introducing inside money instead (treasuries) of outside money (gold). By doing that the current US dollar fiat standard emerges.

Dutch rocked the both first…just to give you some context:
“At $42 an ounce, $250M works out to 5.9M ounces of gold. Out of a supposed 252M stockpile. Jelle was right, if removing 2% of the US’s gold was such a problem, then the problem was much larger than advertised.”

After that France, Switzerland, and the UK did the same. France and Switzerland converted 200mill and 50mill respectively at that time. Which ultimately led to the historical moment on the 15th of Augustus, 1971. The US feared a run on the gold…

US President Richard Nixon completely stopped dollar convertibility to gold, “temporarily” he said. It has been 50+ years since the meaning of the word “temporarily” has been converted to “never”.

Richard Nixon’s decision to suspend gold convertibility of the dollar on August 15, 1971, resulted in the collapse of the Bretton Woods system.

The international monetary and financial order has been a criminal scam for a very long time. Gold bugs were right, but their timing was way off.
Look at the damage of that scam: wtfhappenedin1971.com

Bitcoin opt-out!
Imagine a future where central banks are replaced by national Bitcoin mining operations. A bold blend of tech and economics!
I quote Luke Gromen: “The use case of Bitcoin is political freedom & the preservation of democratic values. Simply put, once you control the money, voting becomes irrelevant. That this is not immediately obvious & valued to many policymakers should be an important signpost (red flag?) in and of itself.”

I will say it again. Bitcoin offers an opt-out from the financial system. When you, for the love of god, still decide to buy a Bitcoin ETF…you are selling this valuable option and paying a fee to do so. Holding your own Bitcoin is key in the upcoming years/decades.

“Afraid of the government banning Bitcoin? The US government banned ownership of gold in 1933 when it was $20 an ounce Gold is $1800 an ounce now, up 90X since it was banned. Stack sats & hold your keys. They can’t take your BTC if you hold it yourself.”

🎁If you have made it this far I would like to give you a little gift:
In the following interview/podcast ‘What Bitcoin Did – WBD751″ you will learn:
– Currency devaluation’s impact on Malawian people
– Globalisation, debt & manipulation
– Economic dependence & exploitation in Africa
– Bitcoin: empowerment & energy independence

It is a great discussion of the global economic structure and how it impacts non-dollarized economies.
“If Bitcoin becomes a bigger part of the global economy we take this weapon away from states…then they’re going to have to look at the other options…if they try to impose those things, that will probably lead to their downfall.” – @gladstein WBD751

www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/bitcoin-a-30000ft-view

or watch it on YouTube:

Credit: I have used multiple sources!

My savings account: Bitcoin

The tool I recommend for setting up a Bitcoin savings plan: The Relai app is especially suited for beginners or people that want to invest in Bitcoin with an automated investment plan once a week or monthly. Hence a DCA, Dollar cost Average Strategy.

For new users, the app can be downloaded from all Play Stores. The iOS version is only available in Swiss, Austrian, German, and Italian App Stores. If you set up a Bitcoin Savings Plan (weekly/monthly) you can use my code CRYPTOFRIDAY and your fees will be reduced by 0.5%!

Check out my tutorial post (Instagram) & video (Youtube) for more info. ⠀

Get your Bitcoin out of exchanges. Save them on a hardware wallet, run your own node…be your own bank. Not your keys, not your coins. It’s that simple. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

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