To my knowledge, I'm not Irish,(i) but I am feelin' fairly fortunate this week. The feeling comes from the curiosity of what new people I'll meet as a result of events which recently transpired.
As you might've read, there is all sorts of panic percolating through the fiat banking bezzle system. This panic came to pass due to the Federal Reserve, after nominally being the chaperons of the school dance and all the while waving the banner of "responsibility" and "fighting corruption", it turns out in practice they've been spiking the punch bowl with fentanyl.(ii) They might've gotten away with it too if not for Bitcoin's adamantine supply curve and strong protection of property rights keeping them honest. So, USDBTC, the market's strongest price signal, spoke in 2020-2021 and, as a response, the bumbling bureaucrats at the Fed started withdrawing the drugs. They were pushing forward and all outwardly confident for a while too, then a couple of the lightweights started choking on their own puke and rather than letting the system sober up, they went right back to pushing drug of choice : cheap money.
As such, the balance sheet of the Fed rose from March 8th's print of $8.342283 Trillion to $8.639300 Trillion on the Ides.(iii) What's a mere ~$300 Billion(iv) among friends ? It's "only" a 3.56% increment. For the "visual thinkers" in the readership, here' a chart :
It's barely a blip, ya know ? By the way, aren't the y axis units precious ? Labeled "Millions of Dollars" with M increments. Man up already and go with straight Trillions.(v)
Let's put aside the funny money numeraire and price this monetary inflation in a more sane unit, the satoshi. To dampen the short-term noise, we'll take the 2y simple moving average, which is 4244 satoshi/dollar.(vi) Multiplying that by the $297.017 Billion expansion yields a cool 1260`5401`4800`0000 satoshi which is 12`605`401.8 BTC or 65.24% of the supply at time of writing(vii) and 60% of the total potential Bitcoin supply.(viii) Here's a(ix) term chart :
Of course, one would have to pay a friggin' fuckton(x) more than a measly 300B filthy fiats to acquire 12M BTC. How deep the orderbooks are on the various fiat interfaces is an exercise for the "alert reader". The gist of it comes from that ancient, evergreen article from the font(xi) :
There will certainly be psychological backlash, in the sense that consumers are trained from infancy to get what they want, and so the reaction to badmouth whatever ignores their precious will and desire is quite strong. Nevertheless, the pressure is unyielding : people holding Bitcoins have no practical incentive to get rid of them, and people trying to get rid of their increasingly worthless dollars have no recourse.
Bitcoin continues to deliver slaps and each time, some of the rare few make sense of the plain fact they need to change themselves and adapt to Bitcoin, while the many mediocre masses ignore, discount and carry on with the learned helplessness in which they were trained by their socialist muppet masters. That's quite alright. It's for the select few, this Bitcoin, not the many. Which are you ?
As that Eulora MOTD goes :
Learning is not compulsory. Neither is survival.
And now back to your regular scheduled programming :
Cheers !
P.S. that's a Leprechaun in that there tree, innit ? Where da gold at ?
- Being an American mutt, my roots get rather muddled and aren't well documented past the 19th Century. While I come from European roots which yielded American fruits, I'll never be a United Statist. [^]
- It started with beer and wine in the '80s with Greenspan ; then hard liquor in the '90s with the same bartender ; then Greenspan and Bernanke apparently started bumping Lil' Wayne mixtapes and moved to "lean" --the "purple sizzurp"-- in the '00s ; then Yellen was blowing championship caliber rails of oxy in the bathroom stalls on K Street and now Powell has been pushing "dragon's breath". Maybe, this footnote doesn't mix exactly with the punch bowl metaphor, but the point is the monetary intervention racket ratchets up each round. [^]
- "Beware the Ides of March", amirite ? [^]
- Oh, don't forget about the $50B the Swiss blew on the Credit Suisse zombie. [^]
- It's not so easy to grasp how big trillions are. Consider this, a million seconds is about 11.5 days, a billion seconds is about 32 years and a trillion seconds is... wait for it... thirty two thousand years. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. [^]
- 0.00004244 Bitcoin/dollar [^]
- 19`320`337 BTC. [^]
- Which is 20`999`999.97690000 BTC. [^]
- Annoyingly, Poloniex is the only fiat exchange available a trading view with Bitcoin as the quote currency. Sure, Bitcoin is the primary quote currency for altcoins, but few have the sense to correctly identify the USD/FRN for what it is, a shitty altcoin. [^]
- Substantially more than a shitload, ftr. [^]
- I linked to the full article rather than using the selection tool because if you've not yet read it in its entirety, there's not really a better way you can spend 5 minutes from a financial education point of view. It'll probably take some time to sink in, but that's how it goes. [^]