Is the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Good for Bitcoin?

Many people have been critical about the SBR, not from a perspective of price, but from whether it is actually good for advancing Bitcoin.

Here are a few reasons I think the SBR is *GOOD* for Bitcoin broadly 👇 1) Drives Bitcoin Adoption

When a new client who wants to buy Bitcoin for the first time asks me why Bitcoin has any value, I get to say:

"Actually, the US Government formally stated that Bitcoin is a unique and valuable strategic asset"

Some people only do what is approved

This week began with the President tweeting that XRP, SOL, and ADA would be in the strategic reserve

It ended with a Bitcoin-only strategic reserve and a "sell-only" crypto stockpile

What changed between Sunday and Thursday?

👇 Donald Trump tweeted on Sunday that the "Crypto Reserve" would include several (controversial) altcoins

Surprisingly, this sparked a significant amount of backlash, not just from Bitcoiners, but from a wide swath of crypto commentators who felt this weakened the reserve

All life on earth owes its existence to sunlight yet we are told to avoid it

Should we really be hiding from the sun, or is the sun is one of our greatest allies in health?

I explored the research on sun exposure, here is what you need to know👇🧵 When most people think of the health benefits of sunlight, they think of Vitamin D

Yet the vast majority of sunlight's benefits are not due to Vitamin D, but instead due to the complex way light manages circadian biology - our bodies responses to light and dark cycles

Tether recently announced their Q1 results showing a massive profit but also disclosing a 2% #Bitcoin position

We ran the numbers to show if adding 2% BTC to a 'cash portfolio' improved risk adjusted returns, and fit a low vol portfolio

It did 🧵

https://twitter.com/paoloardoino/status/1656301275645108224

First, lets clarify our assumptions:

- We had to use treasury proxies (treasury ETFs)
- We cant model the secured loans portion
- We modeled from 2017 to now
- We included quarterly rebalancing

Holding 2% #Bitcoin massivley improved @Tether_to 's conservative portfolio

‘Noooo you have to keep your back perfectly straight or you will injure your discs’

Actually, you can just train your spine in flexion and then your spine will not suck in flexion Also, believe it or not you are stronger in light spinal flexion because your diaphragm and pelvic floor are lined up

‘Neutral spine’ in deadlifts is basically slight extension

I have started to tell my girlfriend 'thats cope' whenever she is coping and it has been amazing

She now tells me when I am coping, and we are both rapidly getting good

She has set several deadlift records in the past few weeks, and life has become much more organized When someone is making excuses, putting things off, or acting defensively simply being told 'thats cope' is highly effective, if you have the desire to 'get good'

How would you respond to a political candidate that said the following:

"I am for this policy because I know it is fundamentally right. I will not debate it on a level of rationale. I will not provide reasons why I believe this.

If you agree with me, vote for me" How would you respond to a close friend who said:

"I believe this thing because I know it is fundamentally right. I will not debate it on a level of rationale. I will not provide reasons why I believe this. This is my stance"

All of Twitter is simply a proxy war being fought by long dead philosophers whose ideas live inside you "Philosophy is stupid, action is all that matters"

Bro, I am so sorry but you are just a Tulpa that Nietzsche made

In Mesopotamia the King was known to embody the archetype of a Deity

However, each year the King was ritualistically stripped of this mantle and made to confess the ways in which he fell short of the ideal

🧵on why transcendental virtues are the antidote to utilitarianism One thing our politicians don't do is admit fault

Why?

Surely part of the reason is personal failing, but it's more than that

There are 2nd order impacts to saying "We were wrong" in today's world, especially when all outcomes are utilitarian

2/

Anyone who is at all confused as to why Bitcoiners like liver, pans, sunlight, anti-seed oils, etc

You simply aren't ONLINE enough

Each of these items possess its own passionate subculture

Bitcoin attracts people who seek out information in online subcultures "Oh gee what a shocker, these people who discovered a niche internet asset and became obsessed with it also do the same with other subjects who could have ever seen it coming?"

Everyone wants to know why modern life has led to so many physical and mental health issues

Diet, exercise, chemicals, culture- everyone has a different theory

What if none of these are the actual drivers?

And what if we are getting closer to finding the real reason?

👇🧵 Let me be clear, I am NOT saying those more common factors have no role

It's clear that they certainly have an effect, and some specific practices (sedentary as opposed to exercise, truly artificial diets vs "suboptimal" diets) more than others

However....

2/

Capital misallocation is one of the most pressing issues with our current financial system, and Bitcoin REALLY does fix this

I wrote an article (which I will be discussing on @WhatBitcoinDid next week) exploring this topic in detail.

Here is why we need #Bitcoin
🧵👇 Capital misallocation is when our economic system, due to monetary and financial distortions, is impeded from the efficient allocation of resources

Those resources are Capital

Capital includes factories and commodities, but it also includes knowledge, skilled workers, etc

Off my last tweet, here is the book idea/plot

A father's child dies due to a genetically preventable disease. The society he lives in has strong social norms against using their advanced technology for many different reasons, including human genetic engineering. The society is extremely high tech, robots work the fields, AI governs central technology advancement, space travel, limited genetic engineering of food crops

However, there are also myriad restrictions on what can be done.

There is a strong central religion

Why is all of the Sci-Fi transhumanism, and no one can imagine a deep future of high-tech deep traditionalism?

Think (for example) Greco-Roman strong traditional culture, meaningful gender roles, strong social taboos around bad forms of transhumanism Think a sprawling Metropolis of traditional architecture, strong norms and values instead of most sci-fi cyberpunk "anything goes" postmodernism on steroids?

Why isn't this ever even imagined?

In this 21st year of the 3rd century of the Empire Joe, first of his name, decreed a debt jubilee for the sons and daughters of the academy.

The factions had grown too unsettled, in their rage they had deconstructed gender and religion. They had to be appeased Virtue was no more, values were another victim of the rage of the academy

Joe believed only a debt jubilee could placate the academy

But the people were unsettled, the peasants couldn't understand why the academy was bailed out

Surely, the farmers had struggled just as much?

This notion that despite the appearance of regularity (or fractals) in financial markets there is actually no information there is an important one

Moving from a view of markets as complex but knowable (or modelable) to one where markets are fundamentally uncertain is fantastic This build on another point in the book that price isn't information in the same way it's commonly discussed

While it is information, it's more accurately the destruction of all non-salient information and condensed down into a single variable

The reality of all discourse, in every discipline, is that all participants operate with partial information

No one person, no matter how expert, has all of the information available in the discipline

1/ And an entire discipline in aggregate only has whatever information is available at that time, which is always less information than exists

And each discipline, no matter how specialized, has countless intersections with other fields, which participants lack information in

2/

There's been a lot of chatter lately that Bitcoin has failed as an inflation hedge.

But what if I told you Bitcoin has acted perfectly as an inflation hedge?

Where the confusion lies is how people define inflation. Allow me to explain with a summary of my latest article👇🧵 Is inflation the prices of goods increasing? Or is it the expansion of the money supply?

Inflation was originally defined as the creation of more paper currency against a limited supply of collateral (gold, etc)

It didn't refer to prices increasing

1) The focus on limited supply as the value proposition for Bitcoin is misleading people to view ETH as a superior investment if it has decreasing supply

Ultimately the true value of Bitcoin is it's battle tested resistance to changes in monetary policy 2) Even if ETH was actively deflationary, decreasing in supply each year, it would not possess the true value that Bitcoin brings as a monetary asset

Ethereum exposes itself to multitudes of risks that are not appropriate for a purely monetary good

There are no signs of a top in terms of liquid supply change

Let's compare the current supply change environment to previous cycle tops

The current level of massive flow to illiquid wallets is unprecedented historically 2/ In 2013 there were 2 meaningful tops

The first one is pictured below in terms of liquid supply flows

It is clear to see that coins started flowing into liquid wallets well before the top occurred, and there were no significant flows to illiquid wallets

This was posted and then deleted (not sure why, I appreciate it Radigan!)

So it seems like Plums thesis boils down to *in very broad terms*

"China is supporting Tether/Bitfinex because now they can print dollars"

I feel like this makes several assumptions

1/ 2/

That dollars are being printed from thin air. We already have confirmation that Tether is backed * at minimum* by mostly actual cash (with some other assets)

So the thin air bit doesn't make too much sense

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