For those that were around last cycle, happy four year anniversary of Black Thursday - the craziest day of my career. FTX was def shittier, but Black Thurs was crazier. I'll never ever forget it.

A quick story- Most will remember, early March 2020 was when the world (and financial markets) were coming to the realization about how serious Covid was going to be.

Markets were acting REALLY bad and the Fed was still a few days away from unloading an earthshattering amount of easing.

🚨🚨 Today I'm publishing part 2 of my thesis.

Get comfy. This is prob a 15 minute read. It's called-

Financial Nihilism: The Zeitgeist of Young America So, apparently last month’s main section “A Lack of Pretense That Any of This Shit Does Anything or Will Ever Do Anything”…was quite a doozy. I’ve been writing these for a long time so I think I have a decent sense of when I write something above or below the average of all the monthlies I’ve written previously.

And I knew the one last month was a good one when I wrote it. But even I underestimated how much “A Lack of Pretense…” was going to strike a chord with folks. Because when I turned the main section into a tweet thread, it went properly viral – 2k+ bookmarks, 500k+ views. Big numbers for content that meaty.

https://x.com/Travis_Kling/status/1753455596462878815?s=20

We now interrupt your regularly scheduled raging bull market for some thoughts around Sam Bankman-Fried.

Sam's mother Barbara wrote a letter to the court two days ago, pleading for light sentence for her son.

I've pasted the six page letter here. It's worth the read-

🚨🚨Today I'm publishing my thesis on what I think could be the defining feature of the next 12-24 months in crypto.

Settle in, this is a long one. The thesis is called:

"A Lack of Pretense That Any of This Shit Does Anything or Will Ever Do Anything"

Not financial advice. I write a monthly update letter that goes out the 1st of every month. At the end of the Closing Remarks from last month’s letter, I said:

**Update**

We recently sold our $65mm claim in the FTX bankruptcy.

We got a price we were happy with and a price that was much, much higher than we were expecting just six months ago.

Ikigai will continue operating as an investment business. At the end of the day, the decision on whether to sell the claim was mostly a function of opportunity cost - how much do you think the claim price would increase in the future vs taking the cash now and deploying it into something else that can earn a return.

Today marks the one year anniversary of the worst day of my career and one of the worst days of my life - the day FTX froze withdrawals. The first weeks were incredibly brutal. I didn't sleep much at all. Feelings of terror, guilt and shame. We laid off most of the team.

A quick walk down memory lane starting six months ago today.

Story time - On Dec 9th, 2022 I wrote this tweet thread. It was the first time I spoke out about the risks at Binance.

I didn't take it lightly at all. And I received more backlash on Twitter than I ever had before. The thread went pretty viral - 2mm impressions.

https://twitter.com/Travis_Kling/status/1601277098412617735?s=20

This guy is head of the BIS. Today he said fiat has “won the battle” against crypto and “technology doesn’t make for trusted money”.

Hot Take- He’s not entirely wrong. It remains to be seen what will happen in the future. But at present, I wouldn’t characterize us as “winning”. #Bitcoin hasn’t acted as a store of value. Its acted like an unprofitable SAAS stock. This doesn’t appear set to change any time soon. BTC will likely move about like an unprofitable SAAS stock in the future. It’s basically the inverse of the DXY, which proves big boy’s point.

Yeah so this is a real thing, confirmed by multiple informed sources. You'll see more shoes dropping here over the course of this year and the next.

A couple thoughts-

https://twitter.com/nic__carter/status/1622973966360133634

In the wake of the damage done in crypto over the last year, its natural and necessary to try and use that damage as a catalyst for change for the better. This is the nature of the world. You make mistakes, you learn lessons, you make changes based on what you learn, you improve.