Bitcoin

[fmyth]

If it's of interest...

What we're seeing here is what happens with BTC and similar assets when global liquidity gets tight. The single most dominant factor in the price of BTC (and all crypto currently) is how much money is sloshing around the global economy. And right now, we just entered the very beginning of a severe liquidity shock - a global shortage of USD.

BTC prices exploded as a result of excessive money printing from the covid era. But over the last 6 months or so, different parts of the global economy have been getting stress-tested, with institutions redeploying their dollars to shore up important investments. The first place they pull money from are risk-on assets, and crypto are the most liquid of all for the most part, easy to get in and out of in a blink. So they pull those dollars by selling BTC, which depresses its price - down almost 50% in less than 6 months.

BTC and US Treasuries are two of the four easiest ways to spot what's going on in the global economy (the other two are the price of oil as seen in BNO/USO index prices, and the value/volatility of the US Dollar). And right now, it's getting bad.

All these countries needing physical oil are spending 2x what they were 2 months ago, and they're using their on-hand USD and selling off any crypto holdings into USD first, to help their petroleum-related industries acquire that supply. Their entire economies - and the incumbency of many of their governments - depends on them doing this.

From there, at first they tend to start selling their US treasury bonds/bills, etc - causing the price of the bonds to go down (and the yields to go up) briefly, or they borrow USD and are required to use the US Treasuries as collateral...increasing demand for USD and causing its price to further go up.

When they're out of rope on what they've got on hand, countries and institutions start offloading everything they can to get into USD (because it's the global currency of business), and a big part of borrowing USD means acquiring US Treasuries to use as collateral with lending institutions. So you get this weird, somewhat abrupt U-turn of the value of US Treasuries - they dump, and then they jump. These liquidity shocks often start with the price of bonds going down while the price of dollars goes up - and when the end of that rope hits, and they still need more Treasuries to borrow USD against, they'll go on the open market and buy Treasuries with anything they can...causing the price of those Treasuries to then swing hard back up.

That's what happens in a small shock - including the price of BTC plummeting.

This is not a small shock.

Because what's happening now, as a result of this USD shock, is a series of globally cascading events as all sorts of dollar-denominated debts around the world are suddenly, unpredictably becoming unsustainable as the price of the dollar goes up out of the blue. Institutions can't get enough USD quick enough to pay their debts, and the cost of those debts will skyrocket as the USD's value goes up. It's the kind of thing that can absolutely crash the global economy and numerous governments in a relative blink.

Just about the only way out of that problem - to save, literally, entire economies, tens of millions of jobs, and the retirements hundreds of millions of people, if not billions - is to unleash a hurricane of new USD, to bring its value back down.

Fed make money printer go brrrrr.

And that triggers the price of BTC to start jumping again. The bigger the liquidity shock, the bigger the jump in BTC after. And we are facing an absolute liquidity crisis.

I personally suspect the next bottom of BTC will be about $60k if we only have a liquidity crisis. If that also crashes the US stock market more than 20% over a couple of months, I'd expect it to go down below $50k-ish. Best guess is somewhere between June-October. But 12-24 months later, after global governments print their way out of the crash, BTC will be back above $100k or so.

100% agree. Hodl what you've got and if you have cash DCA in.

 

[eddielasvegas]

A good sign...


Eddie

 

[fmyth]

Today, Strategy announced that it has acquired an additional 34,164 BTC for $2.54 billion at $74,395 per bitcoin. Strategy now holds 815,061 BTC acquired for ~$61.56 billion at ~$75,527 per bitcoin.

 

[fmyth]

 

[MountainTracker]

Charles Schwab now allowing direct purchase of btc, not paper btc. Fees are supposedly lower than Coinbase and Gemini, I’m not sure if there is a waiting period to withdraw.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[RockAndSage]

Today, Strategy announced that it has acquired an additional 34,164 BTC for $2.54 billion at $74,395 per bitcoin. Strategy now holds 815,061 BTC acquired for ~$61.56 billion at ~$75,527 per bitcoin.

That is just insane. For those who don't know, "Strategy" began as a 1990s era software firm. A few years ago, they realized there was just no comparing how much money they could make doing software compared to simply buying BTC.

I'm all-in on XRP, given that I believe it has the biggest upside of any major coins. But, the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that BTC is going to be on a steady, high-angle 50-70 year growth trajectory, as more and more people come online and are able to get into it as part of daily banking, to park their money until they need it in some other form. You really can't do that with any other asset - it's just so instantly liquid, with such tight buy/sell rates, across a global market they have access to with a phone. Across most of the world, people would do the exact same thing with physical gold today if they could. But it's a physical, locally-limited market, with much higher buy/sell spreads, to the point that it's largely dumb park short-term money in gold in most countries.

 

[Baghdad Bob]

I like the reasons why Bitcoin was first invented, especially to counter the mindless printing of fiat currency by central banks around the world. It will be Interesting to see how AI and quantum computing impact online security. I don't know about you, but don't passwords feel so much like the 1900s. That will be the first to go. Seams the easiest to crack.