Bitcoin culture is completely lost right now. For the last few years, Bitcoiners have cultivated this off-grid, carnivore, long-termist mindset that is ultimately very conservative and anti-tech. And now there’s a huge dissonance between the group that has stewarded this culture and the technical landscape we find ourselves in due to AI. This group is watching hundreds of millions of dollars get hacked out of the ecosystem and they don’t even know what to say. They don’t even have a take because they’re completely out of their depths. And what’s worse is the old gray-beard technical behemoths aren’t necessarily in a better position to fill this gap. A lot of them checked out when Bitcoin hit $100k and don’t know anything about AI either. In some ways they’re actually worse than the carnivore luddites because they’re extremely confident in their ability to understand what’s going on. The reality is that everything changed this year, and if you weren’t actively keeping up with that transition, you’re lost.

I figured out what they are doing with the dollar. They are swapping it. Push the old one out, pull a new one in, and the new one hurts Americans and pays the elite every time it moves. Here is how it works: Step 1: Weaken the physical dollar abroad through Tariffs, Trade wars. Create so much friction that countries stop using the dollar in trade. They move to local currencies, gold, other systems. The dollar index drops 12.6 percent in one year. Steepest decline in thirty years. BRICS accelerates away from dollar reserves. That part looks like incompetence but if there is one thing Scott Bessent is not, it's incompetent. Step 2: Ban the government from making a digital dollar. Trump issued an Executive order in January 2025. No federal agency is allowed to build one, so the public option...the competition to a private one, is dead. Step 3: Pass the GENIUS Act. The law that creates a legal framework for private companies to issue digital dollars instead. And here is the key, the law requires every stablecoin issuer to hold reserves in short-term US Treasury bills. Lutnick and Bo Hines wrote the GENIUS Act to benefit Tether. Fun fact: Howard Lutnick's Canto Fitzgerald owns 5% of Tether and Bo Hines left shortly after the GENIUS Act was signed to be CEO of 21st Century, Canto Fitzgerald's crypto arm that Tether now owns. That means every digital dollar that gets minted automatically creates one dollar of mandatory demand for government debt. Unlike normal investors, stablecoin issuers are price-inelastic, they buy Treasuries regardless of yield because the law says they have to. Brookings projects $2.3 trillion in captive Treasury demand by 2030. So you push the physical dollar out and countries stop buying Treasuries. Then you pull it back in through private digital dollars that are legally required to buy Treasuries instead. Different dollar with the same control. Except now it is not a public system, it is a private one, and the private company at the center of it takes a cut on every dollar that moves. The private company is also incorporated in the BVI's so no regulator has jurisdiction. That company is Tether. $183 billion in dollars running through it, $13 billion in profit last year. It has never passed an audit. Co-founded by Jeffrey Epstein's crypto advisor. Reserves custodied by the Lutnick's family firm. Protected by a law that was championed from inside the White House by a man who quit one month after it passed and became the company's CEO. Scott Bessent said that stablecoin firms could buy up to $1 trillion in government debt. The European Central Bank warned this "effectively outsources parts of the national debt to the crypto sector." So in turn, our dollar gets weaker, our groceries cost more, our 401k buys less, and every time that happens, demand for the private digital dollar goes up. They get richer and we absorb the cost. That is the trade, and the people who set it up are the ones collecting on both sides. Full investigation is on my Substack. Link in bio.

Massive ooof.