TBL Thanksgiving '22 Dinner Table Narratives
Bitcoin isn't dead, inflation is fading rapidly, and staying informed with The Bitcoin Layer. The current global macro backdrop, Fed policy rate expectations, and the implications for risk.
Dear readers,
Happy Thanksgiving! I gave the crew the week off from content, but we are all grinding anyways, bringing you the front page of bitcoin. My grind? Global macro research and analysis. And so I had to bring you an emergency chart pack and some thoughts from back home as I am fresh off international travel to the United Arab Emirates and India.
During my trip, our industry faced and continues to face one of its greatest periods of strife, yet I have never been more optimistic about our product that delivers bitcoin research and analysis through a global macroeconomic lens. Why am I so optimistic? Let’s dive in.
Voltage helps you solve the biggest problem with Lightning nodes and scaling. No more headaches with maintenance, reliability, or uptime issues. Voltage makes running Lightning instant and now easier than ever. These radical improvements to Lightning empower startups and enterprise brands to bring incredible applications and services to market. You can also spin up a personal node and pay by the hour. Scale your infrastructure as fast as Lightning itself.
Create a node in less than 2 minutes, just visit voltage.cloud
Manufactured Narratives
In the United States, I’m thankful for the range of voices. I don’t watch television news, I steer clear of empty story lines, and I work hard to build my own sources of information. And I hope that The Bitcoin Layer is one of those high-signal sources for you. One thing that tends to happen on international trips is exposure to two omnipotent sources of information: BBC and CNN International. These two channels are inescapable if you’re on the go between the US and Asia, in my experience.
Within minutes of consumption, my brain was triggered as to all the manufactured narratives that are thrown our way. It reminds me that despite the relative freedom of speech present in my personal sphere in the US, much of the world is not only subject, but prison to groupthink.
I can conclude one thing definitively from the brief interaction I had with the world’s “most trusted” and ever-present news channels for the globe-hopper population: mainstream is lightyears away from a bitcoin-only narrative and currently entirely mired in crypto confusion. The number of people that haven’t read The Bitcoin Standard or Layered Money outweighs the number that have by orders of magnitude, and this is despite a significant portion of the population actually having some exposure to “crypto.” Bitcoin and crypto aren’t the same hasn’t penetrated the mindshare—it seems the news cycle has no memory at all. After the 2018 security token (ICO) collapse, a 2022 exchange/stablecoin token collapse should feel familiar. To us, it does. But to the mainstream, the sky is falling.
The healthiest thing for bitcoin is to continually rid itself of fraud. With no regulation, we can all admit this will happen frequently. But regulation doesn’t guarantee moral behavior—just look at the banking industry. The fall of FTX, Three Arrows Capital, and potentially Genesis, is healthy for bitcoin. Why? What are the profit motives of each of these firms? Make money by trading bitcoin at high frequencies. This is a far cry from exchanges focused on infrastructure for swapping US dollars for bitcoin, or bitcoin companies focused on building out the infrastructure so that people can use and store bitcoin in safe, effective, and innovative ways. FTX, 3AC, and Genesis were greedy, shitcoin casinos—don’t mince your words when trying to find the adjectives.
What will your family ask you tonight?
Bitcoin is dead now, right?