Diversify into what?

David wrote this essay in early 2021, at the height of Bitcoin’s last bull market, and I think the insights are even more valuable now as we enter the early innings of Bitcoin’s current bull market:

The second unfortunate realization I have come to is that Bitcoin is (or soon will be) just about the only investable asset on the planet for the foreseeable future. This may sound like a preposterous statement, but it isn’t. Believe me, I have looked high and low for viable alternatives in order to diversify my portfolio and there simply aren’t any at the moment

And he shares this chart:

Screenshot 2023 12 04 At 09.22.24

Fiat currencies — pretty clear that global inflation will continue to be a problem for the next 5-10 years (and I can’t help you if you believe the mind-virus that is “2% inflation is good for the economy”)

Of the above, other than Bitcoin, I tend to think stocks will do ok, and probably real estate because civilization would collapse if peoples’ home values fell in half. People start marching and burning things when that happens. So that, and bank collapses, are what governments will do anything to prevent (witness China now, and US after 2008).

Recommended TV and movies – November – Peaky Blinders S5, Blue Eye Samurai

Trying to track my media consumption like I track books; sharing a few I thought were exceptional:

Peaky Blinders season 5 – finally caught up on this after hearing relatives were watching it; love everything Cillian Murphy’s in, and though I think Anya Taylor Joy is over-exposed, can’t really blame her generation’s Meryl Streep

Blue Eye Samurai – incredible example of Western anime, already wrote about it

White Boy Rick – thought it would be a McConaughey acting exhibition, but was instead a look at criminal justice innards and a surprising nuanced performance from Richie Merritt

Predators – a regular rewatch, my favorite in the Predator series, and a stacked cast (Adrien Brody, Alice Braga, Topher Grace, Danny Trejo, Laurence Fishburne, it’s like a more diverse Expendables with a much scarier antagonist)

Health and fitness learnings for November: the many benefits of HIIT

Every month, I try to collect interesting health related advice, facts, and stories to remind myself of what’s important / what can be improved / what can be turned into a useful health habit.

Here’s November:

Generally: patients with profound insulin resistance tend to respond best to low-carb restriction (source)

Shimiken exercises 90 minutes a day, four days a week, focusing on heavy weight lifting and deep squats, which he says not only help his thrusts but also build up testosterone (source)

Great thread on creatine: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1720093644051669028.html

Several nights of sleep restriction can throw off blood glucose levels, impair energy production, and disrupt natural body temperature rhythms. However, incorporating high-intensity interval training during this sleep-restricted period can counteract these effects. (source: think it’s a Rhonda Patrick podcast)

HIIT increases testosterone levels significantly more than steady-state cardio (source)

The chest should neither expand nor collapse during proper inhalation or exhalation. (source: The Naked Voice)

At least three times a week, Clark uses a sauna for 20 minutes before a cold shower. While working, she eats 16 ounces of vegetables a day, a mix of raw celery, radishes, carrots, peppers, and blanched broccoli along with a salad or soup (source)

I never wake up out of hunger – but frequently do out of eating the wrong or too much food. Hard to resist though. (source: a tweet, I think)

Mouthwash is the biggest dental scam. Kills your oral microbiota. Avoid (source)

Bitcoin will see 2 mini bull runs, and BTC > $100K may become the new normal

My starting assumption as we enter this bitcoin bull market is that we’ll see 2 mini bull runs.

The first one started a few months ago, driven by the improving global liquidity conditions and the optimism over a US Bitcoin spot ETF. This run-up will probably grind steadily upward until the ETF is approved (likely by January 2024). It’s possible that the approval itself won’t be “sell the news” and, as up to $1B of newly injected buying pressure enters, will send Bitcoin even higher. Temporarily. This run-up alone could see Bitcoin pass its $69K previous all-time high (made in November 2021).

Then there will be a sell-off, a pressure release valve, driven in part by underwhelming ETF demand (which will come, only more steadily and incrementally than people think), and by excess leverage justified by the unsustainable excitement. Bitcoin will fall below the $69K mark, say to $50K or so.

By mid-2024, as the ETF inflows steadily build, as macro liquidity conditions steadily improve, as halving supply shock starts to actually affect the market by May, June, and beyond — that’s when the second and “real” bull-run happens, and BTC soars past $100K and could touch $200K or more. This is where the real institutional and maybe even nation-state fomo begins to kick in.

Cycles are inevitable and at some point, the bear will be back. But I think BTC > $100K could become the new normal.

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I could be very wrong about the above. Bitcoin could see 1 massive quick bull run followed by a multi-year slow grind down. What Bob Loukas calls a left translated cycle. But I think there’s too many positive shoes to drop for this to be the more likely outcome. Whereas most of the negative shoes have dropped (driven in part by political and institutional pressure to clear the bad actors out of the system before the big tradfi money men step in, they don’t wanna get their shoes dirty after all).

Random facts — things I learned this week (Nov 26 2023) — “The best computer is a quiet, invisible servant”

Sortino ratio: a measure of risk-adjusted return; basically how much more return per unit of downside risk

On AI hallucinations:
OpenAI’s technologies had the lowest rate, around 3 percent. Systems from Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, hovered around 5 percent. The Claude 2 system offered by Anthropic, an OpenAI rival also based in San Francisco, topped 8 percent. A Google system, Palm chat, had the highest rate at 27 percent.

Some David Goggins quotes from his appearance on Joe Rogan:
-I don’t like doing ’em so I gotta do ’em. That’s my life
-I wanna be uncommon among uncommon people
-There’s no trophy on the mantle… there’s a trophy on my fucking brain
-Most people quit at 40%
-Through work ethic I developed self esteem

What is gradient descent:
Algorithm for finding local minimum of a function
Opposite is gradient ascent
Used in machine learning to minimize cost / loss function

“The best computer is a quiet, invisible servant”

Only cement and steel are manufactured more widely than plastic, and 22% of plastic evades waste management systems, ending up in uncontrolled dumpsites or lost directly into the environment

There is no such thing as medicine that is not also poison (the Greek word “pharmakon” means “drug” and “poison”). There is no such thing as virtue that is not also vice (and vice versa)

Gendarme = gens d’armes (men at arms)

Maddi’s definition of what it means to be good at stress—the courage to grow from stress—is still my favorite description of resilience. To be good at stress is not to avoid stress, but to play an active role in how stress transforms you.

Aliyah: immigration of diaspora Jews back to Palestine / Land of Israel
The First Aliyah — aka agriculture Aliyah — a major wave of Jewish immigration to Ottoman Syria between 1881 and 1903

Your best decisions come from stillness. Stillness is amplified in nature & meditation.

The Ethernet design was inspired by the Additive Links On-line Hawaii Area network (ALOHAnet), a radio-based system at the University of Hawai’i. Computers transmitted packets, prefaced by the addresses of the recipients, over a shared channel as soon as they had information to send. If two messages collided, the computers that had sent them would wait a random interval and try again.

Japanese does not allow any syllables ending with a consonant with the exception of /n/ (ン). English has thousands of words ending with consonants like cat, look and ship but they are simply unpronounceable in the Japanese phonological universe

Complex syllables like strength, sixth and clothes are even more unpronounceable for Japanese speakers because the Japanese phonology doesn’t permit two or more consonants to be squeezed together. The English /th/ sound is totally impermissible in Japanese — in fact, in most human languages 3 — and therefore needs to be replaced with the closest Japanese sound /s/ as in surī (スリー) “three.”

A study from the 1990s showed that over 35% of all vocabulary printed in 70 Japanese magazines were foreign loanwords, most of them being of English origin. A 2010 book about wasei eigo (Japan-made English) also indicated that Japanese people use 3,000 – 5,000 loanwords in daily conversations, and 94% of them are of English origin

Mouthwash is the biggest dental scam. Kills your oral microbiota. Avoid

Patriot (whichever PR man thought up that name should be getting a million bucks a year) missiles intercepting evil Scud (ditto for that PR man) missiles.

Good bye is contraction of god be with ye

“If you don’t accept excuses you wind up in much better places”

I was at Goldman when they did the GSCI. Now everyone things of Commodities as an asset class. In the 90’s I was very active in emerging markets. Now everything thinks of EM as an asset class. Blockchain will be just like that. The existence of an ETF is a very important step in becoming an asset class. Once an ETF exists, if you don’t have exposure, you’re effectively short.
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The SPDR Gold Trust (GLD) ($54.6bn) and iShares Gold Trust (IAU) ($25.3bn) represent almost 90% of the US gold ETF value, with no other competitor over $10bn.
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The table below shows these cycles. The rhythm is amazingly steady. The rallies are within 23 days of the 1,076-day average bull market (2.95 years). Same tightness on the downside – bear markets end within 24 days of the 382-day average (1.05 years).

Writing is the fastest way to growth hack your understanding of anything

Over the past 5 yrs, the return of a 4x levered gold position would be like Bitcoin.