The financial press is buzzing over bitcoin’s performance as compared to the bond & stock markets since Trump again took office. Banks and other corporate institutions are looking to cash-in on the new crypto gold rush. What a story, blah, blah, blah…
Meanwhile, there is virtually no mention or analysis of crypto-fascism in the fake media. Any sensationalist crypto tidbit is fine to report in the corporate media, but the dangers of Trump-Musk crypto fascism must be kept quiet. Crypto-fascism is an issue that could topple the entire economic & political house-of-cards, it is that murky-murky. Crypto is probably tied into ICE disappearances of visa students & even US citizens to Central American prison hellholes. Constitutional rights and due process have been thrown out the window by the crypto-fascists, while traditional finance & the CIA Democrats sit on their hands and do nothing.
There is massive popular resistance to fascism in any form, but it is being marginalized & politically suppressed by the corporate-union apparatus. Polling data can’t be relied upon, as all their numbers are clearly faked upwards to boost whomever is US President. As a rule, I cut all “in favor” or “support” poll numbers in half– at least. Corporate polling has class bias favoring the upper-middle-class & ultra-wealthy, meaning it doesn’t accurately reflect popular sentiment because it excludes working class & the poor, ie- the great majority. There are plenty of non-voters who are disgusted with Trump & the Democrats, but their voices are silenced by the two-party straitjacket.
Corporate America installed Trump in 2024 and therefore they must bow to his wishes, unless he goes too far as he did with his steep tariffs, then Trump zig-zags somewhat. To illustrate who is in charge, just two days ago Amazon threatened to post the cost of Trump tariffs online, provoking a tantrum from the führer who immediately called Jeff Bezos to demand a retraction, which happened. In this vein, favorable reporting of crypto is primary for Trump. Crypto connections to murky fascist third-world prison camps is NOT on the White House agenda for the corporate press. Legitimizing bitcoin and playing up its “benefits” as a ‘reserve currency’ is the crypto-fascist propaganda line.
Crypto exchanges recommended by Google/Investopedia (as of this publication) are: Kraken for lowest fees; Gemini for best experienced traders [!]; Coinbase for beginners [!!]; Crypto.com for bitcoin; and Bitmart for altcoins. These listed exchanges are proven frauds, most were given wrist-slap punishments for their malfeasance during the Biden administration. But even that limited government oversight is now deemed too harsh for Trump-Musk and his crypto fascist cohorts.
To correct myself on a bitcoin anecdote I shared yesterday, according to crypto folklore in 2010 a bitcoin owner offered 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas, which is the first claimed transaction in crypto. Of course, there are no receipts or proof-of-purchase documents, just online hearsay, but Kool-Aid drinkers are very sensitive & particular about bitcoin history so to avoid hysterics I wanted to set the record straight on that. It wasn’t just a “few bitcoins” as I wrote, it was ten thousand– supposedly.
I read now that January 3, 2009 is considered the bitcoin launch date. Color me skeptical there too, as bitcoin price data first became available only in July 2010. Kool-Aid drinkers keep trying to push bitcoin development & historical dates backwards in time (18 months) to give it more longevity. This supposedly helps in selling crypto’s legitimacy. As a side note, I suspect many pro-crypto online comments are now being generated by Elon Musk AI bots.
In terms of crypto history, 2017 was the year bitcoin exploded into popular consciousness, especially on social media. Bitcoin started at ~$1,000 and went crazy from there, maxing-out at over $19,000 by December. But bitcoin crashed (again) in 2018, ending the year at ~$3,700. If there is any single repeating trend in bitcoin history, it’s its boom-bust cycle. That keeps getting overlooked by crypto proponents, as does the FTX/SBF crypto fraud of 2022, etc.
Satoshi Nakamoto conceived a maximum of 21 million bitcoins ever being created or “mined,” which is crypto gospel. This fixed supply creates an ever-increasing demand among Kool-Aid drinkers (who don’t understand where money comes from or how it is a store of value), which perpetually inflates the crypto bubble. Libertarians all believe in supply-and-demand as a store of value, while entirely ignoring commodity use value, which means bitcoin goes to zero when the crypto bubble bursts.
As of this publication, the total number of bitcoins created is 19,857,590.625. This means there are over 1.1 million bitcoins remaining to be mined. Crypto whales own all the bitcoin, and here are the numbers to prove it. The top 8% of crypto wallets own ~99% of all bitcoin in circulation. The top 1% of crypto wallets control over 90% of the bitcoin.
Currently, it costs ~$137,000 in electricity for a small-scale operation to mine a bitcoin. Gizmodo estimates the most optimal cost for whales mining a bitcoin to be ~$82,000, up from ~$56,000 last September. Rising interest rates and/or energy costs put all bitcoin mining operations into the red, no matter how large their scale. Then you have to store bitcoin on a slow & bulky blockchain which is another energy hog in terms of computer use. The costs of crypto never end.
The only way bitcoin can remain viable is for its price to keep rising. That is the definition of a pyramid scheme. The pressures on bitcoin are immense, as it is requiring huge flows of billionaire capital just to keep the crypto Ponzi scheme from collapsing. There are plenty of fascists with nine zeros in the bank accounts, so lack of capital won’t be the direct cause of the final bitcoin collapse. It will more likely be a mass public awareness of the dangers of crypto-fascism that eventually brings down bitcoin. In any case, the big crypto crash is inevitable and it is coming soon.
Investigating basics & tips: When following & investigating crypto, you have to do an initial deep dive into the subject, then pull yourself out of the muck while learning to see macro-trends over time. Don’t take your eye off the ball, which is bitcoin. I’ve posted all the crypto shortcuts you need (and you need them), so start here, here & here. For the record, my first article on crypto was in December 2017, so I’ve been following long enough to know what goes on.
A seminal event in the Trump-Musk administration was the White House crypto summit on March 7, previewed the week of here & here, then reported here. One can’t understand crypto-fascism without understanding the importance this recent political event, which most of the media ignored or at best only took lightly. Now they are rushing to catch up.
By mid-2023 US crypto banks Silvergate, Silicon Valley Bank & Signature had collapsed (reported here & here) and as a consequence, Coindesk cut their staffing dramatically. Since then their crypto reporting has turned into headlines only or bland AI-generated content. They even limit the number of free articles per month now, something they never did in their prime. For years before that, Coindesk was the best place to go for anything news in crypto. Now it’s probably Cointelegraph. What I learned at Coindesk is that you definitely need to be young to survive in crypto, as I believe the speed of it all is part of the addiction. When crypto was dead-in-the-water by mid-2023, every Kool-Aid drinker looked towards Donald Trump as the white knight who would ride in and save crypto, when he is actually the conman who rides away with all the loot.
Things happen at such dizzying speed in crypto, and everything is mutable, especially its history. For instance, I typically use Coindesk’s bitcoin tracker, but sometimes I’ll use bitcoin data from another source, as I did above. Often when I compare historical tracker data, there is a significant difference in bitcoin price. Kool-Aid drinkers always rattle on about ‘secure blockchains’ and their ‘immutability’ yet I’ve seen & reported bitcoin tracker data manipulated. Bitcoin falling to $26 on Coindesk’s tracker on July 2, 2019 was proof positive that crypto is entirely a scam. Coindesk covered up their own blockchain tracker data meltdown with generic garbage and pretended that no one noticed– and most didn’t. That’s how crypto has gotten so far.
Understand you don’t see that level of blatant manipulation & fraud with any fiat currency or exchange-traded commodities– these exchanges all list the same prices, always. There are ‘reputable’ trackers for different crypto, and it’s been boiled down to a few (Blockchain Explorer & Coindesk) since Fed interest rates were lifted, but now they mostly share their data to maintain “industry continuity” which (in their mind’s eye) burnishes their public veneer of legitimacy. In other words, crypto Kool-Aid drinkers assume you are too stupid to ask questions and brazenly go ahead from there. Once confronted with facts & rational understanding crypto fascist Kool-Aid drinkers can be neutralized by their own poison.
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