Tag Archives: crypto

Strategy’s STRC bitcoin timebomb

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Preface: This is the second part of a current series. Part 1 is here.

Strategy’s STRC is a high-yield, dividend-paying preferred stock that was first issued in July 2025– about a year ago. STRC was specifically created to raise capital to buy bitcoin by offering high annual income to investors. The stock is designed to maintain a stable par value of $100. Dividends are distributed to shareholders semi-monthly in cash.

Currently STRC is trading ~$75, with an effective yield that is about to go up from 11.5% to 15% on June 30– which is this Tuesday. As the STRC stock price goes down, the investor yield goes up. This fundamental capitalist feedback loop is now becoming the weakest link in the crypto house of cards.

Note this early promotional image below from Seeking Alpha of STRC. which was presented as analysis, capping the STRC dividend level at 12% over the next 16 years. As discussed above, STRC is already at 11.5%, and about to go three percentage points off their yield scale (to 15%) in less than a year. In other words, STRC is about to break through the yield projection models that were presented as legitimate crypto analysis less than a year ago.

Ever since Grayscale won their Supreme Court lawsuit against the SEC in August 2023, the nature of crypto has been flipped. Bitcoin is now publicly traded on Nasdaq, NYSE, etc, in the form of Exchange Traded Funds (ETF) that allow investors to get into bitcoin/crypto without actually buying bitcoin/crypto. The fact that bitcoin needs ETFs to attract investors who don’t really know (or care) what bitcoin is, tells you a lot about the nature of the crypto industry.

Nearly three years later, no one left in bitcoin/crypto advocates for it as decentralized finance. Bitcoin/crypto is now mostly traded in the form of stocks which are highly manipulated by the futures traders in the derivatives market. Most futures traders are shorting the market now because they no longer believe in Michael Saylor’s Strategy.

Note that STRC has no direct bitcoin backing, as it merely represents a claim on the company’s residual assets. Strategy’s only “asset” is the 846,000 useless bitcoins it holds for which it is ~$16,000/bitcoin underwater. This sinking ship, the USS Strategy, keeps trying to reshuffle deck chairs to maintain the illusion of rational business management.

How can Michael Saylor’s Strategy pay their ever-increasing dividend obligations to investors when no one wants to buy bitcoin anymore? Everything depends on the price of a useless asset (bitcoin) going up, and that’s not going to happen because the word is out.

Donald Trump, Elon Musk, etc, are widely seen as the leading crypto criminals. The Clarity crypto bill which Trump advocated for so strongly in 2024, is now dead in Congress. This crypto-sponsored legislation, along with the stablecoin bill, were designed to give a legitimate regulatory framework to crypto, in order for it to be eligible for a taxpayer bailout if the industry needs it.

The industry will definitely need a bailout to survive, the issue is the political pressure lawmakers have received over the Clarity & stablecoin bills. Traditional banking leaders have argued crypto capital requirements & consumer protections aren’t there. The fear is a crypto crash could take the entire financial system down, and they are correct.

The Fed will not be lowering interest rates anytime soon, which chokes crypto out. Bitcoin came out of the post-2008 subprime mortgage crash, as a new form of financial manipulation based on perpetual near-zero interest rates. After 2008, interest rates were kept near zero for over a decade, stimulating speculation into high risk assets such as crypto. Bitcoin mining is dependent on low energy costs and low interest rates, neither of which exist anymore.

Everyone in crypto wants to spin their narrative. No one in the industry wants to rationally look at the entire picture, gather all the facts, and come to an objective conclusion. In a macro-political sense, bitcoin is dead because Trump tariffs & his foreign wars (Venezuela. Iran, Lebanon…) have raised the cost of doing business for everyone. The crypto industry survives on cheap credit and small margins, which have been obliterated by the increased cost of living since Trump began his second presidential term.

The entire crypto market is dependent on bitcoin. Bitcoin is entirely dependent on Michael Saylor buying more bitcoin. When Strategy can’t buy any more bitcoin, and in fact has to sell bitcoin to pay its high-yield dividends to spooked investors, that’s when the big one hits. If Strategy tries to sell more STRC, the value of that stock will continue to decline, as the investor yield goes up, so that’s a downward spiral. If Strategy tries to sell bitcoin, well we saw what happened when word got out Strategy sold 32 bitcoins a month ago. Bitcoin went form $73k to $60k within a week, where it’s tenuously stayed since.

Who wants to give Michael Saylor the bailout loan he so desperately needs? He’s close to Trump, so he’s in the right circles, and that’s what’s kept him solvent up to this point, but patience is running out with big finance, and Trump has never been a partner in business that could be trusted. Trump’s own personal family fortune now rests on crypto, under his Trump Media umbrella, so he definitely has vested interest in keeping the bitcoin Ponzi scheme going. The question is now becoming, who is going to pay the bill on all the unpayable debt invested in useless crypto/bitcoin? That question has revolutionary implications which are not too far off. That is the question which bourgeois economists/politicians can’t/won’t honestly answer.

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Bitcoin’s latest death spiral

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Preface: This is a serial that went one week– Sunday, November 16 through Sunday, November 23. Note that if you see ‘time stamps’ indicating different days of publication, that’s a serial. I don’t know when a serial is going to end, until it ends and I find out about it. There is a lag between when it actually ends, and me finding out, because I’m not privy to the closed-door discussions of the financial & political elites who run the world. I can only know & understand them through the propaganda they disseminate, which must be carefully deciphered to be correctly understood by the kids & working masses. The financial elites have decided (by indicating a December Fed rate cut) that bitcoin can’t be allowed to collapse, as it was doing again this past week. This blog (which specializes in crypto criticism) chronicled the process, and since a new level of “stability” has been reached, this story is over– for now. That’s how this serial ends. Come find me again when the next bitcoin crash happens, it won’t be long now. It won’t be very long.

Bitcoin has had quite a roller coaster run since Trump was elected last November. Exactly one year ago, bitcoin was valued at $89,875.56 on Coindesk’s tracker. It was at $106,188.14 on January 20, when Trump took office for this second term. Trump launched his own crypto, held a crypto summit, and had legislation passed that gave legitimacy & bailout protection to the industry.

Bitcoin peaked at $124,714.85 on October 4, 2025.

Less than a week later, on October 10, President Trump announced an additional 100% tariff on China, on top of the 30% already in place, to be effective on November 1. Bitcoin has been dropping ever since. This, and the reduced likelihood of a December Fed interest rate cut has sent bitcoin plunging. Here’s a recent screenshot of the Coindesk bitcoin ticker over the last year.

Bitcoin now faces a key $94-92K support test, with any dip below that level threatening a deeper fall to possibly $70K (or worse) amid massive liquidity outflows. For some reason, the crypto industry has chosen this price level ($92-94K) as a key point in its development. It may take some time, since there is such strong institutional support at $92-94K, but when this level is breached, apparently there isn’t much institutional support below this level until ~$70-74K. If that happens, all but the biggest crypto whales in bitcoin will be wiped out.

The future existence of crypto is being tested right now. Crypto whales are burning cash (while secretly selling bitcoin) to keep bitcoin afloat, as small investors are being liquidated, while new investors are too few. The entire crypto market is in ‘Extreme Fear’ according to industry analysts. Crypto whale Elon Musk stated less than a week ago that bitcoin & AI were the way out of the US $38T debt. In fact, bitcoin is only the latest manifestation of a problem that has created such an unpayable mountain of debt.

Update: Mon 17 Nov 2025 1:00 PM CST

Right now crypto whales are buying bitcoin, as they burn through their cash trying to prop up its market value. As discussed above, $92-94K is a strong institutional price level. What this means is that crypto whales have all agreed that this price level must be strongly supported with cash infusions when necessary, in order to maintain the bubble.

Holding over 1000 BTC is the definition of a whale. Right now there are 1300-1500 bitcoin whales in existence, but not all whales are created equally. Elon Musk is a huge whale, but his influence has been muted somewhat by his conflicts with Donald Trump, who is now also a whale– along with his family.

Michael Saylor is a very influential crypto whale. According to Coindesk, Michael Saylor now holds “649,870 BTC acquired for $48.37 billion, or $74,433 each.” This explains the $74K price level, discussed above. Whatever the average price a large whale has paid for their bitcoin becomes an institutional price level. No market has ever been more manipulated by insider trading than bitcoin/crypto.

As of this writing bitcoin is ~$92.5K. Under intense downward pressure, crypto whales now have two conflicting strategies. The biggest such as Michael Saylor are burning cash to buy bitcoin. This props up the market and increases their monopoly power in crypto. Some smaller whales are selling their bitcoin. Fear has created panic, so some whales are cashing out.

Instead of big fish eating little fish, which is crypto business as usual, it’s now whales eating whales which isn’t sustainable. Once the skittish whales have sold out, the hardcore whales have a larger stake in bitcoin– with no buyers but themselves. No newbie wants to enter the crypto market when it’s crashing, as it is now. So the question becomes: How long can the crypto whales hold out? That answer depends on their available cash, access to credit, and the willingness of Congress to give them a bailout.

Sun 23 Nov 2025 09:05 AM CST

On Friday November 21, Federal Reserve Bank of New York president John Williams announced a possible rate cut in December. Since then, bitcoin which had plunged to ~$80K, has made a miraculous recovery, now at $86K and rising again. This is how the capitalist market operates, workers who need a loan can’t get one, while the Fed always makes more money available to crypto.

Clearly, the crypto whales have exerted their nefarious influence again, implying if bitcoin goes down, the whole stock market could collapse. That was the content of Bloomberg, Barron’s, etc, articles before a possible rate cut (now estimated at 70%) was announced on Friday. Crypto is intimately linked to AI, so whenever you read about the “AI bubble”, think bitcoin, as big banks & universities (such as Harvard) are in on bitcoin. This episode once again reveals that crypto/bitcoin is the weakest link in the capitalist fake economy.

Top comment I read on Yahoo! during this time-frame: “Something is wrong when $19 Billion in liquidations causes a 20 something percent drop in an “asset” with a $1.9 Trillion market cap. That is only a 1% liquidation. There are much bigger dominoes to fall.”

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Stablecoin legislation update

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The fake media is reporting today, “Despite the charted course for GENIUS Act passage by the end of the week, one amendment proposal threatens to derail plans. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) is pushing to insert the text of the Credit Card Competition Act (CCCA) into the stablecoin bill, drawing the ire of several lawmakers. The CCCA, introduced on the House floor in 2023, has failed to pass through the legislative process. The bill seeks to mandate major banks to use a payment network apart from Visa and Mastercard, but an amendment proposal to merge it with the GENIUS Act has generated dissent.”

In other words, leading Democratic lawmakers are unwilling to stand up and state to the American people that crypto is a Ponzi scheme. Their only resistance to crypto is to sneak an unrelated poison pill amendment into the GENIUS Act.

Let’s be clear, every Democrat in Congress knows crypto is a scam. Since FTX/SBF in late 2022 this has been acknowledged by everyone, outside the Kool-Aid drinkers. There is massive public opinion against crypto, especially with Trump’s brazen conflict of interest in establishing his own crypto exchange & tokens. Yet the Kool-Aid drinkers are about to get their stablecoin legislation, legitimizing crypto as money and setting up bitcoin for another bull run.

The Laken-Riley Act, the Big Beautiful Bill, and crypto legislation are all together as part of the Trump-Musk crypto-fascist plan to transform our US constitutional democracy into a dictatorial police state. The Democrats are Vichy collaborators in this crypto-fascist process. That’s the rest of story which needs to be understood.

* An amendment requires a simple majority to be approved in the Senate. The Credit Card Competition Act is considered politically toxic because it pits finance capital against restaurants & retailers. Bourgeois politicians don’t like that. So if a Senate majority votes the CCCA amendment in, it’s a signal the GENIUS Act is dead, because everyone votes against the CCCA. This is how Democrats are playing both sides of the legislative fence in this crypto debate.

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Sam Bankman-Fried trial update: Where’s the money?

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The SBF trial finished last week with the boy wonder himself testifying, as his attorney Mark Cohen comfortably led the defendant through a benign & naive narrative they are trying to spin to the judge & jury. Below is a courtroom sketch of Mark Cohen, the completely incompetent, ineffective & overpaid defense lawyer for SBF, as depicted by CoinDesk courtroom artist/reporter Nik De.

The SBF trial was paused Monday through Wednesday last week (Oct 23-25), because Mark Cohen was testifying with lots of press, cameras, reporters, etc, in another Manhattan courtroom– specifically in the Donald Trump v. New York fraud trial. That is a civil trial in its punishment & compensation phase, as Donald Trump has already been found guilty of fraud.

DOJ prosecution cross-examination in the criminal trial of SBF is expected to begin Monday (tomorrow), with the trial possibly ending next week, allowing the jury to deliberate a verdict. If convicted, the judge is going to come down hard on SBF, with an appeal highly unlikely to change anything, meaning SBF will need a Presidential pardon to get out of jail. SBF spread a LOT of money around into dark places and Trump loves NFTs, so it could happen. The other murky, unanswered question is, “Did SBF already cut a secret deal?” Its answer is unknowable to the public, but known in inner ruling circles.

Trump pardoned dozens of criminals (pic above) at the end of his Presidency simply because they paid his under-the-table extortion money, or they pledged their undying loyalty to the Donald.

Over $8 billion in customer funds is still missing from the FTX/Alameda fraud. Everyone in crypto assumes SBF has the stolen crypto stashed away in hidden wallet(s) somewhere in dark cyberspace. SBF was allowed plenty of time to do that– as FTX collapsed last November, as he was extradited back to the US from the Bahamas, and surely after he was allowed more-than-generous bail terms by a lenient Manhattan judge who let SBF stay with his parents in Palo Alto, California and work online, even after repeated violations of his bail terms.

Obviously US intelligence was monitoring & scrutinizing SBF’s online activities, but none of this (or its findings & conclusions) have ever been revealed to the public. What was SBF doing online during those months he was out on bail?

Without question, SBF moved massive crypto transfers from the time he was held by the Bahamian police, up until his bail being revoked after he published the personal diary of key DOJ witness (& former girlfriend) Caroline Ellison, who was SBF’s partner in crime. She pleaded guilty, as did a few others at FTX/Alameda, so their prison sentences will be much lighter. But the question still remains, “Where’s the money, SBF?”

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Financial establishment rules in favor of Grayscale in SEC lawsuit

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I’ve characterized this Grayscale vs SEC legal battle on social media in the past weeks as Musk (crypto) vs Buffett (traditional finance), which is an oversimplification. The CIA is also big on bitcoin, and that matters.

Bitcoin is used to funnel funds to ISIS militias (formerly Al Qaeda) in Syria & Iraq for the purpose of regime change in Damascus & Tehran, etc. Since the US-German intelligence-backed Maidan coup of 2013-14, large amounts of crypto have been funneled to leading fascists in Kiev. Those were the ‘greater forces’ in play at Jackson Hole last week, which keeps crypto alive– for now.

Every major bank CEO & financial player at Jackson Hole was consulted & listened to while this legal ruling was being decided. It was intentionally kept airtight from the corporate media, which is why you heard no reporting or analysis from any of them the entire time. Rising interest rates & working class interventions loom large over crypto’s long-term future.

If this was a ‘landmark legal decision’ (and it is), then why was there no serious reporting when policy was being debated during these past weeks? It’s because the ruling elites wanted to conspire in complete privacy on this highly sensitive matter. Elite class forces were battling one another to influence this legal ruling, and the corporate media smokescreened it, keeping the public ignorant– until they were told exactly what to say earlier today.

Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founder of FTX Cryptocurrency Derivatives Exchange, departs from court in New York, US, on Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022. Bankman-Fried was released on a $250 million bail package after making his first US court appearance to face fraud charges over the collapse of FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange he co-founded. Photographer: Stephanie Keith/Bloomberg

A bitcoin exchange trade fund (ETF) has now been US government approved, that’s what all this means. The crypto industry plan is to have a centralized bitcoin exchange, where different wallet holders, blockchains, bridges, etc, can buy/sell bitcoin & convert into dollars, etc; and (eventually) add ‘ether’ & a few top stablecoins to this exchange. That’s the crypto vision. It’s no longer ‘de-fi’, which divides a segment of crypto purists. That’s the latest in crypto news & analysis.

This essay below was published concurrently in response to the Vatican supporting Russian tsarism.

Tsarist Russia was a brutal absolute autocracy, dating back to the mid-9th century. Historically, Napoleon couldn’t conquer Russia, so it remained a backwards, in-bred monarchy, in an era when the rest of Napoleonic Europe formed into bourgeois representative republics, or what we now call nation states. Germany was the last of these 19th century powers, formed in 1871 through wars, revolutions, and finally counter-revolution– like all the rest.

All the tsars were hated by the peasants throughout its history, from Russia/Ukraine, all the way to Siberia, where dissidents (industrial workers, revolutionists, etc) were exiled as criminals. This eventually led to the Russian Revolution of October 1917, when the Bolshevik Party galvanized workers in St. Petersburg, the industrial capital of Russia, and led a workers’ revolution which turned a broken 3rd-rate world power (about to be carved-up by imperialism after WW1), and transformed it into a powerful workers’ state!

It also ended the Great War, as each imperialist nation ceased its European-theater hostilities, and turned their militarism on the newly-formed Soviet government in Moscow, along with a propaganda & police campaign targeting perceived revolutionary threats in their own countries– see J Edgar Hoover. US imperialism (& the rest) aided the Whites who were led by tsarist generals, admirals, fascist Black Hundreds & other terrorist/anarchist scum. Trotsky formed and commanded the Red Army, the fighting force of the oppressed workers & peasants, which defeated the tsars reactionary forces backed by imperialism. The political leaders of the Russian Revolution were Lenin & Trotsky, who after this bloody Civil War from 1918-22, were politically isolated and eventually killed by reactionary forces in the apparatus– led by Joseph Stalin.

That is a brief history of the formation & early political degeneration of the USSR. The Vatican unapologetically endorses Russian tsarism because BOTH are remnants of feudalism & the Middle Ages, which makes for sticky politics in 2023.

The intention of Lenin & Trotsky was for this to be the FIRST workers revolution, followed by others in Europe– particularly Germany with its powerful working class & industrial might. Revolutionists, Karl Liebknecht & Rosa Luxemburg, were murdered by Wiemar secret police immediately after WW1, while Adolf Hitler was enabled– even after his failed coup attempt in November 1923. Hitler scribed his racist anti-socialist manifest Mein Kampf in prison, and then on release for good behavior, established the Nazi Party which terrorized Europe, exterminated 6 million Jews, and attempted to annihilate the Soviet Union in WW2. This wasn’t just one madman who got out of control. Hitler, like Trump, is historically cultivated by powerful reactionary forces to do its dirty work in defense of capitalist inequality in times when liberal reforms aren’t possible.

Lenin died in January 1924. It was always Trotsky’s suspicion (which he could never prove), that Stalin poisoned him. Trotsky formed his internationalist Left Opposition in 1923, to counter Stalin’s reactionary ‘socialism in one country’ theory he presented as gospel in 1924– after Lenin’s death. Stalin was better than Trotsky at forming murky alliances with reactionary politicians, since that’s who he was. Bourgeois subterfuge & laying traps was how Stalin hijacked the Bolshevik Party and defeated Trotsky to attain complete political leadership of the Communist Party. Many of the best Bolsheviks had died in the Russian civil war, and by 1929 with his Left Opposition politically isolated by a reactionary bureaucratic apparatus, Trotsky was exiled by Stalin. Trotsky would never return to the Soviet Union. He was murdered by an agent of Stalin (with help from J Edgar Hoover FBI agent, Sylvia Ageloff) in Mexico City in August 1940 at the outset of WW2 in Europe.

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Is Sam Bankman-Fried now an agent of US Intelligence?

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The conspiracy theory that SBF is now an agent of US intelligence is supported by the facts and his actions since pleading “not guilty” in a Manhattan courtroom. The DOJ normally takes no prisoners in its prosecutions, unless a secret deal has been reached.

From a historical perspective, the DOJ investigations of Donald Trump have been as restrained a legal action as you will ever see, because he’s so connected to right-wing militias (which intelligence agencies view as an asset), but the DOJ still went after him to some extent for his malfeasance. SBF has the same criminal credentials, but with even more value to US intelligence, so he’s been treated with kid gloves by the DOJ & the corporate media because they’re all tied-in to the CIA Democrats.

The dictatorship of finance capital can be clearly observed in crypto. SBF & Co. have surely made secret deals, as they are being integrated into US intelligence to help move dark money to Ukraine, etc. Thus, none of the defrauded customers will see a penny of the $5B in assets the US government has claimed to have recovered (so far) in the FTX fallout.

Republicans have now setup a new committee to bail out this distressed “asset class” known as crypto, and as a result of this activity, bitcoin has moved up by ~$2K in the past few days.

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