🌊 Wednesday Bitcoin Flows

• David Bailey at Bitcoin Magazine appeared on Yahoo Finance to discuss Donald Trump’s upcoming appearance at the Bitcoin 2024 conference.

• Nate Silver, well-known election poll analyst, has joined crypto-based prediction market platform Polymarket as an advisor.

• World Coin (WLD), the crypto project from OpenAI Founder Sam Altman that scans peoples’ eyeballs to collect biometric data in exchange for tokens, had a price spike. The reason: an early investor ‘unlock’ was delayed. Meaning that retail investors have a bit longer before the true insiders unceremoniously dump a giant steaming pile of WLD on their heads.

• Craig Wright, the proven fraudster who falsely claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto for about a decade, and maliciously sued people who claimed otherwise, has been ordered by a judge to post publicly that he is not the founder of bitcoin. You can read the fresh new disclosure on his website here.

• Bitcoin Magazine has been invited to the Republican National Convention, to cover what will allegedly be a “very Bullish Bitcoin announcement” on Thursday.

• Brian Riedl at Reason asks why Americans stopped caring about the national debt, and lays down some harsh lessons on the fiscal state of the USA.

Similar story again yesterday: Whale balances going down, while the middle cohorts went up.

Great day to be a Bitcoin Miner investor yesterday. Look at that almost completely unblemished sea of green.

🥇BlackRock

What do you call it when BlackRock buys 4005 BTC ($265m)? We call that: “Tuesday.” They now hold more than 322k BTC. That’s about $21 billion worth, and 1.5% of the total Bitcoin supply. Yeah.

🥈Fidelity

Fidelity wasn’t quite as hot, but still pulled in another 940 BTC ($61m). They’re holding 180k BTC now.

🥉Ark

Ark slowed down after their massive Monday, but still saw inflows of 465 BTC ($30m). Not bad at all.

🧮 Total

Now we’re really starting to move. Tuesday net inflows were 6610 BTC ($429m). That’s the biggest single day in about six weeks, and means we’ve seen 16k BTC come in over the past three trading days.

Some things never go out of style. Like an Oxford button down shirt, or French cuisine, or incompetent politicians ignoring the second-order consequences of price controls.

In the year 2024, we have an aging, unpopular US President trying to resurrect his administration with populist ‘Hail Mary’s like capping rent increases at 5%.

Of course he wasn’t the first and won’t be the last to try on this timeless classic.

Let’s rewind back to 301 AD. An unpopular, aging Roman Emperor, Diocletian, issued an Edict of Maximum Prices, in an effort to curb runaway inflation.

The Edict attempted to set prices for basically everything in the economy: fabrics, precious metals, even people (i.e. slaves) and exotic animals.

One Reddit user created the below chart to illustrate the different levels Diocletian set for the priciest pets.

Those Romans loved their lions! And according to this ‘ancient money calculator’ (the veracity of which I can’t really vouch for), 150k Denarii is apparently equivalent to USD $6.5m today.

The Edict was naturally a huge failure and resulted in the shortages that anyone with a modern, high-school level understanding of economics would expect.

It would be nice if modern governments could clear that hurdle too, but alas.

Those are the Flows this Wednesday.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow.

— Julian

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