Merge complete Ethereum’s Merge completed last night around 4.30pm Australian time. Bizarrely, it was marked by the appearance of Pandas for those running Ethereum nodes. Perhaps a more robust species could have been chosen? It was a complete non-event which is exactly what was hoped for. Blocks continued being produced and some 18 hours on,

Gas again The latest EU plan to address the gas crisis is barrelling into view. After the single largest one day fall in gas prices ever last week, Russia responded by turning gas off completely. The response was predictably perverse from Ursula von der Leyen, a person not fit to care for goldfish, less still

The magic of forecasting That cartoon is from the early 1980s; not much changes. On that theme, the whole market took a dive last week as Jerome Powell reaffirmed his commitment to higher interest rates and fighting inflation. He couldn’t really say anything else though, could he? The strange thing is the Federal Reserve now

Exponential trend Do you invest in exponential trends? Maybe not, in this case if you invested $10k when it first fell 90% you’d have $5m now. People kept using it and it kept on growing and growing. Sure enough, another crash happened. Investing $10k at that point would be $800k now. It’s Amazon. The government

Omnishambles He’s basically saying that the move to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) will happen in September. In fact you can track the likely time here, currently suggesting 15 September. All of that is well and good, but you can’t help feeling that events are rather moving in another direction. We reported last week on the US government blocking mixing service

Data driven “I’m a data driven person”. It’s hard to know how to interpret the statement. You do what excel tells you? You completely ignore your instincts. For a single individual, it seems a very strange thing to say and yet we hear it all the time. If you have it on your LinkedIn profile,

Narrative shift If you wanted a looking glass into future White House press conferences, this was one. That was released late last week ahead of GDP numbers. Sure enough, last night, the US printed its second quarter of negative GDP. For as long as anyone can remember, that has been the definition of recession. It

Nickel The world’s largest Nickel trader is a gentleman called Xiang Guangda, known in the market as ‘Big Shot’. It turns out that in April, Big Shot went short Nickel at $25,000 to the tune of 150,000 tonnes. The price of Nickel then rocketed to $100,000 and he was sitting on an $11 billion loss.