$100k I hope so, because after 7 years running this fund I feel like I’m 80. Netherlands When does a country become a prison? It’s not unusual to be taxed on capital gains on leaving (like the US or Australia). Arguably you made the gains in the country and they…

Cantor Fitzgerald Paolo is the CEO of Tether. That tweet is how he announced their latest transaction, the sale of 5% of Tether to Cantor Fitzgerald for $600m. The subtlety here is the understatement. He understands something that few people appear to have their heads around. Cantor is an old…

Through gritted teeth Tudor Investment Corp (because of the track record of Paul Tudor Jones) is a closely followed hedge fund. During the quarter they increased their bitcoin holdings to $159.9 million of iShares Bitcoin (4,428,230 shares). That’s a 400% increase in shares from Tudor’s previous filing as of June…

Like TV I have never seen the economic mission so simply explained. Nothing has changed since our last update on this chart though. Wherever the government involves itself, prices are dramatically higher. Whatever is tech-heavy has seen prices collapse. Once again. Prices should always fall. When people question the rise…

Winning Bigly I wrote these notes on Monday before we knew the outcome. I figured it would be easier to write about Kamala winning before she had done so.  As a reminder to myself to have a little more courage in my convictions, here they are. KAMALA That was not…

$100k In this sector, when you wish for something, or make a prediction, there is a good chance you will be slapped around the face with a rotten fish. Most readers have been on the volatile ride with us over the years and know that dropping 50% in short order,…

An appeal to envy So we enter a new phase. The strategy among global central banks of insisting ‘bitcoin is a bubble that will fail’ has not worked. The ECB website is littered with attack articles going back decades. What is new this time is the basis of the argument.…

Bribery Election bribery is not new. In Australia marginal constituencies receive many times more Federal funding than safe seats. It’s not normally advertised though, which makes the latest effort of Kamala Harris surprising on a number of levels. It is apparent that she is struggling for votes from black men…

ETF options Options on BlackRocks Bitcoin ETF IBIT are now approved. A highly volatile product on top of a highly volatile product. It took 10 years to get a simple spot ETF and 6 months to get something that must surely be orders of magnitude more risky. Pricing options correctly…

Cricket season Over the road, the cricket square has been cut. Chief among the amusements of the game is there is always a record that falls in cricket. However dull the particular encounter, something will happen. “The highest 8th wicket stand between a right and left hander in a tea-time…

Perception At the commencement of the internet did anyone perceive that URLs like google.com would be worth billions of dollars? To begin with google was quite straightforward; a URL and some mathematics that could search the internet. It was very difficult to anticipate at that stage what it would become.…

The time has come Why might the time have come? Because prices are back under control? No! because the labour market is not. The Federal Reserve is not the same as the ECB. Its mandate is twin, prices and employment. I think this critical difference is going to come to…

Polymarket Potential investor: “just tell me one thing that has actually worked, that is a viable product, that isn’t bitcoin that’s out there right now, today”. Me: “OK. Polymarket. The largest prediction market in the world“ The styling as a ‘prediction market’ is rather cute. You can open a market…

The State I have referenced this book a lot, admittedly to mixed feedback. Some of you loved it, plenty of you DNF. Personally, I think it’s aging well on multiple levels. One of which came to mind this week following a tumultuous period in the United Kingdom. One of the…

Safe Haven “and so, it's become absolutely clear that bitcoin is not a safe haven asset” I was watching Bloomberg on Monday as the Japanese market went into meltdown, completing its worst day since 1987. Some talking head (from an Australian investment firm) popped up and made the declaration about…

Mad to quit So our prediction for a surprise July cut was wrong. “If that test is met, a reduction in our policy rate could be on the table as soon as the next meeting in September.” The ‘test’ is of course inflation versus unemployment. The Federal Reserve, unlike the…

Nobody uses it If we were to ask people if they know about AI, they would say yes. Overwhelmingly, they have used ChatGPT, been moderately impressed, and rarely use it now. To get the best from it requires sustained effort and most people simply will not make any sort of…

The bounce What if something worse had happened? Would bitcoin rise or fall? Let us for a moment imagine the worst and some war broke out involving major world powers; does bitcoin go up or down? Wars are terrible for bonds and generally not that good for most equities. The…

Selling A significant dip in price over the last week, with Bitcoin dropping as low as $53k at one point. As we have discussed before, the Mount Gox distributions would spook the market as people who have waited a very long time for their money finally got their hands on…

Chevron I confess to never having heard of the Chevron Precedent. Certainly though, as an industry, we have been held back by its consequences. The 1984 ruling gave federal agencies wide powers to interpret the law, including how they might best be implemented. Previously when challenged, Federal Agencies have simply…

This happens once Investor feedback: Let’s say you think bitcoin is money, how can you actually make money from something that is supposed to act as money? If it really is money then it should not go up or change in value really, the fact that that is happening means…

BRICS Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The original members of the BRICS group. They first met in 2009 and frankly, for a very long time, it was a nothing-burger. On the 1st January this year, the intention was that Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Iran would…

VanGuess We often discuss here that nobody really knows how to specifically price assets in this sector (including us). Enter VanEck, one of the world’s largest fund managers with $100 billion in AUM. They wowed us last week with their 2030 estimates for Ethereum. Low end $360; high end $154,000.…

Brief A necessarily brief one today, I’m afraid. Some more extensive comments on recent movements can be found in our monthly update to fund investors which went out earlier this week. 1.2 From Nikkei Asia. Several things about the headline strike me. Firstly, “child friendly policies”. I would make the…

The Spectator From last week’s Spectator magazine: “Bitcoin has already achieved what tulip bulbs and South Sea Company shares failed to do: come back for a second and third bubble. The ability to buy Bitcoin through an exchange-traded fund may yet inflate a fourth” I suppose we should have some…

Politics So it heats up. As we mentioned last week, Trump had intimated his support for cryptocurrency generally. He has now taken this to the next level and his campaign is accepting contributions in digital currency. If the Democrats do not follow suit and decide to take the view that…

You are not alone This is the first quarter since the launch of the ETFs where we get to see which hedge funds are holding bitcoin. It was a pretty special quarter quite honestly. For example, BlackRock sailed straight past MicroStrategy in holdings to 274,000 BTC. Across the chart, 8%…

Magic: The Gathering A game of Magic: The Gathering We need to discuss Mt Gox because over the next few months it will become intensely relevant. A brief history. Launched in 2007, based in Tokyo. The name is odd and it stands for ‘Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange’ because its…

Hong Kong ETFs Interesting spin in the South China Morning Post (owned by Alibaba Group). “....as the US has been delaying a decision on such products”. I think the analysis is rather harsh on the Americans since they were first to the Bitcoin ETF and also now completely dominate bitcoin…

Explaining the bitcoin halving Today there are 19,679,792 bitcoins on issue. Tomorrow there will be 900 more. The network processes transactions on average every 10 minutes and in doing so, delivers 6.25 bitcoins per block to miners. 6.25 *6 *24 = 900 bitcoins per day. From the 20th April, that…

Disappointed I somehow always feel disappointed with the performance of bitcoin. There are occasional bouts of excitement when it really charges; but mostly, I feel disappointed. I don’t know if remarking on it is even helpful but it speaks I suppose to my expectations. Thursday was therefore another miserable day…

First tough week Last week was probably the first tough week since the ETFs launched. We experienced net selling. Some critical factors appear to be the end of the approaching quarter, which will cause some balance sheet shuffling but also the settlement of the Genesis bankruptcy. Overall, $0.8 billion in…

Not Satoshi By its nature, bitcoin invites attack. Anyone can copy the software. Anyone can call it their own. From the very start, it was open source and intended to be so. That has had many consequences, which include many forks of bitcoin, where copied code purports to be bitcoin…

What if? One of the better books about cryptocurrency is Cryptoeconomics by an ex US Navy pilot called Eric Voskuil. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend reading it unless you are really an enthusiast but it sets a very interesting tone because he has worked deeply with the US government. For example,…

Getting high A short note on all-time highs. Bitcoin, give or take, has an all-time high price of US$69,000, which has been topped a few times intra-day this week. It first arose in November 2021. Since then we have had inflationary impulses of 4.7% in 2021, 8% in 2022 and…

Dad Politics is about winning For a long time, since the beginning in fact, digital assets have had no friends in politics. Simply, it was not a vote winner. Indeed there was no need to take a position on things like bitcoin because nobody had really ever heard of it…

Groq* Off topic to start, but this really caught my attention and won’t be in the AFR for at least six months.  I insist you try groq.com. Before you do though, I will explain. Programs like GPT-4 and Google's Gemini use enormous amounts of computing power. That is why you…

New Zealand I had no idea who New Zealand's Reserve Bank Governor was until this week. In a discussion with a parliamentary committee he had this to say about the actions of the Central Bank: “We actually fund ourselves and work out what dividend to pay. It’s a great business…

Sideshow Enter the AFR Economics editor. The article makes the case that the legitimisation of bitcoin through the ETFs essentially blesses the use of digital assets. This will usher in an era of government issued central bank digital currencies which people will naturally prefer to bitcoin. Unbacked cryptocurrencies such as…

Consensus Is it time to jump on the “Bitcoin bandwagon” asked the AFR. Their full article here is not unreasonable; urging caution and small allocations. “Most advisers, and their licensees, will give them a wide berth at least until there’s a solid performance track record, and an ‘investment grade’ asset…

ETF In the end; it was an embarrassment. First of all, the SEC Twitter account announced on Wednesday that the ETF had been approved. Some 15 minutes later, the Chairman of the SEC popped up to claim that the account had been hacked and no such thing was true. A…

2023 Last one for this year. Thank you for your emails and support throughout the year. Increasingly it is noticeable that people understand bitcoin and decentralised protocols and what they are trying to achieve. MoneyBits will return on the 12th January … unless something happens in the meantime. If you…

The price of the ETF And so. We start to see the price of having a bitcoin ETF. Brisbane-based Wallet of Satoshi (WoS) has removed itself from the US App Store. WoS is probably the most successful Australian firm in the entire space with users all over the world. They…

Yellen dances on CZ’s grave The big guns were rolled out in the US late on Tuesday after Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) pleaded guilty to charges of money laundering in the US. On the left, US Attorney General Merrick Garland; the most senior lawyer in the country. Next, Treasury…

A big day Today is the last possible day that the SEC could approve all current Bitcoin ETF applications simultaneously. It arises by virtue of the way the various deadlines roll out, with Hashdex and Franklin hitting their first deadlines (I’ve never heard of them either). This would have the…

In a different universe On the left, the branding of one of the largest fund managers in the world. On the right. Fidelity Digital Assets, launched 2018. If you have a hugely valuable brand you do everything to protect it and you can see the subtle strategy here. It looks…

Bond Vigilante The Chris Joye fan club were out in force again this week after he “brilliantly showed” how it's an everyday occurrence to get 5-6% on your cash. I brilliantly googled it and the first thing that came up was 5.6%. The fan club appeared to be suggesting why…

Statistics I would probably doubt Josiah (1880 - 1941; former Bank of England Director) were it not for my own experience with statistics. On taking a new job in finance some years ago in the UK, I was presented with a form for signature. It was from the ONS, Britain's…

Shhhh If the stock market falls 3% in a day. It’s news. If it falls 10% in a day, it goes into the archives and if it ever fell by 50% we would be talking about it for the next 100 years. I do not have an answer to Meb’s…

Milkshake You knew the US dollar was doing well; I bet you didn’t know it was this impressive. Every single currency in the world is down in the last decade against the USD. One theory explaining this is the dollar milkshake. The video is four years old but it got…

The price of fish Back in the 1990s a survey was conducted in fishing villages on the West coast of Africa. The idea was to measure the impact of mobile phones on supply curves for fish. Pre phones, if a fisherman at a port had too much of a particular…

Upgrade “the rally on El Salvador bonds almost defies gravity”. So says Santander, which is quite something given the disastrous year bonds are having almost everywhere else. In truth, the bonds still have a junk rating, but through bitcoin, El Salvador has found a way to put itself on the…

Narcos Those of you who haven’t watched Narcos are missing a treat. Released in 2015, the final series aired three years ago later to great acclaim. It was visually pleasing, atmospheric and unsurprisingly, given the product they were shifting, highly addictive. The story depicts the progression of Pablo Escobar's cartel…

A loser “We agree. The denial of the Grayscale proposal was arbitrary and capricious because the Commission failed to explain its different treatment of similar products.” So said the U.S. District of Columbia Court of Appeals. The SEC now has 45 days to appeal; but the next stop is the…

Do it and do it fast The starting gun has fired in the US elections with the first Republican primary debates last night. Here’s a guess at how things roll out from here: The US election is next year. Very hard to win if unemployment is rising and inflation is…

Passive investment My new favourite account on Twitter is StripMallGuy. He buys and sells small shopping centres in New York. If you are interested in commercial property in particular, he is a must-follow. This particular tweet struck me because where do you find truly passive investments? People will tell you…

Sunday looms The saga of 'will they, won’t they' for US bitcoin ETFs reaches its next major milestone this Sunday. Back in April, Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest submitted their ETF application. We are now at the second Approve/Deny/Extend stage for the SEC. The situation is rather complicated by the SEC…

Everything’s a fine I assumed they were dead. Somehow though, the corpse of Credit Suisse managed to get fined by both the Bank of England (£87m) and the Federal Reserve ($269m) for their dealings with defunct hedge fund Archegos. Credit Suisse lost $5.1bn (£4bn) when the hedge fund defaulted in…

1984 A light start for you. We have a tendency to be histrionic about privacy and the State and all manner of things here. Presumably with that in mind I was sent an alternative view of the Orwell classic 1984. Reasonable to suggest that had Orwell included Def Leppard, the…

Lowe Down As you rise through the ranks of the civil service (or anywhere really) it becomes less and less about talent and more and more about politics. In the case of Australian Reserve Bank governor, Philip Lowe, his time has come. His contract coincides with a difficult economic situation,…

Big enough to control “Instead of investing in gold as a hedge against inflation, a hedge against the onerous problems of any one country, or the devaluation of your currency whatever country you’re in – let’s be clear, bitcoin is an international asset, it’s not based on any one currency…

Oops Towards the end of 2022 there was a particular shift in the sentiment towards this sector. Choke Point 2, as it became known, targeted the banking relationships of crypto businesses and ultimately took out Silvergate Bank, Silicon Valley Bank as well as a few others along the way. While…

Fink so Is it curious that in the week following the virtual take-down of Binance in the US, a flurry of major US operators submit ETF applications? First we had BlackRock, followed 48 hours later by Fidelity (Cathie Wood’s ARK re-submitted their original application last month).  In an environment so…

I’ll call him I’m reliably advised that it’s been a “terrible week for bitcoin”. I believe the contrary to be true. In the wash up of the SEC movement against Binance, Coinbase and others, several coins have been absolutely crushed having been specifically called out by the SEC as securities.…

Enforcement time Finally! The SEC brought its action against Binance, which has obviously been coming for a while. It immediately caused the BNB token to fall by 10% and the whole market fell on the news. The SEC went as far as posting this on their social media platforms, which…

Excellent reading material I urge you to read this. You will need at least half an hour but it will be worth your time. Written in 2015, its forecasts about the speed of human development are absolutely excellent. Among other things, it predicts that right about now we will have…

You no longer bank here … and just like that. The largest digital currency exchange in the country lost its banking facilities. The decision is no doubt related to perceptions on KYC undertaken by Binance. I have to say though, having used that platform, it’s at least as rigorous as…

You were right You were right when you said “bitcoin will never overtake the USD and can’t cope with large transaction volume”. You were right when you told everyone not to invest in it because it will ‘crash’ and ‘it’s a bubble’ and stay safe and buy Westpac shares. It…

The four horse persons There was an AFR sponsored talkathon last week. Four fund managers were asked if they were 25 years old today, where they would invest in for the next 10 years.1 Interesting how prominent the bond talk is. I’d hardly call it a stock-pickers market at these…

Would you like fries with that? McDonald’s is growing like crazy and opening new restaurants in the USA for the first time since 2014. It is also cutting staff, so the staff per unit sale metric continues to fall with automation. As an economic microcosm, McDonald’s has always been excellent.…

Asimov “Changes will take place and perhaps what you are doing will have no meaning in 10 years” That is Isaac Asimov explaining change. More importantly he pointed out that everyone understands change but they do not understand the pace of change. 100 years ago, change was slow, taking longer…

A visitor It is August 2022. A young man comes to visit our office to talk about bitcoin mining. He has a job in finance but also appears to have deep knowledge of the economics of bitcoin. I categorise bitcoin knowledge like this: The visitor understands the energy link and…

A compressed file It would seem the world is ending, thanks to artificial intelligence. Time Magazine and many others recently called for its complete shut-down before it’s “too late”. Others have suggested large AI data centres should be bombed (seriously). The essence of the complaint runs like this: AI is…

AI exam results GPT-4 is very good at exams. It smashed the bar exam straight into the 90th percentile. It is also outstanding at mathematics, which is more than could be said for its predecessor 3.5, which was good but not brilliant. Since these results came out, GPT-4 has also…

Genius Hello Larry, can you help us? I mean, that is the only job banks have. They take deposits, at call, and make longer-term loans like mortgages. Then they hope like hell everyone doesn’t ask for their money at once. I wish it was more complicated. Sure, there is complication…

The safest asset in the world Let’s be honest. You had never heard of Silicon Valley Bank and neither had I. This week, and for a few more no doubt, they will be one of the best-known banks in the world. The subject of opprobrium because not only did they…

P Marca From Mr ‘Code will Eat the World’, Marc Andreessen, a take on AI. Everywhere the government is involved gets more expensive. Everything with technology involved gets cheaper. As he puts it: The sectors in red are heavily regulated and controlled and bottlenecked by the government and by those…

End of the Empires US government interest payments on debt are now approaching $900 billion annually; they exceed the $722 billion defence budget by about 20% and are growing far more rapidly. Some weeks ago we covered the amount of US government debt that will need to be refinanced in…

Shadowy coders Back in 2021, an American Senator complained in her submission to Congress that cryptocurrency put the financial system in the hands of ‘shadowy super coders’. In so doing, she coined a phrase that was then adopted by thousands of enthusiasts across the globe, many of whom added ‘shadowy…

Daniel Pickering, Chief Investment Officer of ListedReserve, joins ausbiz to discuss the drivers behind bitcoin's recent price surge. Watch the full show here

Choke Point In 2013, the United States launched ‘Operation Choke Point’. The aim was to restrict access to banking for high risk industries like payday lenders, ATM operators and other industries allegedly linked with money laundering. The unique element of the plan was that it did not involve legislation. Instead,…

The bankruptcy cascade In May 2022, the collapse of a protocol called Luna kickstarted a cascade of liquidations across the whole industry which lasted for 9 months. For the first few weeks it appeared to have been contained but slowly people came forward declaring losses and in some cases bankruptcy.…

The Singularity I confess that the rise of the AI machines has really piqued my interest. Using them personally I can do all sorts of things that I could not do before, even just entertaining doodles. I asked ChatGPT this week to write me a program in C++ that could…

Supercore Excluding food, energy and shelter? Krugman calls it ‘supercore’. I call it the inflation rate for dead people. There are enough signs now that inflation is slowing quite sharply, not least second hand car prices falling off a cliff. We probably don’t need highly manufactured numbers from our least…

Daniel Pickering, Chief Investment Officer of ListedReserve, joined Asher Westropp-Evans on ausbiz to discuss the latest developments in the 'crypto contagion that began last year. Topics include the ongoing FTX saga, shifting sentiment in the crypto and bitcoin sectors, Genesis Trading filing for bankruptcy and interesting developments in Ethereum. Watch…

Davos Late to the party as usual, this was the only accommodation I could find for the WEF gathering in Davos. A mere 8.6 km hike to the conference and $14,000 per night (including breakfast). Pocket change really because non-politicians (all the major CEO’s) are being charged $250,000 to attend…

Predictions Prediction number one then. Marc Andreessen will still be boring in 2024. Here are some more: The second half of the year will be very different to the first. If you were the White House, the message to the Fed would have to be get this done quickly. We…

Review of the year It was bad. They I was forced to consider the question this week when I was asked, “who is the eponymous, ‘they’?”. ‘They’ track your data (and then lose it). ‘They’ want to control us. ‘They’ want people to pay more tax. ‘They’ don’t want people…

Daniel Pickering, Chief Investment Officer of ListedReserve, joined Asher Westropp-Evans on ausbiz to discuss the latest developments in the FTX saga, the challenging circumstances ahead for Binance and BNB, and the widening discount to NAV at the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. Watch the full show here

AI If you haven’t yet tried artificial intelligence, I can recommend it as a way to spend a weekend. There are many iterations, some for art, some for language and some for text. You can register here for what I consider the simplest version. It is completely free and absolutely…

The state of things On the bench $17k. Behind it lies the separation of money from the state. When asked, most people are quite comfortable that their elected government is in charge of the money supply. They remark, very reasonably, that “who else is going to do it......you?”. It is…

Contagion Next up in the FTX drama is Genesis Trading, perhaps the largest prime broker in the digital asset sector. Genesis is owned by the Digital Currency Group (DCG) who also happen to own the largest bitcoin fund in the world, the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC). GBTC trades now at…

Things we cannot say A forbidden topic. It’s just a thought. Emerging from the wreckage of FTX to lead the industry is a Chinese-Canadian guy who bootstrapped a business into a multi-billion dollar business. For the first 12 months of his operation nobody would give him a bank account, so…

Fried Before we begin, I should make clear that ListedReserve has no exposure to FTX or the FTT token. This week’s drama being a good lesson in why segregated custodial arrangements for digital assets are vital. I suppose they will make a movie from this one day. In the battle…

Daniel Pickering, Chief Investment Officer of ListedReserve, joined Asher Westropp-Evans on ausbiz to discuss the latest Coinbase results, bitcoin miner capitulation, and rumours of liquidity issues in Sam Bankman-Fried’s empire. Watch the full show here: https://www.ausbiz.com.au/media/can-crypto-players-survive-low-liquidity-environment?videoId=25267

Risk-free These are nervous times for investors looking for shelter. Taking up the challenge is BlackRock, who when they aren’t buying all the family homes in America, also operate the iShares Treasury ETF. Their website provides helpful resources showing exactly what historic returns would be for plucky bond investors. In…

Daniel Pickering, Chief Investment Officer of ListedReserve, reviews the most important bitcoin news over the last month. Read the full article here: https://www.livewiremarkets.com/wires/bitcoin-news-you-need-to-know-including-the-best-kept-secret

Burst “Bitcoin, briefly the world's favourite cryptocurrency, is in trouble. It plummeted from a peak of around $33 per unit in June to just $2.51.” Quite the fall it was too, 95% in four months. Still, it didn’t die, blocks kept coming, the monetary policy stayed exactly the same as…

The pivot that isn’t coming  While we wait for the Federal Reserve to pivot to money printing, I might put forth the suggestion that it simply isn’t going to happen. There are signs that the objective of the Fed is far bigger than simply killing off inflation. The Federal Reserve…

4% Increasingly, 4% seems to be the magic number. When US 10 year yields hit that level, the system wobbles. Various collapses attest to that, first in Sri Lanka and most recently in the UK. US debt now sits at $31 trillion. At 4% interest their annual repayments would be…

Daniel Pickering sits down with Jake Woodhouse to discuss internet based gambling in Asia, why the gambling industry is often an early adopter, the similarity between Bitcoin, internet, and mobile adoption, why Bitcoin’s ability to settle large sums over a short period is valuable, the threat of regulation, the rationale…

Australia It’s no surprise to see Switzerland and the USA at the top of the list for average wealth. However, if we look at median wealth the story is rather different. This measure controls for super-rich Americans who dominate the rich list. The United States does not appear at all…

Daniel Pickering, Chief Investment Officer of ListedReserve, joined Andrew Geoghegan on ausbiz to discuss why investors should look beyond the shorter term macro movements and look for the fundamentals that will drive future price movements. Watch here: https://www.ausbiz.com.au/media/looking-beyond-short-term-volatility?videoId=24572

UK goes all in The UK bond market fell off a cliff with 5 year yields shooting straight past 4%. Sterling fell to 40 year lows too, just to make sure foreign investors took a proper pummelling. The Chancellor then jumped on the Sunday morning TV shows promising more of…

Art Scott is the CEO of Masterworks, a business that allows people to buy fractional stakes in artwork. His claim, which is nominally true, is that art has historically “returned” 23.2% annually. It’s an interesting business, but more interesting because art actually returns nothing at all. There is almost no…

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…

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…

Daniel Pickering, Chief Investment Officer of ListedReserve, joined Nadine Blayney on ausbiz to discuss the increasing centralisation of Ethereum, the 'perfect storm' hitting the bitcoin mining industry, and Q2 results from the publicly-listed bitcoin miners. Watch here: https://www.ausbiz.com.au/media/urge-to-merge-the-ethereum-merge-draws-closer?videoId=24043

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…

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…

Moneyweb Crypto is a cryptocurrency podcast from Moneyweb, one of South Africa’s premier online sources of business, finance and investment news and information. ListedReserve's Chief Investment Officer, Daniel Pickering, joined presenter Ciaran Ryan to discuss US sanctions on Tornado Cash, the upcoming Ethereum 'Merge', the future of Ethereum and forks…

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…

Hands up if you’ve said this in the last 12 months! ETH The upcoming ethereum merge is starting to look interesting. The short version is that at some point in September, ethereum will move from a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake (PoS). The consensus view here is that this…

Daniel Pickering, Chief Investment Officer of ListedReserve, sat down with Andrew Geoghegan on ausbiz to discuss the risks and opportunities for Ethereum investors post-Merge. Watch here: https://www.ausbiz.com.au/media/the-merge-risk-and-reward-for-investors-and-miners?videoId=23324

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…

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…

Super Mario Windfall Tax “Report finds”. Always a worry that. Who wrote the report? Do they have an agenda and do they have any understanding of economics? In this case the report was written by the ‘Australia Institute’, who according to their website, are ‘a progressive think tank’. It’s hard to…

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…

Price controls This is how we control inflation now — by shouting. Evil oil companies are price gouging American consumers. Or, prices remain high because nobody can pick up a signal from the markets after the price mechanism was destroyed. The true cost of inflation is that it makes economic…

Denied “the proposal did not meet standards designed to prevent fraudulent practices and protect investors”. Once again, the SEC has denied Grayscale’s application to convert their bitcoin fund to an ETF. There were over 11,000 letters from investors and academics in support of the application this time, which is far…

I told you so! Everyone who says I told you so. Didn’t. A quarter to forget (or remember) Quite something this last quarter. Massive collapses in DeFi, massive liquidations across the sector and the price movement proves it. Below are the five worst quarters in bitcoin’s history: Our fund has…

Cryptocurrency-focused managed fund data provider, Crypto Fund Research, has added The ListedReserve Managed Fund to its extensive database. Crypto Fund Research produces timely, high-quality, trusted data on over 800 cryptocurrency managed funds to assist investors, financial advisors, family offices, and endowments with manager selection and portfolio construction. The Crypto Fund…

New money, old habits Zero Celcius DeFi lender Celcius stopped customer withdrawals on Sunday. The email to customers was reminiscent of the Lehman Brothers collapse: The carefully chosen wording about honouring withdrawals “over time” caused the Celsius token to fall as low as 14 cents, down more than 95% in…

Little Apple The Big Apple is getting smaller. Once the place we all wanted to go and visit; not any longer. There has been huge net migration out of the state since 2000. One million people have left New York since, for a net loss of 250,000 residents. That ranks…

New branding! Our weekly newsletter is growing quickly. Previously referred to internally as ‘The Weekly’ we felt that name lacked panache, so now it’s MoneyBits. If you are reading that as MonkeyBits, I assure you that you’re the person with the problem, and not us. Otherwise it’s business as usual.…

The Prophecy …and it did. It spread all over the globe and now everything you use every day is laced with cryptography. Your phone, messaging apps and email. Much to the frustration of governments around the world. Then it spread to money. Like everything else it touched, it won’t stop.…

Terra update Many of us are struggling with the complexity of the collapse of the Terra stablecoin. A rather simple explanation was provided in the week clarifying matters: What else could go wrong? Actually, quite a lot. Here are three other things that would be viewed as existential threats to…

A quiet week I confess it has been rather quiet on the inbound money side this week. It’s no surprise given the brutal plunge with perhaps more volatility to come. All this is nothing new for bitcoin or indeed for us as a fund. This is our fourth meaningful drawdown.…

Did Amazon grow? An honest question, if Amazon revenue growth was +7% in the last quarter and inflation in the US was 8%; did Amazon grow at all? In real terms, surely no. Consider then that the US economy actually shrank by 1% in Q1 this year. It is rather…

The Ministry of Truth The American government last night announced the formation of a “Disinformation Governance Board” which will counter misinformation relating to Homeland Security. I can't imagine that this could go wrong in any way at all and I’m looking forward to their considered musings. It does focus the…

Web 3.0 A crisis? At no point in the last 60 years have bonds yielded such a negative real return. Perhaps more critical now is the fact that government borrowing has never been at such consistently high levels. So while bonds are an awful investment, never have there been more…

Mornings with Liam Bartlett is a morning radio show from 6PR. ListedReserve's Chief Investment Officer, Daniel Pickering, joined Liam to discuss crypto scams, selecting a digital cryptocurrency fund manager, and Bitcoin regulation in Australia.

Livewire is Australia’s #1 source of investment ideas from leading fund managers. In this article on Livewire, ListedReserve's Chief Investment Officer, Daniel Pickering, discusses the diminishing role of fiat currency as a measurement basis for value, investment performance, and wealth. Read the full article here (free account required): https://www.livewiremarkets.com/wires/the-collapse-of-fiat-money

Time for a new boyfriend? A quarter to forget for bonds The purchasing power of money invested in bonds is now collapsing at quite a rate. $100 invested in Treasury Bonds in July 2020 is now worth $81.90, concluding with the worst quarter for bonds since, well, forever. I don’t…

Managed fund research and data provider FundMonitors.com has added The ListedReserve Managed Fund to its database. FundMonitors.com produces rigorous, high-quality, trusted research on over 600 actively managed funds to assist investors, trustees and their advisors with appropriate manager selection and portfolio construction. The FundMonitors.com database enables comparison of funds based…

April Fool Exxon Mobil We mentioned last week the likelihood of energy producers and bitcoin miners merging over the coming years. As if by magic, Exxon Mobil (the world’s largest energy producer) revealed they are now using flared gas to mine bitcoin. As it turns out, the project has been…

On the Couch is a weekly podcast from Marcus Today, presented by Henry Jennings. ListedReserve's Chief Investment Officer, Daniel Pickering, joined Henry to discuss the bitcoin supply curve, crypto ETFs, interference in financial markets, and his thoughts on the bitcoin price. Listen here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1852332/10306919-on-the-couch-with-daniel-pickering-from-bitcoin-fund-managers-listed-reserve

Zeitgeist Risk The investment game can be very accurately characterised by simply saying, “I buy or sell assets where the risk is not priced correctly.” Specifically, for our asset class there are a number of aspects that are not understood by the market that mean risk is hugely mispriced. For…

ListedReserve's Chief Investment Officer Daniel Pickering appeared on Chris Judd's Talk Ya Book to discuss the performance of the Managed Fund, layer 1 blockchains, stablecoins, and blockchain gaming. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZQeWwHYxiE[/embed]  

Who wins? Sexy eyes Retinal fundus, I discovered, is the interior lining of the eyeball. Anyway, the artificial intelligence used in this research predicted the sex of the owner of the eyeball with 87% accuracy. The most surprising thing is the researchers do not know how the machine is doing…

Daniel Pickering, Chief Investment Officer of ListedReserve, sat down with Andrew Geoghegan on ausbiz to discuss how ListedReserve constructs a digital asset portfolio. Plus, commentary on DeFi, 'Crypto Winter', bitcoin ETFs, and blockchain gaming. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHAIut8PaCA[/embed]

A bus Hostage to fortune The power of energy independence is being writ large across the sky by the Ukraine conflict. The US Secretary of State is looking to ban Russian oil imports for reasons we can well understand, but with oil at $100 translating to $4/gallon at the US…

State of the Union A confused Kamala Harris wonders why he's talking about Iran Normally, the State of the Nation is boring. Now that Joe Biden does it, there's real anticipation, generally for the wrong reasons. He didn't disappoint either, immediately addressing the war in the Ukraine: "Putin may circle Kyiv…

Investment research and data provider Morningstar has added The ListedReserve Managed Fund to its managed fund database. The Morningstar fund database allows investors and financial advisors to access a wide variety of investment options based on data across investment type, operations, performance, and portfolio data points, all while scaling across…

Euro-Trash President Vladimir Putin must be terrified of the EU. Prior to his decision to invade the Ukraine, he was assured by Ursula Von Der Leyen that the EU might impose energy sanctions if he did. It's another example of Euro-madness and the high handedness that permeates the European Union. They just don't…

ListedReserve has partnered with Coin Metrics for the provision of transparent and independent digital asset pricing for their flagship Managed Fund. The partnership will provide an empirically tested pricing methodology that is robust to outliers and market manipulation, to ensure the integrity of the unit pricing of ListedReserve’s product offerings.…

The real question This question lies at the heart of our industry. As a fund we believe people are selecting to do this because the technology is helpful and valuable. Whether people are exchanging bitcoins, NFT's, stablecoins or whatever it may be. That activity necessarily happens outside of the purview of the…

Executive Order We are still waiting for the Executive Order from Biden on cryptocurrency. He is likely to instruct various agencies in the US to find an appropriate regulatory backdrop against which the sector can operate. Likely it won't be good for those not strictly following securities law. There is…

Times like these It is for times like these that we remind everyone: You will at some point experience a significant drawdown of 50% or more in this sector The right time horizon is 5 years+ With those things in mind it is much easier to to cope with what…

The problem in America A very simple measure of inequality is to compare the mean wealth (simply, all wealth divided by the number of people), with median wealth (sort all people by wealth in order and choose the person in the middle, the median person). The international chart is fascinating…

CZ You don't know this man and you have probably never heard of him. His name is Changpeng Zhao, known in the industry as CZ. I put it to you that he is the richest man in the world.  Common knowledge has it that Elon Musk on $275 billion, closely followed by…

In 2022 This is our final note for the year. Despite an ordinary finish, it has been an amazing year. There is no question that our core asset hit the mainstream in 2021 and this time around due to institutional adoption. Irrespective of short-term prices, our macroeconomic thesis continues to…

How to lose $1 billion in one afternoon Brewster's Millions was a fun film from the mid 80's. The premise was that Brewster must spend $30 million in 30 days in order to inherit $300 million. The rules of the game were: not allowed to own any assets, destroy the…

Transitory Senate Banking Committee Ranking Member Pat Toomey (R-Pa.): “How long does inflation have to run above your target before the Fed decides, maybe it’s not so transitory?” Powell: “the word has different meanings to different people, the Federal Reserve tend to use it to mean that it won’t leave a…

Reminder It has been a rather volatile month thus far with bitcoin down 17% from highs and assets across the board in correction mode. It's time for the quarterly reminder that this is not at all unusual and doesn't look like going away anytime soon. The fact is, we are…

Web 1,2,3 As expected, the latest Bitcoin spot ETF was rejected by the SEC on Friday. It is nearly nine years since the first ETF application was filed by the Winklevoss brothers in 2013. At that time investor protection was front of mind and it allowed the SEC to successfully…

Miner progress Signs of a full recovery from the China mining bans of April and May are now in sight. Looking back, they will likely be seen as a universally good thing for bitcoin. The USA is now the dominant bitcoin miner and along with Kazakhstan and Russia is among the big…

Zuckaverse The reaction to Facebook's rebrand to Meta was somewhat surprising. So many people apparently horrified that some digital panopticon might be created in which an evil billionaire megalomaniac controls the world. Where has everyone been? This already happened 10 years ago. Facebook has nearly two billion daily users and…

You and your houses The bore-athon that is the discussion about house prices continues unabated in the Australian press and at BBQs across the country. Everyone with a house expressing their smug surprise, everyone without their utter despondency. It would be fair to say prices have done well in the…

ETF A short comment on the ETF. It went live and was successful with the second highest volume of any ETF launch ever. The team at Arcane Research declared it the most successful ETF launch ever because it had the highest "natural volume". Meaning, if you strip out the giant…

Mint The Coin The annual debt ceiling dance is well underway in the US. It is nonsense as usual because there is zero chance that America can ever default. All their debt is denominated in dollars and they can create as many of them as they wish. Still, it's more…

China ban #46 Bitcoin fell sharply on Friday after China announced its latest ban on cryptocurrency. While I am certain they mean business, the issue for China is they have announced a new ban every year since 2013. The headline above is from the first ban that year which caused…

Gensler We were treated to an interview in the Washington Post this week with SEC head Gary Gensler. He had plenty to say but reserved particular ire for stablecoins, which he likened to poker chips. The driving force behind his intervention was likely the recent Coinbase proposal for a USD…

Doublespeak One of the great examples of political spin was delivered last week by the US Director of the National Economic Council, Brian Deese. Americans are complaining about rising prices, with food inflation well into double figures. Brian was unleashed on the nation to calm nerves and set the record…

El Salvador goes live Bitcoin became legal tender in El Salvador on Tuesday. It was not met with universal approval locally and you can understand why, a lot of people struggle with technology, and this really is a quantum leap for some of them. I cannot emphasise enough how important…

Investment strategy As a new fund manager (not yet four years old), it is a learning curve. Perhaps the most surprising thing we have encountered across the industry is the amount of time that goes into number crunching and comparison to benchmarks and "consensus views". Consensus seems to be an…

It's not what they say "Not for us" "It's a ponzi" "It's going to zero". We still hear it every day from banks and institutional fund managers. What they say is one thing though, what they do is more instructive.Take BlackRock, the world's largest fund manager, with $9 trillion at their disposal.…

It's the future you see Book week this week. Given the amount of airtime being given to virtual worlds and what happens as the world goes increasingly digital, I thought it might be fun to have a look at the best books on this very topic. Read them and make your…

IT Skill The pandemic has revealed something that we knew but didn't fully appreciate. The general level of IT skill in the workforce is appalling. Technology moves fast but almost nobody moves with it, so very quickly we are left behind. One of the first programs I ever used when I got…

Denominator Here's an idea for you. The NAB has published house price data showing an annual increase of 21.6%. That's 1.6% per month. The average price of a residential property in New South Wales is now $1m (higher in Sydney). Property prices are increasing at about $16,000 per month. The…

Boring We'll start this week with a story. A boring story. Years ago I worked with someone who had a mantra. I didn't like him personally and found the whole thing very annoying. It's borrowed from Albert Einstein.   "if you always do what you always did, you'll always get what…

User Growth If the bitcoin price is continuing to disappoint short term participants, they should perhaps look to user adoption for comfort. In these log charts (from woobull.com) we can see the start of the previous bear markets in 2011, 2014 and 2018. The pattern this time is different. User…

Overreach There were two instances of institutional overreach this week (more later on the second).  The first was the G20, who, at the suggestion of the Americans, have "agreed" that there should be a global minimum tax rate of 15% on companies. Firstly, this is strange because no G20 country…

It's difficult You will have picked up over the years that people involved in bitcoin are rather anti-government. The source of this really goes to the original design of the network which anticipated that one day (or every day) governments would try to undermine bitcoin to ensure the survival of…

Half Time After a disastrous first half for us with the sky falling in and all doomsayers fully validated. The results are now in. Once again. Focus on the long-term macro picture and think in four-year cycles. The lightning network Going back some years now, 2017 in fact, the Lightning…

Reminder A gentle reminder from Morgan Stanley about where we stand in the current scheme of things. We could perhaps also include the bond market on this chart as well, but ultimately the global M2 money supply is a reasonable long term target for bitcoin. M2 is a measure of…

Bitcoin Miami In perhaps the largest gathering yet of Bitcoin participants, Miami hosted Bitcoin 2021. Over 12,000 tickets were sold for the event (which weren't cheap at $1,500 - $15,000) so it was incredibly well supported. As with all conferences, it was 90% canapé and hangover with 10% value thrown…

Joe Biden released details of his first budget on Friday with $6 trillion to be spent in the next year against $4.2 trillion in revenues. Of all the things that stand out in the budget, "only" $300 billion is new spending. The rest of the $1.5 trillion shortfall is consumed in…

Peak bad news? Having navigated Elon Musk, I had thought there was nobody more prominent that could have an opinion on Bitcoin. I was wrong. This tweet from the Pope was taken as a dig at the protocol and its power consumption. Reading it, it could equally be about aircraft, space…

The wrong chart Quite the week. No need for another reminder of how frequently we have these steep pull backs, since we've just had one. The situation is adequately described below. For those that don't know. The term HODL originated in 2013 after bitcoin's price had crashed 40% to $450. A…

Elon Musk is right It makes no sense to mine bitcoin with coal. That is why almost nobody does. Coal is simply too expensive. Bitcoin miners can only operate profitably at 3 cents per kilowatt hour and less. Fully costed coal is a lot more than that, hence most bitcoin mining…

It was the annual gathering of Buffett sycophants last week. Tell us more Warren about how you have underperformed the market for the last 15 years etc. etc. Year after year they are asked about bitcoin and still have not come up with a coherent critique. It's difficult to let this…

Bitcoin has died** You didn't really think that some computer code was going to compete to be a global asset class, did you? I mean, that was pretty stupid of you if you did. A bunch of bearded cryptography enthusiasts versus all the intellect of the world's bankers? It was hardly…

Protocol Henceforth, references to Bitcoin (B) mean the network, the software, the entire protocol. References to bitcoin (b), mean the currency embedded in that protocol. I'm glad this convention has emerged, it has bothered me for a while. Obviously, when starting a sentence, you'll still have an issue and will simply have…

Risk Free Here's an interesting trade for you from Bloomberg. December bitcoin futures were trading at a $5,000 premium to the spot price last week. All you had to do to make the 8% annualised return was go long spot bitcoin and short the December future. Sit tight for a few months…

Quarterly performance Fund Managers love quarterly performance, especially when it's good. "Here are all the amazing things we did with our brilliant and insightful analysis that's three miles deep and two inches wide" or whatever that Scottish sounding bloke says. Fo us, quarterly performance is really irrelevant. Time and again,…

The dog ate my homework “The trouble with excuses is that they become inevitably difficult to believe after they’ve been used a couple of times.” The pressure on US regulators to sign off a Bitcoin ETF is growing. In Canada, Purpose Investment's ETF raised $0.5 billion in two days. It…

International Women's Day Did you enjoy it? I certainly did. In particular, the 'heartfelt' emails from male CEOs warbling on about all the great things they are going to do for women before immediately defaulting to their normal behaviours once the day is over. Not to be left out, President Kamala joined…

$28 Trillion Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate and all round moron, often repeats "Debt is money we owe ourselves". His argument is that it does not matter, because America can print money whenever it wishes to pay back whoever it wishes. Sadly, he is absolutely correct. Furthermore, he can point to Japan…

In what is one of the most anticipated public offerings of the last few years, Coinbase has filed for direct listing on the NASDAQ. Rather quietly it has become a very big company: 43 million customers worldwide $456 billion in transaction volume to date 1,200 employees (amazingly small) Interestingly, no…

Square US financial services company Square reported their full year this week. Bitcoin revenue has gone from a bit of a sideshow to being the single biggest revenue item, by far. Sales grew 9x in 2020 and in their forward looking statement Square announced that in January 2021 CashApp had set…

Water Taken from an address by David Foster Wallace in 2005, the idea is that the most obvious and important realities are often the hardest to see. Everyone has default settings, things they assume are just correct and they never question them. The idea is an excellent one and you can…

 Cash on Hand To great excitement this week, Tesla allocated $1.5 billion of their Corporate Treasury cash to bitcoin. The excitement did not necessarily extend everywhere though. Here is Nils Pratley, who to my surprise is the Financial Editor of the Guardian (yes, they have one). Irrespective of what you…

I went to Davos (on Zoom) A small town in Switzerland rejoices as world leaders don't visit. Remember Davos? The big pow wow for the rich and famous in the Swiss Alps. Well you haven't heard about it because this year it happened on Zoom. That's right, Davos is now called Zoom.…

Distressed assets What would you say if I tried to sell you this company: The Basics Revenue: $3.3 trillion Enterprise value: $177 trillion Valuation: 53x revenue Revenue growth: negative Age: 244 years old Debt: at a 70 year high   Accounting irregularities The company is very well connected and uses…

Grayscale This is what it hitting it out of the park looks like. Grayscale now has $22 billion under management in their cryptocurrency funds, up from $2 billion 12 months ago. Can they get to $100 billion? I think so, faster than people think too. Even more compelling is the…

The end of the empire Much as I don't like to admit it, the end of the US empire was accurately called 30 years ago by Coca Cola salesman Warren Buffett. In 1990 he raised the alarm about net international investment in America turning negative, noting that America was being "sold out"…

A visit from an alien If an alien visited plant earth and wished to make a purchase, which explanation of money and value would the alien believe? Money 1: Has a publically auditable record of every transaction ever; Has an absolutely known supply at all times in the present and future;…

Bitcoin never had a pitch deck, the code was simply released into the wild and it went from there. As a parting gift for 2020, here is what one might look like.

Falling Down Almost everything in the world is going up at the moment, apart from interest rates and Joe Biden's IQ. We posted this chart earlier in the year about professional analysts expectations for rates and how they seem to be perpetually wrong. Everyone thinks they will rise and they…

Crash Bitcoin has crashed by $50 billion. Actually, this headline was Friday last week and bitcoin has since recovered to be exactly where it was before it "crashed". A good reminder though that bitcoin will, and has, dipped many times along the road. It has dropped by 85% more than…

A multi-asset portfolio As of December 2019 a balanced portfolio, based on global market capitalisation, would have looked something like this. 41% equity, 25% bonds, 20% investment grade credit and then the rest. At its current market capitalisation of $325 billion bitcoin would represent 0.24% of this portfolio. It would…

District 14 She did not wait long. Immediately after Biden was declared winner and having laid low for 6 months while the election battle raged, the truce ended. The Representative of the 14th New York district, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, raged against the Democrat machine. "The people who elected Biden will now…

President Harris? A few weeks back I said I marginally preferred a Biden victory from the perspective of the performance of our funds. Essentially, we are operating the funds as a hedge against the collapsing financial system and our 100% + returns in just over two years show that it…

The Levels Back in August we wrote about "The Levels". The various barriers that the bitcoin would face on its journey, one of the more significant being the US$13,800 barrier. "Again, based on long and short selling their is a great deal of potential activity at $13,800. This is roughly…

PayPal In June this year we wrote about a niche advertisement for a role at PayPal for someone who could program in C+ and had experience in cryptography.  You might recall we speculated that PayPal would add bitcoin to its suite of products. There are 325 million active PayPal users…

Start small This is Greg Schoen, with a genuine tweet from 2011. You can look him up on Twitter @GregSchoen. Greg's 1,700 bitcoins are now worth US$18.5million. He is very open about it in fact. I think he got a good deal. Totally untried technology which back then absolutely nobody…

Whispers in the wind Late last year during an obscure policy discussion in the bowels of the USA, a Federal Reserve governor raised the prospect of an 'inflation averaging approach'. The idea being that inflation would be allowed to overshoot 2% for a period of time to bring the longer…

Who will win? As far as the our funds are concerned it doesn't really matter who wins the next US election. Biden would likely outspend Trump initially, so we marginally favour him from a performance perspective. Longer term, no difference.   Whoever wins will look to pass a large and…

Wrong For a change of scenery let's try some arguments about why our macro-thesis might be wrong. Every week we bang the same drum, well it's time for a new tune to see how convincing it is. Interest rates Let's start with interest rates and the 700 year chart below.…

 Debt works You might look around and wonder. I do. Here is Australian retail store Harvey Norman with their latest offer. The offer has some interesting components: No interest for five years. Quite compelling, except that most things Harvey Norman sells will be obsolete in that time. The gift card…

Bitcoin price falls Cognitive dissonance Thinking one thing, behaving differently, getting stressed as a result I accept and have accepted since I first discovered it, that bitcoin could go to zero. I remind every investor of that possibility. I believe the possibility recedes with time, particularly as the code base…

The Reserve Bank this week released their 2020/21 Annual Plan: The Governor confirms the Bank's continuing commitment to achieving consumer price inflation between 2 and 3 per cent, on average, over time, consistent with its duties under the Reserve Bank Act 1959. Achieving the inflation target preserves the value of money and facilitates…

Jackson Hole When is a summit not a summit? I would say, when it's just a phone call. That's too hard for our central bankers and not serious or important enough, so they are pretending to go to the Jackson Hole Summit this year by calling it the "Jackson Hole…

August 15th Last Saturday we reached the 49th anniversary of the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system. It was on August 15th 1971 that Richard Nixon confirmed he was "temporarily" closing the gold redemption window. Without the formal anchor of a scarce resource, debt and inflation have run wild…

The confidence game "We have every confidence in the ability of [person about to be sacked]" It happens all the time, particularly in sport. Confidence needs to be reinforced which means, it's gone. Fiat currency is a confidence game too. You cannot redeem it for gold any longer and when…

Q2 2020 You wont forget Q2 2020 for the rest of your life. For many businesses it was hard, for some it was the end. For others, like Square in the US, it will be remembered as a break out quarter. Their bitcoin sales increased to $875m in Q2, up…

Your clever friend I hear about your clever friend a lot. He (and it is always he) has a lot to say about bitcoin. In general he is highly educated, normally at a cost of more than $150,000 for the many letters appending his name. He has a highly paid…

In December last year we pointed out an obscure speech by a Federal Reserve governor and speculated that they were testing the water on a higher inflation policy. It was the first drip feed that the US inflation target will exceed 2%. The governor in question, Lael Brainard, said the…

Is it really bad for bitcoin? You would likely have read about the huge twitter hack on Thursday targeting well known accounts, nearly all of them "blue ticks". Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Elon Musk to name a few. Once again this will bring the focus to bitcoin and how…

You are here 1. Global debt now 280% of GDP. Bond yields at all time lows. 2. Federal Reserve balance sheet in vertical print mode. Now at $7 trillion.   3. ECB balance sheet in vertical print mode. Now exceeds 50% of EU GDP.   4. Here's the NASDAQ. FANGMAN…

Wirecard Wirecard Bank was a hero of the banking community in Germany. They grew very rapidly by servicing payments for niche operators around the world. They were part of the elite German DAX30, among the largest companies in the country. The full story of their demise is yet to be…

The Gold and Bitcoin Fund As regular readers know, we are rather keen on bitcoin here at ListedReserve. The thesis is simply that so few things have known supply and provable scarcity. Some investors though are more comfortable with gold because it has tens of thousands of years of history…

It's a Scam Rarely these days do we encounter the feedback "bitcoin is a scam". It does happen though including this week. The argument was along the lines of, it's only valuable as long as people say it is, otherwise it isn't.  A bit like gold then. Nobody ever decreed…

WHERE TO INVEST? This used to be a reasonably easy question to answer for a financial adviser. Perhaps a mix of equity and bonds, perhaps some small leverage depending on your age. We'll change the mix as you get older. Thanks, that will be $5,000 a year, oh and here's…

Goldman Sachs Remember when Goldman Sachs were the 'Masters of the Universe'? Their cult carried so far that the Twitter account @goldmansachselevator had over a million followers. It purported to post overheard conversations in the elevators of the investment bank. It was all part of the mystique. It was great…

How money dies Its tough being a global reserve currency. History tells us surviving more than 100 years is very hard. The Spanish hold the record with 110 years. That particular arrangement fell apart because of the collapse of the Iberian Union between Spain and Portugal. Portugal got tired of…

Buffets The talk is that self serving buffets are now a thing of the past, simply they don't work in this new world order. I was prompted to find out why, here's a possible explanation. Not only that, Buffett has managed to underperform the S&P 500 for the quite some…

The ghosts of the Weimar Republic Germany has been incredibly tolerant of its spendthrift Southern neighbors. The Greeks want to retire when they are 23 having served a 3 day week. The Italians want unlimited deficits and permanent chaos and the Spanish are still in bed, they don't even know…

Price The best advice I can give about the bitcoin price is not to look at it. Over time the price has risen, although it does so in a non-uniform manner. This year is a great example, we have been to $3,900 and $10,500, the sort of volatility that can…

Bloomberg & Bitcoin Bitcoin has a mixed relationship with Bloomberg. We have discussed before some of the negative takes on that platform which I have taken issue with. All told though, the criticism is good. No financial asset is more criticised and maligned than bitcoin, so it was rather encouraging…

Storage costs matter The oil price went below zero on Wednesday at the closure of the May oil contract. There are may reasons why. The most relevant perhaps, is that storing oil is not free. If you buy oil with a futures contract it will be delivered to you unless…

The Bank of England The Bank of England, established in 1694, is a proud institution. With 325 years of operation they must be doing something right. Indeed, perhaps one of the things sustaining it is the pragmatism and honesty of its leaders. Nearly a century ago in 1927, a director…

Pussy Galore This week Honor Blackman, who played Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, died at 94 years of age. One of the best Bond films and certainly one of the best villains in Auric Goldfinger. Goldfinger's plan was quite clever, he intended to set off a nuclear device at Fort Knox,…

The Halving We have written extensively about the bitcoin halving and how that creates a unique supply curve. Our full report on it can be downloaded on our website. The essence of the bitcoin supply curve is simple. New supply is a permanently falling percentage of existing supply. Currently 12.5…

A difference of opinion Debate rages this week about the impact of the interventions of the Federal Reserve, ECB and other central banks. The argument surrounds the impact of the central banks buying government bonds. Here is Joe Weisenthal of Bloomberg. "............., the Fed can't make the money printer go…

Debt deflation We'll steer clear of the daily noise this week and focus on one thing. Deflation. In the Western world it isn't something we are really used to but the cycles of inflation and deflation are as real as the business cycle. The world has been in an inflationary…

Crushed Bitcoin got absolutely crushed last night. Down 26% on the day. Why? So steep was the fall that any leveraged long (and there are many) got swept up in the decline on both regulated and un-regulated exchanges, there was a great deal of forced selling which found buyers with…

Oil your printers, start your helicopters We saw some concerted (and co-ordinated) central bank action this week to address the coronavirus outbreak. The general idea of central bank intervention is that it should smooth market tensions sufficient to give people confidence to invest and generally promote growth. This has been…

Safe haven......? In early January, when bitcoin was rising strongly, the prevailing view was that bitcoin was acting as a risk off asset, much like gold. At the time I said I very much doubted that was the case. Simply, no sane person in a time of crisis looks to…

Collateral The best way to get a cheap loan is to have collateral backing it. You buy a home, the bank keeps the deeds until you pay the mortgage. A company issues a bond, the bondholders get a claim on all the  assets before the shareholders. You can use all…

$10k On Sunday morning, bitcoin once again went through the psychological US$10,000 barrier. When it first happened in 2017 it prompted hysteria from regulators and the public alike: "Bitcoin price soars above $11,000 as central bankers seek to calm fears: Bank of England and Fed officials say cryptocurrency is too…

Realised market cap at all time high In bitcoin, the concept of realised market capitalisation reflects the value of each specific sub-unit of bitcoin based on when it last moved on the blockchain. This is as opposed to the traditional measure which is simply the total number of coins multiplied…

Silvergate Most likely you haven't heard of Silvergate Bank. They  exclusively serve cryptocurrency exchanges and OTC desks and late last year they listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In their first full report as a listed entity, they share some encouraging details about the ecosystem as a whole. Their…

The ECB I love the European Central Bank. They are everything that's bad about bureaucracy and banking all in one handy location. What's more, they are also reasonably open about their internal insanity, this week treating us to a report called "Central Bank Digital Currencies and the financial system". Here are…

Welcome back More than anything, I don't want to be the guy who died wondering. I'm long bitcoin (not investment advice), I think fiat currency is a giant fraud, I think the rest of the world is an enormous bubble benefiting very few people. As far as I'm concerned this…

2019 This will be the last update for 2019, we'll return to action on updates in mid January. It seems then, that this is a suitable time to review some price action. Bitcoin has had (as usual) a very volatile year, ending up around 95% while having six times the…

2030 At the turn of the decade we will be treated to all manner of wild predictions about the next ten years, most of which will be wrong. First cab off the rank throwing random darts at the future was technically bankrupt European behemoth, Deutsche Bank. It's been a tough…

Complicated charts, simple story " At present, our estimate of the prospective 12-year total return from a conventional passive portfolio mix is lower than at any point in history aside from the 1929 pre-crash market peak." It took me while to fathom this chart. The blue line is the estimated…

Philip Lowe In 1980, a 17 year old was accompanied by his parents from Wagga Wagga to a job interview. The story goes that the young man's parents had another plan, they intended to interview the employer to ensure that they would provide suitable employment and circumstances for their son.…

The Three Wise Men Three people in America now have more money than the bottom 50% of Americans. You wonder about the disruption and discontent around the world and perhaps this has something to do with it. To be fair, two of them have made massive contributions to society and…

Benoit’s Anniversary Today is the anniversary of ECB Director, Benoit Coeure’s, comments on digital currency and bitcoin, he made quite a splash at the time, let’s see how things have moved on since. Central banks around the world are in a bind. They know two things are almost inevitable, one…

Our thoughts on the upcoming Bitcoin halvening. Click here The-Bitcoin-Halvening to download the pdf file of The-Bitcoin-Halvening.

Metrics Coinmetrics research issued their latest report this week which gives some insight into the fundamentals behind bitcoin. The full report is here and we provide a summary of the highlights below. Daily value transfer Currently $2.3 billion per day in value is transmitted across the bitcoin network. For context, in 2018,…

Short Squeeze +40% When was the last time an asset with a market cap of over $180 billion experienced a 40% price spike in hours? The answer is hard to find, but the oil price in the 1970s is the best example. It happened again on Saturday morning with bitcoin…

Grayscale Report Q3 reporting season in the US and the first to go were Grayscale who manage the largest bitcoin fund in the world. Some highlights from this quarter: US$2.1 billion in AUM $250 million invested in the last three months with $171 million of that invested directly in bitcoin…

Libra Bingo As we suggested last week, with Paypal gone from the Facebook Libra project, others would likely follow. The Association members didn't disappoint us either, Mastercard, VISA and Stripe all quit the project. Followed then by Mercado, Ebay and Stripe. Once again governments were in action putting pressure on…

Encryption On Friday last week Facebook received a letter from the US Attorney General, Britain's Home Secretary and Australia's Minister for Home Affairs. "We are writing to request that Facebook does not proceed with its plan to implement end-to-end encryption across its messaging service without including a means for lawful…

Australia Australia is rich. Really, really rich. My perception is that most Australian’s don’t appreciate this fact but as a recent immigrant, I can tell you, it’s rich. I’ll labour the point because it’s important; cold water fish, tropical fish, gold, uranium, rare earth metals, every edible animal, all vegetables,…

Price action After months of minimal volatility we got a strong price move, with bitcoin down over 10% on the week. Alternative currencies also continue to suffer with many dropping more than 30% over the same period. One of the causes was multiple legal cases brought this week by the…

The Emperors's New Clothes  "The new target interest rate is 1.75% - 2%" As expected the Federal Reserve cut its interest rate by 0.25% yesterday. The target rate is now 1.75% - 2%. It wasn't very exciting, except something strange happened and the overnight rate immediately went above the target…

The ECB's announcement arrived too late for a full analysis so we'll cover it in full next week. The short version is: QE is back. $20bn per month (so not much at this stage) Deposit interest rate cut to -0.5% Amazingly though, the ECB has introduced a tiered system that…

Failures, all of them Macro hedge? Is bitcoin really a macro hedge? Take the charts below, there is no doubt that the weakening Yuan corresponds with bitcoin’s rise this year. The time period is short and the chart has zero statistical credibility, but: We know Tether issuance (the USD stablecoin)…

Hammering home the message 1. The base US money supply.  Up just over 4 times since 2008 2. Rising prices (but not of everything) US CPI: the blue line near the x axis House prices: the red line. So, lots of money printed. General prices and wages have hardly moved,…

WeWork The ListedReserve Bitcoin Fund is met with skepticism when we first meet clients and fund managers, despite its stellar performance. I can't help thinking we are held to a rather higher standard than some others looking to raise money. For example, WeWork's IPO lays bare the full extent of…

Bond Markets More fun in the bond markets this week. Firstly, the entire Dutch yield curve has gone negative. So, lend them money for thirty years. In 2049, get back less. Good deal? Then, look at the performance of the Austrian 100 year bond up over 50% in the quarter…

A volatile week Traditional markets were wobbling this week. Interest rate cuts again around the world and all out currency wars, with China weakening the Yuan and most Asian currencies coming under real pressure. Macquarie bank went first, advising clients to buy "assets with fixed supply". Well, there is only…

Interest rate death spiral Unemployment in the US is close to 50 year lows, growth is above 2% and yet this morning the Federal Reserve cut interest rates. It's been a death spiral for a least a decade now, with Japan leading the way. Government's are swamped by debt and…

How much is bitcoin worth? We are asked this question a lot. The simple answer is, we do not know, but we do know this: By May 2020 when the bitcoin supply next halves, bitcoin will be more scarce in terms of new supply than gold. Global wealth is ~US$370 trillion…

Battle for hegemony First Chairman of the Fed Jerome Powell chimed in: "bitcoin is a store of value like gold". Also, "the USD won't be the worlds reserve currency forever" Next Trump: "I don't like bitcoin........the USD is by far the most dominant currency anywhere in the world, and it will…

European banks As you probably know by now, the bitcoin genesis block contains the message "Chancellor on the brink of second bail out for banks" dated 3 January 2009. As it happened, the British Chancellor did not bail out the banks a second time, but across Europe the chances of…

The future Amid the wild price ride of the past few weeks there have been some serious developments that give us a glimpse of where this sector might go in future. One you will have heard, Facebooks Libra (covered here last week) and one you may not have, Blockstream's atomic swaps. Blockstream…

The future Amid the wild price ride of the past few weeks there have been some serious developments that give us a glimpse of where this sector might go in future. One you will have heard, Facebooks Libra (covered here last week) and one you may not have, Blockstream's atomic swaps. Blockstream…

Price moves A strong run up in price this week with bitcoin at US$12,500 at the time of writing. The real feature of this run is that it is almost entirely bitcoin driven. Alt coin market caps aren't really moving and bitcoin now represents 63% of the total crypto-market cap,…

Libra Coin Facebook released the promised whitepaper on their new cryptocurrency this week. Hats off to them for the scale of the ambition, which can be summarised as taking over the world of retail banking. What's good about it? It is backed by a basket of assets rather than just…

The general pattern of summer in Europe is French Open, Ascot, Wimbledon then shortly followed by a monetary crisis which ruins your holiday. It has been quiet recently and this is borne out in bond yields. Would you lend to the Greek government for 5 years at 1.6%? How about…

Bitcoin investors Are you alone if you invest in bitcoin? On main street in can certainly feel like it, with many people still in the "it's backed by nothing mindset". To keep you company, here are some of the most vocal and well known bitcoin holders and evangelists: Tim Draper:…

Financial Action Task Force The FATF is (yet another) organisation based in Paris with the goal of preventing money laundering and other "related threats to the integrity of the international financial system". Sponsored by member governments, FATF has turned its attention to cryptocurrency and is due to announce new regulations…

Tech Titans Facebook's march towards cryptocurrency continued this week when they registered a new subsidiary in Switzerland, Libra Networks, which will focus on 'fintech solutions' . Switzerland has been a hub for blockchain activity for some years now with favorable regulation drawing in new businesses. In the meantime a more…

US House of Reps discusses crypto ban In what has been a huge week for this sector the most fascinating thing was this discussion in the US House of Representatives. Congressman Brad Sherman suggesting a complete ban on the purchase of cryptocurrency by Americans. Here's his reasoning: "I look for…

What's the best performing stock this century? Answer: The Monster Beverage company (MNST.O) up 60,000% per cent since the year 2002. It has 35% per cent market share in the energy drinks category. Things have been a little more challenging recently, even so it's impressive stuff. Compare that to bitcoin…

Tether The New York Department of Justice announced an investigation into stable coin Tether this week, following allegations that $850m has gone missing from Tether's fiat backing. The thrust of the story is that Tether (which has the same shareholders as Bitfinex), struggling for bank accounts, was using some less…

Binance DEX The Binance decentralised exchange (DEX) was released on the 23rd of April having been highly anticipated by the industry. Decentralised exchanges are trading platforms which do not custody funds and confirm trades via a consensus mechanism. The Binance DEX is built on a dedicated blockchain - called Binance…

Wettbewerb ums beste geld Me neither......it means "Competition for the best money". That was the headline in Switzerland this week. The former Chief Economist of the Swiss National Bank arguing that negative interest rates and unlimited QE are destroying existing currencies. He points out, that the continuation of negative interest…

Bitcoin price spike Returning briefly to bitcoin's price spike last week. A lot of questions about this, so here is a summary of what happened. Three buy orders for 7,000 BTC each were placed very late US time on 1st April. In total, those orders were just 0.1% of ultimate total…

Bitmain We flagged some difficulties at Bitmain a few weeks ago and they have now confirmed their listing is cancelled. Bitmain was the king of bitcoin miners up to one year ago but a number of missteps has caused them to incur substantial losses. As a reminder, they invested heavily…

News on main street For those of you that follow counter-indicators, here's a good one for you: Headline from Barron's in early December 2017, "Bitcoin Storms Wall Street". The price reached and all time high 14 days later. On March 22, 2019, they declared "Wall Street is backing away from…

Bitcoin Meets Real Estate This week saw Australian real estate powerhouse L.J. Hooker making a move in the blockchain space, organising an auction with cryptocurrency specialists NuYen. The auction will make purchasing the Casuarina Beach property possible in both Bitcoin and Binance coin, and lay the groundwork for future crypto-based…

Fidelity Fidelity's digital asset platform finally went live this week with a select group of clients. Minimal fanfare, the official line was "we will continue to roll out slowly to eligible clients".  Great to have them on board, they have $2.46tn of assets under management, which alone is 40x the…

Square Square reported their earnings for Q4 18 this week. Most surprising was the growth in their bitcoin sales in the final quarter. The activity of square alone represented 6% of the total new supply of bitcoin in the quarter.  When the halvening comes in April 2020, the emission of…

Binance Binance is the largest crypto-exchange in the world by volume. They went from start-up to the biggest in the world in the space of about nine months, without any bank account or legal entity. Impressive stuff. This week they launched the testnet for the Binance de-centralised exchange which will…

Something different this week, with a tour of the bitcoin blockchain. Some key charts, which will illustrate the progress in the ecosystem since last year. Transactions rising We looked a few weeks ago at the bitcoin hash rate, which has risen 20% this year after a steep decline in Q4.…

Dorsey goes long bitcoin There are a good number of famous crypto-disciples but probably none more than Jack Dorsey. The thing with Dorsey is he actually owns platforms that can make use of cryptocurrencies if he chooses to integrate them. Starting with Square, the payments processing platform. Dorsey said last…

Fidelity We talked last year about Fidelity launching products in the crypto market. Fidelity gave a progress updated this week announcing that they are in the final stages of testing their custody and trading product, their full release can be found here. Restricted to institutions and family offices at first…

Maker DAO Launched in late 2017 the MakerDAO protocol is a decentralized stablecoin system that doubles as a collateralized lending platform on Ethereum. The system functions by allowing individuals to take out collateralized debt positions (CDPs) against their Ethereum holdings, issuing the stablecoin DAI in return. Maker has quickly become…

Gemini Dollar Back in September 2018, the Winklevoss brothers launched Gemini dollar a stable coin linked to the USD. Gemini is now widely accepted at cryptocurrency exchanges around the world and seems likely to take over from Tether (the first USD stable coin) at some point. There wasn't much excitement…

And Why Markets are still immature Some interesting action in privacy coin markets today as a new currency took centre stage thanks to a severe code bug. MimbleWimble based privacy coin Beam saw its blockchain halted, as miners began improperly propagating invalid blocks. Beam has only been live on mainnet since…

UX Meets Lightning For anyone who follows our social media, you would have seen our previous writing on the current user experience of the Lightning network (for those who haven’t, look here). In that article, we wrote about the Casa node solution that had recently been released — and how its UX…

51% attack The big news this week surrounded Ethereum Classic (the original Ethereum blockhain). ETC was subject to what's known as a 51% attack where someone with sufficient processing power can effectively take over the chain and re-write recent transactions claiming ownership of coins for themselves. In the end, the…

Welcome back Welcome back to the weekly update from ListedReserve. Looking forward to 2019 with plenty in prospect for the blockchain space. Let's take a look at what's in store. Bakkt Exchange We featured the Bakkt exchange in our last update. They announced in a blog post on 31 December…

Blockchain in space Sound far fetched? Well it is real. Blockstream have had satellites orbiting the earth transmitting the bitcoin blockchain to users for a few months now, announcing this week that the coverage now includes Asia and Australia. The idea is you can connect to the bitcoin blockchain, spend,…

Lightning strikes The lightning network continues to grow despite the crypto gloom. The recent acceleration in terms of money in the network is impressive. That's happening for a number of reasons, firstly more and more apps are starting to use lightning and secondly, wallets that simplify the UX are now being…

Switzerland The Swiss Stock Exchange recently approved an exchange traded product known as the Amun Crypto Basket (a tracker of the top 5 cryptos). Very encouraging volume in the early days of trading versus other commodity type products since launch. Also, trade seems to be institution dominated. We need more…

They think its all over.......... ......but it wasn't, for Amazon, whose stock price from 1997 to 2000 is in the graph above . A stock price now in excess of $1,500. The thing is, it takes time for new technologies to take hold. Consumer habits need to adjust, infrastructure needs…

Market volatility We mentioned sharp price declines last week, they have continued this week with bitcoin down to $4,500 as we write. For newcomers this can feel alarming but the following context for bitcoin drawdowns might be helpful 1) Sep 2010 to Oct 2010: -94.1% ($0.17 to $.01) 2) Jun 2011…

Tumultuous times for Bitcoin Cash Outright war for the control of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) this week (BCH was created from the original fork of bitcoin on in August 2017). Fascinating stuff with the world’s largest miner Bitmain involved in protecting the major investment they are believed to have in BCH.…

Serenity Now! 2018 was a tumultuous year for Ethereum, as the leading blockchain smart contract platform went through both impressive growth and extended stagnation. ICOs were the major driver of volatility earlier in the year, with projects raising on Ethereum in order to fund their development. As the year went…

If you’ve been following our social media, you’d have seen our optimism about the development of the Bitcoin Lightning network. Back in June, we released an article summarising the functionality and the current state of Lightning, but the progress in volume and technology since has been nothing short of remarkable. Amongst…

Why regulators are not avant-garde IMF Chief Christine Lagarde gave a speech last week at the Singapore Fintech Festival that was based around digital currencies. Her speech followed a well trodden path for regulators views on digital currency, where the benefits of decentralised currencies are dismissed or outright ignored for…

The Wright Way? In what has been a relatively flat period for the rest of the market, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) has been at the centre of an increasingly controversial hard fork debate. The division of the community and subsequent development from that has been an incredibly interesting case study in how…

One of the major characteristics driving innovation in blockchain is the prevalence of open source projects. Making protocol code accessible to community developers has seen massive acceleration in the technological development of networks. Whilst this system may be good for the development and evolution of protocol technology, it hasn’t been…

A key driver of liquidity and value in the blockchain technology space is the development of interchain operability. With so many powerful blockchains being developed and deployed for different use cases, the potential for a bridging system that efficiently connects blockchains together is massive. We will provide a quick overview…

Weapon’s Grade Privacy A recent hard fork in the privacy network Monero has seen the implementation of its Bulletproof Update. The update has generated a lot of interest in the Monero community, as it provides a clear improvement in the scalability of the network. We will unpack the technical portion of the…

You may have seen a recent announcement regarding the launch of Blockstream’s new Protocol called “Liquid”. In development since 2015, the Liquid Protocol represents part of a paradigm shift in blockchain. With major networks experiencing scalability and efficiency issues, developers and investors have looked to the potential of layer-2 sidechain based solutions…

One of the fundamental aspects of blockchain design is the development of blockchain governance mechanisms. Blockchain governance, in simple terms, is the mechanism by which design changes are enacted on a blockchain. A governance system which encourages the ability to adapt and evolve to change is key in a blockchain…

Is the future of blockchain at stake? A considerable amount of debate in the blockchain space has been focused on the comparison between the proof of work and proof of stake algorithms. Progress in the efficiency and scalability of blockchains relies on the speed and security of their consensus algorithms. These…

One of major hurdles to online commerce today is the difficultly in empowering individuals to control their own online information, including proving their identity. The potential for smart contracts and their associated platforms to provide a secure and efficient way to manage digital identity is a major source of investment…

One of the key challenges for many blockchain projects is their ability to demonstrate non-trivial use cases outside of basic financial transactions. A major use case being explored by a number of blockchain platforms is the application of smart contracts in traditional supply chains. A typical supply chain describes the…

In part one of the ListedReserve smart contract series, we explored the potential for a blockchain based smart contract to serve as the basis for trustless financial transactions involving digital assets. One key application of this potential is in decentralised exchanges (DEXs), where smart contracts are used as the basis…

In part one of the ListedReserve Smart Contract series, we examined how Smart Contracts at their most basic level could provide powerful frameworks for financial transactions. This article will explore the functionality of smart contracts as a fund raising device for innovation, namely the ability of smart contracts to create…

So, you’ve heard about bitcoin, decentralised digital currency with the potential to disrupt traditional financial systems. You’re wondering how a blockchain based decentralised system can extend its capabilities beyond simple peer to peer cryptocurrency transfers? The answer to that lies in what many call blockchain 2.0, the implementation of Smart…

A short video below demonstrating a transaction on bitcoin’s lightning network. The network continues to grow and we are watching closely to see how it progresses over the next few months. The speed of transaction execution is impressive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QUbpNPGcGY Lightning faces various challenges, not least around security and its ability…

Normally when we talk about remote nodes, it’s IT speak. Well here’s a great site that can show you some geographically remote bitcoin nodes. https://bitnodes.earn.com/ I had a look through for the most remote node in Australia (home country of ListedReserve). The node (which isn’t always on) appears to be…

By way of background, the idea of Tether is that it has parity with the USD to facilitate blockchain transactions. Sending Tether to a crypto-exchange is far easier and faster than sending USD and the user can theoretically hold Tether and have confidence in its 1 for 1 value with…

The bitcoin scaling debate has died down a bit in recent times but it remains a very real issue for the technology and long term adoption of both bitcoin and other coins.  The argument boils down to this; we can make block sizes bigger, process more transactions and scale more…

For most people its probably hard to visualize how a decentralized system works in practice. These short videos show how a bitcoin block propagates across nodes globally over the course of the a few seconds after a block is published to the blockchain. The most amazing thing is the progress…