- This one is David’s fault, though Amy did bits.
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Valuing cryptocurrencies is complicated by a number of factors. First, cryptocurrencies have no inherent value.” — Judge John T. Dorsey in the FTX bankruptcy
Bitcoin has been artificially pumped to almost $100,000 per BTC! Amazing what 9 billion pseudodollars deployed on Binance just since the US election can do, hey?
So I’m getting press questions and I guess it’s time to make this post yet again.
Time to go all-in on bitcoin!
Retail bitcoin trading — ordinary people paying actual dollars for bitcoins — hasn’t recovered. I am confident in stating that this pump is the pump it looks like.
The thing you need to look at is not the price number, but the retail trading volumes against actual dollars. You can see these in Coinbase’s 10-Q filings. The price is up, but the dollar volumes remain down.
If you deploy sufficient fake dollars, you can make the price do all sorts of things. It’s even easier when retail trading is so thin.
The main hazard for the pumpers is that people want to cash out eventually and volume is so thin that doing so crashes the price.
But I should buy in, right? Right?
Can the pumpers get another bubble started? Well, I have otherwise-sensible people asking me if maybe this is a good time to get some BTC in.
So I fear the forces of grift could indeed crank this stupidity engine hard enough.
When you’ve just heard about a fresh price peak, that’s absolutely the time to go all-in! That’s how you buy high and sell low in this business.
Should you go for a nice swim in the shark pool built by the sharks on the assumption that you will definitely be a better shark than they are?
If you must do something so foolish as buying crypto, get ETF shares — that’s the least-unsafe method. And you’re vastly more likely to be able to cash out successfully, sell when it’s dropping or short it effectively.
At least I’ll sell some more books.
(Currently writing some book-like text on the AI bubble, with minimal crypto. I also have some book-like text on smart city scams, which has rather more bitcoins in it.)
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AWS, not quite on the blockchain
Amazon Web Services is sunsetting its Quantum Ledger Database as of July 31, 2025.
QLDB was announced in 2018 and launched in 2019 on early blockchain hype. It wasn’t quite a blockchain, but it did keep a cryptographically authenticated log of changes to your data. [Amazon, 2019]
QLDB did have some actual customers who really needed a database with a full audit log of data changes — but evidently not enough of them.
It’s almost unheard of for AWS to shut down a service. Usually they keep every service running forever, but just raise the price to get users to move to something else.
QLDB reportedly had performance problems — which suggests they used an actual blockchain somewhere in it and the performance issues weren’t fixable.
AWS’ suggested upgrade path is Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL — which also does audit logs. So as usual, the answer to which database is: just use Postgres. [AWS; AWS; Reddit]
Australian securities, absolutely not on the blockchain
Use a blockchain, they said. Fabulous efficiency, they said. Will revolutionize stock trading in Australia, they said.
After the ASX spent seven years and AUD$250 million on their failed effort to replace their old CHESS trading system with a blockchain, their regulator, ASIC, is not letting them go “lol whoops never mind” and is suing them. [ASIC; Concise statement, PDF; Originating process, PDF; case timeline, PDF]
ASIC is particularly annoyed at ASX claiming in early 2022 that the blockchain project was “on-track for go-live” in April 2023 and was “progressing well” when it absolutely wasn’t.
The ASX CHESS system is critical infrastructure for the Australian economy and is precisely the sort of thing regulators get tetchy about.
Elmer Funke-Kupper, the ASX CEO at the time, commissioned the project in 2016, though he left shortly after — but Dominic Stevens was CEO for years of this dumb thing and should absolutely suffer career damage at minimum. Wow, you’re the guy who did that.
Totally wired
We’ve been busy with Pivot To AI — still making a post each and every day! — though crypto stories keep falling out of the AI coverage because it’s quite a lot of literally the same grifters. We have a draft in progress on one right now, and it’s as dumb as you would expect.
If you want to follow the minutiae of crypto news, we heartily recommend signing up for Molly White’s newsletter. [Citation Needed]
Nicholas Weaver: OFAC the Ransomware Gangs. Nicholas suggests it’s time for OFAC to designate every ransomware gang by default. Nicholas’ previous essay on what the US government should do to crypto mixers was implemented pretty much as he said on Tornado Cash, so let’s see which regulators are listening this time. [Lawfare]
I was quoted in July on how Labour’s big win in the UK election affected crypto. I said that nobody on any side of the UK government cared any more. I’m pretty sure this is still true in November. [CryptoNews]
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Hi, David
Can you please share your thoughts on Microstrategy?
It has been raising a lot of money via share and CB issuance and some people believe it will soon be included into the major indexes given its ballooning market cap. Once that happens, there will be automatic index funds buying.
We think MSTR is ridiculous and don’t understand its appeal at all. As Matt Levine says, it’s basically a big pile of bitcoins. So functionally it’s a close-ended bitcoin fund like Grayscale GBTC used to be. Now we have proper bitcoin ETFs, it makes no sense anyone is still buying into this thing. But it’s the second Trump era, so indexes? Sure!