Captain Ripples

The real reason the US is invading Venezuela goes back to a deal Henry Kissinger made with Saudi Arabia in 1974. And I'm going to explain why this is actually about the SURVIVAL of the US dollar itself. Not drugs. Not terrorism. Not "democracy." This is about the petrodollar system that has kept America the dominant economic power for 50 years. And Venezuela just threatened to end it. Here's what really just happened: Venezuela has 303 billion barrels of proven oil reserves. The largest on Earth. More than Saudi Arabia. 20% of the entire world's oil. But here's the part that matters: Venezuela was actively selling that oil in Chinese yuan. Not dollars. In 2018, Venezuela announced it would "free itself from the dollar." They started accepting yuan, euros, rubles, anything BUT dollars for oil. They were petitioning to join BRICS. They were building direct payment channels with China that bypass SWIFT entirely. And they were sitting on enough oil to fund de-dollarization for decades. Why does this matter? Because the entire American financial system is built on one thing: The petrodollar. In 1974, Henry Kissinger made a deal with Saudi Arabia: All oil sold globally must be priced in US dollars. In exchange, America provides military protection. This single agreement created artificial demand for dollars worldwide. Every country on Earth needs dollars to buy oil. This lets America print unlimited money while other countries work for it. It funds the military. The welfare state. The deficit spending. The petrodollar is more important to US hegemony than aircraft carriers. And there's a pattern of what happens to leaders who challenge it: 2000: Saddam Hussein announces Iraq will sell oil in euros instead of dollars. 2003: Invaded. Regime change. Iraq's oil immediately switched back to dollars. Saddam lynched. The WMDs were never found because they never existed. 2009: Gaddafi proposes a gold-backed African currency called the "gold dinar" for oil trade. Hillary Clinton's own leaked emails confirm this was the PRIMARY reason for intervention. Email quote: "This gold was intended to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar." 2011: NATO bombs Libya. Gaddafi sodomized and murdered. Libya now has open slave markets. "We came, we saw, he died!" Clinton laughed on camera. The gold dinar died with him. And now Maduro. With FIVE TIMES more oil than Saddam and Gaddafi combined. Actively selling in yuan. Building payment systems outside dollar control. Petitioning to join BRICS. Partnered with China, Russia, and Iran. The three countries leading global de-dollarization. This isn't coincidence. Challenge the petrodollar. Get regime changed. Every. Single. Time. Stephen Miller (US homeland security advisor) literally said it out loud two weeks ago: "American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela. Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property." He's not hiding it. They're claiming Venezuelan oil BELONGS to America because US companies developed it 100 years ago. By this logic, every nationalized resource in history was "theft." But here's the DEEPER problem: The petrodollar is already dying. Russia sells oil in rubles and yuan since Ukraine. Saudi Arabia is openly discussing yuan settlements. Iran has been trading in non-dollar currencies for years. China built CIPS, their own alternative to SWIFT with 4,800 banks in 185 countries. BRICS is actively building payment systems that bypass the dollar entirely. The mBridge project lets central banks settle trades instantly in local currencies. Venezuela joining BRICS with 303 billion barrels of oil would accelerate this exponentially. That's what this invasion is really about. Not stopping drugs. Venezuela accounts for less than 1% of US cocaine. Not terrorism. There's zero evidence Maduro runs a "terror organization." Not democracy. The US supports Saudi Arabia, which has zero elections. This is about maintaining a 50-year-old agreement that lets America print money while the world works for it. And the consequences are terrifying: Russia, China, and Iran are already denouncing this as "armed aggression." China is Venezuela's biggest oil customer. They're losing billions. BRICS nations are watching a country get invaded for trading outside the dollar. Every nation considering de-dollarization just got the message: Challenge the dollar and we will bomb you. But here's the problem... That message might accelerate de-dollarization, not stop it. Because now every country in the Global South knows what happens if you threaten dollar hegemony. And they're realizing the only protection is to move FASTER. The timing is insane too: January 3rd, 2026. Venezuela invaded. Maduro captured. January 3rd, 1990. Panama invaded. Noriega captured. 36 years apart. Almost to the day. Same playbook. Same "drug trafficking" excuse. Same real reason: control of strategic resources and trade routes. History doesn't repeat. But it rhymes. What happens next: Trump's press conference at Mar-a-Lago sets the narrative. US oil companies are already lined up. Politico reported they've been approached about "returning to Venezuela." The opposition will be installed. Oil will flow in dollars again. Venezuela becomes another Iraq. Another Libya. But here's what nobody's asking: What happens when you can no longer bomb your way to dollar dominance? When China has enough economic leverage to retaliate? When BRICS controls 40% of global GDP and says "no more dollars"? When the world realizes the petrodollar is maintained by violence? America just showed its hand. The question is whether the rest of the world folds or calls the bluff. Because this invasion is an admission that the dollar can no longer compete on its own merits. When you have to bomb countries to keep them using your currency, the currency is already dying. Venezuela isn't the beginning. It's the desperate end. What do you think?

The Bitcoin "4-Year Cycle" is a mirage and a lie—always has been. Watch this short video in full to break the spell. Credit: alpha waves (YT Channel)

A lot of people have been asking for an update on this chart, so I’ll just leave this here for anyone who needs to see it.   This shows the average BTC trajectory following an oversold RSI reading, with RSI falling below 30 at t=0.   So far, it’s been pretty bang on.   Unless you believe the 4-year cycle is still in play, which we don’t, this chart should hold up contextually over time. No, it won’t be perfect, but assuming the bull market isn’t already over, it’s a useful chart to keep in mind.   As we’ve outlined many times, based on our work on the business cycle, the current path of financial conditions, and our expectations for overall liquidity, the balance of probabilities is that this cycle extends well into 2026.   In that world, the 4-year cycle is dead.   Remember, the 4-year cycle was never about the halving, despite widespread belief that it is, but instead has always been driven by the public debt refinancing cycle, as outlined in our work at GMI, which post-COVID was pushed out by one year. In our view, the 4-year cycle is now officially broken because the weighted average maturity of the debt term structure has increased. And the bigger picture is that there is still a vast amount of interest expense that needs to be monetized, which has far exceeded GDP growth. Another thing to keep in mind is that bases can take time to form and usually come with plenty of chop before the bigger up-move kicks in. Finally, let me repeat what I said when I first posted this chart last month.   If you think the bull market is over and we are now facing twelve months of pain, this chart is not for you. Move along...

1/ On Losing Faith Is it over? Was it all a fever dream? Have we run out of steam? Is it time to pivot to AI for real this time? 2/ Everything is dead? BTC: DAT premiums down, nobody cares ETH: Stablecoin Alts: Crushed NFTs: Right click saved Meme coins: As expected tbh Zcash: Pumping! which ofc means "cycle is over" 3/ This is the worst cryptotwitter timeline I have ever seen relative to the environment. Nobody is attacking us, USA is being reasonable and rational, no CEX has run away with our money, and yet, dead, dead, dead. No narrative, no spark, nothing. 4/ Why? I read the timeline and it tells me: a/"nobody owns BTC" (odd, I mean someone has to own BTC, there is a ton of BTC) and b/ "the gamblers have liquidated themselves (again)" - true, but it was always like this 5/ This TL feels different. This does not feel like "fuck I got liquidated", it feels like malaise, tiredness. Like boredom, to be honest. I know you think it is the price action but the price action is obviously downstream from psychology. 6/ I have a different view of what is going on. I think almost everyone forgot what matters, chased after things that did not matter and, we are in the process of discovering they don't matter. 7/ What matters? Only decentralization, only permissionlessness. Nothing else matters at all. Everything else about crypto is WORSE than a centralized database and always will be because that is how computers work. 8/ In my view, basically everyone "major" except vitalik has strayed from the light on this. Let's start with Team BTC which USED to be very interested in how to build a network that become nation-state resistant. This was the BTC of Antonopoulos, of Lopp 9/ We are 5 years into the BTC of Saylor and that BTC is 100% about driving price action. It is about driving flows to BTC, about getting fully integrated with the USA financial system. 10/ It sounds nice, it sounds better than the system beating us with a big stick, but the net effect is that more and more BTC ends up in Coinbase Custody in New York State Nothing wrong with that, but none of that BTC is nation-state resistant. It is 100% non-resistant to the US government specifically. 11/ The problem with this is that with permissionlessness off the table, the only thing left to drive purchases of BTC is FOMO. "there are only 21M, they are going to run out, you need to buy some before others do and it goes exponential" 12/ I mean, maybe that is true. I am not making price predictions, I still own BTC and always will I think. But it is cringe, and it is wrong. 13/ You can think about this by taking it to the extreme case and trying to understand which of the two scenarios adds value to the world. 14/ Scenario A: Blackrock owns all 21M BTC, everyone on planet earth owns shares in the Blackrock ETF and Brian Armstrong is in charge of making sure we don't lose Our Precious Scenario B: Everyone on earth has their own BTC wallet and BTC is distributed in several billion places around the world and it is literally impossible for any government to stop BTC 15/ In Scenario A, BTC is a complete and utter failure. It is just a pet rock. Yes it is "rare" but it is also "100% seize-able by the USA government" At which point, it might as well be an IOU from the USA government that it pinky-swears is rare 16/ "but it is not like this because other nation-states are accumulating and game theory blah blah blah" No my brothers and sisters. The exact scenario where your BTC get seized is a) centralized and b) hyperbitcoinization Maybe the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve is happening and it is your ETF and $STRATEGY (TM) capital stack all along (thank you for your contribution to our national security) 17/ To be clear, nobody is seizing your BTC (let alone your ETH) now because it is not important enough yet. But, if it was, I dunno, I would not trust those centralized vehicles. CEO, Board, shareholders, SEC, US government, state government, custody firm, their regulators all have an angle of attack on a DAT. 18/ If USA seizes BTC, other countries won't save you: EU: "Thank god our dreams have come true, we can ban it also" UAE: "grumble grumble, but fine we will go along" China: "ban. unban. ban. unban. anyway so long as currency is not free-floating, BTC won't be free here" Russia: "someone falls out of a window" 19/ Of course, BTC in ETFs is by no means the worst of it. The "crypto's main use is a casino" crowd is the worst. This is not a zero-sum game, it is a negative sum game because it is rigged. 20/ "what about the JPGs huh?" -> I still love them. The best ones are the best tokens in the world by far, rare, suffused with meaning, with no external dependencies and great to hold on-chain. And beyond the art JPGs, I think that NFTs can do many more things, but this is on me to "show, not tell" 21/ I want to circle back to BTC because it is the easiest to reason about. When people explained to me time and time again that it was a ponzi, I had a simple explanation of why it is not. 21/ BTC lets you do some things better than the existing system. "be sovereign over your money" or "send money to anyone on the planet within minutes" or "maintain an insurance policy against the existing financial system" 22/ I could not tell you how much value this had, but I knew it was not zero. In fact, the value went up the more people used it, the bigger the network was, the more people you could transact with, the more resilient it was to government censorship. These are the economics of a network system, not of a ponzi. 23/ If you take this away, if you stop building a network but instead just, at the extreme, just sell everyone shares of the ETF, well there is no network, there is no incremental network value being generated by the next buyer. 24/ In this model, BTC becomes more ponzi-like. If a new participant does not make the network stronger by joining, they are not adding value, therefore there is a fixed pie and it is just value transfer to an existing holder. 25/ Again, take it to the extreme other direction -> assume we managed to move the whole economy to decentralized rails. I think that world would be better, it would make better decisions, it would take advantage of the wisdom of crowds, there would be more transparency, less rent-seeking and the aggregate value of the world goes up because it is more productive. Some % of the improved value of the world will get captured by the early participants to the network (which is normal and fair) but some % will be captured by everyone (as a late participant or consumer). 26/ But if we don't make the world better, if the world is exactly what it is, but also we play with a pet rock, this will not happen and, well, eventually playing with pet rocks gets very boring 27/ So what to do? The same things you always should do: a/ push yourself, and by extension, the world an inch, a foot, a mile down the pathway of decentralization. many ways to do this, it is a journey, start today. b/ remember, you, yes, you in the mirror have no business trading perps or day-trading stupid coins. you are bad at it and your future self will be mad at your current self. 28/ If you must do it, carve out a budget and test how great you are across the cycle with your budget (1%, 5%, 10%, 20% of your portfolio, not all of it) I am of course a dinosaur, but my total portfolio % of "putting money into stupid coins I have been FOMOed into it" is less than 1%. It has gone about as well as you might expect. 29/ Other than that, own some BTC, some ETH, some NFTs (good ones, that you like) in a self-custodial wallet, a small number of your favorite alts if you must. And keep your job. Earn money, don't try to be a pro crypto trader, this is an imaginary job that only cobie and like 5 other people are qualified for. I have always worked, every single day of my adult life. You should too. 30/ Crypto is a bad way to get rich quick, but a decent way to get rich slowly. In any case, you should have some stake in the decentralized world, in the digital world. 31/ I think in the end, "it" will be OK but "it" it not everything, it is not most things. As it always was, most coins will go to zero, most NFTs will go to zero. These are the rules of the game. 32/ Most of you are young. You have time, you have time into the ASI world, you have the greatest gift and wealth of all. You will be ok. 33/ Don't mope. It does not help anything. If you are bummed out, sad about your outcomes, there is only one sure thing that helps. Get back to working. 34/ Even if you are young, life is short, your life is the important thing, money is just a game, just a tool, just an information system. Don't anchor to your wealth, don't anchor to your ATH, it is not real, my ATH wealth has gone down 90% multiple times. Note it and just keep going. If you are healthy, in a decent country, in a half-decent economic situation, you are better off than almost anyone who has ever lived 35/ If you have an opinion (even a dumb one) about Monad or Grifters, you are in the 0.001% most forward thinking people in the world. Did you make a "mistake"? Who cares, everyone makes mistakes - keep going, keep trying, keep making mistakes, eventually you will find your way, you will get a win. This is how it goes. 36/ use a hardware wallet and even better a SAFE 37/ and to close again with the most important thing. decentralization is the only thing that matters. if you go in that direction, if we go in that direction, in the end, it will be ok. i have no doubt about this, i have never had any doubts about this, it matters so much more than you think it does. /the end

1/ On Losing Faith Is it over? Was it all a fever dream? Have we run out of steam? Is it time to pivot to AI for real this time? 2/ Everything is dead? BTC: DAT premiums down, nobody cares ETH: Stablecoin Alts: Crushed NFTs: Right click saved Meme coins: As expected tbh Zcash: Pumping! which ofc means "cycle is over" 3/ This is the worst cryptotwitter timeline I have ever seen relative to the environment. Nobody is attacking us, USA is being reasonable and rational, no CEX has run away with our money, and yet, dead, dead, dead. No narrative, no spark, nothing. 4/ Why? I read the timeline and it tells me: a/"nobody owns BTC" (odd, I mean someone has to own BTC, there is a ton of BTC) and b/ "the gamblers have liquidated themselves (again)" - true, but it was always like this 5/ This TL feels different. This does not feel like "fuck I got liquidated", it feels like malaise, tiredness. Like boredom, to be honest. I know you think it is the price action but the price action is obviously downstream from psychology. 6/ I have a different view of what is going on. I think almost everyone forgot what matters, chased after things that did not matter and, we are in the process of discovering they don't matter. 7/ What matters? Only decentralization, only permissionlessness. Nothing else matters at all. Everything else about crypto is WORSE than a centralized database and always will be because that is how computers work. 8/ In my view, basically everyone "major" except vitalik has strayed from the light on this. Let's start with Team BTC which USED to be very interested in how to build a network that become nation-state resistant. This was the BTC of Antonopoulos, of Lopp 9/ We are 5 years into the BTC of Saylor and that BTC is 100% about driving price action. It is about driving flows to BTC, about getting fully integrated with the USA financial system. 10/ It sounds nice, it sounds better than the system beating us with a big stick, but the net effect is that more and more BTC ends up in Coinbase Custody in New York State Nothing wrong with that, but none of that BTC is nation-state resistant. It is 100% non-resistant to the US government specifically. 11/ The problem with this is that with permissionlessness off the table, the only thing left to drive purchases of BTC is FOMO. "there are only 21M, they are going to run out, you need to buy some before others do and it goes exponential" 12/ I mean, maybe that is true. I am not making price predictions, I still own BTC and always will I think. But it is cringe, and it is wrong. 13/ You can think about this by taking it to the extreme case and trying to understand which of the two scenarios adds value to the world. 14/ Scenario A: Blackrock owns all 21M BTC, everyone on planet earth owns shares in the Blackrock ETF and Brian Armstrong is in charge of making sure we don't lose Our Precious Scenario B: Everyone on earth has their own BTC wallet and BTC is distributed in several billion places around the world and it is literally impossible for any government to stop BTC 15/ In Scenario A, BTC is a complete and utter failure. It is just a pet rock. Yes it is "rare" but it is also "100% seize-able by the USA government" At which point, it might as well be an IOU from the USA government that it pinky-swears is rare 16/ "but it is not like this because other nation-states are accumulating and game theory blah blah blah" No my brothers and sisters. The exact scenario where your BTC get seized is a) centralized and b) hyperbitcoinization Maybe the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve is happening and it is your ETF and $STRATEGY (TM) capital stack all along (thank you for your contribution to our national security) 17/ To be clear, nobody is seizing your BTC (let alone your ETH) now because it is not important enough yet. But, if it was, I dunno, I would not trust those centralized vehicles. CEO, Board, shareholders, SEC, US government, state government, custody firm, their regulators all have an angle of attack on a DAT. 18/ If USA seizes BTC, other countries won't save you: EU: "Thank god our dreams have come true, we can ban it also" UAE: "grumble grumble, but fine we will go along" China: "ban. unban. ban. unban. anyway so long as currency is not free-floating, BTC won't be free here" Russia: "someone falls out of a window" 19/ Of course, BTC in ETFs is by no means the worst of it. The "crypto's main use is a casino" crowd is the worst. This is not a zero-sum game, it is a negative sum game because it is rigged. 20/ "what about the JPGs huh?" -> I still love them. The best ones are the best tokens in the world by far, rare, suffused with meaning, with no external dependencies and great to hold on-chain. And beyond the art JPGs, I think that NFTs can do many more things, but this is on me to "show, not tell" 21/ I want to circle back to BTC because it is the easiest to reason about. When people explained to me time and time again that it was a ponzi, I had a simple explanation of why it is not. 21/ BTC lets you do some things better than the existing system. "be sovereign over your money" or "send money to anyone on the planet within minutes" or "maintain an insurance policy against the existing financial system" 22/ I could not tell you how much value this had, but I knew it was not zero. In fact, the value went up the more people used it, the bigger the network was, the more people you could transact with, the more resilient it was to government censorship. These are the economics of a network system, not of a ponzi. 23/ If you take this away, if you stop building a network but instead just, at the extreme, just sell everyone shares of the ETF, well there is no network, there is no incremental network value being generated by the next buyer. 24/ In this model, BTC becomes more ponzi-like. If a new participant does not make the network stronger by joining, they are not adding value, therefore there is a fixed pie and it is just value transfer to an existing holder. 25/ Again, take it to the extreme other direction -> assume we managed to move the whole economy to decentralized rails. I think that world would be better, it would make better decisions, it would take advantage of the wisdom of crowds, there would be more transparency, less rent-seeking and the aggregate value of the world goes up because it is more productive. Some % of the improved value of the world will get captured by the early participants to the network (which is normal and fair) but some % will be captured by everyone (as a late participant or consumer). 26/ But if we don't make the world better, if the world is exactly what it is, but also we play with a pet rock, this will not happen and, well, eventually playing with pet rocks gets very boring 27/ So what to do? The same things you always should do: a/ push yourself, and by extension, the world an inch, a foot, a mile down the pathway of decentralization. many ways to do this, it is a journey, start today. b/ remember, you, yes, you in the mirror have no business trading perps or day-trading stupid coins. you are bad at it and your future self will be mad at your current self. 28/ If you must do it, carve out a budget and test how great you are across the cycle with your budget (1%, 5%, 10%, 20% of your portfolio, not all of it) I am of course a dinosaur, but my total portfolio % of "putting money into stupid coins I have been FOMOed into it" is less than 1%. It has gone about as well as you might expect. 29/ Other than that, own some BTC, some ETH, some NFTs (good ones, that you like) in a self-custodial wallet, a small number of your favorite alts if you must. And keep your job. Earn money, don't try to be a pro crypto trader, this is an imaginary job that only cobie and like 5 other people are qualified for. I have always worked, every single day of my adult life. You should too. 30/ Crypto is a bad way to get rich quick, but a decent way to get rich slowly. In any case, you should have some stake in the decentralized world, in the digital world. 31/ I think in the end, "it" will be OK but "it" it not everything, it is not most things. As it always was, most coins will go to zero, most NFTs will go to zero. These are the rules of the game. 32/ Most of you are young. You have time, you have time into the ASI world, you have the greatest gift and wealth of all. You will be ok. 33/ Don't mope. It does not help anything. If you are bummed out, sad about your outcomes, there is only one sure thing that helps. Get back to working. 34/ Even if you are young, life is short, your life is the important thing, money is just a game, just a tool, just an information system. Don't anchor to your wealth, don't anchor to your ATH, it is not real, my ATH wealth has gone down 90% multiple times. Note it and just keep going. If you are healthy, in a decent country, in a half-decent economic situation, you are better off than almost anyone who has ever lived 35/ If you have an opinion (even a dumb one) about Monad or Grifters, you are in the 0.001% most forward thinking people in the world. Did you make a "mistake"? Who cares, everyone makes mistakes - keep going, keep trying, keep making mistakes, eventually you will find your way, you will get a win. This is how it goes. 36/ use a hardware wallet and even better a SAFE 37/ and to close again with the most important thing. decentralization is the only thing that matters. if you go in that direction, if we go in that direction, in the end, it will be ok. i have no doubt about this, i have never had any doubts about this, it matters so much more than you think it does. /the end

NEWS: A California judge ruled Bored Ape NFTs are not securities, tossing the class-action suit against Yuga Labs Unlike Top Shot & DraftKings, BAYC was sold on 3rd-party marketplaces, and royalties weakened the “common enterprise” link Major precedent for NFT securities law