BTC Train

Investments (mostly Bitcoin), MBA, flying-ATP, grappling/TKD/MMA, travel, drones, trail runs, health. We have bitcoin now. Abolish the Fed

[BTC Train @AhnerMatt]

@nvk If tax money was not provided to these companies subsidizing their growth &protecting their market, then you’re right. That is not the case with AI, Space &Social Media companies. Therefore, for those #Trump is right. 🇺🇸 ppl should receive a piece of profit for their investment

[BTC Train @AhnerMatt]

@ScottBottomsCO Great job Scott!! 👏 👏 Godspeed!

[Natalie Brunell ⚡️ @natbrunell]

I met Ben Hunnewell at Strategy's conference and couldn't stop talking to him.

He once thought $STRC was "too good to be true." Now he calls it pivotal and made Prevalon Energy the first company to hold it.

We get into STRC, Strategy, Strive, $SATA and what Bitcoin critics get wrong. Plus, he teaches me about his expertise: battery energy storage systems, AI data center power consumption and more.

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Who is Ben Hunnewell of Prevalon Energy?
1:37 Turning a Bitcoin Skeptic Into a Believer 4:01
Why Own STRC?
10:41 Tracking Strive $ASST & SATA’s Revolutionary Daily Dividend Move
12:28 Why Are Daily Dividends a Big Deal?
13:33 Strategy STRC Dividends
18:13 Navigating Market Stress Events
19:49 Why People Love or Hate Strategy
23:11 Upgrading Corporate Credit Ratings
26:40 Battery Energy Storage Systems
30:44 Facts vs. Propaganda
35:35 Bitcoin Mining Using Waste Heat Energy
36:57 Smart vs. Unintelligent Green Transitions
40:11 Peak Shaving & Power Grid Arbitrage Operations
44:04 Best Way to Power the Future
47:55 AI Capex Growth: Is This a .com Bubble Replay?
51:54 China's Rare Earth Processing Monopoly
56:54 Hard Realities Facing Average Americans

[BTC Train @AhnerMatt]

@JohnStossel You mentioned the reason homes ARE more expensive &harder for avg Americans to buy but stopped & shrugged it off. it requires deep dive. Inflation siphons money from the value avg ppl can store from their earnings & gives it to banks. Fixed supply Bitcoin is the fix. End the Fed

[Rand Paul @RandPaul]

The scientists who wrote the "lab leak is a conspiracy theory" letter? They organized it themselves then told each other they needed "the appearance of independence."

Both were paid intel informants. Both worked with the Wuhan lab.

One scientist called it genetically engineered. Days later he wrote the opposite. Then got a $9 million grant.

No conspiracy required. Just people covering their own tracks.

[Forest Park Pharmacy @ForestParkPharm]

Tennessee just did what Congress can't.

They passed a law to break up the health insurance giants.

Specifically, they made it illegal for pharmacy benefit managers — the companies in charge of pharmacy insurance — and pharmacies to be owned by the same company.

That makes perfect sense.

For example: CVS Caremark is the PBM, and CVS is the pharmacy. So if you have Aetna insurance, you have CVS Caremark as your PBM, and they're going to do everything they can to make sure you use CVS as your pharmacy. Aetna, Caremark, CVS — all the same company.

That causes all kinds of incredibly obvious problems that this law hopes to fix.

If your insurance company is in charge of approving your medication, deciding how much to pay for it, AND deciding who gets that money — while also being the pharmacy that gets paid at the end — guess what happens to prices?

They go up.

Governor Lee signed the law last week. CVS immediately filed a federal lawsuit because they said it will force them to close all 136 stores they have in Tennessee.

Let that sink in.

I'm not sure most people realize what that says about CVS and health insurance in general. They had to choose between owning the middleman (the PBM) or the healthcare provider (the pharmacy).

Without hesitation, they chose the middleman.

The biggest pharmacy chain in the country — with a store on every corner — would drop all 136 of their Tennessee locations in a second if it means keeping their middleman business.

It is more profitable for them to be a health insurance middleman getting between you and your healthcare than it is to actually provide the healthcare.

That is the problem with healthcare in America.

We have made the middleman so powerful that they've taken complete control of the entire system. Three PBMs — Caremark, Express Scripts, and OptumRx — handle around 80% of all prescriptions in this country.

How on earth can we expect healthcare to work well and remain affordable if that's where the money is?

We all auto-pay our insurance straight out of our paycheck before we even see the money. And not surprisingly, they're keeping a ton of it.

That's why we fired them.

And they can't file a lawsuit to stop us.

That lets us offer fair, transparent prices. No PBMs. No insurance games. No hidden markups. You see the cost, you pay the cost.

[Simply Bitcoin @SimplyBitcoin]

Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh on CNBC:

"If you're under 40, Bitcoin is your new gold."

"With every passing day, it's getting new life as an alternative currency."

This is the Fed Chair. Not a Bitcoin podcast.

[Salvadoran Pride @SalvadoranPride]

Trying out the Nostr ride-share app in El Salvador. It gives 100% of the fare to the driver and accepts Bitcoin. 🇸🇻⚡

[Wall Street Mav @WallStreetMav]

If AI is cutting so many white collar jobs in tech, finance, call centers, and just about every sector of the economy ... why do we have ANY immigration visas still bringing in more people?

Shouldn't we be pushing active reduction in the current visa holders? Zero renewal visas.

[BTC Train @AhnerMatt]

@BTCtreasuries Even during the lowest interest rates of the last 15 years, 1.75% 30 years seems really low. How does an average American with very good credit get that rate?

[BTC Train @AhnerMatt]

Works well for me too

[Camus @newstart_2024]

Andrew Huberman’s sleep cocktail is a game changer.

Magnesium threonate + Apigenin + Theanine.
He says this combo shuts down racing thoughts, calms anxiety, and helps you fall asleep fast, all backed by solid science.

I’ve been using it myself and it actually works. Deeper sleep, no grogginess the next day.

When you’re wired from screens and stress, a simple, effective tool like this can seriously improve your recovery and energy.

Tried this stack yet, or what’s your go-to for better sleep?

[BTC Train @AhnerMatt]

@CraigBrockie Gut

[Mike Alfred @mikealfred]

Larry Fink likes Bitcoin. Donald Trump likes Bitcoin. Kevin Warsh likes Bitcoin. Scott Bessent likes Bitcoin. Stan Druckenmiller likes Bitcoin. Paul Tudor Jones likes Bitcoin. Elon Musk likes Bitcoin. And you and your uncle Joe think you're smart for not liking it? Get real.

[BTC Train @AhnerMatt]

Great explanation abt the problems credit rating agencies caused for $MSTR. @saylor ‘s masterful maneuvering around those obstacles and Avik Roy’s understanding shows me 1)much greater $BTC adoption is inevitable 2) $MSTR & $ASST are very underpriced

[Taylor @taylorbhurst]

This was always the long-term play for AI applications

And @HeyPuter (puter.js) allows you to do it!

https://t.co/MqgJy9xuee

[BitcoinTreasuries.NET @BTCtreasuries]

JUST IN: World's most profitable hedge fund Renaissance Technologies just disclosed it bought 1.17 million shares ($204.6 M) more of #Bitcoin treasury company Strategy $MSTR and now holds a total of 2.13 million shares ($371.5 million).

123% increase. They know what's coming👀🔥

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

Let me recap the earnings call. $MSTR

[Lightning News @LightningNewsX]

Instead of watching an hour of Netflix watch this 30 minutes lecture and learn more about bitcoin mining than most people working at top Bitcoin companies learn in their entire careers.

[Adam Livingston @AdamBLiv]

THE BANKERS ARE ABSOLUTELY LOSING IT

The American Bankers Association is, at this very moment, in a Washington conference room with the Bank Policy Institute, the Consumer Bankers Association, the Financial Services Forum, and the Independent Community Bankers of America, drafting a joint statement that says -and I want you to read this slowly - that letting people earn yield on a digital dollar would reduce farm loans by "one-fifth or more."

Five separate trade associations.

Five sets of lobbyists billing six figures an hour.

One coordinated press release.

All to protect a business model whose entire value proposition is: we'll hold your money, pay you 0.01%, lend it out at 7%, and if anything goes wrong the taxpayer eats it.

My dearest reader, the BANKS are TERRIFIED.

Let us briefly review their PRODUCT. Time to be honest about what a checking account is.

You hand a man your dollars. He gives you back a number on a screen. He takes the actual dollars and lends them to your neighbor at 7%.

He pays you nothing.

When his loan book detonates because he lent against an empty office tower in San Francisco, the FDIC writes a check funded by - surprise - the same dollars you handed him.

He gets a bonus.

You get a fee for using the ATM that isn't his.

THIS is the thing they are lobbying Congress to protect.

The moat is so shallow that a literal piece of code with no employees, no marble lobby, no tellers named Diane, and no quarterly earnings call is currently eating their lunch by doing the radical, unprecedented thing of paying you for the use of your own money.

And their response is to, OF COURSE, NOT COMPETE AT ALL.

Their response is to call their senator.

"It would reduce farm loans by 20%"

The ABA actually said this. Out loud. In a statement.

With their names on it.

A farmer in Iowa is currently being told by lobbyists in Washington that his ability to buy a combine depends on his neighbor not being allowed to earn 4% on a digital dollar.

The combine, apparently, is held together not by hydraulics but by the financial repression of the farmer's cousin who would otherwise move $8,000 from a checking account to USDC.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers, not exactly a den of cypherpunks, looked at this claim, did the math, and concluded the actual effect on lending would be 0.02%.

Correct. Two basis points. The ABA's response was that the White House had "studied the wrong question."

The wrong question. The question of whether the thing you said would happen would actually happen. That question. Wrong.

The right question, presumably, is "how do we keep this gravy train running for another forty years."

And on that question, I will grant them, they have done excellent work.

So here is the loophole they are fighting in Section 404, please brace yourself.

The proposed text says crypto firms can offer rewards for using a stablecoin - paying with it, transacting with it, doing literally anything with it - as long as they don't pay you for just sitting on it like a deposit.

The bank lobby's objection to this is that people might use the rewards to keep using stablecoins.

That is the loophole. The loophole is that customers might enjoy the product and continue using it.

This is, and I cannot stress this enough, the same logic as a restaurant lobbying Congress to ban credit card cashback because it "incentivizes the idle holding of credit cards."

Their actual quoted concern is "overtly incentivizing the idle holding of payment stablecoins for extended periods of time."

Yes, people might prefer the new thing to our thing. This is a Yelp review written by the competitor.

You want to know how cooked their model is?

Goldman Sachs, BNY, and Morgan Stanley have signaled they're fine with the compromise. Why?

Because they don't run retail. They don't have ten thousand suburban branches whose entire economic logic is paying grandma 0.40% on a money market while charging her grandson 24.99% on a credit card funded by grandma's deposits.

The institutions screaming loudest are the ones whose entire business is the spread.

The gap between what they pay you and what they charge someone else.

That is a tollbooth on a road built by the Federal Reserve, maintained by the FDIC, and patrolled by a regulatory apparatus designed in 1933 to protect a banking system that no longer exists.

When your business model is "regulatory arbitrage on the time value of other people's money" and a piece of open-source software shows up offering a better deal, you have two options:

Get better, or get Congress.

Guess which one is cheaper.

So imagine, for a moment, you had to pitch a retail bank as a startup in 2026.

"Hi. We hold customer money. We pay them roughly nothing. We lend it out at 7-24%. We have 4,000 physical locations, each with a security guard, a sad pen on a chain, and a woman named Janet who needs a notary stamp to let you close your own account. Our app was built in 2014. Our wire transfers take three business days because of 'cutoff times,' which is a phrase we invented. When we lose money, the government replaces it. When we make money, our CEO buys a yacht. We are now lobbying Congress to ban our competitors from offering a better product."

You'd be laughed out of the room. You'd be laughed out of a room full of bankers.

And yet here we are, watching five trade associations spend millions to convince the United States Senate that the republic itself depends on Diane at the branch in Ohio not having to compete with a smart contract.

The CLARITY Act will pass, or it won't.

The markup is May 11.

The bankers will lose this fight or they will win it on a technicality and lose the next one.

Because the thing they cannot lobby away is arithmetic.

You cannot legislate your way out of paying 0.40% when something else pays 4%.

You cannot regulate the time value of money.

You cannot pass a bill that makes your product good.

Every dollar of stablecoin yield that gets blocked in Washington is a dollar that walks out the front door anyway... into Treasuries, into Bitcoin, into anywhere that doesn't require Janet's signature.

The deposits stay because of inertia.

And inertia, historically, has a half-life.

The funniest part of this entire spectacle is that the banks are correct about one thing: if customers can earn yield on a stablecoin, they will move their money.

They have correctly diagnosed that their product is a hostage situation.

Their solution is to lobby for thicker chains.

Mark it up.