Chip Carney

Bitcoin is the hurdle rate

[Krystal Ball @krystalball]

Absolute insanity.

[Chip Carney @Chip2022]

@TFTC21 Nope. If this happens it will prove voters have absolutely no say in what happens to our country.

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

Although virtually all Republicans eventually admitted by their votes that it was right to release the Epstein files,

only three were brave enough to sign my discharge petition to force that vote.

Boebert, Greene, and Mace have paid an enormous price for doing the right thing.

[Chip Carney @Chip2022]

@WaltherPeck @BTCsessions Wow, I don't even know what to say to this.

[Chip Carney @Chip2022]

@AdamBLiv Once you see it, you can't unsee it. You see it in everything. Yet all day I see people posting why it will fail, or behave like a magnet repelling their ability to learn these truths. "If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry."

[Adam Livingston @AdamBLiv]

The case against Bitcoin requires you to believe that the smartest engineers, the largest asset managers, the wealthiest individuals, multiple sovereign nations, an increasing share of the US Treasury, and most of Silicon Valley are all wrong about the same thing at the same time, while the man explaining this to you on cable news is right, despite the fact that he was also wrong about the housing bubble, the dot-com bubble, the Iraq War, transitory inflation, and what would happen if you printed nine trillion dollars in eighteen months.

At some point the simpler explanation is that he is paid to be wrong.

And at some point after that, you stop watching.

[Chip Carney @Chip2022]

@MatthewLauseng @megynkelly Aha! You got him! Good for you.

[Chip Carney @Chip2022]

@Aella_Girl Oh, and there is no credit check, no lengthy applications. You pledge your coin, borrow at 50% LTV. Cash in hand in a day or two.

[Chip Carney @Chip2022]

Bitcoin is still a bargain. Also, it has been growing at over 30% CAGR for awhile and probably still will. Now there are lenders to borrow against your Bitcoin for 9-11%. You can do the math here. Keep the asset, borrow to meet your expenses, never sell. Folks who bought a city block of Manhatten never sold it. They borrow against it for generations. It is not wise to let folks know how much Bitcoin you hold, but it should certainly not be 0. Talk to the Nerds again, or DM me if you wish.

[Chip Carney @Chip2022]

@PatrickCar81281 @BrianRoemmele Thhank you, this was my first thought on this as well. How to discern the facts from opinion. The truth from narrative based on an agenda. Media was created to control narrative from the start I believe.

[Chip Carney @Chip2022]

@Crypto_Mags @wesleyplpl I wonder how much understanding the Church has in the differenciation of Bitcoin from the rest of Crypto? Could it be intentional to glance over these differences to prevent too fast of adoption of Bitcoin and a mass exedus from traditional finance and currencies?

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

True

[Chip Carney @Chip2022]

Elon stated if anyone could come up with a plan to end homelessness and bring it to him he would write the check immediately. He understands that socialism and handing out money will not resolve the problems society faces. To use a comment from @Codie_Sanchez Capitalism believes in you and your ability. Communism believes you are incapable and unable. While there will always be people in society that need assistance and a social safety net, most of our homeless or people in poverty are just without the tools necessary to succeed.

[Chip Carney @Chip2022]

view
/vyo͞o/
📷

The term "view" can refer to a physical scene, a personal opinion, or the long-running television talk show.
📷https://t.co/hEArRBctgG +1

[Marty Bent @MartyBent]

It’s all a complete scam.

[Chip Carney @Chip2022]

If used with battery and grid tie you can actively participate in balancing grid power, utilize off peak grid power and use the blended cost of electricity often much less than commercial rates to reduce the cost to mine. Also, demand response incentives is another income stream to add to the balance sheet and reduce opex.

[Chip Carney @Chip2022]

The better question, is this the right attitude for Disney? I don't think the human body is sinful. How we dress should be about comfort. This is preening and attention seeking for reasons that are not in line with the family vibe of Disney. I try not to, but its hard not to judge.

[Chip Carney @Chip2022]

@PlanBpassport This is the dream.

[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.