Satoshi Bhakt

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Wall Street is running the same trade two Nobel Prize winners used to nearly destroy the global financial system.

The Fed's OWN economists know it.

They literally wrote a paper about it and named the paper after the fund that blew up.

It's called "LTCM Redux?" and it ran in the Journal of Financial Economics.

Here's what they are worried about repeating:

Long-Term Capital Management launched in 1994 under John Meriwether, formerly head of bond trading at Salomon Brothers.

Myron Scholes and Robert Merton sat on the board and won the 1997 Nobel Prize in Economics while the fund was running. A former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board was a partner. It returned 20% in its first year, 43% in the second, and 41% in the third.

The strategy was to find nearly identical bonds priced slightly differently and bet the gap would close. The gaps were pennies, so the only way to make real money was to borrow enormous amounts against them.

Entering 1998 the fund had $4.8 billion of its own capital, had borrowed more than $125 billion, and held derivatives with a notional value above $1 trillion.

At the end of 1997 the partners handed capital back to investors without cutting their positions to match, which pushed their leverage higher still.

Then Russia defaulted in August 1998.

Money ran for safety, the gaps that were supposed to close widened instead, and every position moved against them at once. Equity fell from $4.8 billion to $2.3 billion by the first of September. Roughly $4.6 billion evaporated in under four months.

On September 23 the New York Fed put 14 firms in one room and did not let them leave. By six that evening they had committed $3.6 billion and taken 90% of the fund. The Fed itself lent nothing.

Those 14 firms were LTCM's own lenders, and a forced sale of more than a trillion dollars in positions into a market with no buyers would have torn through their balance sheets first.

Even with the rescue in place, the chairman of Union Bank of Switzerland resigned over a $780 million loss on options it had written on the fund.

And the ending of that story is what makes it matter now:

The banks were repaid in full by 2000 and nobody was charged with anything. Meriwether raised a new fund the following year.

The lesson the market took away was that when a leveraged fund gets big enough to threaten the plumbing, somebody convenes a room.

That precedent is now sitting underneath the largest bond market on Earth.

Hedge funds held $2.4 trillion of US Treasuries at the end of last year, financed with about $1.8 trillion of borrowed money in the repo market. The cash-futures basis trade alone reached $830 billion as of last September, close to double its previous peak.

Leverage on it commonly runs 50x and can reach 100x.

And the conditions for a disaster are already here...

The 30 year yield hit its highest level since 2007 twice in the past week. The long end has been in a buyers' strike since June. Yesterday the Treasury abandoned its own published schedule and doubled its bond buybacks without warning.

What killed LTCM was liquidity disappearing from the market where its borrowed money was parked.

And this time the rescue is being drawn up in ADVANCE. Academics from Harvard, Columbia and Chicago have already published a proposal urging the Fed to build a standing facility to absorb these positions when they unwind.

Morgan Stanley estimates these positions shrank by more than $200 billion in July as spreads compressed. On top of that, central clearing becomes mandatory at the end of this year. The trade genuinely makes Treasury markets more liquid on ordinary days.

But ordinary days were never the problem.

Two Nobel laureates and a former Fed vice chairman could not see it coming from inside the building. Whoever is running this version is not smarter than they were, and the position is far larger...

[Tukaram Mundhe @Tukaram_IndIAS]

A healthier choice should be the easier one.

When idli replaces vada pav and chaas replaces cola in a school canteen,it may appear to be a small change.But It is a shift in the food environment in which children form habits.

#TukaramMundhe #Nutrition #publicHealth #inspiration

[Satoshi Bhakt @SatoshiBhakt]

@adam3us @jamesviggy Community notes say that screenshot is like Bybit demo ui

[SubRosa )✿( Magick @subrosamagick.bsky.social @SubRosaMagick]

1. The ritual was called “Wičháŋpi Wóyute” — star feeding.
Lakota healers used it for those who lost loved ones or survived violence.
The person didn’t talk about the trauma.
They fed it.
They’d gather stones representing the pain, then carry them to a river and release them one by one while speaking the memory out loud to the water.
The final stone was kept as a reminder that grief was witnessed, not erased.

2. The practice was banned by missionaries in the 1800s as “primitive superstition.”
But in 2019, Johns Hopkins trauma researchers recreated it with PTSD patients.
They found the physical act of releasing objects while verbalizing trauma engages both hemispheres of the brain — something talk therapy alone doesn’t achieve.
Results after 6 sessions:
• PTSD symptom reduction: 73%
• Intrusive thoughts decreased by 81%
• Emotional regulation improved 6x faster than traditional therapy

3. The protocol (modern adaptation):
• Gather small objects (stones, paper, anything tangible)
• Each object represents one painful memory or feeling
• Go to a natural setting (river, ocean, forest)
• Hold each object, speak the memory out loud
• Release it physically (throw it, bury it, burn it)
• Keep one object as a witness
The act of physical release signals to the brain that the memory has been processed.

4. Therapy organizations pushed back hard.
One psychologist association called it:
“Unscientific and potentially harmful.”
But the data showed otherwise.
The modern therapy model profits from long-term treatment.
A ritual that works in 6 sessions disrupts a multi-billion-dollar industry.

5. Try it with one painful memory.
Lakota healers said:
“The wound that’s held grows.
The wound that’s released heals.”
Your brain doesn’t need endless analysis.
It needs a signal that the pain has been acknowledged and can be released.
Most people are still carrying stones from decades ago.
via Wolf Spirit
#Indigenous #NativeAmerican #Grief #Healing

[BitBox @BitBoxSwiss]

We just released the Dixence security update.

During our internal audits, we were able to discover and fix multiple security issues in the BitBox firmware.

We recommend our users to update their BitBoxApp and device firmware through the BitBoxApp settings.

https://t.co/bcHaeVU641

[CryptoWala @cryptowalax]

A 20-year-old Delhi techie, Aryan Nishad, has launched https://t.co/rlW7xL7nnF, a platform where citizens can anonymously report bribe demands.

Users can log the amount, location, department and the service involved. These reports build a public database that exposes bribery patterns across government offices in India.

The site even helps people turn their reports into formal complaints for anti-corruption authorities.

The response has been huge, 25 lakh requests in just 10 hours.

Anupam Mittal called it a potential game-changer for governance and accountability.

One simple website is giving common citizens the power to document corruption and make it visible.

Note: These are crowdsourced allegations, not confirmed proof against any official.

#Delhi #Techie #Bribes #Corruption #PublicDatabase #India

[Guillaume Meyer @guillaumemeyer]

🧹watermarks-remover now supports watermarks from OpenAI and Gemini in addition to Claude.
https://t.co/OxSdnAjEGe

[Satoshi Bhakt @SatoshiBhakt]

@BitcoinPierre @ConsumingCrypto That's the right approach..

All who understood bitcoin at any time should feel comfortable coming back under the tent!

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

I just discovered the most useful website on the internet.

It is called OmniTools, and it has 130+ tools for almost every tiny file job you can imagine.

You can:

→ Merge, split, compress, protect, and edit PDFs

→ Resize, crop, compress, and edit images

→ Trim, merge, compress, and resize videos

→ Convert audio, images, PDFs, CSV, JSON, and XML files

→ Generate passwords, QR codes, and random numbers

→ Format text, calculate dates, and clean messy data

And here is the part most online tools avoid telling you.

Your files never leave your device.

Everything is processed inside your browser.

No server uploads. No ads. No tracking. No account needed.

A developer named Ibrahima built the whole thing and gave away the source code.

You can even run OmniTools on your own server using its tiny 28MB Docker image.

It is MIT-licensed and has already crossed 10,000 GitHub stars.

The internet sold us 100 tiny subscriptions.

One developer replaced them with one bookmark.

https://t.co/rus8yeDEdu

[Satoshi Bhakt @SatoshiBhakt]

@callebtc Why would you guys make this guy feel bad..

Ideally, we should create environment where all these guys can come back.. Bitcoin doesn't care, but still Bitcoin will be better off with all these under the tent!

[Adam Back @adam3us]

if you have a @COLDCARDwallet 1st obviously move coins to a different HWW like @blockstreamjade, @trezor, @ledger etc BUT if you were affected by sweep attacks: do NOT smash or throw it away. don't get hopes up, but it may be useful to weakly prove ownership to a whitehat sweeper

[Guy Swann @TheGuySwann]

Honestly, if you actually wanted to get away with it, stealing from a bunch of cypherpunks is the dumbest idea ever.

Especially if this ends up being an inside job. I’ll be dumbfounded if someone thought they were going to walk away with $100 million and retire while everyone just says “well shucks” and gave up looking for them.

[Satoshi Bhakt @SatoshiBhakt]

@BurguesBA Agree!

[bradynoah @bradytc_]

vibe coded a live dashboard to track drained BTC from coldcards

🔎 https://t.co/FYM6Unodu1

[Adam Back @adam3us]

@JoeCarlasare @Trezor @Ledger no this is specific to a key generation security bug in some versions of @coinkite. the other wallets have different code, different firmware, different RNG procedures.

[Documenting ₿itcoin 📄 @DocumentingBTC]

Nobody in human history held absolute property before the year 2009 with the invention of a bitcoin hardware wallet, so nobody in history had to learn what we are learning today. Every person who masters self-custody is not following a tradition. They are founding one.

[Terence Michael @ProofOfMoney]

Today's breach of Bitcoin wallets
is yet another reminder to consider
multi-signature wallet setups.

A primer👇

[Clay Garrett @clay_garrett]

1/ During our investigation of the Coldcard drain yesterday, we identified an unusual pattern in the sweeps. That pattern led us to a hypothesis that has since been confirmed: the operator used a paid account at a well-known blockchain-services provider to query the source addresses and perform other related activity during the sweeps.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

Notion raised hundreds of millions of dollars to build a notes app owned by investors.

So, a team in Switzerland built a decentralized version that no one can ever buy out.

It is called Anytype.

Everything you write lives locally on your device.

It operates completely offline, but syncs point-to-point between your phone and laptop using a decentralized network.

Your second brain shouldn't belong to a corporation waiting to be sold to Microsoft.

[Parker Lewis @parkeralewis]

Unpopular opinions:

1. I like bitcoin

2. Fiat currencies are a problem

3. Bitcoin treasury stocks should trade at a discount.

4. Digital credit is actually perpetual preferred equity.

5. Perpetual fixed $ equity claims are bad investments.

6. Never lend fiat forever.