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The Arc Of Markets (Which are Wonderful)... and Bitcoin Crosses $100,000

The Degenerate Economy Continues To Accelerate

Author

Howard Lindzon
December 05, 2024

Good morning from Phoenix…it is still unseasonably warm and beautiful.

I have a lot of friends in town for The Grass League $100,000 Par 3 Shootout that starts tonight - under the lights - at our Grass Clippings course. There are 80 insanely talented players teeing off this afternoon. Our team ‘The Hat Tricks’ is ready to go and here is our tent on 18:

Enough about golf today…Bitcoin crossed $100,000!!!

My daughter Rachel owns some and I am proud of her for HODLing it from below $5,000. Her first 20 bagger.

I have shared this often here but the first person to mention to me that I should buy Bitcoin was Yoni Assia, the founder of Etoro. It was 11 cents. Here is a tweet from 2011 where Yoni first discussed buying it…(click the link and read the comments too)

Lucky for me, Yoni was buying Bitcoin, not for himself, but for Etoro, which I decided to invest in after Yoni pitched me at that same meeting in 2010.

The bad news is I never bought Bitcoin personally at 11 cents. The good news is Yoni and Etoro held those Bitcoins he was buying and kept on buying (to his boards chagrin at the time) and he and Etoro has also built a multi billion dollar brokerage and crypto exchange that operates in over 100 countries.

A few weeks ago in New York, Yoni, his co-founder brother Ronen and I had dinner together with a bunch of friends and Yoni told us a few harrowing stories of lost passwords and laptops that were chased around the world in order to recover.

I guess my point is, for all my knowledge, network and friends, I am a putz and underachiever when it comes to Bitcoin wealth accumulation.

I am not alone in my putziness and underachievement when it comes to Bitcoin and crypto. My friend Matthew Prince, the founder and CEO of Cloudflare - a $38 billion public company - chimed in with this on my Twitter post:

My main point today is the markets are wonderful.

My buddy Ted Merz is a legend when it comes to the markets having spent 30 years at Bloomberg covering markets and building products.

He wrote this great newsletter piece the other day titled ‘The Arc of Markets’ where he described how his FIRST job as a journalist back in 1991 was covering a market he could not see. He ends with this beauty:


But the arc of markets bends toward price transparency.

I got the prices. Chemical Bank got PR. Clients got valuable information.

Eventually that fax would be replaced with a live feed.

Along the way, the bid offer spread collapsed from points to a quarter point and then an eighth. Price transparency spurred larger trading volumes.

This is how every market works. You start with obscure secondary market prices for something like Mexican pars and then move to static indications and eventually live feeds.

In recent years we’ve seen it happen with everything from crypto to alternative assets like sneakers.

There are so many more data sets waiting to be gathered and leveraged.

So many markets that have yet to emerge.

As I have been writing about here since I started Wallstrip at the beginning of Web 2.0 in 2006 to today and the beginning of Real Time 2.0 where now a few billion more people have been onboarded to the financial markets including crypto…the markets are incredible, wonderful, fascinating and cruel.

With so many markets yet to emerge and so much free time in a society that is tech enabled and with so much money printed across the globe, the investor and speculator class era is just beginning.

The next 100 Bitcoins and Warren Buffett’s are out there amidst the hundreds of millions of degenerates and thousands of grifts. I joke and call it ‘The Degenerate Economy’ but hopefully this helps explain what I am really excited about.

Have a great day.

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