From Yesterday's Simply Bitcoin Live | Episode 1628
The Numbers
Gold rose while stocks and Bitcoin fell today, an early signal that capital is already looking for somewhere that cannot be debased.
The News
The S&P 500 erased about $2 trillion in roughly 40 minutes after the open this morning. Asian semiconductor and AI names lost around $550 billion overnight across South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, Nvidia is now red for the year, and chip and data center stocks from AMD to Micron to Dell fell double digits. SpaceX dropped 10 percent too.
The trigger is Washington. Democrats just took the House and Senate, and Rep. Ted Lieu says Republicans let AI "run wild" while Rep. Yassamin Ansari is pushing to pause advanced AI development and ban superintelligence outright. A JPMorgan note making the rounds added fuel: years of AI capex still have not produced the productivity gains that were supposed to justify the spending.
Bitcoin had nothing to do with any of this and got dragged down anyway, erasing yesterday's 6,000 dollar pump as about $245 million in Bitcoin longs got liquidated in a market wide flush near a billion dollars. Gold, meanwhile, is one of the only things green this morning.
If the AI trade really is unwinding, gold is getting the capital first. Bitcoin is next in line.
Ueno Bank, which counted more than 60 percent of Paraguay's adults as customers, was seized by the central bank this week after its solvency ratio fell below half the legal minimum. Nearly 3 million people, in a country of about 6 million, woke up unable to touch their own savings, pensions and paychecks. President Santiago Peña announced his resignation Thursday after his own party turned on him, and lawmakers moved to impeach him anyway.
The same week, a French bank was hit with a $131 million hack. Different country, same lesson: the money you hand to a third party is only as safe as the institution holding it, and you do not find out how safe until it breaks.
Nearly 3 million people found out this week what happens when the bank, not you, controls the money.
The Moscow Exchange, Russia's largest trading venue, will open Bitcoin, Ether and Tether trading on December 1st under the country's new crypto law. Retail investors have to pass a test first and are capped at 300,000 rubles a year, a little under $4,000, through a single broker.
It is the same pattern every country runs. Qualified and high net worth investors get in first, and the general public follows once the infrastructure is proven out. The US did it with ETFs. Russia is doing it now, just with a smaller door and a shorter leash.
Every country eventually opens the door. Russia just put a date on it.
Opty walks through why today's crash has nothing to do with Bitcoin, and why Paraguay just became the clearest case yet for holding your own keys.
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