Since Friday, SpaceX is public. Or is it? Technically, “the biggest IPO in history” had a float of merely 4.3%—this is how much of the company is actually public. Not a record among big IPOs—Aramco’s 1.5% is in a league of its own—but isn’t that interesting? One of many conversation starters here.

The First Trillionaire

Two days ago, Musk officially became a trillionaire. How much is a trillion? A million seconds is over 11 days. Can you tell how much a trillion seconds is? A year? 10 years? 100 years?

It’s almost 32,000 years.

My first question is: what does it even mean? The company is not even profitable, yet the market estimates its capitalization at over 2 trillion dollars. You can blame the massive money printing, or the erosion of investing fundamentals caused by the crypto hype era, but it’s obvious that the numbers are detached from fundamentals in any meaningful way. You can only make comparisons with other assets, and those are not looking great either. By some estimates, OpenAI is valued around 30x sales; SpaceX easily crossed 100x.

The Float-Restriction Premium

What makes it possible is the hero of the first paragraph: the tiny 4.3% float. It means that the overwhelming majority of shares can’t be sold yet, while demand for a piece of one of the most exciting companies on the market is enormous. Thin supply, and the price does the only thing it can. It pops.

Traditionally an IPO price is the marginal seller meeting the marginal buyer, but this time 95% of holders are locked out. The price you get reflects scarcity, not value.

Then there is the engineering, and it’s a Raptor 3 level (or should I say SPAC level?):

SoFi runs a 30-day anti-flipping window and has threatened fees for selling within the first 120 days. Fidelity dropped its maximum IPO balance to attract small accounts. Nasdaq-100 admission just 15 trading days after listing, Russell 1000 in five. Only the S&P 500 held its rules and declined to fast-track. Looking at the plumbing: retail is herded into the most expensive offering in history, threatened with penalties for leaving, and held in place until index funds are forced by the rules to buy billions, regardless of price.

End of the Buyback Era

For two decades the US market mechanically shrank—buybacks, fewer IPOs, public companies going back private. Tech companies were asset-light, and often the best use of cash was buying back their own stock; Meta raised ~$16B in 2012 and then spent over $100B repurchasing shares. Fewer and fewer shares were left to buy, and that pushed prices up.

That era ended this week. In the AI season, the asset-light giants become asset-heavy: data centers, Nvidia chips, power plants, rockets. Goldman sees $675B of new equity hitting the market this year. SpaceX’s $75B record raise covers less than a third of the roughly $235 billion in commitments one analyst totaled through 2030.

Don’t Frontrun the Unlocks

SpaceX is one of the most exciting companies of my lifetime. That said, the price we saw on Friday contained almost no information about the business, and almost all of it was about the mechanics. There are no sellers, because they’re locked up. Literally, only 4.3% of the stock is in circulation.

The 95% lockup is not forever. The first real unlock hits after Q2 earnings, and unlocks continue for the next year until Musk’s stake unlocks in Jun ’27. Besides Musk, there are two main groups that are currently locked:

180-Day group — This is the bulk of SpaceX’s pre-IPO shareholders: employees, early investors, and other insiders on the standard ~180-day lock-up, but with the cliff broken into a staggered ladder of fixed milestones and post-earnings windows rather than a single release.

Extended group — These are typically the larger or more senior holders the company wanted held back longer to avoid concentrating supply, releasing in smaller batches across the Q4’26 through Q1’27 earnings windows and the spring 2027 milestones.

So here is the schedule:

Even if you believe Musk will never sell, there is less than 5% of the stock in circulation, and among those still locked there are many first-time millionaires, or early investors who have waited for this moment, sometimes for over 20 years. While today’s investors buy dreaming about future fortunes, there are people for whom this long-awaited moment is coming now.

There is no price discovery before this cohort joins the market.

I’m waiting.

In the meantime, after 2 weeks, the six Nasdaq bots are all down, “buying the dip.” I publish results weekly in our private Discord.

Then Millennials and other less patient market participants started to notice that another index, Nasdaq-100, grows even faster and many started to switch from to . 100 companies seem diversified enough, and it’s hard to not notice that this is where the majority of the growth happens.

The uncomfortable truth is that the majority of the growth happens even closer to the top. Much closer. If you ever heard about the Magnificent 7 you know exactly what I mean. Yes, it’s this chart:

The top 7 companies in the S&P 500 index are responsible for almost all of the index growth, while the remaining 493 tickers are barely keeping up with inflation.

There are two independent reasons why:

1. Raising popularity of index investing escalates concentration in a mechanical way.

2. The “Mag 7” provides infrastructure without which you can’t run any business.

I wrote pieces about both topics (1, 2), but here is a summary:

Why Indexing Fails

The idea of index investing was revolutionary when the market was driven by the global collective of capital allocators and index was merely following the wisdom of the crowds.

However, it doesn’t work when most of the capital starts to be allocated that way. You don’t follow any wisdom anymore. You follow previous investors, that follow previous investors, that follow previous investors… you see what I mean? Where are the allocators? Who picks the stocks? The crowd is still there, but the wisdom part is gone.

Today big companies grow just because they’re big, not because someone read the earning reports and thought “yeah, this looks like a good investment.”

But that’s not the whole story.

New Market. New Rules.

The new economy relies on the infrastructure provided by tech giants. It doesn’t matter if you run a bakery, a SaaS or even a logistics company, you need email, and 90% of emails are being opened in either Apple or Google mailbox. You need ChatGPT, Facebook ads, and orders from Amazon.

In this new market, a scenario where a bakery is doing better than Apple doesn’t make any sense. Any business that has profits must share them with the providers of the infrastructure.

The Threat

The threat is real. In a market where over 50% of capital is allocated passively, trillions of dollars are tied to stocks that barely trade besides being bought by ETFs. Everything works as long as pension funds are buying, but if the market will crash again, and ETFs will start selling blindly the same way they blindly buy today there is an ugly elephant-in-the-room question to answer:

Who is the buyer for Jack Henry & Associates and 492 other passively pumped companies in the long tail of the S&P 500 index?

If Not Index, Then What?

I already wrote about all of that. I’m repeating myself. But this time, I’ll give you a new answer. The one I found for myself.

I think it’s clear by now that I don’t believe in broad market diversification anymore. You want to diversify, but on the winning side of this new reality, and the winners are the infrastructure providers. Not even the top 100 tech companies, but likely no more than the top 20. In fact, the top 20 of the Nasdaq-100 represent 80% of its allocation—a perfect example of the Pareto principle in action.

Investing in the Mag 7 is nothing new. There’s even a ETF, but while it’s focused, it misses an important part: the automatic allocation that indexing provides. The Mag 7 stocks are picked manually based on the current winners. If you remember, before “Mag 7” there was FAANG, but (N)etflix has been replaced by (N)vidia, and we can’t know how the top will look in 10 years. Even today, the top 7 Nasdaq stocks include Broadcom, which is bigger than Tesla despite being much less popular as a brand.

Indexing is still the answer, and with fractional shares and automation, for the first time it’s accessible to small buyers.

Nasdaq 20

If you prefer to pick stock manually, I salute you. It’s not for everyone, but it’s a noble way to invest. I look for something that I can recommend to my friends, something that still works passively, and I came to the conclusion that the top 20 Nasdaq stocks are the most obvious answer.

This is what I’ve built:

With the new index portfolio bot at Deltabadger, you can pick up to 20 top Nasdaq stocks and find a sweet spot between market cap based and equal allocation. Which configuration works the best? I have no idea.

That’s why on Monday I started 6 of them: 7, 12 and 20 assets, each in both mcap and equal allocation versions. I will share results weekly in the Deltabadger Discord.

It’s a new world, and I don’t have all the answers, but this is where I am right now. These are the stocks in my Window Portfolio for the year(s) to come.

Then another headline hits you in the face: Block 4,000, Oracle 30,000, Amazon 16,000, Meta 1,500, Salesforce 1,000, Atlassian 1,600, Microsoft 15,347, ASML 1,700, Ericsson 1,900, Pinterest 675—over 126,000 tech jobs cut in the first quarter of 2026 alone, with AI cited as the driver in the majority of cases.

Previously execs hid behind “restructuring” and “strategic realignment.” Dorsey’s memo is “departing from the classic tech layoff playbook”: Block isn’t in trouble, AI is just better.

You can believe the guy on LinkedIn who’s still happy in his corporate job, telling you not to worry because it’s business as usual—or you can start making moves.

The counter is simple. When you hear about another layoff while the company is doing just fine, buy the stock. This is the signal, the alpha in the blindspot of most investors.

Humans vs. Spreadsheet

Those massive layoffs are companies pulling ahead—gaining an advantage the market hasn’t priced in yet fully. Elon Musk explains it in a great analogy from the era before electronic computers, when “computer” was a job title—that’s right!—and skyscrapers were filled with people, mostly women, doing manual calculations all day:

“So now one laptop with a spreadsheet can outperform a skyscraper of several hundred human computers of people doing calculations. Now, if even a few cells in that spreadsheet were done manually, you would not be able to compete with a spreadsheet that was entirely a computer.” Listen →

So, are you preparing, or are you playing against arguably the strongest player in the tech game? Did I get your attention? Good. Now time for the nuance.

Not all layoffs are equal. They're legacy players like Intel cutting because they're losing. Skip those. Focus on those firing from strength: Block, Meta, Amazon, Salesforce… you get the drill. Yes, this feels gross. Yes, you're profiting from someone else's layoff. Leaving the upside for the already-rich doesn't help the white-collar guy—and it won't pay your bills when your notice lands.

Remember the craftsmen in 1811 who didn't have the option to buy mill shares. You do. So buy them. Buy as much as you can.

Staring At The Window

In the Window Manifesto the portfolio idea is to simply narrow the index from S&P 500 to Nasdaq 100, and add Bitcoin. Then later I spent some time talking about how indexes may eventually stop working as a “safe bet” (what Bitcoin hedges in the mix).

If you want to try stockpicking, how aggressively a company leverages automation is one of the better filters. I quoted Elon, but Tesla is one of those companies so obvious the market already values them highly. It’s much more interesting when you look at companies like Block, Salesforce, or even Meta.

Look at the chart:

Block is down 25% while everything else on this list did 100-4000%.

And that’s exactly the point. The obvious names—Nvidia, Tesla, Meta, Microsoft—are already priced for the AI era. The market figured them out years ago. The alpha isn’t there anymore.

Block is what this thesis actually looks like. Before the layoffs, they were crushing it:

• Profit up 24% year-over-year

• Operating income up 46%

• $9.2 billion in the bank

• $2.3 billion returned to shareholders in buybacks

They had the cash to keep everyone. They fired 40% of the company anyway. Over 10,000 employees down to under 6,000. Then they told investors Q1 earnings would grow 920%.

You don’t need a finance degree to understand those numbers.

The obvious trade is the Window Portfolio. The interesting trade are companies like Block, and speaking of Bitcoin: Block is also a treasury company that holds 8,780 BTC. How could they fit better?

*

That’s all for today.

Anthropic calls the new metric “observed exposure.” They took around 800 occupations from the O*NET database, mapped the tasks each job involves, then checked which of those tasks actually show up in Claude’s real-world usage data.

That’s pretty cool.

The result is a radar chart showing two layers: a blue area representing theoretical AI capability, and a red area representing actual deployment. In Computer & Math occupations, 94% of tasks are theoretically feasible for an LLM. Only 33% are currently covered. On the other end, 30% of all workers have zero AI coverage—cooks, motorcycle mechanics, lifeguards, bartenders, dishwashers.

They split workers into high-exposure and low-exposure groups, and compared unemployment trends. If AI is displacing people, the exposed group should be doing worse. Their finding? Both groups move roughly in parallel. No significant divergence since late 2022.

The report has two problems:

1. It assumes AI is the only force that can differentiate affected and unaffected sectors—while in reality, the split mostly tracks blue-collar versus white-collar work.

2. It underplays the junior job market, which already shows a 14% gap.

1. It’s Camouflage

This method is sound in theory. In practice, it relies on a big assumption: that both groups—the programmers and the bartenders, the financial analysts and the lifeguards—are subject to the same economic forces besides AI.

But why assume that AI is the only differentiator?

Right now, blue-collar jobs are collapsing. Manufacturing employment is down over 100k. Trucking is declining. Tariffs are crushing trade-dependent industries across the board. These forces hit the “unexposed” comparison group hard—and have nothing to do with AI.

Meanwhile, tech companies are cutting headcount while posting record revenues. Atlassian just fired 1,600 people, while reporting 26% cloud revenue growth. Block cut 4,000 jobs to become “intelligence-native.” WiseTech eliminated 2,000 positions because, their CEO said, the era of manually writing code is over. Tech layoffs in 2026 passed 45,000 by early March.

If blue-collar jobs are falling because of tariffs, and white-collar jobs falling because of AI, the diff-in-diff registers zero.

2. Junior Jobs Market

But there’s a second problem with the report, and it might be more important than the first: it doesn’t properly examine what’s happening to entry-level workers.

To be fair, the report does look at young workers—and what it finds should have been the actual headline. Among 22-25 year olds, hiring into AI-exposed occupations dropped roughly 14% after ChatGPT launched. Hiring into unexposed occupations stayed flat. This effect doesn’t exist for workers over 25. The report mentions it, but hedges it as “just barely statistically significant.” Really?

If a company makes ten senior developers do the work of ten seniors plus five juniors it doesn’t lay anyone off, but it also doesn’t post those junior roles. There is no signal in the CPS data. The report itself explains why this disappears from statistics: young people entering the labor market for the first time don’t have a previous occupation listed in survey data. If they can’t find work and leave the labor force—go back to school, do gig work, move home—they never appear as “unemployed.”

Waiting For the Job Apocalypse

I don’t claim I know for sure. But this is the reading consistent with my experience.

AI comes for junior jobs first.

As it becomes more capable, and companies learn how to implement it properly in their workflows, it will go after positions requiring more experience. You’ll not feel the impact if you’re currently hired senior. Not yet. You may feel it if you’re looking for a job, and you’ll definitely feel it if you look for a job as a junior.

If you’re in a senior position in one of affected areas: switch from earning to owning. Invest whatever you can while you can.

If you’re starting on the market, learn entrepreneurial skills and those involving “moving atoms”—if to do the job you have to be on site, be with the customer in the same room or his living area—that is a resilient profession. You still have to invest as soon as the paycheck hits your account.

It’s time to build our “Window portfolios.”

✦

While waiting for the end of jobs, I created this dollar-cost averaging calculator that now works in almost 50 languages. It may help.

:

Yesterday evening, after chatting with users in the Telegram channel, I deployed an MCP server feature for Deltabadger. Now, you can connect it to Claude or OpenClaw and your agents can talk to the app and do crazy things on your behalf like:

Every Monday invest $100 into the most promising US stock based on sentiment on X.

Show me my portfolio with total PnL across all connected exchanges.

I need to take $1000 out of my portfolio, which asset do you recommend to sell?

Such a feature would take weeks to deliver even a year ago. It took a few hours.

Fun fact: later on the same evening I posted a little “rage baiting” post on Linkedin:

The “hook” in the first sentence triggered a lot of people, so they vastly missed the main idea that comes later, but what stood out even more is that many programmers are not aware of the current state of AI. They don’t believe AI delivers working software, and are confident that without a senior developer it’s impossible to build any serious project. Which was true… half a year ago.

What is MCP?

MCP stands for Model Context Protocol — it's an open standard developed by Anthropic that lets AI models like Claude talk to external tools.

In the app, it looks like this:

Quick connection to Claude, and… you can talk to your money:

I’ll be honest, I’m not yet entirely sure what is the best use case for it, but it’s likely… all of them. This may be the new interface in the long-term. I can imagine in a year it will become the main way you interact with your investments.

Testing and Safety

There are some valid concerns about safety. We all know that agents still hallucinate, and “money hallucinations” can have serious consequences. That’s why you can control your exposure by limiting it to read-only functions, or activate “paper trading” and play with making trades without spending real money.

You’ll need a https:// URL, so for hosting locally the open-source version, you can get it with Ngrok or Cloudflare tunnel.

I’ll be grateful if you can share your thoughts and maybe request a feature you miss.

Alpaca

Using Deltabadger for stock investing is finally possible thanks to Alpaca—a US-regulated, API-first broker that feels more like Kraken, but still gives you the regulatory protections that come with FINRA membership.

✦

It's never been easier to build.

It's also never been harder to figure out what to build.

Fortunately, there are users asking for features and giving me feedback. Whether you use the hosting or host the app yourself, the Window Portfolio can look as simple as this:

It's hard to find time for writing. I'm thinking about making some short talking-head videos, since writing weekly seems to be harder than I expected. But for now, I will go with the flow. Till the next one.

Today you’ll walk, maybe fifteen kilometers. You’ll find food or you won’t. By nightfall you’ll sit by a fire and someone will tell a story about the hunt. This is Tuesday. This is also Saturday. This is every day for a hundred thousand years.

There is a moment every morning, just before full consciousness, when your brain doesn’t know what century it is. For a few seconds you’re pure hardware made for a different world. For a few seconds your brain is back on the savannah.

Here, nobody has a career plan. Nobody lays awake at 3 AM wondering if they were falling behind. The cortisol is your friend, to squeeze some fats and proteins, juice your blood with sugar, and buy you the 3 minutes of heroic sprint so the lion can’t get you. Life is hard, but it’s what your body and mind are made for.

Your eyes have opened. You missed the alarm. Your cortisol is still high, but your endocrine system is confused: where the hell is the damn lion?

The Mismatch

50,000–200,000 years ago, our brains stopped evolving, but our environment hasn't. Quite the opposite — it changed beyond recognition:

10,000 years ago, agriculture broke our bodies and social structure. Humans got shorter, sicker, and more malnourished, but wealth accumulation became possible. Society split into classes.

250 years ago, industrialization broke time and meaning. We replaced sunset with alarm and built identities around hours of output.

15 years ago, social media went straight after your brain. This time the algorithm didn't need to force submission—it was easier to use what was already there.

Today our 200,000-year-old hardware runs software updates from the Pleistocene. The cortisol that evolved for 3-minute sprints now handles 3-year mortgage anxiety. Sometimes I ask myself: what was the evolutionary purpose of the emotion I feel? How is my savannah endocrine system trying to help?

The Detour

If you can’t imagine the incoming disruption of work—a future where there may be no more jobs for most of us—remember that for 95% of human history, nobody had one. You could be a shaman, a hunter, a mother, but those were not jobs. It was your role in the tribe, your contribution, your purpose, or your fate. The idea of doing repetitive mechanical and computational tasks on schedule is largely the product of industrialization.

What happened to the savannah man? The coal mine turned him into a machine. The office turned him into a computer. Neither provides meaning directly connected to his life. His atomized family has no stable tribe. His skin sees no sun. The only thing he gets is a handful of tokens to exchange for food, shelter, and pleasure. But 250 years of industrialization is a mere 0.1% dent on the human timeline—a detour.

The Happiness Checklist

Before that, the happiness checklist was simple: food, sleep, movement, shelter, love, tribe, and purpose. All self-help advice is reverse-engineering the savannah default.

On the list, you’ll not find quarterly targets, likes and followers, money—things that simply can’t make you happy because happiness is part of programming coded before they existed.

The checklist matters because the savannah man is still here. Living in his savannah body, and savannah brain, in a weirder and increasingly alien reality. We all know the dark versions of the story: Terminators exterminating humankind, the human farms from the Matrix, or Wall-E where machines make humans obsolete and fat.

But what if the AI disruption, for the first time since agriculture, doesn't just break another part of the familiar landscape—but gives some part of it back? What if instead of living the life of a corporate robot, you can finally go back to the checklist?

✦

I'm writing this on a Friday evening. There's no lion, no coal mine, no quarterly targets. Just a man telling a story to his tribe. If you squint, the screen almost looks like a fire.

2 months ago my product was shutting down, today it’s back like nothing happened, full of new features. Users are confused, and I’m not gonna lie, I’m still a little confused myself. It looks like the “AI takes our jobs” is not just hype, and I’ve suddenly got equipped with a team of world class experts to help accomplish everything that had to be done.

As great as it is, I had to ask myself an honest question: why even bother with the app? Who cares about “DCA into Bitcoin” anymore? It seems crypto is dead, and everything is about AI taking over. Surely the “number is down” a lot, so why should anybody care?

I believe you still should. I do, and plan to continue working on Deltabadger, both the open-source software, and the official brand new hosting.

Money for Robots

The first decade of Bitcoin was all about discussing what and why. One of the topics present since the inception and even before, was the difficulties the traditional banking system creates for software to interact with the money layer smoothly. It’s not programmable, there is no API. An app cannot create a wallet, accept and make payments. You need external services like Stripe to interact with the banking layer, not without serious limitations.

Now, we enter the era of AI bots, when the bot can even make realistic human-like calls, but still can’t open a bank account. However, it can create a Bitcoin wallet, make and accept Bitcoin payments. No issues whatsoever.

Because Bitcoin is money for robots.

Critiques say Bitcoin failed because it’s not stable, or because people don’t use it to pay for a coffee. Both arguments are important only for humans. Price stability is meaningful because our brains like save energy and “anchor” to familiarity. Instability of prices brings us anxiety. Algorithms don’t care.

The same is true about the second part of the critique, in the old economy based on the human labor and human spending, it was a valid point. But it’s very clear that this is not what the future will be. The majority of monetary exchanges will be algorithmic, automated, executed between non-human participants for which Bitcoin is by far the most convenient means of exchange.

Robots will Pay our Debt

Another AI-disrupted angle is that while inflation and broken monetary policy are still a very real problem, I don’t believe in collapse of the dollar anytime soon. We’re entering an era of exponential efficiency that has a serious shot at offsetting all the horrific debt. Many people still apply cyclical patterns from the 20th century, or even follow Ray Dalio’s idea that the US empire and the dollar is heading to its end. This doesn’t work if the economy starts growing exponentially.

I can’t unsee what I saw in the last month in my own project: I completed a 2 year roadmap, solo in 2 months. There is no way back. If you don’t see it yet in your workplace, that’s understandable, the software is the closest to the fire, but it’s coming. First to white-collar jobs, then humanoid robots will do the same for blue-collar segment.

Don’t be a Robot

So far, it’s not dystopian at all. Robots will make our life great, so what’s the problem? You likely won't need to save for retirement anymore—at least not to avoid sleeping under a bridge. It's quite possible that accommodation, food, and basic medical care will become very cheap or even provided by the state. But there is a catch, and we kind of see it already:

Yes, you have free access to more and more services, but you lose control: over your data, privacy, autonomy to make some decisions. Let’s be honest, most people don’t really care, so you have to ask yourself how important it is for you. However, if you like to stay sovereign, maintain freedom of choice, where and how you live, what you eat, who you share your data with—having capital will still matter.

Will home prices still go up forever when the global fertility rate is negative across the entire West while homes may be 3D-printed soon? Will gold maintain value after asteroid mining becomes real? The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that Bitcoin is the one asset that surely will do great in the abundance era. It’s ready for robot-economy, space exploration, dollar collapse, AI taking our jobs—it’s ready for the future.

The new Deltabadger reflects this perspective. Open-source, it's available for everyone. As a private server, it gives you more control, more privacy, more independence. And as a community, it gives you a human tribe in a future run by machines.

This is where I am at right now, drinking coffee, still harvested by human hands.

I’m not a whiny person. Not only did I promise my long-term subscribers (who lost the service) to find a solution, but there was a path forward discussed already before: making the app self-hosted, and offering it as a self-managed solution where users manage the database and trades themselves, and I offer only the hosting. There was only one problem: saying it’s a lot of work was an understatement.

Two Years in a Month

I had no funds to hire a developer anymore, and I’m not a great coder myself. However, during over six years I collected a lot of domain-specific knowledge around my project architecture and technology stack. I opened Claude Code and started working on tasks I would have been too shy to touch a few weeks earlier.

What I realized pretty quickly is that even after using AI-assisted coding for the last 3 years, I was significantly behind what AI can actually do now. Claude can now log in to the server, access all available APIs, read logs… and basically solve any problem in minutes. Suddenly the whole picture changed completely:

In a month, working alone, I finished the roadmap for the next 1-2 years.

For many of you, it may sound like a crazy statement, so let me give you an example: a single exchange implementation, 3 months ago, was taking about a week, and could maybe be closed in 3 days with a good flow and focus.

Claude implemented six exchanges, a month of human labor, in 43 minutes.

The most disturbing observation was that most of the time, AI doesn’t do anything not because it can’t, but because I don’t know yet what it should do next. I need to think first, and that takes time. For the first time since I started working with computers in 1990, what slows the work is… me. I am the slowest part of the system.

What is Work?

If you think about it, most of the work during our history has been repetitive mechanical tasks: collecting crop, putting boxes on the factory line, filling cells in Excel. What is clear now is that all repetitive tasks will be automated. Yes, all of them.

In the middle of last year, the idea was that we’ll be more productive with a team of AI agents assisting us. You’ll be like a project manager with your own team.

Guess what: AI is better also at managing such a team.

I seriously started to think about what my job now really is. I spend a big part of the day thinking about what should be done, but usually it comes down to a bigger story behind it: What is the meaning of this feature? Why is it important?

The best new definition of work I found for myself is creating the story of the product. Why does it exist? Why should anybody care? Why should you use it?

What if our job from now on is mainly to provide meaning to what has to be done?

The Era of Opinionated

Deltabadger uses Rails. It’s an amazing piece of code from 37signals they like to call a “highly opinionated web framework.” It means it doesn’t simply do the job. It proposes a specific philosophy and approach to the problem. Rails tells you: “Others are doing things wrong. I think this is how your app should be done.”

When I started to think about how to explain open-sourced Deltabadger as a product, I realized that adding “opinionated” to the description does a lot of heavy lifting. This is not a “DCA bot for crypto” — it expresses my opinions, beliefs, and personal investing and life philosophy. The features, the design, the business model — all reflect it.

My opinion is that:

• white collar jobs will disappear before blue collar jobs

• the distance between earners and owners will increase

• society is better when individuals own capital

• modern monetary policy is broken

• most people shouldn’t trade

• most people should invest

• switching from earning to owning is the best hedge against the disruption coming

…and this is Deltabadger. Not just DCA functionality.

Any functionality is now just a commodity: it’s already possible to ask a chat “write me a DCA bot for Binance” and get whatever features you want if you can express them clearly. In software, the only space that’s left is for products with a good story, good design, a unique approach that is something more than an average from a training data. This is the value added now.

So, Wait… Deltabadger is Back?

Yes, the service is back. The software itself is now open-source. The service, on the other hand, becomes an official hosting to run it. We call it Deltabadger Cloud.

Since every user now runs a separate server, you can create multiple accounts not only for yourself, but also for your close ones. It supports 10 exchanges already, and more are coming. It finally allows you to invest in cryptocurrency indexes like Top 10 Layer 2 coins (and 280+ more), we’re exploring adding stocks, DeFi protocols… the future is bright.

If you have any questions, jump on our Telegram channel. It’s quite alive these days.

✦

It was a long break, but I had a good reason. See you next week.

T

If AI make us so much more productive, how much easier would be to write this game today. It took Jordan 3-4 years to build. You could surely do it faster today. How much faster? I bet it’s a year.

Is Work Easy Now?

When we remove the technical difficulty, we start to see that what's left is still a lot of work. What is the game all about? Who is it for? How is it different from everything else on the market? What about character and level design… as Ben Affleck said, AI writing is pretty shitty.

So what the conclusion?

It was never easier to validate if your idea is worth anything, but the work is still there.

Are Ideas Still Cheap?

The reason why in the previous era writing code looked like the most important part of any software was because it was scarce and hard to get. Producing quality lines of code required years of learning, and even then took a lot of time.

Making it easy removes this value from the equation. What is value now? Whatever still takes time. Just writing a Prince of Persia knockoff would be perfectly enough in 1991 to have a successful game. In 2026, it’s not. You can generate such a knockoff with a prompt, and that’s why it’s not even interesting enough to try.

It’s simply not interesting.

What we want is scarcity. We want things that are hard to get. Nobody appreciates oxygen which is essential to survive the next five minutes. We appreciate diamonds and Picasso paintings despite their value is purely imaginary.

When I started in the startup industry, smart people were saying that ideas are cheap, and it’s all about execution. I believed that.

Is it still true? What if execution became the easy part. In many cases it did. Now, all that left is the idea. Suddenly, that’s the most expensive part.

Can you surprise me? Can you make a game I’ve never seen before?

What was unique about Prince of Persia was the smooth character movements that used rotoscoping for the first time in a computer game. The result was shocking. Despite having barely a few pixels the character moved like a real person.

But this alone would surprise no one today.

What's the rotoscoping of 2026? What can you build that AI can't generate from a prompt?

Inventors vs. Investors

If you’re an idea person, congratulations. Making them real was never easier. If you have ideas: build. Just be ready for competition bigger every year.

But if that doesn’t excite you—and it surely doesn’t have to—then invest.

The gap between those who own the means of production and those who don't will widen faster than ever before, but the window is still open. You can still acquire assets that position you on the right side of this shift—assets that may become far less accessible as automation concentrates wealth and reshapes markets.

Bitcoin - The native money of the information age. The only asset that’s provably scarce, perfectly liquid, and controlled by no one.

Technology stocks - One day robots will build robots. But today, you can still become a shareholder in the companies that will sell them to the world.

Your network - Skills depreciate. Credentials expire. Relationships compound. In a world where human connection becomes the luxury good, the people you invest time in today become your most valuable asset tomorrow.

Jordan Mechner spent four years alone in a room bringing Prince of Persia to life. He’d likely still do great today, even if technical execution takes a prompt. However, if you’re not building, make sure you own a piece of economy that just started to explode. The future won’t leave you hungry. But it might leave you without options. I prefer to stay sovereign.

✦

Speaking of building and investing: we’re still slowly testing and improving the freshly opensourced version of Deltabadger. Many users already run it on their server, but I spent last two days trying to debug the Umbrel build. Wish me luck. On paper Umbrel seems like the perfect home for Deltabadger. If you want to help: install and test. Jump into our Telegram channel if you have any questions or ideas.

Why Does the App Feel So Much Better?

I must confess: I enjoy running the app locally more than I expected.

Recently, I’ve heard an interesting idea: why do AI agents struggle so much interacting with the web? Because the web is adversarial. There are a lot of things to prevent hacks, bots, malicious behaviors, all of which make the experience worse. Things break easier, and internet connection issues annoy everyone.

However, on your local computer, you feel safe and cozy. No CAPTCHA, no 2FA, no “low wifi signal.” Everything works fast, and the app is smaller because it has only one person to serve: you.

This is how the app feels run locally. It’s small, fast and to the point.

More importantly, it’s the “sovereignty” I’m looking for right now. One dependency less, no server subscription needed. More on that later.

Open Source is Life

Although regulations killed the app as a business, open sourcing resurrected its community. When the app was running without any problems online, the app Telegram channel was dead. Things are working, nothing to talk about. I knew that I have users because of looking into statistics and occasional direct messages.

It’s great to see the channel alive again, and getting real feedback from people trying to install the app on different platforms. That’s pure joy.

The six years of my work is now public. Even the depressive October and November when I desperately looked for ways to save the product as a business. It’s all out:

And it already has surprising consequences: it looks like the link from a big public repository boosts the pagerank. Ahrefs bumped DR +7 points in the last week alone.

Development is Cheap Now?

It's a ridiculous thing to say, but stripping out all the business logic made the app better. No paywalls, subscriptions, referral program, CAPTCHA… who needs that? From a user perspective the experience is now clean, smooth, and the app is fast.

But from a development perspective, removing 50% of moving parts allowed me to finally update the whole stack to modern architecture, and you know who else loves it? LLMs that can now understand the code better and solve every problem on the spot.

Wouldn’t that be great to always try first build something as cool and simple as possible, and add the whole “business bloat” to it only later and very carefully?

The work I did in the last two weeks—deploying for multiple platforms, adding new features—shocks me, even though I've been shipping code with AI for two years. The most expensive part of building online products suddenly became the cheapest one. I’m not exaggerating. It really is, and it exposes something that was always true:

Ideas can now be verified much quicker, and bad ideas are still bad.

From here, I can take Deltabadger into any direction, but the success or failure is just on me, and there is no longer a place to hide if my idea sucks. It’s no longer because I didn’t have capital to bring it to life. This excuse is gone.

There Was No Better Time to Build

The original 1989 Prince of Persia video game was created and programmed by one person, Jordan Mechner. He did everything except the music: programming, animations, the script and level design.

With better hardware and the internet, software became a monstrosity and modern AAA game titles are written by hundreds of people and cost millions. One of the things AI revolution does, is that it brings power back to solo creators.

I never felt more capable of doing stuff on my own. Only today, I implemented a small feature in the app, deployed fixes for Windows version, assisted some users with their installation, and now I’m finishing my Substack article.

If you have ideas, you have to build. And I still do have ideas.

Umbrel

Looking for the default platform recommendation for Deltabadger users, I was prompted by some of them to look into Umbrel, and boy, did I catch the bug for it.

There is something beautiful about running your own small personal “home server,” with things like maybe your personal Bitcoin node, tracking portfolio with Rotki, and now also running Deltabadger bot. I feel like this is the perfect ecosystem for the app, and I plan to spend the next weeks to both explore Umbrel myself, and making sure Deltabadger offers a smooth experience for Umbrel users. More on it soon.

That’s it for today.

If you’re a European, in this article, you’ll learn how and why to access US ETFs. The reason why you can’t with your current broker is quite ironic:

Does the EU Understand the Market?

To “protect investors" the EU regulations (PRIIPs) require ETFs to publish Key Information Documents (KID) projecting future performance. What is quite funny is that the US law treats such projections as litigation risk. That’s why the US issuers don’t publish KIDs, which is the reason you can’t buy their ETFs. It seems like the US regulator understands that the future may be different than any projection, while the EU thinks promising future results makes the investment safer.

The irony? You can buy leveraged CFDs on those same ETFs. Yes, the regulation meant to protect retail investors pushes them toward riskier products.

We’ll fix this nonsense, but first:

Is It Even Worth It?

The six-figure difference over 30 years can be a good reason to go the extra mile on its own, but that’s not my main reason to hold assets with non-EU brokers.

If you read my last newsletter, you know I don’t believe in single-thesis portfolios. That applies to jurisdictions too. If you think I’ve become an EU-skeptic after the shutdown of Deltabadger, it may be difficult to deny—but I held this position much longer. That’s one of the reasons I started to look into Bitcoin and offshore silver vaults a decade ago.

Your EU broker, your EU bank account, your EU property, your EU job, your EU pension—all operate under one jurisdiction that overnight can impose new rules affecting your plan.

I’m not saying the US is inherently better. I’m saying: diversify and keep your assets in different regulatory regimes. The real value is optionality. The fee savings are a bonus that pays for the extra effort.

The “Official” Way? Become a Professional.

EU brokers like IBKR and SAXO will tell you that you can buy US ETFs if you qualify as a professional investor. You need to check “only” 2 of 3:

• €500,000 portfolio

• 40+ significant trades in the past year

• Work in finance

Most of us don’t qualify. Moving on.

Brokers Outside the EU

The good news is that brokers outside of the EU will often happily open accounts for Europeans. I must confess, these are options I don’t know personally yet—I plan to test them this year and share my experiences, but tastytrade pops up in my feeds often these days, with Firstrade, TradeStation, and Charles Schwab being other popular options.

All four are US-regulated (FINRA/SEC). Your ETF shares are held in your name, not the broker’s—so broker problems mean transfer delays, not lost assets, and all offer $500k SIPC protection on top.

EU Brokers That Found Workarounds

I’m more familiar with EU-regulated brokers that offer US ETF access through various structures: Exante (Cyprus/Malta) requires €10,000 minimum, but offers full US ETF access. Freedom24 (Cyprus) has no minimum, and explicitly offers US ETFs to retail.

However, as I said: my main motivation is keeping some assets outside of the EU regulatory regime. Personally, I’m tempted to start my exploration with TradeStation because of the API access that is still a rarity among brokers. I recently open-sourced Deltabadger, and I dream about adding stock broker support to it.

No Free Lunch

Nothing is free. US brokers come with:

Tax complexity. US dividends are withheld at 30% by default. They'll prompt you to file W-8BEN to reduce it to 15%. Most EU countries let you credit this against your local tax bill—so you’re not taxed twice. Check your country’s rules.

Estate tax risk. US assets above $60,000 may be subject to US estate tax if you die. That's treaty-dependent, so check your country's rules. Worth knowing if your portfolio grows.

Finally: you’ll need USD. Use Revolut to convert cheaply before transferring.

Is it worth the hustle? In my opinion, yes.

TL;DR

If you’re investing €500/month into $EQQQ via IBKR, it’s still a good plan. (IBKR is another broker I'm exploring for the API access.)

However, if like me you’re a sovereign optimist, and want to mitigate the regulatory risk and save on fees, open one account outside of the EU. I’ll be back to the topic later this year, when I collect some experiences.

I write every Saturday. If this was useful, you’ll probably like what comes next.

Subscribe now

In 1997, The Sovereign Individual predicted "cybermoney based on mathematical algorithms that have no physical existence"—twelve years before Bitcoin. At the time, it seemed obvious this would make tax collection harder for governments and empower individuals.

Today, we know that the information age provides authorities with equally powerful tools. Yes, “cybermoney” exists. But so do facial recognition, on-chain analysis, social credit systems, and AI-powered surveillance.

But that's not the book's biggest miss—the state isn't the only one building fences anymore. Algorithms are the new rules, incentive structures, and gatekeepers.

The Old Playbook is Dead

Your job application? Filtered by AI screener. Your emails? "Summarized" and never read by the person you wrote to. Your social media? Shadow-banned—but your screentime keeps growing, exploiting brain patterns you don't control.

Under the hood, the world’s mechanics faced dramatic updates, but the surface looks like it always did:

We save for retirement knowing the pension system won't survive.
We take 30-year mortgages in a world falling below replacement fertility.
We enjoy stable employment at companies that already quietly stopped hiring.
We read our social media feed, but everyone suddenly sounds like a robot, using fancy phrases like 'watershed moment' and 'infrastructure play' that they never used before.

It’s not certain what the algorithm is up to. Will it take your job? Quietly filter who you interact with? Stealthily push you into buying stuff you otherwise never would?

If you feel lost, I'm with you. After the EU just killed my business—regulated out of existence overnight—I'm starting this year by figuring out the path forward myself, and I see a different world.

The old playbooks are over, and I don’t have all the tactics yet.

We’ll be exploring them here, preserving the “sovereign” vision from ‘97 using whatever tools we find. But here's what I believe:

Investing is no longer about comfortable retirement. It's what gives you options, independence, and makes staying sovereign possible.

From Earning to Owning

For 200,000 years, Homo sapiens lived as hunter-gatherers, spending all day trying to find meat, berries, and shelter to survive till the next day. In a way, it’s a metaphor for how many of us still live today.

10,000 years ago, agriculture changed everything: instead of daily grinding, we invested time into production and storage. That investment gave us time to think, plan, build civilization.

The work/save/retire playbook was how industrial societies organized life.

For many it still meant a never-ending grind, but it worked. Now industrial “hunter gatherers” have entered an ice age. Woolly mammoths and saber-toothed cats are going extinct. While some are already learning to farm the digital land, most are still hunting what's no longer there.

For thousands of years, we lived the same lifestyle our grand-grand-grandparent did, and our grand-grand-grandchildren would. Today, we can't predict our reality a decade ahead. We need new rules and new tools. Just buying S&P 500 and cruising toward retirement is not a plan anymore.

No Crying in the Casino

When I started investing, I understood it essentially as a tool to grow the available amount of dollars over time. Yes, “growth assets” and “compounding interest”, but still denominated in dollars at the end. It’s intuitive: money is a language everybody understands. Unfortunately, broken monetary policy made many people see the market merely as a casino:

When you read today’s financial discussions and opinions online, the perspective that dominates is that investing is betting. Prediction markets, NFTs and Pokemon cards, SPACs, leveraged ETFs—whatever can offer a moonshot. “No crying in the casino,” says Chamath Palihapitiya in the prospectus of his SPAC AEXA.

Dividends? Fundamentals? Too slow. If you’re risk-averse, buy Bitcoin.

The market goes “long degeneracy” because it lost hope, but gambling is a game with very few winners. Everybody knows that one day the setup will break, yet economic uncertainty pushes people to embrace high-risk bets, because “If I can’t succeed the way my parents did, maybe I can get lucky.”

I believe you can still win. You just need a new map.

The Sovereign Optimist Way

First, accept the new reality:

• The rules of investing changed, but most advice didn’t

• Investing is not optional anymore, it’s a defense

• The system’s safety nets are vulnerabilities

• Simple single-thesis portfolios are over

The digital farmland is a place of opportunities, but it’s a new game:

Build a strategy that doesn’t depend on a single job, a single country, or a single asset class. Protect your offline networks. Own illiquid assets that can’t be hacked, censored, or remotely locked. Your unique skills, your kids—those are investments too. This is diversification. There is a place for alternative assets like collectibles and prediction markets, but I see investing as growing your stash of things you own, not multiplying dollars.

Stop thinking in dollars, because the future may favor a different denomination, and may not have a salary for everyone, but what it will surely have are goods and services other people want. Start packing all you can find into your barn, and store safely.

Winter is coming.

✦

Staying sovereign is about living on your own terms. The future will offer multiple models, but choice will be reserved for those who secured their options. Everyone else will receive defaults.

Sovereignty without hope is paranoia. Optimism without independence is wishful thinking. I am becoming a Sovereign Optimist.

This year, I post every Saturday. Have an amazing weekend, and see you next week.

…and if you want to go more tactical:

Join the Optimists →

Here are the story, the pain, the lessons, and what's next.

Long Story Short

The irony is that when I started Deltabadger I spent a long time carefully planning and checking to not build a regulated financial product: I didn’t hold customers’ assets, I didn’t do financial advisory: the idea was a subscription-based service offering simple vanilla automation… so I thought.

1. When I started my company in 2019, the “crypto license” in Estonia cost €345, but I didn’t even need it.

2. A few months later, in 2020, the cost of the license suddenly rose to €3,300.

3. In 2022, the cost of the license reached ~€12,000, but I still didn’t need it.

4. Finally MiCA raised the cost to €200,000 + recurring ~€70k a year and now I discovered that I do need it.

I’m pretty sure that the license eventually will get even more expensive, making starting anything in the space available only for a large corporation. Poland already tries to be proactive regulating the space twice as strictly as the EU requires.

If you're wondering, what changed is that now being involved in execution of user transaction in any way requires a more expensive CASP license than for custodian wallets. Of course, it’s completely unnecessary absurd: the money was never going through my service, why I didn't need any license until now. All users were already AMLd and KYCd on Kraken or Coinbase. Requiring it again at my external SaaS just because users want to have some convenient automation using the API access makes no sense.

Regulations are not the biggest problem here. The regulatory instability is.

This is why the EU is such a business-unfriendly environment right now. No business can anticipate what changes politicians will impose on it next year. As if surviving in a market weren’t difficult enough: your business idea may be completely invalidated by newly added rules and taxes, sometimes even applied retroactively.

There is also no sandbox to try anything—this applies also to other cutting-edge technologies like AI. The initial compliance required to be able to even test an idea is overwhelming and often completely blocking. What has become the “gold standard” is simply bootstrapping projects outside of the EU, but for an already established platform with users from Europe, it’s too late for that.

Deltabadger is dead.

There is an amazing fulfillment coming from building a product that thousands of people use and love. It’s a great feeling. It’s addictive.

Shutting down the same product is emotionally the opposite. Six years of my life gone. I think about the over 700 long-term and lifetime subscribers that trusted me. I can’t sleep at night. I start to see all the bridges I’ve burned, sacrifices made to build the thing. The phrase “opportunity cost” hits hard.

But it’s done.

This chapter ends here.

Long live Deltabadger.

I’m a big fan of open source. I wouldn't have been able to build such a product as open source from day one, but since I have to do it now, I will enjoy every second of it.

There is a whole new category of users excited about open source and Deltabadger becoming an Umbrel app, and I am too. I’m ready to continue working on it and supporting it as long as I can.

Now, it’s time to make use of all the lessons learned.

What I’ve Learned

I’m slowly getting over being disappointed with myself, and all the big mistakes on the way. I’m not sure if my disappointment with the EU goes away as quickly. I really hoped to build the business here. I made the conscious decision to try, and I did.

Now, it’s time to move on. I’m quitting the EU as the direction moving forward. It doesn’t mean I physically leave tomorrow, but my plans no longer rely on it.

I always felt European. It was my primary identity, before being a Pole. Now? I am not sure what it means today. Greek philosophy still speaks to my heart. Maybe I’m a Slav? It’s another identity that comes to my head before my nationality, but the word has a shared root with “slave,” so I pass for now.

I’m moving toward the future where I rely on the EU bureaucracy as little as possible. I don’t see it as a political declaration, as much as a matter of practicality. It looks like I like doing things considered here “off the books” and if I want to continue, I need to look for solutions that work.

I’m a “second time founder” now: yes, the one that thinks distribution first, product second. This may be the best part of the story: everything I learned about the business. At Deltabadger, I had a lot of luck I didn’t properly leverage, or leveraged it just a tiny bit too late. Whatever comes next, I have tools I didn’t have when I started, and I cannot stop building now: in the builders’ renaissance of the AI-era.

I’m back on the trail.

✦

In a way, starting again brings me closer to you, the reader, and what I’m writing about: making the best out of the narrow window of opportunity we are in.

During those six years, I spent a lot of hours writing emails and messages to my users. One of the things I realized is how much I enjoy writing. I’m making Substack the new home for those words.

Today, I close a chapter. Tomorrow, I start again.

Happy New Year.

I didn’t, so I dove to the very bottom.

You may not like Saylor, you may even not like Bitcoin, but from a pure math perspective Strategy is pretty damn interesting. Let’s explore how the “money glitch” works so moving forward you can understand the numbers and enjoy the show fully while it’s unfolding.

How it started.

In 2020, at the beginning of COVID, like most of the market, the MicroStrategy stock tanked badly. It was a follow-up to many years of declining price and revenue. Saylor had a problem.

When central banks fired up the money printers in response to COVID, the U.S. money supply exploded by 26% in a single year (compared to the usual 5–6% annual growth). With near-zero interest rates, Saylor calculated his cash was generating real yields of –15% to –26%. He famously called it “toxic,” “trash,” and a “melting ice cube.”

Ironically, Saylor had been a skeptic who’d tweeted in 2013 that Bitcoin would “go the way of online gambling.” But in 2020, facing the unprecedented monetary expansion, and after looking into different options, he finally got his Bitcoin epiphany: fixed 21-million supply made it superior digital gold—a true store of value in an era of infinite money printing.

It’s Bitcoin. They need to buy Bitcoin.

In August 2020, MicroStrategy made its first purchase: $250 million for 21,454 BTC.

The Glitch

The market responded enthusiastically, and the stock reached the highest level in over 20 years. At the time, there were no Bitcoin ETFs, so offered convenient Bitcoin exposure for stock investors around the world.

In fact, the stock started trading at significant mNAV premium (modified Net Asset Value) meaning, the market cap of the company was significantly higher than the value of Bitcoins on the balance sheet. Here is where the “money glitch” discovery happened:

Imagine that Microstrategy has Bitcoin worth $1M, but the market cap of $2M. This means the mNAV of 2.0. If they issue additional $2M of stocks and buy Bitcoin, now the holdings are worth $3M, while the market cap is $4M, the mNAV goes down from 2.0 to 1.33.

Yes, the premium allows them to print money and buy more Bitcoin—debt free, at least initially.

That’s the beginning of the magic math. That’s the glitch.

Matt Levine summarized it ironically:

The basic idea is that the US stock market will pay $2 for $1 worth of crypto.

But why?

You may ask: why would anybody do that? Great question. The answer is: leverage.

Since the stock is not pegged to Bitcoin like an ETF, the mNAV goes up and down, offering traders leveraged exposure to Bitcoin without margin calls or the cost of servicing debt.

Leverage without margin call is the product.

You may roll your eyes, but there are many Bitcoin traders that like the leverage, and is a volatile stock that offers it. However, this mechanism had its limits:

In 2020-2023, many institutional investors (pension funds, certain ETFs, retirement accounts) literally couldn’t buy Bitcoin directly. was the only way in. This structural demand helped sustain the premium. The January 2024 spot ETF approvals changed it—suddenly BlackRock offered the same exposure at 0.12% fees. That’s partly why mNAV compressed from 3.4x to 1.15x.

Saylor was too good at math to stop there. With Bitcoin’s massive average annual growth, and the company still having some revenue from the legacy business, he saw an even bigger opportunity.

If Bitcoin appreciates faster than the cost of debt, why not borrow money to buy more? This is where it gets both interesting and complex at the same time.

Convertible Bonds

Between 2020-2025, Strategy issued $8.2 billion in convertible bonds—part loans, part stock options. Here is how they work:

Normal bond: You lend a company $1,000. They pay you interest (say 5% annually) and return your $1,000 at maturity. Simple.

Convertible bond: You lend a company $1,000. They pay you lower interest (say 0.5%), BUT you get the option to convert your bond into stock at a predetermined price. If the stock moons, you convert and profit. If it doesn’t, you still get your $1,000 back.

Now, let’s look at the terms:

The average coupon is merely 0.42%—essentially free money to buy an asset that historically compounds at 50%+ annually.

Two of the bonds (Convert 2029 and Convert 2030 B) pay literally zero interest. It may seem confusing why anyone would lend at 0%, until you realize the potential profit at conversion is +55% and +74%.

Bondholders have legal claims.

If Strategy can’t repay at maturity, bondholders can force company to liquidate the Bitcoin. The conversion feature helps—if MSTR is above the conversion price, bondholders happily convert to equity instead of demanding cash.

The risk starts to be visible only when the stock price falls:

Convert 2028 has a $183 conversion price, roughly the current price, so it’s at the money, but if drops to $150 by the September 2027 put date, those bondholders won’t want underwater stock. They’ll demand their $1 billion in cash.

How it’s going.

When mNAV compressed, equity and debt issuance slowed down. At the beginning of 2025, around the time the company removed “micro” from the name and rebranded to Strategy, they also pivoted to preferred stocks—a hybrid between bond and stock.

The “Accretive” Problem

Let’s get back to the “infinite money glitch” math example first:

If the number of shares doubles, but Bitcoin holdings triple, it increases “Bitcoins per share”—which Strategy emphasizes, calling it “accretive”—but they’re quiet about stock dilution: current shareholders own less of the company due to the permanently increased total number of shares.

Convertible bonds have another issue: they allow hedge funds to profit risk-free from MSTR’s volatility while extracting value from common shareholders:

When Strategy issues a 0% convertible bond, hedge funds buy the bond and simultaneously short MSTR stock.

• If MSTR rises, they convert the bond to shares at the preset price and cover their short—capturing the spread.

• If MSTR falls, they profit on the short position while still holding a bond that gets repaid at full value. Either way, the hedge fund wins.

The cost? Common shareholders get diluted when bonds convert to shares—precisely when the stock is high and dilution hurts most. Strategy emphasizes “we raised $8 billion at 0% interest!”—but stays quiet about how convertible arbitrage extracts value from volatility that rightfully belongs to equity holders.

That’s where “preferreds” come to the rescue:

Preferred Stocks

While common stock gives you a piece of the company, preferred stock gives you a “senior” claim with fixed dividend payments (like bond interest), but limited upside.

Seniority means that if the company goes bankrupt, preferred holders get paid before common shareholders but after bondholders.

Preferred stocks are right in the middle: like bonds, they offer yield, but unlike bonds, they have no maturity date, no common stock dilution, and dividends payment flexibility. Strategy issued five classes of them, each with different seniority and terms:

Highest Seniority

(Strife): 10% cumulative dividend. Payments can be skipped, but they compound at 11-18% until paid. Most protective—designed for pension funds seeking stability.

(Stretch): Variable rate (~10.75%) compounding monthly dividend. Payments can also be delayed, but there is no “yield penalty” for it.

Middle Seniority

(Strike): 8% cumulative with conversion option—each share converts to 0.1 MSTR at $1,000. For investors wanting both yield and Bitcoin upside.

$STRE (Stream): Euro-denominated for the European market, 10% cumulative. It works similarly to Strife, but has lower seniority. This one is likely the least relevant for most readers since it’s only accessible to institutional investors.

Lowest Seniority

(Stride): 10% non-cumulative—the key difference. If Strategy skips a dividend, it’s gone forever. Higher risk, but it trades at $80, giving a ~12.5% effective yield versus STRF’s ~9% at $110.

All preferred dividends are paid quarterly, except STRC, which pays monthly.

Preferred stocks aren’t unusual—Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and JPMorgan all have publicly traded preferreds yielding 5–7%. What’s unusual is Strategy offering 10% yields on stocks backed by Bitcoin.

A Few Months Later…

These preferreds have existed for less than a year, but we can already see how they behave under normal market conditions. In theory, they should all trade around $100, but as you can see, the market value them exactly by their seniority:

Premium or discount represents what investors think about probability of getting paid. The highest seniority trades at 10% premium, while non-cumulative lowest seniority dropped to $65 during a Bitcoin dip. That’s interesting because the yield is promised for the nominal price of $100, so the effective yield (if paid) goes up to 15%.

Now you almost understand preferreds:

Perpetual income. No maturity date. Collect 8-10% annually.

Indefinitely? Not quite:

1. Strategy can redeem them back at $100 per share.

2. Dividends aren’t guaranteed. We already discussed that part.

3. Inflation erodes the value of each share over time (something many miss).

4. Finally: the company could fail. We’ll talk about it later.

So, there is one big question to answer left.

Is It a Ponzi?

Let’s look at the actual numbers:

Strategy holds 660,624 BTC worth ~$59.5 billion at current prices. Total obligations (debt + preferred) are $16 billion. That’s a 4.1x coverage ratio—selling 24.4% of Bitcoin holdings would be enough to pay all the company debt back despite not having to be paid anytime soon.

The BTC Breakeven ARR of 1.36% means if Bitcoin appreciates just 1.36% annually, the holdings generate enough value to cover all obligations indefinitely.

Strategy appears absolutely safe… for now.

Paper Appreciation Doesn’t Pay Cash Dividends

Let’s imagine a problematic scenario:

The first convertible put date is September 2027 ($1 billion). If BTC is at $50K and mNAV is 0.6x by then, refinancing becomes very expensive or impossible.

Today, that sounds impossible, but a big part of the problem is that the plan is to continue issuing shares and debt, and in 2027, the numbers will be different, and hard to estimate now.

Strategy needs $811 million annually to pay preferred dividends. The legacy software business doesn’t cover even half of it, so where does the money come from?

Recently, they raised $1.44 billion specifically to build a cash reserve—that’s about 21 months of dividend runway. But raising capital to pay back earlier investors is exactly where the “scheme” accusations start.

After 21 months, they must either:

1. Issue more equity (only works if mNAV > 1.0)

2. Issue more preferreds (market appetite is finite)

3. Sell Bitcoin (destroys the thesis)

Can it continue for a few more rounds? Maybe. But what is the endgame? What is the target revenue stream? So far it’s a blurry vision of a “Bitcoin bank”—lending against BTC holdings, offering yield products, and so on.

How It Breaks

The biggest misunderstanding among Strategy critics is how this model fails.

Until the company loses its Bitcoin holdings, this isn’t insolvency.

The real failure is the collapse of the common stock caused by losing capital market access. If the Bitcoin price falls too much, or if for any other reason investors start to question Strategy’s ability to pay, the model collapses.

As the seniority structure dictates, the bondholders, then preferred shareholders will get paid (in the worst case by selling Bitcoin), but common stockholders will be left with a dead body: an empty shell of a former software company stripped of its Bitcoin.

So, what does all of that really mean?

If you’re looking for interesting trade ideas, Strategy’s tickers offer plenty. In 2026, the company has virtually no chance of being in serious trouble. It’s simply too well-capitalized. I haven’t expected to say it, but preferred seems to be risk-off assets now, and especially those with higher seniority can be a good alternative to bonds and other yield products.

All of the risk is held by the common stock.

What about long-term? What about the Bitcoin bank vision? Time will tell.

Why Are We Here?

I put treasury companies in the same basket as SPACs, prediction markets, NFTs, and memecoins. The common denominator is that the capital structure is more important than the underlying product/service. Retail investors don’t fully understand how they work—and they don’t care. As a consequence of monetary and technological disruption, they don’t believe in a distant future anymore and look for quick liquidity instead.

On one end, the market is being gamblified, with prediction markets successfully removing the stigma from making crazy bets. On the other hand, passive investing already moves over 50% of the capital, while even the good old S&P 500 doubled in the last 5 years.

If something looks like a scheme these days, it’s not just Strategy.

But is it a world record? Not even close. Japan tried 100. Sweden averaged 140. We can learn from those experiments:

They didn’t make housing cheaper.

If you’re thinking about buying an apartment, keep reading. I promise there’s hope at the end.

100-year mortgages? Already happened.

Japan’s late-1980s bubble produced the 100-year, three-generation mortgages. The mortgages were marketed as a path to homeownership, but they failed to increase housing affordability—in fact, the easier credit helped inflate the bubble even further. Instead of helping regular buyers, people used them as estate-planning tools to reduce inheritance taxes. When the bubble finally burst, property prices collapsed, and twenty-five years later they remain down across most of Japan.

Sweden’s story is even more absurd. Their mortgage system used fixed-rate “bottom loans” covering up to 75% of a home’s value where borrowers never had to pay principal—just interest, forever. By 2013, regulators calculated the average mortgage term had reached 140 years, with nearly one-third of mortgages being pure interest-only payments. Instead of building equity, people were renting money indefinitely while pretending to own homes. In 2016, regulators capped mortgages at 105 years and forced minimum principal payments.

So, what are the takeaways?

Super-long mortgages don’t solve affordability. Japan’s 100-year mortgages became tax shelters for the wealthy while trapping regular buyers in perpetual debt. Sweden’s interest-only structure let people pretend they owned homes for decades. In both cases, regulators eventually panicked and intervened, but only after the damage was done.

Cheaper credit makes housing more expensive.

The Affordability Paradox

Yes, the very mortgage that makes housing accessible makes it less affordable. It’s really simple: if there are 10 apartments on the market and 100 people get enough money to buy them, there are still only 10 apartments. Quickly someone will offer more to get to the front of the line, and the price will rise.

The only way to make apartments cheaper is to increase the supply of apartments. Not the demand!—and this is what cheap credit does.

However, it seems like no matter how high prices are, people still buy real estate.

Flight to Assets

Part of this is the broader flight to assets, which is not unique to housing—when money printing accelerates and traditional savings lose purchasing power, capital floods into anything scarce: stocks, crypto, gold, and yes, real estate.

(For more on this dynamic, see The Window Manifesto.)

In fact, real estate is bar-none the biggest asset class of all. The returns are worse than those offered by stocks or Bitcoin, but the majority of investors still choose real estate. And they’re not wrong in a sense—you should only invest in things you understand, and there is no human on earth who doesn’t understand “home.”

However, there’s another, maybe even more important, reason why so much capital flows into real estate. It’s the only place where a retail investor can get 5-10x leverage on their capital at an institutional-grade rate of ~6% a year. No margin call. Imagine that you could invest in stocks or Bitcoin with 5x leverage and pay it off over 30 years on similar terms. Many investors would likely pick better performing assets.

Now, we need to understand one absurdly overlooked part of real estate:

The Money Printer

Not enough people know that 30-50% of new money enters the system through mortgage lending. When you borrow money for your house, the bank literally creates a check out of thin air and home buyers get brand new dollars in their account.

Mortgages are the money printer.

Many people understand the link between printing money and inflation, but miss that real estate inflates first—because that’s where new money enters.

Domesticated Cantillon Effect

The Cantillon effect describes how those closest to new money creation benefit most—they get to spend freshly printed money before inflation dilutes its value. Normally, this privilege belongs to banks, governments, and large institutions. But a mortgage is the only place where you’re literally first in line to receive newly created money. You get to buy a real asset with fresh dollars before they flood the rest of the economy and drive up prices everywhere else.

That’s why it feels like you’re “forced” to get a mortgage to keep up—because in a sense, you are. In the fiat system, skipping it means opting out of the VIP spot right in front of the printer, and saying no to the cheapest dollars they’ll ever be.

So, let’s do it. Let’s take the 30-year mortgage before prices go even higher.

Right. But first, let’s look 30 years into the future.

It will be interesting.

30 Years From Now

Who buys apartments? Humans. But wait, everyone seems to have a place to live, so why do we need more? We need more because there are more and more people.

The current global fertility rate is 2.25. This is how many kids the average woman has. As long as this rate is no smaller than 2.1—the replacement level—the population will be growing, and that’s the demand side of the real estate market.

So far so good.

The average usually doesn’t tell the whole story. Here is the map of the world. Blue countries have a fertility rate above 2.1. The rest are already way below.

This hits different. Here is how it changed over the last few decades.

The current prediction is that by the year 2050, even the global average will already be below 2.1, and if you notice, that’s sooner than today’s 30-year mortgage’s last payment. Of course, during those 30 years, we’ll build way more apartments and homes. Who are we building for? Some explanations include: Migration from Africa (already happening and will work for some time, until they share the trajectory all other countries did when they developed); longer lifespan (Bryan Johnson says we will live forever); maybe even breeding humans artificially.

Or the whole developed world becomes South Korea, with a fertility rate of 0.72—the world’s lowest. The real demographic impact on housing likely won’t hit until around 2035. By then, who inherits those apartments? And more importantly, who do they sell them to?

The irony of the housing market is that while today we discuss affordability as the biggest problem, in 30 years we may see those apartments paid back with sweat, blood, and tears standing empty.

Finally, one thing the 30-year mortgage assumes is stable employment, but in the middle of the “AI bubble” many question if 30 years from now there will be any jobs at all. You may not believe in extremes, but at least now, the job disruption is clearly visible. What does it mean for millions of long-term mortgages?

Let’s bring it home.

The Real Solution

We talked a lot about the demand side of the real estate market, but the truth is that the only solution to housing affordability is either vastly limiting access to credit—homes will get cheaper, but most will not be able to buy them anyway—or increasing supply. In 50 years a better demand/supply ratio may happen due to demographic decline. Today, we can help with deregulation of development, and prefab/3D-printed homes. All of that will likely happen simultaneously and gradually.

If you need a home and you can afford a reasonable 20-30-year mortgage, it’s still how the system works today—do it. But real estate as an investment with a multidecade time horizon has way too many question marks. In 50 years housing may not be a problem at all, and that’s the real reason to not take the 50-year credit. Put your down payment into your Window Portfolio, and rent.

The Good

Most people still think stock investing is difficult and risky, a gamble where only the quickest draw wins. But in reality it’s the opposite—it’s a solved problem.

It was solved by John Bogle in 1976, when he launched the first market cap-weighted index fund. He realized that most investors couldn’t beat the market, and the fees they paid trying were destroying their returns. His solution was elegant—stop trying. Just own everything in proportion to its market value, pay almost nothing in fees, and capture the market’s return.

Wall Street ridiculed it as “un-American” and “a sure path to mediocrity.” The fund raised only $11 million against expectations of $150 million. But Bogle was right. By 2000, his Vanguard 500 had surpassed the legendary Magellan Fund. Today, market cap-weighted index funds control roughly $13 trillion in U.S. equities alone—nearly half of all long-term mutual fund and ETF assets.

So, just dollar-cost average into a broad market index fund, and that’s it. That’s the solution. Can you do better than this? Maybe. Most people can’t.

The good news is; if you just do that, you’ll double your money every 7 years or sooner.

*
But the scale changes everything. Index funds were designed to be price takers—passive participants riding the wave of market returns. But when they’re the biggest shareholders in nearly every company, they’re inevitably price makers, influencing corporate governance, capital allocation, and market dynamics in ways Bogle never imagined.

The question is not whether index investing works for individuals—it clearly does—do it. But what happens when the solution becomes the system?

The Bad

In 2025, Tesla shareholders voted on Elon Musk’s $1 trillion compensation package—the largest in corporate history. If Tesla hit an $8.5 trillion valuation and twelve operational milestones, Musk would receive stock worth up to a trillion dollars.

Proxy advisory firms like ISS urged a “no” vote. They said the package was excessive, lacked guardrails, dangerous.

But here’s where it gets interesting: who are the biggest Tesla shareholders? Vanguard, BlackRock, State Street—the index fund giants that collectively own more Tesla stock than anyone except Musk himself.

Representing the actively managed ARK Investment, Cathie Wood had a vastly different opinion:

“Isn’t it sad, if not damning, that institutional shareholders rely on proxy firms to tell them how they should vote? Index funds do no fundamental research, yet dominate institutional voting. Index-based investing is a form of socialism. Our investment system is broken.”

She’s not wrong. Index funds own massive stakes in Tesla—not because they believe in the company, but because Tesla is 2.4% of the S&P 500. They have to own it. They’re locked in by their mandate.

Despite having enormous stakes, they simply don’t have skin in the game the way activist investors do. They don’t profit from Tesla specifically succeeding. They track indices, not businesses. Their incentive is to minimize controversy, follow proxy advisors, and avoid standing out.

Let’s make it clearer: The people with the most voting power are institutionally required not to care about company performance.

In the old market, shareholders were gunslingers—they lived or died by their picks. Now, the biggest shareholders are deputies who don’t care which side wins. They’re just counting the bodies.

Eventually, the package was accepted. An active investor, Mike P, who voted ‘yes,’ captured the difference perfectly:

Today, I cheered in my car as it drove me home when I heard that Elon’s pay package was approved. I voted my 750 shares on it with a huge grin on my face. If Elon gets paid 1 trillion dollars, I will be a multimillionaire.

That’s happy ending, but when you zoom out, you see a much bigger problem:

Index funds break price discovery

The efficient market imagined by Eugene Fama and practiced by Benjamin Graham works when investors do research, make bets, and allocate capital to companies they believe will succeed. The best capital allocators study balance sheets, evaluate management, assess competitive advantages—then put their money where their analysis leads them. Winners—those who do the best job—govern most of the capital.

That’s how capital flows to the best companies. That’s how markets separate winners from losers.

But index funds don’t do any of that. They buy Tesla because it’s big. They buy Nvidia because it’s big. They buy Apple because it’s big. Market cap becomes the only metric that matters.

There’s no research. No analysis. No conviction. Just: “It’s in the index, so we buy it.”

We see this clearly when traders frontrun news about companies joining indices—like when Strategy joined the Nasdaq 100, or when it almost joined the S&P 500. It’s hard to avoid conclusion that the announcement itself moves prices, regardless of fundamentals.

When enough capital operates this way, you get a self-reinforcing loop. Big companies get bigger not because they’re performing better, but because they’re already big.

That’s not price discovery. That’s price following.

Everything is a Memecoin

The new generation of investors grew up on memecoins. They didn’t have a chance to experience the meaning of fundamentals. Traditional metrics like P/E ratios or free cash flow seem disconnected from results. Many are calling value investing dead.

As Jeff Park writes in The Fall of the Intelligent Investor:

“Benjamin Graham’s definition of value is no longer useful... Investors no longer care about empirical metrics like cash flows because there are greater ‘qualitative’ shocks that can upend the valuation input overnight... The future belongs to the Ideological Investor.”

When the biggest pools of capital are required to ignore fundamentals, and the newest investors never learned them in the first place, and pick stocks based on their memetic potential, what’s left to anchor prices to reality?

Everyone’s digging for gold, but nobody knows what gold looks like anymore.

The Ugly

In 2019, Michael Burry—yes, the guy who saw 2008 coming and made a fortune betting against subprime CDOs—gave an interview to Bloomberg:

“The recent flood of money into index funds has parallels with the pre-2008 bubble in collateralized debt obligations. Central banks have more or less removed price discovery from the credit markets. And now passive investing has removed price discovery from the equity markets.”

His concern wasn’t just about individual companies being mispriced.

“This is very much like the bubble in synthetic asset-backed CDOs before the Great Financial Crisis. Price-setting in that market was not done by fundamental security-level analysis, but by massive capital flows based on Nobel-approved models of risk that proved to be untrue.”

Burry pointed out something most people miss about index funds:

Liquidity Is an Illusion

“The dirty secret of passive index funds is the distribution of daily dollar value traded among the securities within the indexes they mimic.”

Trillions of dollars are tied to stocks that barely trade. The S&P 500 sounds like the most liquid market in the world, but over half the companies in it trade less than $150 million per day. That sounds like a lot until you realize trillions of dollars are indexed to them.

Right now, money flows in smoothly because index funds are buying a little bit of everything, all the time. But what happens when everyone wants to sell at once? Who’s on the other side of that trade?

There won’t be enough buyers. The same mechanism that made it easy to pile in—automatic, mindless capital flows—will make it catastrophic to get out.

Index fund investors are more often buy-and-hold types, but even if binding 500 stocks into one basket does not increase volatility, it does increase correlation (everything moving together), which means when there’s a crash, it affects everything simultaneously. That’s a form of the increased systemic risk Burry saw before.

In 2008, everyone thought they could sell their CDOs whenever they wanted.

Then one day, there were no buyers.

“This fundamental concept is the same one that resulted in the market meltdowns in 2008,” he said.

The correlation problem goes beyond index funds: stocks, bonds, crypto, gold, and real estate that historically provided diversification now rise and fall in unison. It’s a flight to assets, any assets, as capital seeks refuge from monetary debasement.

Here’s what Burry couldn’t quite say—or maybe didn’t see.

The index fund bubble isn’t just a market problem. It’s a monetary problem.

When Market Becomes a Saving Account

In November 2025, China’s central bank resumed bond purchases—effectively printing money—and Bloomberg reported “fund rotation into equities.” This isn’t theory: central banks are actively forcing capital into stocks regardless of valuations.

Why? Because people can’t hold cash. Inflation erodes it. Bonds barely keep up. Real estate requires capital most people don’t have. Gold doesn’t yield anything.

Everyone is forced into stocks—not because they’ve analyzed companies, but because there’s nowhere else to go. The stock market has become the new savings account. Index funds are simply the most efficient way to use it as one.

A Thousand Year Old Problem

In Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber discusses an Islamic philosopher Al-Ghazali and his idea that ideal money should be abstract—its monetary function shouldn’t compete with any other utility. That’s an interesting observation from the era of commodity money:

When gold serves as money, its monetary demand competes with its use in jewelry and industry.

This applies to index investing perfectly:

When stocks serve as money, their monetary demand—as inflation hedges and stores of value—competes with their primary function: allocating capital to productive enterprises.

The result is price distortion in both.

This is the real “ugly” of index investing: it’s a symptom of monetary dysfunction. When fiat currency fails as a store of value, every asset class is forced to absorb that monetary premium and serve dual, competing purposes.

When that happens, neither function works properly.

The current system is broken. Fiat currency forces everyone into asset markets. Index funds are the rational response, but they’re breaking price discovery and creating systemic fragility.

Part II: For a Few Dollars More

For decades, everyone’s been chasing paper dollars—stocks, bonds, real estate—anything but dollars themselves. But what if the problem isn’t what you’re chasing? What if it’s the dollars?

Equation of Exchange

In 1911, economist Irving Fisher formulated what he called the Equation of Exchange:

Where M is the money supply, V is velocity (how fast money circulates), P is the price level, and Q is real GDP (the quantity of goods and services produced).

Simplified, it means: Total Money = Total Value of Goods & Services

Here’s why this matters: If the money supply (M) grows faster than economy produces goods and services (Q), then prices (P) rise and we get inflation. Currently, it does and we do.

However, if we could have money that doesn’t grow supply, the opposite would happen: prices would fall, and the purchasing power of your money would increase automatically with economic growth.

As the economy grows, your money automatically captures that growth because the same money now represents more productive capacity.

You don’t need an index fund. The money itself is the index.

In Search of The Hardest Money

But this only works if the money supply can’t be inflated.

For most of human history, that was impossible to guarantee. Gold was the closest, with the lowest stock-to-flow ratio, but the supply was still growing and in the digital economy the form factor feels like an ancient relic making it hard to consider money in a traditional sense.

Then came debt-based fiat currency, with supply expanding indefinitely. Every year, more dollars, more euros, more yen. We all know this part:

Despite the goods and services side growth constantly accelerating, the money side always grows faster. As we discussed, to maintain your purchasing power you’re forced to convert it into something else: stocks, gold, real estate, anything that might keep pace with monetary expansion.

Index funds become the default solution—a way to keep your purchasing power tied to economic growth. We discussed all the problems that arise with it.

But what if money could do its job again?

As we already noticed, we would need money with a finite supply, and we know one.

Bitcoin is not only the first form of money with a supply that truly cannot be inflated. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin. No central bank can print more. In this model, Bitcoin’s fixed supply can absorb unlimited growth in the goods and services of the global economy.

Hyperbitcoinization: The Bitcoin Endgame

The hyperbitcoinization scenario is not about the present, but a hypothetical future.

If Bitcoin becomes the global store of value—what bitcoiners call “hyperbitcoinization”—the equation balances naturally:

• M: 21 million bitcoin (fixed)

• Q: All goods and services (growing)

• Result: Each bitcoin’s purchasing power grows with the economy, accelerated by the gradual loss of coins and other factors decreasing the circulating supply.

Your bitcoin holdings would automatically capture global economic growth without you needing to own stocks, real estate, or anything else as a monetary hedge.

The money itself becomes your “index fund” for human productivity.

Right now, Bitcoin is still in its monetization phase. Its price is driven mostly by new capital flowing in—people discovering it, institutions allocating to it, countries adding it to reserves. It’s volatile. It’s growing through adoption, not through representing economic output.

This is expected. Gold went through the same process over centuries.

But imagine a future where Bitcoin’s adoption has saturated. This is the part skeptics miss when they call it a “ponzi”:

Even without new money inflow, Bitcoin’s growth rate would be driven by the real economic growth rate, because the equation of exchange demands it.

When Money Works

If Bitcoin becomes the dominant store of value, as Al-Ghazali’s ideal abstract money, it could change how the market functions:

Stocks could be just stocks again. No more “I need to be invested in something.” Graham’s intelligent investor could come back from retirement, and active capital allocators could practice true price discovery again.

Real estate would just be housing. Prices would reflect utility—location, quality, livability—not a forced monetary premium.

Gold could become just jewelry. Impossible? For thousands of years, shells were currency. Technology disrupted shells, and it can disrupt gold as well.

The radical idea:

You wouldn’t need to invest to preserve wealth. You could just save. Your money would naturally increase its purchasing power through economic growth.

This future is not guaranteed, but here’s what is certain:

The current system is broken. Fiat currency forces everyone into asset markets. Index funds are the rational response, but they’re breaking price discovery and creating systemic fragility. The solution isn’t to stop using index funds—it’s to fix the money.

The principle is clear: the harder the money, the better markets function.

In 1976, John Bogle fixed investing for individuals. He couldn’t fix the money.

It’s time to fix the money.

Fix the money, fix the world.

For decades, the story was simple: when markets grew, the economy created jobs. When markets cooled, hiring slowed. The two lines moved together, intrinsically bound - both being a proxy for the same thing: economic prosperity.

Then something broke.

Something happened on November 30, 2022. Since then, some of the Magnificent 7 stocks have almost tripled. Meanwhile, job openings are back to the 2019 levels.

Some people struggle to see through the volatility noise, so here’s the 3-month correlation that cuts through it. No, it’s not like before.

It’s a lagging indicator, but that’s precisely why it matters. Shorter timeframes show noise; this shows how unusual sustained negative correlation is.

On the first chart, one line represents capital - ownership of productive assets. The other represents human labor - your ability to sell your time and skills for money. For your entire life, they moved together. Now, the gap is widening.

The question you should be asking yourself:

Which line represents you better?

FIRE

In 1992, Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez published Your Money or Your Life, laying out a powerful idea:

if you can accumulate 25 times your annual expenses, you could safely withdraw 4% per year and never work again.

The concept simmered for years. Then in 2010, Jacob Lund Fisker published Early Retirement Extreme, and something clicked. By the mid-2010s, FIRE—Financial Independence, Retire Early—had become a movement, particularly among millennials watching their parents grind through decades of corporate life. Blogs proliferated. Subreddits formed. A software engineer making $150,000, living on $40,000, and retiring at 35 instead of 65—this “fired” people’s imagination.

Roommates in your thirties, used cars, cooking every meal, saying no to expensive hobbies—surely not for everybody. But for those who did it, the reward was time.

FIRE was aspirational. It was never about securing your retirement, but about lifestyle design, and living life on your own terms.

FIRE adherents, fundamentally, relied on the same assumptions as traditional financial advice—the ‘safe withdrawal rate’ of 4%, 7% returns and the need to accumulate 25x your annual expenses.

What happens when Bitcoin does 50% annually? Or when QQQ does 20%? Suddenly, the math of 25x becomes disconnected from reality—you may need only 10-15x, but FIRE fans often didn’t like too much risk in the portfolio and followed the classic portfolio compositions like the three fund portfolio or even 60/40.

That’s a good place to look at this classic playbook closer.

Work. Save. Retire.

The advice was everywhere, and for decades it worked:

1. Get a good job. Save 10-15% of your income. Max out your 401(k). Get the employer match. Be consistent.

2. Diversify with a 60/40 portfolio. 60% stocks, 40% bonds. When stocks fall, bonds rise. When stocks rise, bonds provide stability. Rebalance annually.

3. Buy and hold index funds. The S&P 500 returns about 7% real per year over the long term. Don’t try to time the market. Don’t pick individual stocks. Just own everything and let it compound for 30 years.

4. Get a 30-year mortgage, and buy a home. You’ll slowly climb the corporate ladder and pay it off. By 65, you’ll have enough to retire comfortably and free of debt.

This wasn’t bad advice. For people who started investing in 1980, 1990, or even 2000, it worked beautifully.

“It works until it doesn’t.”

Then, one by one, things started to break:

The 60/40 portfolio is dead. Stocks and bonds used to move in opposite directions - that was the entire point. When stocks crashed in 2008, bonds rallied, cushioning the blow. But since COVID, the correlation broke. In 2022, both stocks and bonds fell together. The hedging mechanism that justified holding 40% bonds disappeared.

The S&P 500 isn’t what you think it is. The “500” implies diversification, but the Magnificent Seven (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, Tesla) now represent over 35% of the entire index. In 2023, these seven stocks generated nearly all the gains. The other 493 companies? Barely keeping pace with inflation. The S&P 500 is no longer diversification—it’s 7 companies dragging 493 along. If you own VOO, you’re paying for dead weight.

Returns aren’t 7% anymore - they’re 15-20%. But only if you’re in the right assets. The S&P 500 is up 20%+ annually since late 2022. Bitcoin has beaten nearly every traditional asset class year after year, yet classic investment advice doesn’t even acknowledge it exists. Gold hit all-time highs. Even real estate in certain markets doubled, making homes not accessible anymore.

Everything is rising simultaneously. Stocks, crypto, gold, real estate - assets that used to move independently are now moving together. This isn’t normal diversification behavior. It’s a massive flight to assets, any assets, as people (consciously or not) sense that holding cash or bonds is a losing position.

And finally, the 30-40 year career—oh yes, that. Remember the chart? Job openings falling during a period of explosive economic growth and corporate profit expansion.

It looks like the growth is still happening - just not for everyone. Companies are finding ways to expand, to increase productivity, to generate returns for shareholders without adding headcount.

Luddites and The Loom Machine Moment

In 1811, skilled weavers in Nottingham could see the power looms coming. They’d spent years—sometimes decades—perfecting their craft. A master weaver earning 20-26 shillings a week could support a family comfortably. Their skills had value. Then the machines arrived.

They watched their wages collapse as the looms spread. Most just hoped it wouldn’t be as bad as it looked. Surely there would still be demand for quality handwork. Surely the machines couldn’t fully replace human skill. Surely the economy would adapt and create new opportunities for displaced craftsmen.

Sounds familiar?

Some smashed the machines in protest, raiding factories at night, becoming known as Luddites, after Ned Ludd (also called King Ludd or Captain Ludd), a likely mythical figure of a weaver who smashed two stocking frames in a fit of rage around 1779.

By 1820, hand-loom weavers were earning 5-8 shillings a week—a 70-80% collapse. Their skills were worthless. Many of their children became factory workers earning a fraction of that.

Before society eventually ‘won’ affordable clothing, the immediate economic winners weren’t the skilled craftsmen. They were the people who’d owned capital—factory owners, investors, landholders—or those who’d accumulated it early enough to ride the wave up instead of getting crushed by it.

The Window

Now, hear me out: there was a window.

In the 1770s, setting up a small cotton mill cost £3,000-£5,000—significant, but achievable for someone with savings or a partnership. By the 1790s, that figure had tripled to £15,000 as mills grew larger and steam power became standard. By 1811, when the Luddites were smashing looms, the window had closed. The scale had shifted beyond what working craftsmen could afford.

The weavers never had a chance to buy shares in the textile mills.

We’re ready to get back to the chart.

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT.

This is your loom machine moment.

The window is open.

New Rules

What if I told you that FIRE is no longer a lifestyle choice, but the only certain defensive strategy against what is coming?

The Industrial Revolution took decades to unfold. The fundamental difference between AI and the power loom isn’t what it disrupts—it’s how fast it accelerates.

ChatGPT went from zero to 100 million users in two months. Within a year, AI was writing code, designing graphics, handling customer service, generating legal documents, and analyzing data. Within 18 months, companies were reporting 30-50% productivity gains in knowledge work.

But here’s what makes this truly different:

AI accelerates its own development. Every improvement in AI makes the next improvement faster. More capable AI helps researchers build even more capable AI.

This is a feedback loop, not a linear progression. The old playbook doesn’t work for the accelerating future. You can’t “save 10% annually for 30 years” when you don’t know if traditional employment will exist in 10.

The Flight to Ownership

Have you wondered why the Magnificent Seven now represent over 35% of the S&P 500? Part of it is earnings and productivity—these companies are genuinely generating massive profits from products and services everybody you know uses. The second part of the story: everyone wants to own the piece of the damn loom machine.

Investors, consciously or not, understand what’s happening. They’re moving capital toward the owners of the technology, not toward businesses that depend on it as well as on the human labor.

It’s not the only reason why assets are growing—many point to the failure of monetary policy—but it’s a system based solely on human worker headcount that is in danger. Fertility rates are falling, pension systems are becoming less efficient, and the most popular jobs, like truck driver, may soon disappear.

Capital is flooding into anything scarce—stocks, crypto, gold, real estate. Grab what you can before it’s too late.

Two Winners

Investors in any of those asset classes had a chance for their “I told you so moment” in the last few years, but two stand out:

Tech stocks - Companies building and deploying AI—the Magnificent Seven—the loom machine makers.

Bitcoin - The digital gold, land and index in one. More scarce than apartments in Manhattan, more divisible and transferable than gold, moving with the market like the S&P 500, but on steroids.

These two forces—productive capital (tech stocks) and hard money (Bitcoin)—are sucking up the global dollar milkshake.

The Math Has Changed

The old investment advice assumed 7% returns and 30 years to accumulate, but things have changed:

• You don’t know how much time you have. What if the number is 5?

• The market grows 10-20% a year, not 7.

• Broad market diversification thesis doesn’t hold well.

• Bitcoin crushes everything else year by year.

• Real estate prices go up fast, but demographic changes add question marks.

• Bonds are not negatively correlated with stocks anymore.

What’s The Plan?

There is no plan. Your house is on fire. Run.

If you’re a worker, invest whatever you can in the hardest assets you can access. Continue until you don’t have to rely on your work anymore.

That’s it. That’s the new strategy.

The Window Portfolio

Forget broad market diversification. Forget the three-fund portfolio. Forget bonds. Forget cash beyond what you need for 12 months of expenses. It’s simple:

1. Buy Bitcoin.

Not “I’ll buy some when it drops.” You must have Bitcoin. Not an ETF. The actual thing. Start dollar-cost averaging today and continue until you don’t have to anymore.

Bitcoin stored privately on your hardware wallet, is money that will likely continue outgrowing other asset classes for a decade to come. Importantly, in the politically unstable future, it cannot be seized during crises when governments look for assets to “redistribute.” Accelerationists also say that it’s a preferred currency for AI and robots in a future dominated by them. Get some.

2. Sell S&P 500. Buy Nasdaq 100.

The S&P 500 is 493 companies barely keeping up with inflation, dragging down the 7 that actually make the returns, but the index still gives you many benefits: you don’t have to monitor changes, you don’t pay capital gain taxes from rebalancing, and you need less money to diversify properly.

What is your second best option? Replace 500 companies from the NYSE with the 100 tech stocks from NASDAQ. You’ll get less of the drag, and closer to what matters. If you buy VOO or SPY, buy QQQ instead.

QQQ and Bitcoin are the new “60/40”—a simple, asymmetric portfolio for the acceleration era. It also aligns with Jeff Park’s Radical Portfolio Theory, and in fact is a minimalist “radical portfolio.”

This is where the Window Portfolio starts. Make your own, but recognize that the market is now driven by new forces, and simply buying a lot of different assets is not diversification.

Is it real?

There are many people right now saying: “this chart doesn’t say what you think” pointing at other reasons for the job market declining. Unsurprisingly they usually have their own businesses or products. Often heavily leveraging AI. If you’re not in that position, you may ask yourself: how long are you willing to wait if it’s happening?

We haven’t even seen humanoid robots yet, but you’re likely already watched synthetic content, or even talk with a bot without realizing that. What I propose is not a lifestyle choice—it’s the only defensive strategy about the technological acceleration:

Own as much of it as you can.

It’s real.

*

This is not financial advice. This is a manifesto.

The skeptics will tell you it’s irresponsible. They’ll say you need bonds for safety, that “crypto” is speculation, that you should enjoy your life now. They’re still following the old playbook, hoping for the best like the craftsmen in 1790.

That old “work, save, retire” world is gone.

The Luddites smashing the looms didn’t have options.

You still do.

Verdict: “Henry Ford was a visionary who predicted Bitcoin 104 years ago!”

There’s just one problem:

Ford’s proposal was the exact opposite of Bitcoin.

What Ford Actually Proposed

Let’s look at what the 1921 New York Times article actually says.

To say that Ford was critical about the financial system is an understatement:

“Under the present system we go to Europe and become lenders to foreign governments. If we lend a billion, they in turn lend it back to us. Then in the end we cancel the debt. There is something decidedly foolish about this so-called international finance.”

So far, so good. However, he also didn’t like gold:

“The essential evil of gold in its relation to war is the fact that it can be controlled. Break the control and you stop war. And the simple way to break the control of the international bankers, the way to end their exploitation of humanity forever, is to end gold as the currency of the world.”

The Dam

Ford’s energy currency proposal emerged from his bid to lease the Muscle Shoals dam in Alabama. Rather than having the government borrow money through bonds to complete the dam, Ford suggested issuing currency backed by the dam’s energy output—eliminating interest payments to Wall Street entirely.

His proposed solution was to replace gold with units of energy. Ford argued that energy is ‘imperishable’ and represents real productive capacity—the ongoing power output of dams and plants that would exist for generations. Unlike gold, which sits in vaults, energy currency would be tied to actual work being done. This is the part that speaks to bitcoiners—isn’t that proof-of-work?—but then comes the hit:

Ford explicitly wanted to eliminate the ability to hoard wealth.

“Wall Street get nothing!”

Ford’s currency was designed to be anti-hoarding. Energy can’t be stored long-term in the way gold can. It dissipates, it must be continuously produced, so the currency would represent the ongoing productive capacity, not stored energy you could hoard. Ford wanted to eliminate speculation and the power of “international bankers” by making currency tied to something that couldn’t be stockpiled the way gold could.

Would he think about Bitcoin investors differently than about Wall Street investors?

Bitcoin: Digital Gold, Not Digital Energy

As you can see, the comparison isn’t just wrong—it’s backwards.

Bitcoin is designed to be hoarded, and the store-of-value function took over the other two: unit of account, and medium of exchange. With its fixed supply, deflationary design, “HODL” culture, Bitcoin behaves like gold that Ford hated.

Yes, Bitcoin mining consumes energy. But once mined, it can be stored indefinitely at essentially zero cost, hoarded, and used for speculation. This is precisely what Ford was trying to eliminate.

Ford wanted to remove the store-of-value function from currency to stop speculation and banker control. Bitcoin maximizes the store-of-value function as its core feature.

The Irony of Bitcoin Success

While TradFi (traditional finance) embraces Bitcoin, we’re learning that it can be “wrapped” in obfuscated financial instruments exactly like any other asset. Bitcoin ETFs, derivatives, paper Bitcoin, rehypothecation—the traditional financial system is doing to Bitcoin exactly what it did to gold.

It’s very unlikely that Ford would become a Bitcoiner:

For many, Bitcoin was supposed to disrupt the financial system. The irony is that instead, it’s being absorbed into it, becoming just another asset that can be financialized, leveraged, and controlled by the very institutions it was meant to replace.

Ford’s Energy Currency Idea Was Flawed

I don’t want to claim that Ford’s idea was better—a currency that cannot be stored doesn’t make any sense to me either. The three functions of money (medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value) exist for good reasons. A currency that loses the store-of-value function is barely usable as money.

It’s important to remember that he brought this idea while he was negotiating the 99-year old lease for the dam. The idea is creative but reminds me of some of Elon Musk’s raw takes on Bitcoin and monetary system.

Three days after the original article, a New York Times editorial pointed out a fundamental contradiction: Ford proposed that “a certain amount of energy exerted for one hour would be equal to one dollar.” But if the energy unit is defined in terms of dollars, it hasn’t replaced the dollar—it’s just pegged to it.

Good point, and it leads to something interesting.

The History Rhymes

From a monetary perspective, Bitcoin shares too many properties with gold to behave differently long-term. If gold didn’t end “fiat money,” neither will Bitcoin. The idea of “hyperbitcoinization” is naive. What we saw with gold, is rather the opposite: the gold came first, but it was slowly replaced by fiat.

Gold was supposed to constrain governments and prevent monetary manipulation. It didn’t. It got abandoned when it became inconvenient (1971), and it became just another tradable asset within the fiat system. It’s also accumulated heavily by central banks that know fiat money eventually collapses.

Learn From The Goldbugs

This season we see the private sector taking full advantage of Bitcoin’s gold-like properties. Michael Saylor, one of Bitcoin’s biggest proponents, has enthusiastically embraced the ‘fiat playbook’—borrowing billions in convertible bonds at low interest rates to buy more Bitcoin, creating exactly the kind of leveraged financial speculation Ford wanted to eliminate.

Treasury companies aren’t helping to hyperbitcoinize the economy. They demonstrate how Bitcoin gets financialized, wrapped in derivatives, ETFs, and debt instruments until it becomes just another asset in the TradFi toolkit.

So, bitcoiners, learn from the goldbugs. They’ve been on this front much longer. In a way, bitcoiners are the new goldbugs to carry the torch of fiscal conservatism, and financial sovereignty. You’ll always be the niche that people mock—until the next market crash, when everyone suddenly needs to get some sats like it was toilet paper in 2020.

On the opening page of the next ten-year chapter of Ethereum, the “ultrasound money” narrative lies dead, the token’s price remains far from the dreams of investors, while the Ethereum treasury companies make analysts sweat.

The irony? All of it is also a symptom of its success.

The Meme

EIP-1559 (Aug 2021) introduced a burning mechanism to Ethereum that destroys a portion of transaction fees. On days when network activity is high, it's likely that more ETH will be burned than issued, leading to deflation.

In the world of crypto, deflation is a powerful counterspell to one of the biggest demons: money printing.

If strict monetary policy, with limited supply, makes Bitcoin “sound money,” then money with shrinking supply must be even better—the “ultrasound money” meme was born.

Dencun Upgrade

In March 2024, the Dencun upgrade introduced proto-danksharding (EIP-4844) with a new type of transaction called “blobs.”

Blobs allow for storing large amounts of data off-chain making transactions more efficient impacting Layer 2 fees. In fact, the impact was so significant that it was considered the most important upgrade since the shift to proof-of-stake in September 2022:

Two things happened next:

• Ethereum's inflation rate increased, reaching 0.74% in September.

• Revenues fell from over $600 million in March to $120 million in May.

Wait, why?

A Feature Not a Bug

The least exciting for Ethereum “hodlers” side of the Layer 2 success is that it keeps 95-99% of the transaction fees.

In August, BASE, a Coinbase blockchain that doesn't even plan to release its own token, retained $226.40 for every $1 expense connected to posting transaction data and proofs onto Ethereum's base layer. That's barely 0.44% going back to the main chain. The same is true for other L2s.

This keeps the burn rate super low making Ethereum inflationary again.

You may wonder: if the reason for it is just lower transaction volume, why wasn’t the monetary policy adjusted again? The reasons are many:

• Any change in EIP-1559 would require a hardfork, therefore a broad consensus across validators, developers, and the community—that’s not easy.

• At the same time, Ethereum's primary goal was always scalability, not being deflationary. L2s solved the core problem - cheap, fast transactions. The deflationary aspect was a nice side effect, not an objective.

• Ethereum's long-term vision is to become a "settlement layer" for L2s. That mission was accomplished and optimizing for L1 fee burning would work against it by making L2s more expensive to operate again.

• Most likely, L2 stakeholders would resist any change that increases L2 costs. Coinbase (BASE) is the biggest holder of Ethereum.

From a utility perspective, the current system works great. Users get cheap transactions, L2s are profitable, and Ethereum remains secure. What died is the meme of Ethereum becoming “Bitcoin 2.0”.

Is Ethereum a TCP/IP of Money?

As Ethereum L1 is quietly transforming from a user platform into background infrastructure, to understand possible futures, we may start to look for a good analogy. It helps that initially Ethereum was often called the “Internet of Money.” So, what is the protocol underlying the Internet?

Right now, reading those words you're a user of TCP/IP. It's a protocol underlying literally everything online. You might know about it very well, but when was the last time this acronym popped up in your thoughts? Likely, not this week or even month.

But it wasn't always the case. In the early days of the internet, TCP/IP was absolutely central to discussions about internet technology:

In the 1970s-1990s, TCP/IP was constantly discussed and not yet taken for granted. The protocol suite was competing with other networking standards like OSI, IPX/SPX, and AppleTalk. Network engineers, researchers, even early internet adopters had to explicitly choose TCP/IP and understand its architecture. Publications, conferences, and technical discussions frequently explained why TCP/IP's design principles (like packet switching) were superior.

The transition from ARPANET to the modern internet in 1983, when TCP/IP became mandatory, was a major technological milestone that required extensive explanation and advocacy. People needed to understand concepts like IP addressing, routing, and the layered protocol stack.

Does it sound familiar already?

Succeed and Disappear

Why don't you hear about TCP/IP often anymore? The answer may sound weird, but true for all the most successful technologies that solved the problem they aimed to solve:

It became invisible—so successful and ubiquitous that it's assumed rather than discussed. Modern internet conversations focus on higher-level concerns: web applications, cloud services, social media, AI, cybersecurity, and user experience. The underlying networking protocols "just work" for most people.

Additionally, many internet services now abstract away the networking layer entirely. Developers work with REST APIs, WebSockets, or cloud services without needing to think about IP packets or TCP connections.

Is this what happens to Ethereum? Quite possibly.

Just as TCP/IP became invisible by succeeding at its core mission, Ethereum L1 may be following the same path—with the success of L2s making the base layer less visible to users, and ironically, less valuable as a trendy investment.

In the end, the price of the token is not essential to maintain Ethereum's utility—and that might be exactly why the 'ultrasound money' dream had to die for Ethereum to truly fulfill the “Internet of Money” mission.

Related: Ethereum's Second Decade