Cryptofans we love you!  May our cypherpunk selves join together today in love on the powerhouse that is the boss Publish0x!!  Please remember to re-enact revolution today for the Fourth!! Good practice for the crypto revolution.  Check local regs, fireworks &  barbequeing veg and/or meat could be not JUST a good idea, it might be state law!   And thanks for giving us the most views yesterday for almost a month!! 

Unless - y'all are crypto haters working for the FT, in which case - enjoy your workday!! LOL 

First up on our FT crypt news counterpoint - the ongoing struggle / mystery.  The case of the missing crypto prices!!  Once again, BTC & ETH have vanished from the World Markets table, leaving a giant hole where our future was... Scooby Doo, where are you!!  Did the Mystery Van steal the prices because Monday,?!? no wait BTC trades 24/7!   Can some FT ed just not bear the intrusion of coins into their tradfi world ?? That would fit the FT narrative...  Dear readers know it's pretty clear BTC is WAY bigger & more important than the German 2 year which makes press time every time.   It's a puzzle within a conundrum... or just lazy bias. Stay tuned! 

We are STILL on the front page tho, YAY!! any press is good press!! A teaser pointing to an opinion headline: Ok, here we go again.  Crypto is CRAZY, catastrophic, only religious nuts believe!  Yet, juxtaposed right underneath, another headline where the working class is brutalized by inflation.  The (lying, manipulated down) official rates of inflation show a family on a flat income since 2005 lost 50% of their lifestyle and savings to inflation, in reality it's much worse.  The FT should ask those families if ANYTHING resembling hard money to stop that bleeding is "crazed?"  Maybe printing trillions to give to defense contractors for kids to die in foreign wars is a bit off?   Proudly tripling gas prices to support a "liberal world order" (jeez, at least say "free world"!?!)  might be a tad nuts ?  Would the fams say Cantillon positioned kleptocrats hanging paper are killing them?  Well, probably not, unless they are dear readers.  But it don't take a sixth grade education to wonder WTF is wrong with the world of this graph: 

Or just suss out how much granny & gramps paid for their house back in the day.  Anywhoo, sorry to lose it on the first page.  Light n lively Dave, please let's find some humor....crawling through the fiat wreckage: mortgage rates going up!  UK corporate bonds rated junk have gone from 6bn to 40bn, that's funny if in a bad mood :) 

Well kinda funny tradfi story really about hard money on page six - the finance minister of Argentina just quit!! Can you blame him, inflation is at 70%.  OK, tragicomic at best. 

A pic of LaGuarde and Powell sitting together which is funny, but not obvious enough, despite Lagarde's looking very comfy after her criminal conviction over a shady $400 million payment to her crony bank while she sat in power as head of the IMF.  She cried at the trial while proclaiming innocence, but she looks pretty happy over the no jail time part, link below.  Funny, we once saw a brother in an orange jump suit and leg irons in court in Baton Rouge, Louisiana over the theft of a 35$ used TV.   Maybe he would have gotten off if he was wearing Christine's suit, jewelry and scarf... OK not funny. 

Here on page 12, we have a clue !!!   in the mystery of the missing BTC & ETH prices!!  The FT happily prints the price of the FTSE Straits Times in Singapore!!  OK, search for the STI's size,  first up is Wikipedia with a market cap of 288 billion Sing dollars.  With the Sing dollar at 0.72 of USD, that means all the Straits Times stocks in the world is around 200 billion USD.   That's funny, must just be a wild coincidental accident that the FT won't print market data on BTC,  cause right now the Gecko has BTC's market cap at nearly TWICE that of STI   !!???!!

yea right.  Throw another dart - we hit a Bond table where the FT in their wisdom prints not one but TWO govvie bonds from Peru.  That's nice.  Except the link below, the good folks at Cbonds, tells us that ALL the Peruvian govvie bonds IN THE WORLD are only worth 62 billion USD at time of this writing.  Hmm, if math is the criteria, not once, but twice, the P-bonds which are a fraction of 62 billion are more important than the 373 billion of Bitcoin?!!&^&%$!!  We could do this all day on days where the FT skips BTC's price.  Hmm Shaggy, Velma, we don't think we can solve this mystery unless Fred can pull the hood off of the FT's prejudice against cryptocoins...

Aiight, the one article today actually about crypto.  Not news, just opinion, let's roll!!OK we admit we are coming in hot, dog-dirty & loaded for bear.  Elaine Moore, huh?  a pre-emptive strike - who is she?  Ah, she's the deputy editor of Lex!  Hmm, the power behind the throne huh?  We expect the worst.  A quick ADD rabbit hole on spotting Elaine - WTH does Lex stand for anyway?  DId famous hardass Lex Luthor get his start at the FT??? Nah, Lex means like knowledge, law, like lexicon.  A bit classist, always with the misused Latin ya upper crust Brits, somehow Lex means "law of the market" to the FT.  OK, that's pretty cool, points for style. 

Let's go on together, with suspicious minds!! What's the story??  Elaine was covering the June 3rd Graph Day, the biggest web3 event ever in San Fran!  TLDR: "Join the world's biggest dreamers! Dapps! The future! "  "Change is in the air!"   US tech loves "theoretical" web3, "proof that cryptocurrencies can have real world use."   Web3 "evangelists" believe that the third go-round of the web will be controlled by users, freely connecting directly, with safe crypto not going through centralized banks.

 Coinbase & others sponsored Graph Day in the Palace of Fine Arts, including a hackathon with $400,000 in prize money.  Of course, this was planned before the current "crash."  Last year, bitcoin hit almost $50,000 (sic), Matt Damon said "fortune favors the brave" and Gwyneth Paltrow/Cash App gave out $500k in BTC and told Elle magazine she wanted "more women in crypto investment."  (Hey, that was news to us, thanks FT!!) Then rates, recession & "constant scams" burst the bubble.  BTC and Do numbers go down. But the "spectacular" crash did not "dent the tech sector's self-belief." "Prices were plummeting"  but drinks were flowing over NFT chats.  A "partygoer mused" that this could be "the last event of it's kind altogether.  But I doubt it. " 

It's easy to "brush off" crashes when it's not about wealth, rather "crypto is a force for good." Party hoppers from Crypto Bahamas / Miami hung with Tony Blair and Bill Clinton "to congratulate themselves on improving the future." Pricetalk is a "faux pas,"  it's about blockchain "making the world a better place."  Freaking out over losses is for Wall Street stiffs who don't understand the tech. Saying "crypto might be pure speculation is taboo," along with mentioning criminals in crypto and big hacks hurting investors.

Sammy Fried is the "never say die" hero "riding to crypto's defense" buying BlockFi and maybe Robin Hood. Since crypto crashed on down since then, "there will be more opportunities to profit, "  with ETH down 73% and Coinbase stock down 73% in their first year. When Elaine broke her supposed taboo to ask some guy if their would be future conferences like this, "he said he was looking forward to buying some more."  

The real story?  We could pick nits cause we're still petty & sore about no crypto market data today.  Elaine saying BTC hit ATH of 50K makes us think she hasn't a clue about crypto.  Crypto ain't "pure speculation."  We are certain that a lot of her writing was supposed to make us hate & laugh at crypto, but it just doesn't  seem to bite!!??!! 

Dear readers know we agree Matt Damon's Crypto.com ads are beyond despicable.  "Fortune favors the brave" ya know the real Wall Street wisdom there?  Chestnut # 54.5 " what do Pioneers get?  A back full of arrows & face down in the mud. "  Paltrow's actions do seem defendable tho. We love/hate Gwyneth. Her company Goop is trendy, hyperoverpriced and also genius.   She was overrated, pretentious and annoying for her Oscar for "Shakespeare in love" but as Pepper Potts in "Iron Man" she was the hottest smartest comic book character EVER !! And Paltrow's supposedly semi-autobiographical turn as the singing/slutty substitute teacher Holly Holliday in "Glee" lit up the world with hilarity.  

Anyway, to misquote Seinfeld, this is an Elaine problem that requires an Elaine solution.  Yes, Elaine, even forgiving the BTC pricing, y'all might deserve an FU or three for saying web3 is "theoretical."  Some people say Binance and even IBM are web3 now.  We don't agree, but it IS pretty damn clear that DEXs are Web3 Dapps, and yes, a TRILLION DOLLARS went through DEX's in 2021.  Sushiswap did a lifetime trillion by themselves, all user to user with no centralized bank or nuthin. 

The billions locked in DeFi's have crashed down, volumes are down too, but as of this writing the mighty Coin Gecko sees about TWO BILLION DOLLARS A DAY in volume blowing through Defis, nearly a billion a day just by Sushiswap.  Is that enough Dapp "real world use" for y'all?  Your ignorance is showing Elaine.  We are not expecting you to understand liquidity farming, DAOs and all the implications of strange new features but your tradfi brain should be able to handle exchange volumes, let alone accurate price action.  

Overall though, still hard to hate on this opinion column.   Even the graphic, meant to be denigrating, is kinda funny and upbeat. Elaine did NOT say "number go to zero." She let Sammy Fried look goodish, without crying for central bank authority in the usual Lex / FT style.  You can say rates, recession and scams crashed the market, particularly if you believe D'oh ran a Ponzi & the FTC allowing BTC futures but not BTC spots is a scam (which it is.) 

Most importantly, AS IF   Elaine was an actual journalist, she stuffed the story with a lot of quotes  that could be interpreted either way.  Oh,  she almost certainly hoped & assumed those words would make crypto people look foolish and/or insane,  but she left it all open to interpretation, even her own views.  Which is all as it should be.  & weirdly, it kind of captured the zeitgeist!!  So, zero out of five FU's for this story, congrats, but brush up on yer web3 stats.    Cause we DO believe that web3 will make a better world,  AND ya can't have too many pictures of Holly Holliday!! We DO believe we ARE improving the future, crypto IS a force for good.  Especially when compared with fiat and tradfi.  A lot of tradfi guys quit to join crypto not just for fortune, action and adventure, but for moral & ethical reasons, as Elaine probably knows.  And two billion dollars a day says "change IS in the air. "   

Peace, love,  & little  bitty tiny distributed computers running dapps everywhere, 

Dave