Hello crypto lovers, we love y'all, and pray that you and yours are finding emotional triage services this week! Perhaps even in the arms of the ever-lovin Publish0x. What's that noise we hear? That's our collective ass dragging... We CAN count on one thing, which is the FT breaking the radio silence of the last weekend edition to repetitively curb-stomp crypto as best they can!
Our 0xen exclusive FT coverage for today finds two articles and a weighty opinion column in the skinny Friday edition (really, just saying the same thing over & over, but hey - let's mine them for laughs to avoid crying!!!) If drinking, we might want to prepare some shot bingo cards... before we read, guess what the FT is gonna say! Yeppers, stablecoin regulation, check, bloodbath, check 3x, $3.2tn market cap down to 1tn, check 3x, Binance check check, celsius check check check, terra, check check check, GREATER FOOL THEORY, check, freaking TULIP BULBS!!! CHECK!!!
so, the lead story - can you say bloodbath over & over & OVER... sure yew can... we KNEW you could, FT! Use your words!! The FT story - BTC broke $20K. The "realized" price - the average price paid by an investor - is $23,000 according to Glassnode, leaving the average buyer down. Market cap 3.2tn down to 1tn. Terra & Celcius chit the bed, Coinbase & Gemini are laying off. A quote from CZ sourced the "bloodbath" hammering, and CZ and OKX said "Stay safe."
The real story? Personally, we wonder how exactly did Glassnode determine the average price of all the mined coins that have never moved, but we agree that realized price is an important stat/real story. The FT has now printed 3.2 tn to 1 tn about nine times - we hate to give em an inch, but most others now say 3.2 to .9. While we are nitpicking, we were laughing hard the other day when the FT quoted good ol Coin Gecko as a price source!! Now we love the Gecko, but we get laughed at for that love, & bet that was a junior writer. We snidely note that the FT did NOT use the Gecko for THIS story, cause our beloved crypto lizard shows BTC bottoming at 20,216 this week - look it up FT!
NOT being petty - zoom out for big hypocrisy! First off, we hate the subliminal hate. Go ahead and color a bitcoin blood red to make a point if you want, but don't just shade it halfway between red & orange and pretend it was an accident. Note that the entire market has crashed, don't bury it in the tail. The ONLY source of the repetitive "bloodbath" meme was a TWEET from CZ. Jay from OKX said, well, nothing really, risk management is good. Is that really issuing a warning?? Dear readers will remember - we think the FT only included OKX to show they DO know how to spell OKX !!! We bet the FT got a snot-o-gram from OKX after the FT called them OKex yesterday. That's still petty, sorry, moving on... dear readers know that we don't care about 10% layoffs in a fast moving industry. But if ya wanna play that game, FT, maybe a little journalistic integrity would be good - since y'all are exploiting CZ's tweets to fearmonger so hard and all...HOW ABOUT that tweet two days ago where CZ states Binance is HIRING 2000 PEOPLE. THIS YEAR. What, Binance has under 4500 people NOW, so that's ALMOST A 50% INCREASE?? Oh my, let's all get scared cuz the Twinkyrink twins are gonna lay off 10%. Also buried in the tail of the story, a vague hint that BTC under realized price means a market floor may have been reached. What COULD the FT be saying? well here's a (logarithmic) chart of the last three times that BTC went under realized price:
Dear readers know we were brought up in fixed income to laugh at chartists, but this is a fundamental analysis - every time the realized price goes beneath the actual price, the price action GOES RIPPING THE HELL UP. Oh my, end of the world, more selling pressure, blah blah blah, we are getting close to dropping F bombs again. OK, we should just be happy - at least when filling out our "take a shot" Bingo FT card these days, we no longer have to include "it could go all the way to zero" anymore.
Next - Miners are squeezed. The story - costs up, price down. Hash rate is down 4% this week. Miner stocks Marathon Digital, Hut 8, and Algo Blockchain are down around 40%. It's "not fun." 3.2tn to 1tn misstated yet again. Terra, Celsius, blah blah, energy costs up cause Ukraine, no more cheap loans for miners. Consolidation is coming.
The REAL story - 1) who cares about a 4% drop in hash rate ?? A fart in the wind. 2) This story quotes BTC only under 21K, not 20, contradicting the story RIGHT NEXT to it. Guess these are the CoinGecko happy reporters, but sloppy much FT?? 3) who cares about some future consolidation in rapidly changing industries?
The funny hypocrisy?? This story doesn't even mention ALL stocks have crashed. Nor that most miners have sourced very cheap renewable energy since being chased out of China. PLUS - buried in the tail - the smart money (Xive miners) just switch off & chill while BTC is under 25K. Which is funny, zoom out more - gas prices in the US went WAY the eff up LONG before the Ukraine started up. Killing energy production - pipelines, shale and wells - CAN'T be turned off and on quickly. And this week, the FT printed a story about how British Petroleum, BP, was going to sell an hellishly ugly, giant, open pit coal mine - but now, with energy prices up, BP will operate it another decade or so. Q: did the FT slur BP for being "energy hungry???!!??" A: take three guesses. More if ya need em.
Finally, with great thought and deliberation, the SAME story posing as an editorial. TLDR, the story: skip if ya heard this before - Binance & Celsius lockup, job cuts in industry, number go down, terra, regulation needed, especially on stablecoins, the old ways are the best ways you silly children/snot nosed punks. The REAL story: Oh ok, TBF the editorial board steps up a couple notches in this regurgitation. The FT twangs the heartstrings with stories of extra police patrols on Suicide Bridge (Mapo) in Seoul. They throw in the disgusting Crypto.com ads with LeBron James (we hate the Matt Damon crypto.com ads even more, Matt always looks and sounds like the "Team America" movie puppet to us. Or maybe one Winkytwat, not sure) 
To their credit, the FT eds do think a bit deeper - regulating crypto might well lead to normies bailing out total degenerates. Unintended consequences of regulation could be bad news compared to the current, simple, buyer beware system. Deeper still - how can the global movement of crypto BE regulated? Good crypto (e.g. BTC) is designed to be decentralized and "beyond the reach of national governments- a red flag or a libertarian goal, depending on viewpoint." Funny, other articles in the FT are actually about fiat vs crypto, but they won't say it or don't know it - e.g. every article that boils down to "Jesus how did we ever print SO much money, we are so screwed in so many ways, what will we do."
But do NOT give the FT eds too much respect, as they also go mean, with nasty cheap shots just like always. Vicious hypocrisy much? They list Binance's three hour pause ( from 24/7 ops) BEFORE Celsius' lockup, as IF Binance's was more (or even equally) important. They invoke exchange job cuts, somehow magically forgetting to mention even greater exchange hiring. They just HAD to reference tulip bulbs, the absolute chits. And not long ago, they would have also restated /intoned how Bitcoin, the greatest financial technology ever created, giving sound money to the people, built on decades of cypher development and testing, is "intrinsically worthless and could go to zero. " Now, they just say "little inherent value." Blow me down, ya Brits, fiat printing caused centuries of war and crashed empires including yours. Yeah, instead they quote the reprehensible Epstein Island pedo degen Bill Gates saying " Crypto is 100% greater fool theory." Which they KNOW is BS, EVERYTHING purchased for possible resale is greater fool theory, and sometimes it's true! Anyone buying a house knows this - that sinking fear of realizing ya paid more than anyone else in the whole world for that house that month, and ya coulda gone on renting.
OK times are tough and things are bloody, but at least we don't hear "zero" anymore. In closing, FT, let us summarize - we will try being repetitive just like y'all !! We still love and admire ya, FT, but sometimes??!!???? in the words of the immortal DOA
peace love & zoom out - like mountain sized zoom out
Dave
