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** The Biggest Attack on You That You’ve Never Heard Of ** Most people have never heard of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. Yet a small group of central bankers and financial regulators headquartered out of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland, effectively decides what assets banks around the world are encouraged—or discouraged—from holding. And when it comes to Bitcoin, their message is clear. The Basel Committee assigned Bitcoin a 1250% risk weighting, one of the harshest regulatory treatments of any major asset. In practical terms, this makes it extremely punitive for banks to hold Bitcoin on their balance sheets and it also results in pressure on credit rating agencies to completely disregard $BTC as having any value on a company’s balance sheet. For example, @Strategy has over $60 Billion worth of $BTC on its balance sheet and credit agencies currently value it at $0.00. That’s right, zero. Think about all of this for a moment. The same banking system that was tangled up in and received major taxpayer funded bailouts for: • The 2008 mortgage crisis • Massive losses on government bonds • Ongoing commercial real estate stress …has decided that Bitcoin deserves some of the most punitive capital treatment imaginable. Why? Well, because… Bitcoin doesn’t need a bank. Bitcoin doesn’t need a central issuer. Bitcoin doesn’t need permission. Bitcoin allows ordinary people around the world to save in an asset that cannot be debased, diluted, or confiscated through inflation. It is borderless, fixed-supply, digital money transacts over the world’s largest open-source computing network. The Basel rules deliberately favour a financial system where wealth remains concentrated inside banking institutions and where individuals like you and me are forced to rely on intermediaries whose incentives are counter to own and profit at our expense. Bitcoin changes that equation. This is why understanding Bitcoin isn’t just about price. It’s about understanding who writes the rules, who benefits from those rules, and why an open monetary network is viewed as such a threat to the existing system. The greatest financial innovation of our lifetime — Bitcoin — isn’t being ignored. It’s being regulated as if it must never be allowed to compete on equal footing. You can “say no” to this rigged system and join hundreds of millions of others around the world in taking back power. Buy and hold Bitcoin in self custody, taking it off of exchanges. #Bitcoin #BaselCommittee #FinancialFreedom #SelfCustody #FixTheMoney

Could financial engineering of the AI boom become the next major financial crisis? Most people think the #AI story is simple: technology companies are buying massive amounts of chips and data center infrastructure to power the future. But what if the bigger story isn’t AI itself? What if the bigger story is how AI infrastructure is being financed? Michael Burry @michaeljburry, famous for identifying risks in the U.S. housing market before the 2008 financial crisis, has been raising concerns about the growing financialization of AI infrastructure and the possibility that risk is being quietly transferred throughout the financial system. The issue is not whether AI is valuable. It clearly is. The issue is whether Wall Street is creating increasingly complex financing structures around AI chips, data centers, and computing infrastructure that obscure where the underlying risk ultimately resides. In a traditional transaction, a company buys equipment and bears the associated risk. In today’s market, the process can involve special-purpose entities, private credit funds, securitized debt structures, insurance companies, and annuity providers. By the time the chain is complete, the ultimate source of capital may be ordinary savers and retirees who have no idea their retirement assets are helping finance speculative AI infrastructure expansion. This should sound familiar. In the years leading up to 2008, mortgages were transformed into layers of securities that dispersed risk so widely that few participants fully understood their exposure. The result was a system that appeared stable until it suddenly wasn’t. To be clear, this is not an argument that AI is a bubble or that AI has no future. The technology is real. The demand is real. The innovation is real. But history teaches us that transformative technologies and financial bubbles often coexist. Railroads. Telecom. The internet. The technology can change the world while investors simultaneously overbuild capacity, overextend leverage, and underestimate risk. The questions regulators, investors, pension funds, insurance companies, and annuity holders should be asking are straightforward: • How much leverage is supporting AI infrastructure expansion? • Who ultimately bears the risk if AI spending slows? • How much exposure do retirement and insurance portfolios have to these structures? • Are investors receiving sufficient transparency regarding the underlying assets and financing arrangements? Financial crises rarely emerge from the technology itself. They emerge when leverage, complexity, and opacity become embedded in the financial system. The AI buildout may ultimately create extraordinary value for society. But if the risks are being packaged, securitized, and distributed in ways that few people fully understand, regulators and investors should be paying close attention now—not after the consequences become visible. The lesson from every major financial crisis is the same: Pay attention to where the risk ends up, not just where the excitement begins. The question Burry is effectively asking regulators and investors is: If AI infrastructure turns out to be overbuilt, who ultimately absorbs the losses? Many people assume the answer is Nvidia shareholders, venture capitalists, or AI companies. Burry’s concern is that the answer may increasingly be: insurance companies, annuity portfolios, pension-like retirement products, and ultimately ordinary savers. ———- Further reading here: https://thedeepdive.ca/burry-maps-the-pipeline-how-retiree-annuity-money-ends-up-funding-nvidias-xai-deal/

Banks and crypto are all part of the same edifice, and are increasingly merging. Bitcoin stands apart, as freedom tech and freedom money. Study Bitcoin. Choose humanity.

The crypto vs banks “rivalry” that is playing out surrounding the U.S. Clarity Act is way too contrived. It is orchestrated theatre. It is fake competition, the stuff of willing partners in an evolving oligopoly. Banking and crypto are merging. The real rivalry is with YOU, with freedom, and truly “decentralized finance”. To use a sports analogy, the banking “league” has simply agreed to a league expansion. They are allowing new teams into the league, willing to dilute their market share because they have calculated that doing so grows the market and profit. Armstrong/Dimon = Knicks/Thunder. This evolving oligopoly will have defined rules for who’s in and out, centralizing power and control over a vast landscape of digital assets (including custodied BTC). The true rivalry is now with actual decentralized finance: you holding and spending self-custodied Bitcoin.