You Are Living in a Walled Garden

In another life, I worked for a multinational company. It only had 5,000 employees but was a world leader in its industry.

Global operations consisted of three divisions: North America, Europe, and ROW.

ROW stood for Rest-of-World. It of course included Japan, China, and India.

The only people who realized how stupid and shortsighted it was to organize in such a fashion, were those working in the ROW division, outnumbered by the North America division at least ten to one.

That’s what my readers know, and have only known for the whole of their financial investing careers.

Beyond the walled garden, there’s London and Paris and beyond those cities, there be nothing but dragons.

The walls have been built intentionally, to keep capital in and competition out.

The average North American investor knows these walls as KYC (know-your-customer) and AML (anti-money laundering) legislation. They have been brainwashed into thinking the walls are good, and they keep out bad people.

But maybe they have been put there to keep you in.

When cryptocurrency exited childhood and entered its teenage years in 2018, the walls hadn’t been built yet to handle the brave new world of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other altcoins.

It was awesome.

Look at what we have today. This is the screen showing Bitcoin volume on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange:

https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/cryptocurrencies/bitcoin/bitcoin.volume.html

This is what we had back in 2019:

https://www.newcurrencyfrontier.com/2019/03/04/how-the-little-guys-make-money-trading-bitcoin/

We had funding rates that paid out at 100% a year.

We had market-making fees paid out by Bitmex to the tune of $500K a day when Bitcoin traded under $4,000 (read the article from five years ago).

Now? Beyond the CME, we have nothing. And the CME is a joke compared to the trading desks of Bitmex, Binance, and Deribit.

How did the walls come back up? It was easy.

First, they found the heroes and made them into villains, and the rest was easy.

For the rest of the cryptocurrency executives to stay out of jail, they had to swallow the KYC/AML pill.

And all the time, they had to beat the drum, crypto is scary, crypto is for money-launderers, crypto is for criminals.

Look at what they took from us:

That’s Deribit, one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world. Click on the link and watch it live 24x7.

The rest of the world has left North America behind.

The bankers, brokers, and financial bureaucrats cut us off to protect their interests, and to this day, they are still fighting for the status quo, which is stagnation.

Only our leaders can save us now.

Maybe not. Not today anyway.

Next week I will travel to Keats Island, British Columbia, for a well-deserved vacation.

Then it’s onto Namaino on Vancouver Island.

Finally, in late August, a visit to Athens and Rome with a side trip to a wonderful house rented for a week in Tuscany.

The summer is a time to rest. Nothing ever happens, most of the time.

But then September comes, followed by October. That is hurricane season.

Let’s see if the walls can stand up to the coming storm.

DJ