Tom Brady lost $30 million on crypto and this fact drew huge laughs at his roast, with even Kevin Hart apparently reacting strongly, showing the zeitgeist is still very skeptical of crypto

Venture capital allocation cycles are on 4-year schedules requiring capital gathering, allocation, and vesting, which aligns with crypto 4-year cycles and may be the real driver rather than on-chain mechanics

The Federal Reserve's primary powerful tool today is forward guidance and jawboning, not rate adjustments, as evidenced by the strong economy persisting despite fed funds rate above 5% due to loose conditions on the long end (10-year and beyond)

Ryan Selus of Messari has argued crypto has no future in US if Democrats control House for next 4 years, representing a relatively mainstream crypto perspective on political risk.

Student loan debt forgiveness should be viewed not just as a handout, but as addressing a broken education system where very high interest rates are offered to young people without means at a time when federal funds rates were much lower

Forward guidance originated with Alan Greenspan as a tool for influencing markets, though some credit Ben Bernanke with formalizing it, and can be viewed either as market manipulation or as transparency improvement

2020 ICO collapse was driven not primarily by bear market, but by ICO projects needing to dump Bitcoin and Ethereum collected in 2017 to pay for real-world expenses denominated in dollars

The US has had exorbitant privilege that allowed it to run ~7% fiscal deficits during wartime/recessions without consequences, but most other countries running similar deficits without world reserve currency status would face immediate monetary/fiscal collapse

You can marry macro and micro cycle perspectives by noting that micro-level cycles (token unlocks, speculation, venture cycles) operate within the macro-determined environment, so both frameworks are true at different levels of analysis

SEC has been issuing Wells notices against virtually all sizable US crypto corporations while Biden administration vetoes pro-crypto legislation, signaling coordinated regulatory hostility toward crypto.

The Fed is more transparent than many crypto governance systems because the Fed explicitly explains its viewpoint, takes questions, publishes minutes, while crypto systems like Ethereum have vague governance processes where it's unclear who decides on issuance policy

Private capital markets have more abundance than ever before, so CEOs and founders rationally choose to remain private rather than subject themselves to public market scrutiny and short-term earnings focus

Political parties form around coalitions of single-issue voters, with apparently unrelated positions lumped together, so crypto's partisan placement is somewhat arbitrary and could have gone either way depending on coalition dynamics

Fast forward one year and Kevin Hart will likely be part of commercials promoting crypto, illustrating the cyclical pattern where skeptics become advocates after bull markets

The critical distinction is whether debt forgiveness is funded through tax revenue (which anchors moral hazard through skin-in-the-game) or through money printing (which eliminates accountability and incentivizes further misallocation of capital)

The tradeoff from running sustained deficits will eventually come when excess reserve facilities run out (RRP at couple hundred billion, TGA at ~$1 trillion) and direct market financing becomes necessary, likely next year when these reserve facilities deplete

Stan Druckenmiller criticized the Federal Reserve's forward guidance as harmful, arguing the Fed should simply hike when it needs to hike and cut when it needs to cut without telegraphing intentions, and that Fed chairs should not become public personalities

The FTX crash occurred because the Fed turned hawkish and slowed credit creation, which cascaded into revealing cracks in the system and snowballing crypto downturns, demonstrating the primacy of macro over crypto-specific factors

Student loan forgiveness creates a moral hazard and breakdown of social contract because it penalizes those who played by the rules and paid off their loans, while rewarding those who didn't, generating backlash and populist sentiment

Crypto tokens might serve as a bridge between private and public markets, allowing companies to access public funding while maintaining some control, but this depends on political environment becoming more favorable