On the Progress of the Beast, pt. 1
I've been editing my December 2024 post on anti-Christ. I discuss the place of Bitcoin (BTC) in society at some length. Fixing grammar, typos, whatnot got me thinking about an update. The Beast never sleeps. Sometimes I don't either.
It's closing in on October 2025, and over the past several months, my misgivings about crypto have only increased.
(In fact, it's now late November, and I've yet to complete this entry because the crypto market has been in free fall over the past few weeks. I've been waiting to see where this goes since it's central to my reflections here.)
I lay out my thesis: The coming financial collapse will be precipitated by cracks in the crypto markets and will eventually spread to more traditional instruments, which have so far remained sequestered from the dangers of crypto. The rest of the post explores this based on my experiences day trading in 2025.
Trump Always Chickens Out (TACO)
Trump is the crypto president, and his sons have done the Lord's work in pushing the benefits of crypto, going so far as to establish the World Liberty Fund, an outfit for crypto investment. Their drive for all things digital is rooted in their being dumped by Capital One and other banks several years ago as toxic associations. This is the cover story, at least. "We became crypto bros to defend the little guy – the true conservative and patriot – from being de-banked!"
Right.
In the summer of 2025, the brothers indirectly helped in the transition surgery for one ticker, SRM, a plushie toy company that IPO'd in 2024. So far as anyone knows, it didn't really do much with plushie toys, but it managed to get a place on the exchange. No small feat.
SRM was based in Florida, and its ostensible reason for existence was to sell its wares to Disney and other theme parks. Within a few months, however, it underwent a reverse merger, got rebranded as TRON, and was then pushed out onto the street as a crypto treasury for the shitcoin TRX. The Trump brothers were advisors to the firm, Dominari, which brokered the deal, and it seems highly unlikely they didn't have some kind of financial interest at stake.
Established on the exchange in late 2024, SRM's mission was never to sell plushie toys. No, most of those boxes of cute purple dinosaurs were probably burned in a parking lot, and the modest storefront shuttered shortly after SRM's listing. It's unlikely any of the earnings calls – all one or two – covered the state of plushie sales.
Instead, the new TRON ticker that emerged from the ashes of SRM was a crypto treasury dedicated to accumulating Tronix (TRX).
What is TRX, you ask? It is another virtual currency which almost no one has heard of, cares about, or will ever use, either directly or indirectly. There are literally dozens, if not hundreds or more, of these shitcoins traded on crypto exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken. Each of them is obscure, pointless, and a waste of energy and wealth. They are designed as scams by low-quality humans. Crypto is a rich ecosystem for grifts. It is perfectly American.
What is a crypto treasury? It's a publicly traded company that dilutes shareholders by selling vast numbers of shares, or doing private placements for major players – whales. The money raised is used to buy some digital token, which is counted as an "asset" since the theory is that it appreciates in value over time, unlike a fiat currency.
By buying lots and lots of a particular token, the shares themselves become a proxy for it. They are a hedge against inflation and, unlike gold and silver, do not require a home security defense and storage system. People who don't want to trade TRON directly on Coinbase can just buy shares instead and trade it like a stock. This makes getting in and out of crypto easier since it's as simple as buying and selling equity shares in a brokerage account like Schwab or Fidelity.
The theory is that it becomes a convenient way for whole new groups of people (aka, suckers) to get a taste of crypto who otherwise would never open a wallet. Crypto, in return, gets new buyers, which increases its value. Crypto has hit a kind of roadblock in recent years, with Ethereum (whose name still generates autocorrect squiggles in 2025) and BTC having seen no real growth or interest. The market has been saturated, and without new frontiers or new investors, the prognosis is doubtful.
For crypto adoption to spread, it must, perforce, penetrate wider and wider circles of users. In this light, crypto has a Ponzi-scheme quality. With legal money, no one has to be persuaded of its value or utility. With crypto, it has to be sold to its would-be holders. Most normies still do not have a wallet, have never bought crypto, much less traded it on an exchange.
Gold is an asset, a store of value, and the ultimate hedge against fiat. It too doesn't need anyone to sell it. Gold sells itself, needing no hype or massive PR campaigns on its virtues. As the saying goes, a gold piece in ancient Rome would buy you a nice toga; in the current year, it will get you a nice suit. In a late-declining capitalist empire, a store of value like gold is sought out by the rich, central banks, and private entities.
TRON is backed by a seedy family of Chinese billionaires, the Sun family. Young Justin Sun was hailed by the stock pumpers as the second coming of Jesus Christ, whose TRON operation would make millionaires overnight and in the weeks to come. Sun was an early crypto adopter and made his own fortune in it using his dad's resources.
The TRON ticker began trading in early summer 2025 and rose as high as $12 or so before gradually fading to less than $3, here going into October 2025. If it follows the trajectory of other crypto treasuries like GAME, BTCS, ASST, SQNS, LIMN, and dozens of other symbols in 2025, it will soon be under $1.
Within six months, it will have entered delisting territory after dropping below the minimum bid requirements of the exchange where it trades. It will have a period in which to raise its value, but the pump and the excitement are over. SQNS recently had to do another reverse split after allegedly spending hundreds of millions to buy BTC using the wealth of 140 investors. The stock price went as high as 5.50 after the Treasury PR, only to fall quickly to 0.70. The BTC, if actually purchased, shows no sign of being a valuable asset to the shareholders.
The Sun family, along with the Trump brothers, no doubt sold shares at the highs, and the treasury will become a husk, an empty shell that holds – maybe – digital tokens no one wants or will ever use. I say maybe, because with these crypto treasuries, no one audits public companies and says, "Show us your crypto." Whatever money is raised to obtain crypto can be spent on blow, hookers, and racehorses. It is this aspect of crypto operations – think Sam Bankman-Fried and Mt. Gox – which will make them the proximate cause of a currency crisis and possible financial collapse.
The Sun family, of course, is not concerned about shareholder value. They are Chinese, and TRON was brilliant because it is not listed as an ADR. From the outside, an investor looking for a quick scalp or to day trade it would think it was an American company, not a Chinese pump-and-dump outfit.
Day traders are very quick to locate the ADR status of any given ticker, understanding that Chinese and Israeli companies are almost always pure scams. Any money dropped on them, even for a minute or two in a trade, can lead to spectacular losses. Most of us will have a low tolerance for ADRs and will avoid them altogether. The Chinese, of course, understand this, and some have spent considerable effort in acquiring "American" tickers as camouflage. In the case of SRM, you had to find the leadership and board pages on their website to figure out that it was a Chinese outfit.
The Sun family did this with SRM, creating a front company for stuffed toys that could be pivoted into a Digital Asset Treasury (DAT). The idea of raising public capital to sell plushie dolls is absurd since it doesn't require such capital backing. But if you need a front, the plushies are inexpensive to import from China and easy to dispose of when their purpose has been served. You don't have to buy that many of them to put out a fake storefront.
TRON follows dozens of poorly run, dying businesses which have transformed themselves into DATs, destroying their shareholders' stock value in the process on the grounds that, in the long term, the crypto assets purchased would provide stable, steady income. The stock price recovers eventually and becomes more stable, more worthy of additional investment. Billions and billions have been swapped over these new crypto treasuries.
2025 will be the year in which vast wealth was sucked out of accounts in order to buy burnt electricity. For biotechs with a DAT-side like Liminatus, the claim is that this dilution will reduce the need to do further, intensive offerings in the future since there will be revenue generated from an appreciating store of value,
In the case of Ethereum, the digital asset – the token ETH – provides a return on investment if the holder is willing to tie up his "assets" in staking.
Staking is the process of validating the state of the blockchain, and unlike BTC, ETH provides a financial incentive to holders to create a more secure, more efficient validation process. At a treasury level, with enough tokens, it's possible to generate significant, steady income. Imagine a world where more and more shitty businesses decide it's simpler to keep a few people on, fire everyone else, and generate passive income for shareholders off digital tokens. If this sounds stupid, it is, but it is also fueling a mania in 2025.
Loan me your tokens for X number of days to validate the blockchain. In return, I will grant you a stake and pay a fee.
This is like getting a regular dividend, and the idea is to draw in more people who want a stable income stream tied to an appreciating asset instead of a dying paper currency like the dollar, euro, or whatever. At this point, all fiat currencies are destined for the rubbish pile. Wars and rumors thereof are harbingers of currency collapse.
Some see ETH as a more solid, reliable, and transparent form of tokenization than BTC. For this reason, stablecoins and other shitcoins use the ETH chain technology.
It's vitally important to keep the ETH blockchain separate from the token of the same name. A coin's transaction ledger can run on Ethereum, but that doesn't mean it's convertible into ETH tokens, and vice versa. There is ETH, the coin; then there is the blockchain technology of the same name. Ethereum is seen as the king of applications because its framework can be extended into DeFi and other financial use cases which promise to be better, more efficient, more transparent than today's banking products.
A very rough analogy to staking is buying a certificate of deposit (CD). You agree to lock up your money for a year or whatever, and in return you receive a guaranteed interest payment at the end. Your money is "put to work" during this time by the bank. There is a whole lot more going on in staking, but the idea is the same: someone agrees to have their capital tied up in return for a steady return.
Many of the stablecoins like USD have opted to use ETH's blockchain technology. These stablecoins are called that because their value is pegged to the U.S. dollar, but they ride the tail of ETH, so to speak, using its transaction, reconciliation, and validation technology. Unlike crypto, the dollar is actually stable. Well, more stable. While crypto is supposed to be a hedge against the dollar because the latter depreciates so quickly, it's still better than crypto on its own. Crypto as of now doesn't appear to be moving higher even as government budgets expand. The U.S. now faces a $1 trillion interest payment every 100 days, soon to be 95, 90, 85, etc. The debt snowball gets faster at the end.
To put the $1 trillion in perspective, it's roughly the same amount that the U.S. government spends on the military in a year. So, our debt payments are the equivalent of paying for the same standing military four times in a single year. Put another way, 24 cents of every dollar now goes to debt payments.
Crypto Volatility, Instability
In my December post on the anti-Christ, I mentioned that one trait of crypto is that it is volatile. In other words, unstable. It can gain value quickly but also lose it just as quickly, and this makes it attractive to day traders. On Friday, October 10th, BTC dropped thousands of dollars in a few minutes when Trump announced a new set of tariffs on China.
When BTC goes into decline, it can remain on the backside for months or years, leaving investors and holders wondering if it will die out, collapse or revive. I also mentioned the case of Elon Musk tweeting nasty things about BTC, causing it to crash one day.
On other days, he's praised the shitcoin DOGE, causing it to rocket in value. On an episode of SNL that he hosted, he joked about DOGE being a hustle, causing its price to crash. This instability, caused by a single man saying flippant things, has made crypto largely the preserve of gamblers, speculators, and degenerates. The well-meaning, liberty-focused types who wanted an honest hedge against fiat have, in my opinion, probably all left crypto by now.
You can't have the Beast system, and you can't draw the anti-Christ out into the open if the control grid – and more importantly, its underlying currency – is not workable. In its current state, crypto has accomplished one key goal: to get normies acclimated to digital currency, to see it as a valid choice for buying, investing and maybe, someday, transacting. It's also attuned them to the idea that the dollar is dying and will be dead, very, very soon. Never mind that crypto isn't actually used for anything in the normie world. You can't buy milk, bread, gas or make a mortgage payment with your crypto without doing conversions into a real currency or a gift card. I ask crypto fans online if they've ever bought anything with it. This always leads to me being ghosted.
While everyone has heard of crypto, it's unlikely most of the people in your immediate circle actually own any of it. That's the quirk of crypto – it's ubiquitous and nowhere.
Where it fails then is in acceptance. The vast body of normies in the world don't have it, don't want it, and frankly, don't need it. Crypto has drawn people in to a limited degree on the basis of FOMO, but that horizon is past us now, and the number of suckers has dwindled. For every new crypto bro who is going to get rich trading fartcoin or whatever, there are people like me who have seen through it and understand that it is nothing more than burnt electricity. Every single point used by libertarians and ultra-free-market capitalists in 2009 or so in favor of crypto has been demolished. No privacy, no usefulness for real-world applications, no stability, no true hedge against the dollar's death spiral. You are better off holding dollars than BTC because the latter can, as October 10th showed us, lose thousands per coin on the basis of a presidential tweet.
Crypto treasuries are just one tool that has blossomed in 2025 as a way of bolstering the digital currency market. Billions have been sucked out of retail investors to buy up bundles of burnt electricity on the grounds that it will appreciate in value in the years to come. A company that was failing at building and selling semiconductors, like Sequans (SQNS), can magically turn into a treasury, sit on its coins, and watch its problems disappear. Surplus labor can be sent packing; commercial real estate reduced or eliminated.
Wages and salaries are the greatest expense of almost any business after all. Two or three people, well paid of course, working a computer terminal use lots and lots of other people's money to buy digital tokens. In this light, large companies shrink and turn into a new version of the index fund. White-collar grifters get big salaries and stock awards for "managing" the crypto treasury. In truth, buying crypto is not exactly a 40-hour-per-week kind of job.
That's a sticking point, of course. The treasuries still have overhead in the form of white-collar executives who demand generous compensation for their hard work. Investors quickly ask, "What value do you add to this enterprise?" An ETF for crypto is a perfectly fine way to buy and hold crypto on stock market exchanges, so what differentiates the crypto treasury, pioneered by MicroStrategy (MSTR) Corporation a few years ago, from a no-nonsense ETF, aside from bloated executive compensation packages?
The crypto treasury bro is supposed to add value above and beyond what is generated through the token's asset appreciation. In theory, they pioneer new ways to leverage their assets to support crypto-backed retail products, etc. In this sense, a crypto treasury can become, down the road, a kind of asset management firm with its own side investments generating additional revenue from various projects. It can even serve as a finance company for car and home loans.
So far in 2025, however, the executives just look really overpaid. Joe Lubin and Joe Chalom at SBET look especially well-fed, and many investors ask, "Why not just buy an ETH ETF or, better yet, an ETF directly?"
Day to day, the charts of BMNR, SBET, SOL, ETH, BTC, and so on don't look different. They move up and down, and some days, the charts for many of these, if overlaid on top of one another, would intersect perfectly. The reason is that more and more institutions have begun placing bets on tokens like ETH. You end up with companies like SBET and BMNR moving the same way as ETH. In turn, on most days, ETH moves like DOGE. DOGE moves like BTC, all thanks to high-frequency trading algorithms owned and operated by well-funded organizations. The crash of 1929 did not have charts where the instruments all traded in exactly the same pattern, minute by minute, volume by volume (proportionally speaking).
Hedge funds and other investment ventures create a flow of price action that looks eerily similar across different instruments. If ETH is supposed to have something that distinguishes it from BTC (it does, of course), it is not really reflected in the price action. The algos don't really care, and at this point, retail investors just don't have much impact on most stocks or cryptos. There are too few of us to matter.
The 200+ publicly traded companies now identified as crypto treasuries as of 2025 have extracted considerable private wealth from the market, and in return, crypto prices don't look very different. ETH and BTC in "Uptober" are still stalled, just as they were in August. Why does this matter, though, given that stocks and crypto can go through periods of flatness?
It matters because during the same period, a considerable volume of news articles have been published saying that Wall Street, from major funds managed by BlackRock to other massively sized outfits, was sending more and more capital into the big cryptos. Such movement would at some point cause prices to rise, at least gradually. But as said, cryptos struggle, and the treasuries tied to them have declined in value. As of now, Strive (ASST), a recent reverse merger that is rebranded as a BTC DAT – the next MSTR as some would have it – is trading at $0.83 after falling from an earlier high of $12. It has lost 90% of its value in a matter of weeks.
As was mentioned, the only way treasuries can secure crypto is to raise cash, and many billions have been spent this year on this activity. There remains uncertainty, however, as to some of the claims; or at least, enough concern that NASDAQ announced tighter rules around companies claiming to hold digital assets. The regulation exists because of growing discomfort with hundreds of shit-tier companies suddenly pivoting into dilution machines that hoard burnt electricity. It's a kind of tulip mania, with the potential to cause great mischief if it's discovered the money was spent on other things.
But DATs are not the only problem from an accounting perspective. While billions have allegedly been acquired in tokens, the overall prices of all of them haven't moved much over the same period. BTC and ETH do get these bursts to all-time highs, only to fall back down to earlier valuations. MSTR began the year in the 4-500 range and is now trending under $200, having lost $150 per share in the last six months. Where is all the money going then, since prices don't seem to be moving up?
To reinforce the point, take the case of ZONE, a company that sold cleaning products and which pivoted recently to buying DOGE coins. How many, you ask? 1 billion. At the time of writing, they've completed the purchase of 700+ million useless tokens, and the price of DOGE looks the same. When they reach 1 billion in a few days, the price will be... the same, and their stock will be under $1. It trades right now at 32 pennies.
Genius Move
The exchanges also have a problem. With the passage of the GENIUS Act this year, Coinbase, Kraken, and dozens of other smaller, lesser-known crypto exchanges now have to get right with Uncle Sam. Heretofore, the exchanges have been allowed to do their own thing, with Mt. Gox being an example of a financial disaster that has taken well over a decade to get sorted. In that time, other exchanges were able to pop up and run things their own way with no oversight, no adult supervision.
The Treasury Department is, under the auspices of GENIUS, taking RFCs and drawing up a regulatory framework to make them comply with standard accounting practices. This is fine and dandy, but the problem is, as Jim Rickards pointed out, some of these exchanges will have blown a lot of money on hookers, cocaine, and racehorses. When the final regs are dropped in late 2026, there will be two categories of exchanges – those who are doing it right and those who are doing it wrong. The ones who are wrong will be exposed as looting operations that have billions in missing funds and assets. Think several Mt. Gox episodes.
Rickards believes that most exchanges will fall in line easily, but he also understands that an unknown number will be exposed.
I have stirred the crypto pot here and will do a recap of where we are:
1) DATs are sucking out money and buying burnt electricity, destroying billions in wealth that cannot be replaced. It dwarfs the S&L crisis of the 1980s, or more recently, the bad loans made by various U.S. banks.
2) Crypto exchanges have been doing their own thing, unregulated for years, and have had plenty of time to destroy billions more in wealth via loose accounting practices. Think Sam Bankman-Fried cloned several times over, or more Mt. Goxes, where eye-watering levels of crypto are misplaced and cannot be found because of weak auditing controls.
3) Large funds are now directly exposed to crypto through new investments in BTC and ETH. Hiccups in crypto are no longer isolated in their effects to basement dwellers, human traffickers, sex slavers and kiddie porn addicts.
All of the above relate to private crypto, or crypto that is conceived, hatched, and operated in the private sector.
Recall that in the orthodox history of modern democracy, the government steps in and imposes legal frameworks once the market has proven itself pernicious enough to warrant such action. "Look kids, we let you do things your own way and see what a mess you've made! Now, we're going to have to lay down some rules..."
We're going into 2026 with exactly this context before us. The private crypto market has seeped into so many investments, from organizational to individual, that it will send considerable shockwaves through the financial system. One Canadian pension fund dropped $28 million in the aforementioned Strive Asset Management (ASST), a poorly run operation that was losing money when it was still private. It now barely trades at a dollar, having reinvented itself via reverse merger as a Bitcoin DAT. It has diluted shareholders massively in the acquisition of BTC.
What would possess a pension fund to invest so cavalierly in a penny stock with negative revenues and no known business plan other than selling massive numbers of shares to get BTC? This is the kind of risky gambling and exposure that I was referring to earlier. It's no longer limited to stimmy bros, desperate working folks, and indebted members of the shrinking middle class, but has spread as a valid choice among "serious" institutional backers.
MicroStrategy, the Mack Daddy of DATs, is in a year-long free fall, and its collapse would send shockwaves through the economy. Precisely as governments draft legislation to provide much-needed crypto regulation, its vulnerabilities are becoming more apparent.
In the past few days, Tom Lee, crypto permabull and ever-present pusher who is given limitless appearances on CNBC, announced that the massive sell-off in October of all crypto instruments was caused by a "software glitch" in how crypto exchanges handle volatility in price changes.
Following the October 10th collapse, Coinbase reported 1.66 million accounts were liquidated as a result of margin calls, although in crypto, they are called something else and work a little differently. The principle is the same, however: a massive number of sellers were forced to liquidate their positions after a Trump tweet, leading to a massive dip in BTC price. The "digital gold" has proven less than resilient. Stimmy bros who were buying crypto on margin (credit) were suddenly forced to close their positions.
Crypto researchers observed a short position opened right before a Trump tweet slamming China and threatening new absurd sanctions. By the following Sunday, the short position closed before a softer, more demure tweet praising China.
If Tom Lee's comments were meant to explain the Big Dip in crypto, they ended up raising questions like: how the fuck does such a system arise that claims billions and billions in investments but is so easily damaged by "software glitches"? I and many others are now even more concerned about crypto since, as modern PC users, we understand that where there is one bug, there are several, or many. How bad are the others, and when do they manifest?
Lee's interview followed a ZeroHedge article that mentioned certain, uh, exploits discovered in BTC.
Stories of crypto "features" are more concrete, with two MIT brothers going to court after using a technical gap to quickly accumulate $25 million in profit by essentially defrauding other traders. It's not clear what laws they broke since they took advantage of an exploit in a market that is unregulated. Insider trading, for example, is not illegal or outlawed, so even if Barron Trump was responsible for the October short position that raked in $190,000,000 in the space of a few hours, he did nothing wrong.
I'll conclude part 1 by noting another vulnerability of DATs: they risk being reclassified as funds. I mentioned earlier that DATs take on the look of being a managed fund because their primary asset (50% or more) is holding digital tokens. Whatever products they may create later (DeFi for car and home financing) are vaporware. From the financial system's perspective, they are managed funds, and these, in turn, are not open to investment by other funds. (Funds don't invest in other funds, but in stocks.) This is momentous for when the DATs stop getting institutional investment; without the algos buying and selling their shares, the stock price drops even further, closer to zero.
As of now, I've seen reference to a possible decision on MSTR's fate in mid January 2026. Much hangs on this decision, and the 200+ DATs minted in 2025 will be in a position to wipe out a substantial amount of retail and institutional investment. Consider that Cathie Wood's Ark Investments has gone heavily into BMNR, Tom Lee's hare-brained ETH DAT. These large players can't unload their massive positions overnight. In the current market, there just aren't enough retail investors to soak up the extra shares from institutions having second thoughts on the DAT strategy and crypto more generally.
Remember that, allegedly, Tom Lee and many others say Big Money – Smart Money – likes crypto now, even though it's extremely volatile and a threat to any portfolio if held in any significant amount.
The last paragraph isn't entirely accurate, since many funds have a policy against buying cheap penny stocks. On the other hand, we've already seen a single Canadian pension fund dump millions into Strive Asset Management.
This to say that systemic risks are found in crypto and that its collapse would have significant, far reaching effects on the economy and monetary policy.
