2025 is off to the biggest start of any year. Even 2024.
1. A big fat zero for Trump crypto donors. No Bitcoin reserve, as I predicted. Trump predictably gave his wealthy crypt donors a big, fat zero for their support. This goes to show the limitations of money in politics. The assumption is wealthy people can buy political favors or influence politicians, but I think this ability is greatly overstated.
Crypto donors and investors are a minority. In a democracy, quantity beats quality. Why would Trump prioritize invaluable political capital and time for crypto, which has no important economic implications, over more popular issues such as DOGE, DEI, tariffs, etc. that appeal to far more voters? Although he’ll gladly take crypto donors’ money.
2. Big gains on Polymarket betting against the Bitcoin reserve within Trump’s first 100 days and for 2025. I wish I could bet more money, but I don’t want to move the market too much. There isn’t that much liquidity. Otherwise, I would bet even more. All this was made public on this site.
3. Big gains shorting Bitcoin as per my method. Shorting Bitcoin as a hedge against my leveraged tech stock portfolio works as well now at $90k as it did last year at $50-70k. This is due to Silk Road selling as explained earlier.
The details are technical, but on Dec. 2nd 2024 the US treasury moved another 10,000 batch of Bitcoin to Coinbase that were seized as part of legal proceedings against the Silk Road, following the site’s shutdown by the feds in 2013. These Bitcoin are gradually sold during market hours, creating an easily exploitable market anomaly where Bitcoin is weak, allowing me to profit by shorting Bitcoin as a hedge against tech stocks. The first 10,000 batch was moved in March 2023, and a second in March 2024. In each case, this allows me to profit.
By my estimate, a total of 260,000 Bitcoin were confiscated related to the Silk Road. 140,000 Bitcoin, belonging to Ross Ulbricht, were sold to private buyers, such as venture capitalist Tim Draper, who purchased 30,000 in 2014. 50,000 bitcoin, originally belonging to James Zhong, who in 2012 hacked Silk Road, are in the possession of the feds. 69,000 Bitcoin, originally belonging to an unknown hacker “Individual X” were transferred to the feds in 2020, likely in exchange for immunity. In Jan 2025, the feds were cleared to sell those Bitcoin, too. This will create additional selling pressure when they are eventually moved to Coinbase.
Trump has instructed the Treasury to stop minting the penny, but cannot stop it from selling Bitcoin? This goes to show the limitations of money in politics. Bitcoin donors (e.g. David O. Sacks, Brian Armstrong, etc.) gave the most and got snubbed. The initial crypto hype leading up to the inauguration and after was used as exit liquidity. Trump, being the shrewd businessman he is, capitalized off the hype to launch of own coin $TRUMP, that has since lost most of its value. There is an old saying, “If you don’t know who the sucker is in the room or gambling table, it’s you”.
4. Big gains with Meta stock, which is up 13% this year to $715, and tech overall. Regardless of what you think of Zuck as a person or his ethics, he’s pretty savvy. He was right in 2023/2024 pivoting against wokeness and by embracing Trump and MMA, before everyone else got onboard the DEI-backlash. He saw that the left was becoming increasingly unpopular, and he had to pivot. Likely, this was based on sentiment analysis on Facebook, so he had an early head’s up.
5. Big progress with math. I was able to prove all the identities with my method, including a notoriously hard case that had stumped researchers for almost 2 decades and is the simplest proof yet. In mid 2024, I tried to prove even one of them and failed. Finding proofs of these is hard. No mentions on mathexchange/overflow. The closet thing to a proof I found involved conformal field theory (CFT), published in the 90s. A second proof also from a ’90s paper that does not involve CFT is very complicated involving many dozens of steps. Mine is much simpler requiring just 6 steps and no CFT. So from zero in 2024 to proving all of them. I have no idea why one one saw this earlier. But this merits publication and I hope to have it out soon.