The blog

The assets, one by one

What each asset is, how it behaves in a book, what its liquidity looks like and what that means for the cost of trading it.

Crypto · 9 min read

The halving: what the arithmetic guarantees, and what it does not

The halving is the only major event in any market whose date and magnitude have been public since before the market existed. That makes it unusually clean to analyse and unusually easy to talk nonsense about, because a fact everybody agrees on gets attached to a conclusion nobody can demonstrate.

Crypto · 10 min read

The arithmetic behind memecoins

Dismissing memecoins as gambling is accurate and useless, because it describes the outcome rather than the mechanism. They have a structure, that structure is unusually visible on a public ledger, and most of the money lost in them is lost to arithmetic that could have been checked in ninety seconds.

Crypto · 9 min read

Proof of stake, and what staking actually pays you for

Staking gets described as earning interest on a holding, which is the one thing it is not. You are being paid to perform a task, you can be penalised for performing it badly, and the payment comes from three sources with nothing in common except that they arrive in the same wallet.

Crypto · 10 min read

Stablecoins: what actually holds the peg

Most traders treat a stablecoin as a resting place, the thing you sit in between positions. That is a reasonable use and it quietly involves holding a credit instrument issued by a private company. Understanding what keeps the number at one is the difference between a considered decision and an assumption.

Crypto · 9 min read

What actually moves the price of Bitcoin

Bitcoin is the only large asset whose supply schedule was written down before it launched and has never changed. That makes the question unusually clean: if the supply side is fixed, everything that moves the price is on the other side of the trade.