Interesting analysis by some og whales in my circle. Aligns with my expectations of a bullish 2026, but the geopolitical angle is what really peaked my interest.

🚨Chairman of the House Select Committee on the CCP John Moolenaar on 2026 & Taiwan:

• Xi's 2027 readiness deadline makes 2026 an important year where we will prepare for all scenarios using all available tools of our national power to ensure Beijing never decides an aggression against Taiwan will be fast, cheap or successful

[Translation: we will run it hot so we can weaponize the USD in 2027. BTFD!]

Dero is the only true privacy coin left today. It's the only coin that uses El Gamal as primitive, while everything else is stuck in the PC paradigm of privacy through obfuscation of single use outputs. This tech makes Dero a formidable financial weapon against despots' capital controls systems.

Monero is a good coin for as long as privacy is a honeypot play to catch a few criminals here and there. But in case of a major geopolitical rift, privacy becomes a matter of life or death and Monero is unusable. If I could trace it, an entity like the CCP can do it systemically either by bribing Palantir or through a Chinese version of Palantir or just by analyzing onchain data.

I think, because of these implications, Western regulators will have to embrace privacy and the most advanced privacy coin out there, Dero, will eventually be declared unregulatable.

Since 2020, when I first started taking privacy seriously and stopped seeing it as a niche for criminals, this is the first time I finally see where that Snowden moment will come from. If you followed me from the beginning, I've always said that for privacy to eventually break through and stop being a niche it needs to become a political issue. Covid helped expand it by waking up a few people (like me) who were caught up in the cross fire of the draconian covid laws. And a few high profile crises, like that of the Canadian truckers, inspired many. But privacy still never really became a political issue.

Those of us who got involved relatively early, or late from the perspective of OG cypherpunks, have witnessed a fractured community of sorts. There are the criminals (eg: DNM admins caught with honeypots like Monero), the mercenaries (eg: Cake wallet/Chainalysis employees/PR agents), the tourists (moonboys who got rekt by the likes of Haven, Xelis etc), the og cypherpunks (who lurk in the shadows), useful idiots (Monero maxis who have no clue about the tech) and a few purists (who try to understand how things work).

For a purist like me the question has always been, how do we break out of here? The West's political compass has been dead set to fight and abolish privacy in every occasion. So where will the masses required to hold the line come from? Because if they don't then the few of us holding the line will eventually be rolled over and liquidated as collateral damage at best.

Personally, I stuck around because of principled opportunity: as a matter of principle because I think privacy is a key prerequisite to freedom, but also because of opportunity when considering the low valuation of something as advanced as Dero compared to honeypots like Monero that are symbols of an era where privacy's main use case wasn't freedom but that of being a trap to catch those looking for impunity.

Anyway, now I finally see an angle for that mass adoption to happen. I think the air support those like me have been waiting for should finally come if the tensions over Taiwan, which seem to be escalating under the surface, boil over in 2027. That will probably be the perfect shit hit the fan scenario that wakes everyone up.

🚨Chainalysis Alternatives for Monero Tracing Probably as result of the many crime marketing campaigns and their promise of impunity, another bunch of criminals was encouraged to double down on a crime and request a ransom in Monero to get away with it. The victim this time is 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie, her kidnappers are now reportedly requesting a $6m ransom in Monero (after requesting a ransom in BTC first 3 weeks ago).

I hope LE doesn't hire Chainalysis/Palantir (whose shills do crime marketing 24/7) but opts for other firms that can trace XMR for cheaper. Because for every grant that goes to Chainalysis, we will probably see crime rate increase 10 fold when a fraction of that money flows back into crime marketing campaigns encouraging people to commit crimes. And more crime marketing means more victims.

What alternatives are there? Well, for example, Bezalel Eithan Raviv, CEO of Lionsgate Network, seems to be well versed when it comes to Monero tracing. In this Newsweek article he gives a statement carefully putting out plenty of cues that demonstrate he has a deep understanding of the tech. To quote a few:

1) "Behavioral patterns (ie: UTXO structure, clusters, churning transactions, fees), timing analysis (recency heuristic) and specialized forensic tools (eg: OSPEAD or other algorithms to detect related output when they form clusters) can still reveal who is behind a wallet once investigators obtain an address"

2) "Monero presents a harder path, not an impossible one, with the right intelligence, we can follow the money and expose the entity behind the scenes."

Please spread the word about alternatives like Lionsgate Network. Tracing Monero is easy and therefore, it shouldn't be a monopoly of Chainalysis/Palantir sister companies.

By the way if any Monero tracing startup wants to sponsor my channel feel free to message me 🤝

So you must be familiar with the 2026 bull thesis by now, apparently 2027 is an important year for China and Xi. Xi dreams of being the Chinese leader who brings Taiwan home, but of course that's most likely not going to happen peacefully. And since Taiwan is where 90% of world's chips are produced, a war there also means a lot of trouble for the rest of the world.

Question: what happens to Bitcoin in case of a Taiwan crisis in 2027 that leads to a blockade? Maxis may consider it a tail risk but the tail is getting quite fat.

OTOH, this seems a STHF scenario that DERO was designed to resist from its inception thanks to AstroBWT which can be mined on old CPUs and for which ASICs & GPUS cannot be created. So in case of a Taiwan crisis Dero mining would remain unaffected as it can always rely on old CPUs & devices as well on chips that don't require TSMC.

An interesting big picture is emerging here. I mean..imagine, just imagine if SHTF in 2027, push comes to shove, the market starts looking for a real fit.

Here is Ray Dalio today ranting about Bitcoin saying it has no privacy and then about Quantum Computing: "can there be issues regarding that".

Replace "Quantum computing" with "Taiwan blockade" and what he is saying makes perfect sense, is much more tangible.

I think Quantum Computing is like a placeholder narrative/euphemism for an existential risk (2027 Taiwan blockade) that nobody wants to mention yet.

So Dalio has a problem with lack of privacy, maybe a potential Taiwan crisis, and even Quantum Computing...Dero addresses all those 3 issues.

What if Satoshi saw this coming and prepared an answer to Dalio's complaints with the creation of Dero? 🤔

The coin with the most advanced privacy tech out there, truly untraceable (or as untraceable as a crypto can be), provably 10 years minimum ahead of everything else.

Consider the cryptographic primitive choice that nothing else uses (El Gamal), its mining algo lineage for CPUs (AstroBWT), with smart contracts.

And so it happens that this thing halves in the middle of 2026. Right before Xi Jinping's 2027 Taiwan readiness deadline everyone has been prepping for sh*t to eventually hit the fan.

We look set for a parabolic alt season in 2026,

🚨LARGE INFORMED PLAYERS HAVE BEEN RISK ON SINCE LIBERATION DAY AND ARE INCREASING THEIR EXPOSURE FURTHER DURING THIS GEOPOL DIP.

*March 2021: Admiral Davidson, head of US Indo-Pacific Command, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that a Chinese move on Taiwan will "manifest during the next six years."

*June 2021: General Mark Milley clarified that Xi Jinping had ordered the People's Liberation Army (PLA) to be capable of an invasion by 2027, even though a final decision hadn't been made.

*February 2023: CIA Director Burns went on the record stating that US intelligence "knows as a matter of intelligence" that Xi has instructed the PLA to be ready for a successful invasion by 2027.

*July 2023: CIA Director William Burns & DNI Avril Haines personally briefed top tech with classified assessments that China's military buildup was specifically synchronized to reach peak readiness by 2027.

Smart money always knew 2026 was scheduled to run hot.

[BTFD before everything rips!]

Best macro analysis by far imo, you're missing out on some serious macro alpha if you aren't following @bullcase. It has the most convincing bull thesis by far for 2026

It seems like the IRS just built a form that maps out every wallet or exchange you've ever used. And of course this Tik toker who has no clue about the tech shills Monero in the end. If you use Monero for privacy all you do is make Palantir rich.

That said, it's almost as if we're inside a social experiment where they ban privacy, try to push surveillance as far as they can until it reaches a point where people finally realize why privacy matters. Then when privacy becomes a social norm, they roll back everything.

And privacy laws become the litmus test that differentiate the "free" world from Russia and China.

By the way, China and Russia have very effective capital control laws in place. Ever think how would the world change if only there was a way to make those capital control laws ineffective? It's either that or we have to fight a kinetic war at some point

I think crypto as we know it will take a huge hit in the next 2 years. The current supercycle started in 2008 with Obama's QE, QE however came with many strings attached. When you print a lot of money, you want to make sure that the extra money goes in the right places (ie: to prevent the too big to fail from failing) to avoid inflation and the erosion of purchase power.

For this, QE comes with a progressive restriction of privacy rights, through the implementation of capital control laws and excessive taxation. At least here (in our side of the world), it's not because we're worried people may run away with their earnings/savings to China or Russia. The reason we have capital control laws is to prevent that money created to close balance sheet holes falls through the cracks and ends up triggering Weimar-style hyperinflation.

I mean we print so big banks stay solvent, and numbers on computer screens keep showing the right amount. We don't want plebs to start playing if I don't see it I don't believe it, and then try to withdraw all that money in cash. Because then we would see people with wheelbarrows full of money moving around and hyperinflation would kick in.

Of course though, we justify the choking points with prove you're not a criminal if you want to withdraw more than X amount. A lot of "criminals, terrorists, sanction dodgers etc" out there Billie, to keep you safe, I need to verify this first.

In Russia/China, on the other hand, they've capital control laws for another reason, because without them people would take the money and run to invest elsewhere. Now I've been reading up a bit on Kevin Warsh and if in 2027 shit hits the fan in Taiwan, the fun begins. Warsh says we're in the beginning of a structural decline in prices because of AI. Remember how companies used to go to China to save on labor force? Now they will move to US to save even more by leveraging AI, and this means lower prices and a stronger dollar long term. Since we no longer need to outsource manfucturing to China and elsewhere offshore, we no longer need a weak dollar.

Now the best part, why should privacy maximalists & cypherpunks care?

I will tell you in the next post with a chart I created that shows why this is has huge implications for privacy...hold on a sec

Believe it or not, this policy shift will lax up all surveillance laws and privacy will become the norm again.

A structural decline in prices implies M2 will be reduced, and how Kevin Warsh plans to do this remains to be seen, but what matters is that when you dry up excessive liquidity, you no longer need capital control laws, so you go back to "privacy first" laws. See the attached chart, I hope you get what I mean.

Anything that isn't private in this new paradigm will be dumb and useless. Even BTC imo will stop going up, now that's a bold call I know so please bear in mind none of this is financial advice. After 2027, I think a new regime will kick in, and Ray Dalio must know something since he is openly talking about privacy and criticizing bitcoin for being transparent.

TLDR: The Dark Age of privacy coins is about to end, especially for the ones that work as intended (like Dero).

An interesting read 🤔

That article brings up 2 important points: cockroach level defi and the agentic economy. Then it implodes when it calls Eth cockroach level defi.

Anyway, if in the future AI will be commoditized, then frictionless and censorship resistant payment rails will be required. Agents will interact with each other as they are programmed to perform specific tasks, and each call will need to be paid, from agent to agent.

But also, to make this AI accessible to real people and deliver utility, we will again need frictionless payment rails for the front end. So while AI won't need big container ships to be shipped globally, it will need censorship resistant money that is private, global/unstoppable and decentralized.

This currency can't be transparent, can't be POS/censorable, and can't have 99% of its chips produced in Taiwan.

Said currency will become a way of converting energy into intelligence. Now I can't help but wonder, what will that currency be?

And also, when people think of friction, they think of fees. In reality lack of privacy is an even bigger source of friction, because anything that's not private can be surveilled/controlled/censored/gatekept.

Laws and bans aside, surveillance on its own can have a cooling effect. If I'm worried big brother will be able to detect when I buy AI, I'm less likely/more scared to buy AI. For any country that aims to become an AI powerhouse and sell AI by the meter, like Sam Altman says here, then such p2p cash solution will be key for max market share/size.

And again, I can't help but wonder, what will that currency be? Bitcoin, Eth, ZEC, Monero or...Dero?

Eid Mubarak to everyone celebrating! 🌙✨