🚨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! 🌙✨

🚨BEARTARDS HAVE GONE FULL IDIOT SANDWICH BY PRICING 50% CHANCE OF RATE HIKE BY END OF YEAR (exclusive analysis by @bullcase)

Ten reasons why major TACO shocks are inbound and there will be no hikes:

*Bessent wants 10Y yields under 4.5%; Now: 4.40%
*Bessent wants 30Y yields under 5%; Now: 4.94%

In 2025, every single time yields approached those levels we saw TACO.

*Ongoing unofficial of negotiations via Qatar
*Ongoing official negotiations via Pakistan
*Fox News Poll: Trump -28 approval on Iran

There will be no boots on the ground, it's just a negotiation tactic. Trump has absolutely no room to escalate.

*Oil-to-copper ratio: 17 (Stagflation warning >25)
*Freight rejections at cycle high; if oil were hitting industrials, we'd see it here.

Inflation is far from becoming a problem.

There will be no hikes, only more cuts to run it hot. BTFD ASAP if you haven't yet.

Follow @bullcase if you haven't yet, they work really hard to deliver alpha ahead of everyone else. And not minutes ahead, but like months ahead, their altcoin picks are a bitty shitty but the macro analysis part is always on point and ahead of the curve

Canton Network, a banking cartel crypto project, has been doing conflict marketing by attacking ZKPs for being too risky for institutional adoption. As you probably know, I couldn't care less about institutional adoption, but it looks like someone has tipped Canton's shills about an important weakness in ZKPs.

ZKPs rely on SNARKs, SNARKs are a circuit of mathematical constraints where you basically create a set of rules and conditions that define what a valid transaction is. These rules are the brain of your network and are automatically enforced by the circuit at once. Whenever a user creates and signs a transaction, the wallet uses the transaction data as input to generate a proof that the conditions are satisfied. This proof then can be used by anyone to verify the outputs created with it are valid and makes sure the network accepts the new outputs.

So what's the problem here? The risk is that this is like a fully automated pizza vending machine, that does everything on its own from A to Z. You insert a coin, and get the pizza. If something goes wrong inside the machine however the process isn't stopped, you still get the pizza (eg: with grease oil on it)

Chains that don't use ZKPs are a bit different, because the pizza making process has some checks in place, such as humans in a cooking/preparation chain. Let's say a human prepares the base, another adds the ingredients you picked, another one bakes it, and the pizza is served to you ready. If something was wrong with the dough, or if the oven is underheated or overheated, or some ingredient is missing, the process is stopped and either restarted from scratch (if possible) or you're returned the money because the pizza making "failed".

The issue with ZKPs is that it assumes all constraints are working as intended, but what if someone put sand that weighs just like flour? There are no "humans" (proofs) to check the parts for faults along the process. The mathematical rules are executed together at once. If someone fills the dough tank with sand from the Maldives that the sensor detects as dough, then if you put your coins in the machine you will get a hot trail full of sand with tomato sauce and pepperonis on top. The vending machine takes your money and considers the job done. The process doesn't stop, you're served the bad pizza and take the loss.

In a preparation chain OTOH, even if the pizza comes out wrong, the company knows one of the 3 humans in the preparation chain did a mistake. Once the source is identified that human is trained to not repeat the mistake and the problem is fixed.

The problem with SNARKs is that they're very black boxish in execution, you don't know what went wrong until everything is very wrong and probably wrong beyond repair. Canton shills have got a point here, but the solution, obviously, is not a premissioned network like Canton.

Wait and see...wait and see.

Crypto Fear & Greed Index is now sitting in (Extreme) Fear for 70 consecutive days.

the LONGEST streak since the FTX collapse in 2022.

At this point, what other signal do you really need?