TL;DR: Bitcoin busted below $90,000 overnight. Japan market dropped more than 3 percent.  And when we start getting current US Financial reports again?  Well, anyone’s guess.  Still, holiday rallies seem possible but Christmast this year will be more strategic than warm & fuzzy.

Today’s Setup

Is that coffee or Panic! we’re smelling this morning? It’s one of those mornings where the tape looks down – but calm in the sense of “orderly” – on the surface.  To us, it looks like the hull has been breached.  See, the Nikkei plunged more than 3 percent overnight — a move big enough that, in quieter years, it would have been the headline everywhere. Today it barely earns a shrug with most folks. That’s how you know we’re already deep in the danger zone: when real stress becomes background noise.

Meanwhile, political theater continues its off-Broadway run. Rotunda Theater is rerunning the Epstein disclosure like we don’t know virtually everyone is tainted, already.

This kabuki performance tries to look like accountability while ensuring nothing structural actually changes. But the circus isn’t the real problem. The real problem is Accounting.  Specifically, the compounding — the slow, relentless piling-up of issues that don’t resolve, don’t de-escalate, don’t get cleaned up. They just… stack.

Tom Bilyeu’s Impact Theory did a piece Monday that’s worth your time. Because he lays out why America’s screwed: BOTH political parties have weaponized America’s budget to support their parties and buy (imported) voters.  It also explained why Elon Musk threw up his hands…

Which…vastly simplified (both sides crooked, addicted to spending more than we bring in from taxes) is why happy-endings are over on the Fiction Shelf.

When government talks about the Debt in the $40-trillion range, even that is a lie.  because it doesn’t include interest that we can’t walk away from.  (Feel like gambling a world war, buddy? People don’t like getting stiffed…)  But, let’s pretend for a minute.

The U.S. is sitting north of $38 trillion in combined obligations — every year rolling over more interest at higher rates, every quarter borrowing more to stand still. It’s the fiscal version of pulling back on the yoke when the stall horn’s already blaring. Add in the global military liabilities — Ukraine grinding into a power vacuum war, the Middle East simmering with Iran at the edge of open confrontation, and Asia one bad decision away from a shooting calendar — and the load gets heavier still.

Dive, Dive!

This morning feels like one of those classic World War II submarine scenes. We’re already at crush depth, well below what the hull was ever engineered to handle. You can hear the groans — in markets, in politics, in the economic numbers no one wants to talk about. What you can’t hear is the one thing that matters: whether the next little depth charge — a market wobble, a geopolitical misread, a liquidity snag — is the one that buckles the bulkheads.

That’s the backdrop as Bitcoin slipped under $90K.  Not a headline — a tell. (You don’t have a Doc Holiday double-barrel Derringer, for this game.)

Today we go hard. Asking the real question: Can BTC be saved in a world where everything else is creaking at the seams?

When an asset built on computational confidence shows stress at the same time the real economy is creaking, that’s not correlation — that’s a stress test.

The Computing Future of Bitcoin

Before we get into price squiggles and Elliott Wave machinery, let’s do computational fundamentals. This is why I never owned a wallet and called it all a con:

Is Bitcoin built to survive the next computational epoch at all? Beneath the daily price drama is a deeper technical threat lurking just offstage. Three forces — (1) quantum computing, (2)massive AI inference farms, and (3) increasingly omnivorous government monitoring — are converging on a collision course with the original assumptions baked into the Bitcoin design. Add in the escalating overhead of running a blockchain whose mass increases forever, set to run head-on into AI power demands – and you can sketch a very uncomfortable path forward.

Threat 1

The first threat is quantum computing. Bitcoin depends on elliptic curve signatures and hash functions that were considered “computationally infeasible to break” when Satoshi-era hardware was still wandering around in diapers.

That was fine when the biggest threat was a room full of GPUs. But the next decade will not look like the last one. Quantum advantage — even if only partial — breaks the math-first security model.

A sufficiently strong quantum machine doesn’t attack the blockchain itself; it goes after the keys. Once keys can be solved or back-solved faster than new blocks can be validated, the system fails the way old bank vaults fail: slowly at first, and then all at once. Bitcoin maximalists love to hand-wave that “we’ll upgrade the protocol.” Sure. But upgrading a globally distributed system where millions of holders don’t even know what a private key is, and where billions in value sit in cold wallets that will never be patched, is not a weekend job.

Threat 2

The second threat is mass-scale AI compute, which is already running hotter than the ASIC farms of Bitcoin’s first decade.

Bitcoin’s security rests on the assumption that no single actor can provide enough raw computation to rewrite or dominate the chain. That assumption breaks down when AI training clusters, running thousands of GPUs per rack with terawatt appetites, get pointed at the same problem.

Mining difficulty climbs, but the economics don’t climb with it. AI doesn’t care about energy costs. Bitcoin does. An AI-driven mining regime centralizes power even more dramatically than ASIC consolidation ever did. Meanwhile, AI tools become so efficient at blockchain analysis that anonymity — already fragile — evaporates. Every hop, every wallet, every pattern sits naked in front of the machine.

Threat 3

Then comes the government angle, and here’s where the story gets truly existential. No government needs to “ban Bitcoin” to neuter it.

All they need to do is make on-ramps and off-ramps fully transparent, require transactional reporting, fold crypto transfers into AML frameworks, and put the big miners under the same rules as power utilities.  Set having a Developer in Chief with delusions of his own money (not just that Treasury coin) in the wings.

The dream of a stateless currency dies not with a crackdown, but with compliance.

Once the blockchain is mapped — and AI mapping under a regulatory umbrella will make it trivial — the “freedom layer” disappears. What remains is a slower, more expensive Venmo with a PR department.

Need Another?

And finally there is the internal problem: Bitcoin’s own mass. A blockchain that grows forever is a blockchain that costs more and more to operate. The larger it gets, the fewer participants can afford to run a full node. The fewer full nodes there are, the more the system centralizes. The more centralized it becomes, the easier it is for quantum actors, AI clusters, and government enforcers to dominate it. This is not conspiracy theory; it’s systems design. Weight is destiny. Bitcoin’s weight is starting to work against it.

So yes — Bitcoin can bounce, and yes — there are bullish cycles left in it. But the deeper question isn’t price. It’s architecture. Bitcoin was engineered for a world that no longer exists. We are entering an era where computation itself has mutated. When the tools used to “secure the future of money” become the exact tools that can unmake it, the debate shifts from market optimism to engineering fatalism.

That’s the technical backdrop.

Now let’s look at the chart. If you don’t know what Elliott Waves are, and how they evolve, click thee over to the Wiki and read here.  Then come back for the fun.

The long-term Elliott structure is clear:  BTC had a smoking Wave 1 up.  Then, it came down – a normal Wave 2.  Now we MAY be past the top of Wave 3.  Which – if there were a pool game would be where we’d have to “call the pocket.”  We don’t do advice, of course, but in a lot (not ALL) Elliott formations, the top of Wave 1 is usually a support zone.  See how halfway up Wave 3, the top of Wave 1 acted as overhead resistance for a while?

Takeaways:

1. Early U.S. market futures were down.  (Cloudflare has been sketchy on a few sites today like FinViz earlier)
2. Europe is down, on average 1.2 to 1.3 percent (early)
3. This is Tuesday – so “turnaround Tuesday” may appear.
4. Holiday rallies are common, too – turkey is for the table, not the Street.
5. We still aren’t convinced to change our BTC assessment of  2010. Hard pass.
6. bad as it all seems, it’s only a ripple compared to Peoplenomics tomorrow. 60+ pages worth.

You own your own life, your own outcomes, and can engineer them any old way you want.  We just happen to be old school.  Calories and farmland, decent rainfall, and some dirt-scratching tools? Yeah they’re work. But they are honest.

Meanwhile, the turnaround fuel for the Wave 4 bottom is in sight: Fed’s Waller Backs Rate Cut In December Amid Weakening Labor Market: ‘Not Worried About Inflation Accelerating’.  More Money = higher prices, right?

News Noise

Walk with me now.  Bilyeu’s got it right – both parties have gone rogue.  What’s a poor guy supposed to do?

Spend and Pretend, brothers and sisters. Tax without facts. Agenda to the end’a….

Appears to us that Epstein fallout is brolly just beginning: ‘Deeply ashamed’: Former US Treasury chief steps back from public roles after Epstein emails surface. Just in case, we have “the cynical newsman theme” song cued up on YT here.

Is someone going Kaczynski on us? Donald Trump threatens to bomb Mexico and Colombia and says ‘I’d be proud’.

“Jumpin Jack Flash” is a what, what, what? LNG Exports Will Drive Explosion in U.S. Natural Gas Consumption | OilPrice.com

Why we call ’em “kneelers” – people think I am too hard on the Brits.  Check this out: Britain’s Speech Gulag Exposed: 10,000 Arrested Last Year For Social Media Posts.

How about overbown and paranoid? Study Debunks Major Myth: AI’s Energy Usage Is Significantly Less Than Feared. And that’s before central cooling gets applied…

Next, a little something for “jets fans” Ukraine to buy 100 French fighter jets to boost defenses as Russia continues attacks, seizes more ground.

Did they say “Thanks for all the fish?“ Scientists hail breakthrough in decoding whale communication.

Also in SciTechDai8ly (like you didn’t learn from COVID-19 days): Low Vitamin D Levels Strongly Linked to Depression.  So are major market declines and political bullshit but that’s somewhere else…

Around the Ranch: StratMas (Strategic Christmas)

“Anything you want to Christmas dear?”

“No…how about you?”

I had to stop and think about it: No debt, everything free and clear, good health, 20+ ham radio HF stations to set up on whims, 30-acres for antennas, a working tractor and the ex-bunny wife…

“Maybe an 85 inch TV for the living room…eyes are in slow decline….”   But that was about it. I’m a blessed tool slut with capacity to work in any material you name, though I suppose I could beef up on aluminum and titanium welding supplies…

It got me to thinking that Christmas, at least for people past the bang-around phase of life, ought to run on the same rules as strategic planning. Not the Hallmark version with bows and cocoa, but the adult version: assets, liabilities, mission clarity, and resource allocation. Most folks get tangled up in the “what do you want?” question because they’ve never done the strategic step of asking “what problem am I actually trying to solve?” If your mission is comfort, buy comfort. If your mission is resilience, buy tools or beans. If your mission is joy, buy experiences. But buying random plastic crap because the calendar says so? That’s not gifting — that’s panic spending dressed up as tradition. The smartest Christmas isn’t about the presents under the tree; it’s about aligning resources with the life you’re actually building. In other words: treat Christmas like a one-day fiscal year — because if you don’t plan it like a CEO, the season will plan you like a mark.

Since we all have the opportunity to “retool ourselves” every morning into the “new and improved us” for each day, what to I need to realize that better me should be the question.

Care to bet on how many people will begin planning their seasonal spending of that perspective?  If you answer “Lots of ’em” then check which planet you’re on.

Two gifts we endorse – both being strategic: My book Mind Amplifiers and a Peoplenomics.com subscription..  I happen to know the author….he’s a genius level fellow, or so he says.

Christmas Cookies

Flashbacks to my Youth (long, a frickin go) as the holidays loom.  See, my late Danish grandmother lives with us growing up.  Having come to America on the last westbound run of the Lusitania, she’d been a cook for one of the minor royal families in Odense.  And just before Thanksgiving, the cookies would start appearing.

Klejner (also spelled klejner, kleiner, or klejne) is one of Denmark’s oldest traditional Christmas cookies, with roots reaching back to medieval Scandinavia. The name comes from the old Germanic word for “small” or “delicate,” and the cookie itself is a twisted strip of dough — a symbolic “knot” meant to bring luck and protect the home during the dark winter months. Originally fried in pork fat or clarified butter, klejner were prized because they kept well through December’s long nights and could be made in large batches before the holiday feasts. By the 1700s they were firmly embedded in Danish yuletide customs, often made during kagebagning (communal baking days) and served with hot gløgg. Every region developed its own variation: some crisp and dry, others soft and lemon-scented, but the iconic twist — the “little knot of Christmas” — has remained unchanged for centuries.

What triggered the flashback?  Too much Chinese food last night with friends?  No… it was this: People are trying to figure out why Danish Christmas cookies are made in India and it’s started a new propaganda war | Not the Bee.

Off to solve another one of the greatest mysteries:  Why do cookies (like the plate of choc chips from our dinner couple) never last in the freezer?  I can put two dozen in the freezer today and by, oh, Saturday or so, all gone! Seriously odd woo-woo in the kitchen here.  All started about the time a dish ran away with the spoon.  Hmm…

Ahead/ Incoming:

Fed Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization due shortly.  And tomorrow is a Bank Reserve Settlement Day – could fuel an afternoon turn-around, but that’s not advice.  Just windage to crank in…

How’s about we saddle up as World Observers and climb back on the Earth Ride Adventure for another one?

Write when you get it,

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