Stuff That Interests Me

An extra piece for you this week. I had planned to follow up on Dr John’s timely piece on oil and gas today, but it will have to wait.We need to talk about bitcoin.Since peaking at $126,000 in early October, the bitcoin price has been in freefall, and the declines have accelerated this year. Earlier in the week, it touched $60,000 - declines of over 50% from peak to trough. Today it sits at $67,000.Call it what it is. It’s a bear market.Here’s a 2-year chart so you can see the price action. All the gains of 2025 have been given back and we are back at 2024 levels.Bitcoin has become a software proxyMy first observation is that bitcoin’s decline since October has coincided exactly with a brutal selloff in software stocks, even as hard assets - gold, silver, and other metals - have caught one heck of a bid.Just a few years ago, hard assets had no value, it seemed. Forget land, mining, the real economy. It was all about digital, software, IP, trademarks. How things have changed.This chart appeared in a WhatsApp g