This Is Why Doge Will Outlast Its Doubters
This Is Why Doge Will Outlast Its Doubters
Barry vs. The Winklevii
Dogecoin nemesis Barry Silbert continues to find himself in the news, and not in a good way.
Barry, Wall Street's crypto pooh-bah, publicly shorted Doge at its all-time high in May 2021.
Now, his billion-dollar empire is collapsing.
His latest troubles began when he ran afoul of the Winklevoss brothers, owners of the Gemini exchange.
Gemini had a product in which customers could lend their crypto for interest, called Gemini Earn.
Barry's Genesis was one of Gemini's clients, borrowing $900M worth of crypto from Gemini Earn, which has been missing since November.
On January 2nd, Cameron Winklevoss posted a blistering letter to Barry on Twitter, accusing him of misusing customer funds linked to Gemini Earn: “You took this money – the money of schoolteachers – to fuel greedy share buybacks, illiquid venture investments, and kamikaze Grayscale NAV trades.” He gave Silbert a January 8th deadline to resolve the issue of the missing money.
A few days after Cameron's letter, Bloomberg reported that the DOJ and SEC were probing Silbert's Digital Currency Group (DCG) about improper internal transfers of customer funds.
Last Tuesday, Cameron penned another letter, this one directed to the Board of DCG. It called for Barry to be replaced as CEO and accused him of dishonesty and accounting fraud.
The Winklevii's accusations are unlikely to be frivolous: they're working with Kirkland & Ellis LLP, the world's largest law firm, and are doubtless vetting these open letters before they're released to the public. Any sloppiness with the facts would expose them to countersuit.
On Thursday morning, Financial Times reported that Genesis owed creditors a whopping three billion dollars, explaining why no one on Wall Street wanted to lend it money back in December. In the afternoon, a new group of creditors went public claiming that Genesis duped them out of hundreds of millions with dishonest financial statements.
Then, on Thursday night, the SEC charged both Genesis and Gemini with selling unregistered securities.
Unfortunately it looks like the SEC's involvement does not actually improve the situation for anyone (as is often the case), and muddies the waters of a clear-cut instance of fraud by treating both parties as if they were equally culpable.
To Gemini's credit, it appears it acted in good faith, and reportedly reached out to the SEC for guidance about Earn long before the lawsuit.
Tyler Winklevoss called the SEC's move a "manufactured parking ticket" and questioned how it would help individual investors get their money back from Genesis. It would've been a lot more helpful if the SEC caught DCG's misbehavior before it became insolvent, but, like it's dealings with FTX, it missed the ball.
Unlike the DOJ, which is likely pursuing criminal charges, the SEC is filing a civil case. Both Genesis and Gemini will probably have to pay fines and, in the case of Genesis, an SEC fine could mean less money for bilked investors.
While Barry and DCG are on the ropes, Dogecoin has been thriving.
Last week, Twitter added $DOGE cashtag functionality, allowing people to look up the price of Doge directly on the app.
Twitter's cashtags include a link to Robinhood, where users can buy Dogecoin. It'll be interesting to see if the partnership extends further as Twitter builds out its financial infrastructure.
More big news broke on Tuesday, when a researcher shared leaked screenshots of something called Twitter Coins, a feature which hasn't gone live yet.
So far, we know that Twitter Coins show up under a menu for "Monetization," and appear to be an in-app currency.
It looks like users will buy Twitter Coins directly from Twitter, and use them to give Tweet Awards, similar to a system used by Reddit. A line from one of the the screenshots reads, "Coins allow you to support creators who Tweet great content."
It's a matter of speculation what relationship, if any, will exist between Twitter Coins and Dogecoin.
One possibility is that users will be able to purchase Twitter Coins with Dogecoin.
Of course, it also may be that TwitterCoin is literally a code word for Dogecoin—their logos share near identical colors.
However, we'll wait for more evidence before jumping to that conclusion.
No matter how they work, Awards and Coins look like they'll make Twitter more fun, adding a game-like element to the platform.
If that weren't enough good news, on Friday night, Doge ripped above eight cent resistance, the day after Elon announced SpaceX will attempt a Starship launch.
In the big picture Barry and DCG represent the antithesis of Dogecoin: Wall Street money men expanding their sphere of influence by taking cheap shots at the people's crypto.
Whatever downward pressure they've been exerting on Doge's price, it's unlikely to last forever, especially given their current woes.
It's not the Dogecoin way to dance on anyone's grave, but when Doge goes to the moon, no one will mourn the era of Barry.
Twitter Files
Last week, former NY Times journalist Alex Berenson released his first installment of the Twitter Files.
In his thread, Berenson showed an email by Pfizer board member and former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb flagging a tweet about natural immunity for censorship.
Twitter didn't take down the tweet, but appended a "Misleading" fact-check label.
Dr. Peter McCullough weighed in on the incident, saying, "Gottlieb defrauded America for the profits of Pfizer [...] they were silencing scientists who were bringing forward important information on natural immunity." McCullough also cited "four thousand major media outlets that took federal money to push the government's false narrative."
Folks who were on Twitter in 2021 will remember the topic of natural immunity being censored during a push to characterize mRNA vaccines as the only solution to the pandemic and justify mandates.
Elon reposted Berenson's thread with the comment, "Some conspiracies are actually true."
The same day as Berenson's report, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey released another set of emails showing the Biden White House pressuring Facebook to increase censorship.
One email talks about "reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation," including "often-true content."
Elon called the email a "Constitutional violation."
Overall, the public seems to be experiencing a renewed focus on vaccine efficacy and safety, with a series of high-profile cardiac events and an unexplained rise in excess mortality pushing the topic into the spotlight.
Last week, CNN reported a data set was withheld by Moderna and government scientists from vaccine advisory committees. The data suggested booster shots might not be more effective at preventing infections than the original shots.
A Rasmussen poll found that "51% of Democrats nationally believe it is likely the vaccines have caused a significant number of unexplained deaths."
Thursday, BBC News ran an interview with a cardiologist calling for the suspension of mRNA vaccines due to the rise in unexplained cardiovascular events. His demand was echoed by another eminent cardiologist over the weekend.
On Friday, the CDC said a preliminary vaccine "safety signal" was identified linking the Pfizer vaccine to ischemic strokes in people 65 or older.
Outside of the looming medical controversy, there also seems to be a growing reckoning with censorship itself.
Tuesday night, RFK Jr announced a class action Covid censorship lawsuit against the "Trusted News Initiative."
Appearing on Tucker Carlson, RFK explain that the TNI is a "secretive cartel that involved the big legacy media companies [...] and also the social media platforms."
RFK claimed the TNI had two goals that violated the First Amendment:
1) Censor information—true or not—that departed from official government orthodoxies and proclamations about Covid
2) Destroy their rivals—thousands of independent online news sites—by denying them a presence on social media
Finally, signs are emerging of public pushback against the Intelligence Community and its role in moderating social media content.
On Tuesday, the House of Representatives voted to create a committee to investigate the weaponization of the federal government, specifically three-letter agencies.
The vote broke cleanly along party lines, with 222 Republicans in favor of creating the committee and the House's 211 Democrats against it.
The next day, Trump proposed a seven year "cooling off period" during which former intelligence agency employees wouldn't be able to hold positions at social media companies.
He cited "the now-famous Twitter Files" to justify his plan, explaining, "there is a deep state indeed, I wasn't a believer but everybody's a believer right now."
As fate would have it, defenders of the establishment are having their own awkward political moment.
First, there was a report that FBI Director Christopher Wray would be attending the World Economic Forum's Davos summit this week, a conference where pro-globalization economic elites meet to make decisions about the world economy.
What the FBI Director is doing hobnobbing with the billionaire class in Switzerland is anyone's guess.
Then, it was reported that Joe Biden improperly stored classified documents from his Vice Presidency about the UK, Iran, and Ukraine at his UPenn think tank.
Later in the week, another report claimed he was keeping additional classified documents in a "locked garage" next to his Corvette, prompting Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel to investigate.
On Saturday, the White House acknowledged yet more documents found at Biden's Wilmington home. Elon highlighted an article by Michael Shellenberger comparing the media's coverage of Trump's handling of classified documents to Biden's.
Of course, Trump himself broke the news that the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago residence in August over his handling of documents, an investigation which has gone silent in the months since. Importantly, the President has authority to declassify anything he wishes—a power which the Vice President does not have.
The topic of Intelligence Community excesses continued to trend late into the week, when Matt Taibbi released Twitter Files #14.
Taibbi's latest installment presents evidence that the "Russiagate" scandal—the idea that Russia was secretly working with Trump—was manufactured by politicians and the media.
Taibbi's thread picks up the story in January, 2018, when Republican congressman Devin Nunes wrote a classified memo to the House Intel Committee about the FBI.
Nunes' memo claimed that the FBI used the now-discredited Steele Dossier to obtain a surveillance warrant on Trump's presidential campaign, even though it knew the dossier was paid for by the DNC and Hillary Clinton's campaign.
At the time, the media denounced the memo as a "joke" though its claims were corroborated in 2019.
To discredit the memo, House members Adam Schiff and Diane Feinstein and Senator Richard Blumenthal said it was being pushed by Russian influence operations on Twitter using the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo.
To back this claim, they cited a single FBI source.
Inside Twitter, employees found no evidence Russians were behind the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag, nor several other hashtags the media claimed were Russian ops.
Instead, user engagement with the hashtag was "overwhelmingly organic", driven in part by Wikileaks' Twitter account.
Twitter employees were ignored when they reached out to the politicians advancing the Trump-Russia collusion narrative.
In a theme that is becoming familiar, the politicians tag-teamed with the media to push the fake story in complete defiance of the facts. Taibbi wrote, "reporters from the AP to Politico to NBC to Rolling Stone continued to hammer the “Russian bots” theme, despite a total lack of evidence."
When Taibbi asked these media outlets for comment before releasing the latest Twitter Files, they all declined to speak on the matter, as did the politicians who pushed the "Russiagate" hoax.
Nunes did comment to Taibbi: "Schiff and the Democrats falsely claimed Russians were behind the Release the Memo hashtag, all my investigative work... By spreading the Russia collusion hoax, they instigated one of the greatest outbreaks of mass delusion in U.S. history.”
Amazingly, the special counsel appointed to investigate Biden's current document fiasco, Robert Hur, was part of the effort to block the Nunes memo.
On Friday, Taibbi dropped a supplemental installment of the Twitter Files about Schiff.
The thread shows Schiff's office requesting Twitter to ban and de-amplify tweets about Schiff staffer Sean Misko's connections to the CIA and Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Schiff's office claimed the tweets were "QAnon related activity."
After posting the threads, Taibbi was assailed by politicians and media figures who accused him of "spewing Kremlin talking points."
Despite ongoing pushback, the Twitter Files continues to rewrite history, offering an alternate, documents-based account of many of most controversial stories from the last several years.
The much-anticipated Fauci Files still haven't dropped. Appearing on Fox, Fauci took the opportunity to defend himself, saying, "I have no idea what [Elon is] talking about Neil, I wish I did."
Today, Lee Fang released another Twitter Files thread showing Pharmaceutical companies lobbying Twitter for more censorship, including the news site Zerohedge.
We'll cover this and more in next week's newsletter. In the mean time, keep your eyes peeled to Twitter!
Reformat the Eggonomy
No matter how much evidence it is presented, the mainstream seems to have no intention of admitting being wrong about anything—censorship, the pandemic, Russiagate, the intelligence agencies, or anything else.
In the end, it's up to each individual to decide whether to trust independent or corporate journalists.
However, the mainstream would improve it credibility with the public by admitting some level of fallibility for its past mistakes, or even just acknowledging that the Twitter Files is a big deal.
Besides impugning the media, the week's happenings give numerous examples of how elected officials are captured at the highest level.
Corruption isn’t something that occasionally effects government. Corporations, bureaucracies, media, and elected politicians are part of the same amorphous public-private entity designed to siphon wealth from the US tax base and redistribute it to themselves.
The idea that anything can be fixed by holding a few bad actors accountable is a fairy tale. What is needed is a democratically mandated regime change to completely wipe the slate clean and form an updated government that actually serves the people rather than their corporate masters.
This won't be accomplished by storming government buildings to overthrow the current regime, but rather by reaching across the aisle, finding common cause, and establishing a shared body of facts through peaceful dialogue.
The Twitter Files is the first step in this process. It is a bedrock body of knowledge to justify such a movement by revealing just how thoroughly corrupt our current institutions are.
The steady trickle of revelations is better than a single bombshell story that gets lost the moment the news cycle changes.
The establishment's best remaining weapon is the US Dollar: the banking cartel still has the power to manipulate the money supply, and the economy in general.
In the bigger picture, banks use privileged access to money to create boom-bust cycles that decimate the economy, such as 2008 or 2020.
When markets crash, the financial cartel swoops in to buy up assets on the cheap from distressed citizens.
Dogecoin is the missing piece of the puzzle to reform this system, a global, people-owned currency that, in principle, exists outside government or central bank control.
Superior tech and immaculate vibes will win in the end: Doge will outlast its doubters.
Dogey Treats: News Bites
Elon liked a tweet from Tim Pool that read, "Reddit is a psyop"
Twitter Blue launched in Japan.
TateGate
Andrew Tate was admitted to the hospital. Two of Tate's alleged victims denied the public narrative. Logan Paul tweeted, "the matrix is real. pray you never become its target." Andrew Tate's account wrote back, "You are the Matrix. You are an Agent.
Health
Is fasting a remedy for spike-protein exposure"?
What happens to your body when you stop eating sugar for 30 days?
Global Financial System
The Swiss Central Bank posted its largest loss in its 116 year history.
The DOJ seized Robinhood shares from FTX
The World Bank warned of a recession in 2023.
US Treasurer Janet Yellen warned the US will hit its debt limit on Thursday.
Elon posted a chart of Fed interest rates after the 2009 financial crisis and asked, "I wonder what would have happened in 2009 if the Fed had raised rates instead of lowering them." In a follow-up tweet, he wrote, "The higher the rates, the harder the fall."
Elon posted a meme about the global financial system running on Excel.
Crypto
Russia's central bank is reportedly set to begin developing a cross-border payments system using a CBDC.
Ripple CEO Stuart Alderoty wrote an editorial in Fortune urging congress to examine the SEC's role in collapse of FTX and BlockFi
US Politics
The House of Representatives will vote on a bill to abolish the IRS and replace income tax with a consumption tax. Biden said he would veto the bill.
Representative Thomas Massie said he would introduce a bill to audit the Federal Reserve.
Representative Matt Gaetz promised to release 14,000 hours of J6 footage. Speaker McCarthy said he would be open to releasing the footage as well.
Elon said it was "foolish to roll those dice" on global warming after data showed colling temperatures over the last eight years.
Elon said he'd ask George Soros, "Do you actually know where your money is going?" He also posted a meme about "billionaire simps" and Soros.
Brazil
Glenn Greenwald reported a "major escalation of Brazil's censorship regime." Elon encouraged him to share more information.
Covid
Appearing on Fox, Fauci again said of the Fauci Files, "I have no idea what he's talking about Neil, I wish I did."
CDC released its VAERS analysis.
The Pentagon dropped its vaccine mandate for troops. More documents have emerged to show that Covid was a DoD operation.
Elon questioned the efficacy and price-hike of the second Moderna booster.
Meme Stonks
AMC announced it would start screening Titanic on February 10 after Cohen Titanic-themed tweet.
In an interview about Wall Street fraud and illegal short-selling, lawyer Wes Christian said, "Wall Street has figured out a way to make more money killing companies than building him."
SpaceX/Tesla
SpaceX posted a video of Starship 24 stacked on Super Heavy Booster 7 at Starbase. Elon tweeted that Starship would attempt a launch soon. Falcon Heavy launched on Sunday. Elon posted a video of its twin boosters landing with the text, "And that’s how we will land on Mars."
Tesla dropped car prices in the US. Tesla's inventory has fallen by over 50% in recent days.
In response to a tweet about the possibility of a cyber shutdown, Elon wrote, "Starlink."
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Memes of the Week
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Disclaimer: This is not financial advice and I am not a financial advisor. The article above references an opinion for entertainment purposes only and it is not investment advice. Always assume that the author of the article is actively trading and that the opinions expressed may be biased towards the author’s holdings. Do your own research and consult with a licensed financial adviser before making any investment decision. Do not treat any opinion expressed in this newsletter as a specific inducement to make a particular investment. Content, news, research, tools, and securities symbols are for educational and illustrative purposes only and do not imply a recommendation or solicitation to buy or sell a particular security or cryptocurrency or to engage in any particular investment strategy. The information provided is not warranted as to completeness or accuracy and is subject to change without notice. The projections or other information regarding the likelihood of various investment outcomes are hypothetical in nature, are not guaranteed for accuracy or completeness, do not reflect actual investment results and are not guarantees of future results. All investments involve risk, losses may exceed the principal invested, and the past performance of a security, industry, sector, market, cryptocurrency, or financial product does not guarantee future results or returns. Dogecoin is a speculative and highly volatile asset susceptible to pump-and-dump schemes.
At the time of publication, Dogecoin is around $0.07 per coin.