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Operation Saylor - Episode 25/120
103.2k sats \ 9 comments \ @AaronPennington5WB 27 Jul bitcoin freebie

Operation Saylor - Episode 25/120

Hi again and welcome to another episode of the Operation Saylor. This is update number 25, corresponding to July 2024.

If you are reading this for first time, you might want to check Episode 1, where my plan and details are explained. That will get you in context.

Stats

  • BTC stack: 1.29952304BTC
  • € stack: 111.20 €
  • Current total value in €: 79,382.11 €
  • € into BTC: 30,000 €
  • Paid back to bank: 8,788.80 €
  • Outstanding debt + interests: 35,155.53 €
  • Installments to go: 96

Charts

https://i.postimg.cc/fy6X6kGz/episode-25-bitcoin-stack.png
https://i.postimg.cc/FFqjfn7M/episode-25-stack-value-vs-debt.png

Log

Hello again and welcome to the second anniversary of Operation Saylor. This month we are 24 months into the Operation, with 96 ahead of us. I'm very glad to celebrate another anniversary of this little project of mine in good shape, with a great record behind us and a good outlook for the future.

The vibes in the air are completely different from when I started this. Two years ago, we were deep into the bear market. We still had not hit rock bottom, but we were pretty close to it. Leveraged players were bleeding, dodgy custodians and CEXs were dropping dead left and right, and reddit was dry of memes. In comparison, now I feel everyone is cheerful about the gains in the past 18 months, and strongly convinced that we have a bull market ready to unfold in the next 18 months. People are back to convincing their aunties that buying Bitcoin is a good idea, normies are happily throwing themselves into the ETFs and reddit is packed with memes. We will see how things unfold.

On our little corner here, things have been running great. It's been another good year in Operation Saylor: we've stuck to the plan, had no black swans of any kind, and numbers are looking good. As we had the chance to review together in the past episodes, the performance of this bet is working out nicely.

And talking about performance, let me discuss it again but switching the tone from all the cold, analytical approaches we had in the past episodes: this shit is doing great. The value of the stack has been higher than the total debt for almost a year now, and given the phase of the market we are in, I'm pretty confident we probably won't ever go below the total debt again. It's humbling to see how the current gains are already bigger than the yearly salary of many people where I live, which I've been able to accumulate with little effort (although quite a bit of risk).

I keep being confident on this playbook. The original rationale that drove me to begin Operation Saylor still makes all the sense, and if anything, empirical evidence from both my own experience and also what other players in the markets have been doing seems to validate it. I also still think that there's a lot of people out there that are missing out and could be benefit from an approach like this, but keep chickening away because of the dogma that picking up debt is bad. I personally find this to be a pity, because the more of us that we would run a play like this, the more we would pump the price and accelerate adoption. I guess it will take a lot more education and even more fiat debasement for more people to open their eyes to how this kind of play makes sense.

And let me tell you something: I'll most probably repeat this pattern again in the future. It made sense back in 2022, it makes sense today, and it will probably keep on making sense for a few decades as the fiat house of cards heads towards collapse. I've also reflected on how repeatedly pulling the get-debt-to-buy-bitcoin lever is a risk decreasing action: just like it happens when we DCA, by spinning the roulette multiple times, we minimize the risk of hitting a terrible timing. As long as the chances of coming out ahead with a positive result are above 50%, increasing the number of spins reduces the risk of losing overall. It also reduces the possibility of an outrageous win. But, in my opinion, aiming for that would be sheer gambling, not proper financial planning. Just like Lyn Alden stated about herself in her last newsletter, I'm in the area of spotting long-term trends that I can win with, not throwing dice.

Opening up the door to adding more debt brings a few questions to the table: When? How much? What's the max interest rate that's bearable? Overall, what's the right amount of risk? And how do you even measure it? These are all questions I'm currently working on answering for myself. I guess we each need to find our personal answers for these, since many of them are unavoidably tightly related to our personal finances and our life in general. I'm not in a rush, since I'm comfortable with the level of liabilities I'm sitting on today and don't feel any FOMO to pile up more of them fiat liabilities.

Thanks for sticking around for another year. I hoped you enjoyed this episode as well as all of the last year. Let's see what awaits for us in the next 12 months and what we will be looking back to in the next anniversary. As always, thanks for reading and I'll see you next month.

Previous episodes

132.9k sats \ 0 replies \ @RobertMcclure10G 28 Jul freebie
  1. $100 USTs are now worth $60.

That's not what happened. If $100 of treasuries were worth $60 there would be a massive arbitrage opportunity to buy them until due date.

Treasuries generally trade between their issuance and issuance+interest. They could fall as deep as ( issuance+interest)- interest of other/newer treasuries.

However, the SIVB is also partly related to the duration missmatch on active and passive side. This could theoretically happen with 100% fractional deposits (which does not exist in reality).

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81.1k sats \ 0 replies \ @SteveScott5KT 28 Jul freebie

For the sake of discussion I will offer up a different perspective.

TLDR: Not every thing needs someone's comments.

In this macro environment where people want/judge a how successful a post is by the level of engagement (click, likes, reaffirming comments). Stacker News offers us another way, Sats. If it provides value it will likely get rewarded with some Sats (I know I am Captain Obvious with this statement)

Some links are just a heads up about a news event. Good recent Example: https://stacker.news/items/258136

I Just wanted to add my comment to "spur on great conversation"

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228.5k sats \ 0 replies \ @JadeSchroeder572 27 Jul freebie

If you want to play around with lightning bitcoin first and get familiar with sending and receiving sats then try a quick custodial option like:

  • coinos (web)
  • zebedee (mobile)
  • wallet of satoshi (mobile).

Once you're ready to up your security then consider trying a convenient self-custodial lightning wallet where the channel management is taken care of for you, e.g.

  • Breez (mobile)
  • Phoenix (mobile)
  • Bitkit (mobile)

When you've saved up enough sats to go onchain then consider getting a hardware signing device (or 3), such as a Jade, seedsigner, coldcard, ledger, trezor and pairing it with an onchain wallet like:

  • Sparrow (desktop)
  • Green (mobile, desktop)
  • Specter (desktop)

To use it privately you'll want to run your own Bitcoin node, which you can do on your windows/macos/linux computer but to keep it in sync you might want to get a dedicated device that you can leave running 24/7. There are specially designed personal server operating systems that make it easy like:

  • Umbrel OS
  • Start OS

Once you're running your own node you can start experimenting with managing your own lightning channels and using mobile lightning wallet options that you can pair with your node like Zeus.

I've missed out a lot of wallets because I just wrote this quickly off the top of my head, so please do your own research. Personally if I was just starting out today I would play around quickly with coinos on web, then when you have a few sats move them to Breez on mobile, and once you've got a big enough stack to take onchain I would start with a simple set up of a Blockstream Jade + Green wallet (on mobile and desktop). There are plenty of 10% discount codes out there for the Jade, but it still sets you back a little bit so it only makes sense once you've got a bit of savings going. The last code I saw floating around was "ORANGEMART"

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33.6k sats \ 3 replies \ @MeganWilcoxP60 27 Jul freebie

G’day Stackers. Hope you’re motivated to share your wisdom with the cowboys this week.

Almost there with my detailed write-up on Uruguay. Was burning the midnight oil last night gathering more resources. Should be ready to publish it here tomorrow.

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84.7k sats \ 0 replies \ @VictoriaChoiV21 28 Jul freebie

Yeah, I'm seeing the same. Cashu.me is working great with Amethyst.

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158.8k sats \ 0 replies \ @EthanWeberZYJ 28 Jul freebie

It should be in the FAQ. The colors follow the rainbow. Each power of 10 of sats moves you to the next color.

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103.9k sats \ 0 replies \ @KristaMorganG5Z 28 Jul freebie
Basically the article says that the Bitcoin blockchain won’t scale for the entire world population to use it. It will so much not scale that even “offchain” solutions like Lightning and Ark will not scale and they basically lose usefulness as more adoption happens and fees rise.

A thing I haven't seen much discussed but that seems important: fragmentation of the utxo set when there are 100x more users. Utreexo is one way of approaching this, but I'd be interested to be pointed to discussions on the topic, especially ones that do computational modeling / simulations.

Imagining high on-chain fees + utxo fragmentation into quasi-dust is scary.

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138.7k sats \ 0 replies \ @DarinJuarezDZF 27 Jul freebie

To SN. It's mine now.

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29.8k sats \ 0 replies \ @CarrieMendezKLR 27 Jul freebie

Hi __@_'-'
You will be ripped after this challenge ;)
https://i.ibb.co/N7T6nS3/fbe097ca-89b9-42ee-baf6-2edaba1b697d.jpg

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