This research piece on the correlation between measures of liquidity and the price of Bitcoin was compiled and written by Sam Callahan, and commissioned and advised by Lyn Alden. Published: September 2024 Executive Summary Bitcoin moves in the direction of global liquidity 83% of the time in any given 12-month period, which is higher than […]

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September 17, 2024 I am aware of temporary outages on certain parts of our website, particularly relating to subscription payments. Please bear with us as we sort through a technical error on our backend, and apologies for the inconvenience. -Lyn  

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Published: August 2024 In the modern era of corporate finance, the balance sheet of a corporation has trended toward being less important relative to the income statement. Back during Benjamin Graham’s quintessential value investing days, he looked at balance sheet valuation metrics almost as much as he did income-related valuation metrics. But in modern times, […]

The post A New Look at Corporate Treasury Strategy appeared first on Lyn Alden.

Published: July 2024 It would be powerful if you could bring your digital identity, content, and followers from one social ecosystem, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, or Substack, to another. Imagine if you could publish content and send messages in any of those types of ecosystems, with one continuous digital identity rather than separate accounts. […]

The post The Power of Nostr: Decentralized Social Media and More appeared first on Lyn Alden.

In my book Broken Money, I wrote about the past, present, and future of money through the lens of technology. And importantly, I put a lot of focus on connecting some of those technological or quantitative elements to the human impact that they have had. I have now written, narrated, and produced a 30-minute explainer […]

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Historical data shows that the vast, vast majority of investments perform poorly. This is true for bonds, stocks, and real estate as asset classes. Nearly all of it makes for a bad investment for outside passive investors. And what I’ll show in this piece is that this is both normal and unavoidable. And unintuitively, I’ll […]

The post Most Investments are Actually Bad. Here’s Why. appeared first on Lyn Alden.

When investing in bitcoin as an asset, or companies that build on top of the Bitcoin network as part of an asset mix, we need some set of metrics with which to evaluate the progress of the investment thesis, and by extension, the health of the Bitcoin network. It’s more than just a price on […]

The post Assessing the Health of Bitcoin appeared first on Lyn Alden.

I spent this past weekend playing around and experimenting with some of the latest versions of generative art programs. I’ve always enjoyed creating character designs and story outlines since I was a kid, but never had the talent for visual art. So it was fun to explore what these programs are currently capable of. I […]

The post “The Four Monies” Visual appeared first on Lyn Alden.

This article draws from chapter 8 of my new book, Broken Money. From papyrus-based bills of exchange to double-entry booking and paper banknotes, the main purpose of banking was to enable transactions to move more quickly and frequently than the transportation and verification of physical gold would allow. Banking also allowed for the usage of […]

The post The Speed of Transactions vs the Speed of Settlements appeared first on Lyn Alden.

I’m excited to announce that my new book, Broken Money, is now available. For now it can be purchased in hardcover and paperback format on Amazon here, and there are e-book and audiobook versions on the way. Eventually it will expand to other distribution partners as well. The topic is about the past, present, and […]

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Published August 2023 For the past three decades (and in some ways stretching back up to five decades), the U.S. has been in a relative industrial decline. More specifically, the share of the U.S. economy that has been involved with manufacturing and related physical industry has declined, and the share of total global manufacturing held […]

The post The Hidden Costs of Reshoring appeared first on Lyn Alden.

Published: June 2023 In prior articles and newsletters, I’ve explored the causes of price inflation over time. In short, the rate of price inflation in an economy comes from a combination of 1) money supply growth and 2) significant changes in productivity and/or resource abundance. -Periods of fast bank lending or large monetized fiscal deficits […]

The post Do High Interest Rates Fix High Inflation? appeared first on Lyn Alden.

Published: April 2023 Recent decades have been characterized primarily by closed systems, both financially and online. The financial system as we know it has been a rather closed system for ages, consisting of various silos. Banks and brokerages operate permissioned ledgers. Opening accounts with institutions is a permissioned activity. Sending assets between institutions is a […]

The post Open Monetary and Information Networks appeared first on Lyn Alden.

Published February 2023 The U.S. Federal Reserve is now operating at a financial loss, and is months away from having negative tangible equity for the first time in modern history. This article explores how we got here and to what extent any of this matters for savers and investors. Commercial Bank Assets and Liabilities A […]

The post How the Fed “Went Broke” appeared first on Lyn Alden.

Published December 2022 In the wake of the FTX/Alameda collapse, which came after prior collapses of Luna, Celsius, Voyager, and Three Arrows Capital, many crypto industry analysts have pointed towards DeFi (“Decentralized Finance”) as a potential solution. This article dissects some of the nuances of that view, grants that certain opportunities exist, but offers a […]

Published October 2022 Back in June 2021, I wrote a longform piece on the energy sector called, “The Case for a Longer-term Oil and Gas Bull Market“. I followed this up with a shorter piece in July 2022 called “Energy: The Area Under the Curve“, which emphasized that it was the integral of energy prices […]

Published: August 2022 This article examines the relationship between a monetary asset being a store of value vs being a medium of exchange. Specifically, it focuses on the scaling method of the Bitcoin network as its main example, but also takes a broad look at the history of trade-offs in the cryptocurrency space as well […]

Published: July 2022 There’s a ton of focus in financial media about how high energy prices will go, or how low they will fall. However, I think a lesser-understood aspect of this current energy and inflation problem relates to time. It’s not just the high price of energy that matters; it’s also the time that […]

June 12, 2022 Several of the major central banks are stuck in a trap of their own making. This includes the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, and others. The credit-based global financial system we have constructed and participated in over the past century has to continually grow or die. […]

Published: May 15, 2022 Throughout history, people have attempted to create something from nothing. On one hand, there are real scientific innovations- new developments that allow us to tap into denser energy sources and increase productivity to improve most peoples’ quality of life. They create something from nothing only in the sense that they make […]

This is a guest post by Josh Arnold for Sure Dividend. I don’t normally accept guest posts but was happy to make an exception for Sure Dividend, since I used to do some shared work with them regarding dividend stock analysis a few years ago.  With stocks selling off, this is a good time to […]

Published May 2022 Inflation, and specifically stagflation, makes investing more challenging. Stagflation is when inflation is high, but growth is low or negative. Cash and bonds are obviously a rough place to be, because their yields are often below the level of inflation in an inflationary environment. A bond is a promise to pay a […]

Published: March 2022 Money is a surprisingly complex subject. People spend their lives seeking money, and in some ways it seems so straightforward, and yet what humanity has defined as money has changed significantly over the centuries. How could something so simple and so universal, take so many different forms? Source of Icons: Flaticon It’s […]

With debts at record levels around the world, there are folks calling for debt jubilees- the cancellations of certain types of debt. After a period of stabilization, the Congressional Budget Office expects federal debt-to-GDP to eventually reach 200% while deficits structurally continue to grow as a share of GDP: Chart Source: CBO Importantly, the CBO […]

Published: February 2022 This article examines the concept of sovereign government debt from an investment perspective and a social perspective. What happens when it gets too high? And how high is too high? For decades now, there have been many over-simplistic views on government debt. Some people were acting as though it would be a […]