When you get the incentive system right, the market pays back. - xh3b4sd

Many must be concerned with the nightmare that is taxes. It surprises me every time I hear somebody say they are not declaring their crypto holdings when doing taxes. What is the plan with that strategy? You own something because you want to use it some day. Maybe I am making wild assumptions here but let's hold on to that thought for a moment. Now you will only really be able to use your crypto, a financial asset, if you have declared it. Otherwise some day people may come asking uncomfortable questions about where that Lambo was coming from. I can come up with different scenarios to explain that non-declarative behaviour. Maybe you are comfortable in a gray area where the money you make isn't that much of a deal. Though I think depending on the jurisdiction modest four figures of undeclared riches are reason for many bureaucrats to go on a bender. If your holdings are arguably irrelevant to the state, what are you playing for here? To me it appears like getting into relatively lots of trouble for realistically no meaningful gain. Doesn't sound too smort to me! Just pay your taxes alright. Maybe you think you are smarter than anyone else and they won't catch you ever. I saw that movie before, dear reader. It is really easy. If you have a bunch of money while you never declared any taxes for your wealth, then questions will be asked eventually. I think that is only a matter of time. And then imagine being filthy rich and owing the state big time, living with the fear in your neck that one day somebody comes knocking on your door. I wouldn't want to walk in those shoes either. Just pay your taxes alright. Too little, too smart, too ignorant and all the other ideas that people have not to pay taxes. None of them are really worth it in my mind. Maybe everyone is living in some glamorous tax haven in which the local authorities are happy to not take all your money away, for reasons. But I doubt it honestly. What all of this kind of hustle boils down to is the need to account for taxes when doing basically anything money related. What that means for my crypto ventures is to optimize investments in a way that taxes are optimized in a legal way. How so senpai? For instance there are jurisdictions where taxable events become nullified given a certain holdimg period. Imagine you get into a position and hold crypto for more than one year. There are shiny places on this beautiful earth where the effective tax rate becomes zero if you just hold for a little longer. Optimizing positions that way in what we believe to be an industry of 4 year cycles has been a wildly profitable practice for the tax optimizing connoisseurs amongst us. The joke about this efficiency is that you end up with about the same returns like those people out there who obsess about outperforming, while their lifetime wasting over-trading gets them into tax related documentation nightmares. The way a lot of people represent themselves in this industry makes you believe that everyone is a professional trader with a mandate to outperform. And I believe this is not only the wrong way to live, but also not true. If anything, some people believe that crypto is their way to make it. And they see others ball big time and try to copy trade or learn how to do it in the arena. And they lose it all. They are not only losing it all because they make bad decisions in the order books. They are also losing it all because even if, and that is a big if mind you. Even if they break even or turn a little profit on the surface, I have seen countless examples where people owed taxes on their book and that just ruined them. It is the hard reality that you can trade back and forth, thinking you made a little something for yourself, only to realize that after taxes you just wasted your life only to end up indebted to the state. And a final point on the matter. Just pay your taxes alright. You have to understand tax implications in your investment strategy and account for taxes in your PnL. Because if you do not do that, then you do yourself a disservice. If you are in the arena, then you aim to be good. To be good means to play the game and measure yourself against the benchmark. Taxes are part of this equation and if you pretend to be good at making money in crypto without paying taxes, then you are not serious people. You are then only making a fool of yourself. Just pay your taxes alright.

Let's talk politics and prediction markets. Ever since Biden dropped out of the US presidential race Kamala Harris took over. Before Biden threw the towel, Trump was the favourite based on prediction market odds. Now with Harris in the race, she started leading in polls and prediction market odds. And now a couple of observations that we can make. Kamala Harris does not really have a public profile on which basis she can even be measured. We haven't seen much from her other than perfectly sized social media posts, which are frankly, meaningless marketing bullshit. What is interesting on Polymarket are the volumes traded and odds implied for several options in the market about the outcome of the US presidential election in November. At the time of writing we see the top three candidates by volume and odds, namely Kamala Harris, Donald Trump and Michelle Obama. Each has 67 million, 76 million and 52 million USD traded respectively. Each has a chance of 54%, 44% and under 1% respectively. Now polymarket is telling us that the most likely and arguably the least likely outcomes have all about the same trading volume in the tens of millions of USD. I am now wondering how meaningful any of this data can possibly be, because one of those metrics is clearly meaningless. Obama's trading volume being in the same order of magnitude as Trump, while one has about 50% chance and the other under 1% sounds completely absurd. That relationship sounds like meme coin volumes on Solana where some 70,000 USD market cap shitcoin generates 24 hour volumes of many hundreds of millions in USD traded. None of this makes any sense to me. My base assumption would be that TVL and volume are meaningfully related to the significance of the traded asset itself. And any discrepancy between odds and volume on Polymarket today looks rather iffy at best

Talking some numbers, this was the second week of net positive ETH ETF inflows with roughly 27 million USD. Also the daily L2 transaction count hit a new all time high with ober 13 million transactions per day. Interestingly, at the same time the number of weekly active addresses across the L2 ecosystem has gone down by almost 40% from its peek two months ago. We went from 8.6 million to now 5.3 million distinct addresses. The explanation for this inversion is on the one side app specific L3 rollups that appear to make 100 transactions per second. And on the other side people may just be off during summer. And that's why it is called the summer hole. They will come back one day. Until then, take care!