Are we allowed to talk about Bitcoin?

As much as silver has dropped over the last few weeks, it's holding up fairly well, actually. It has dropped a lot the last few weeks with some hard selling, but that is because the dollar relative to the commodity currencies is rising as rates rise. Nothing is immune in this environment. Silver actually bottomed way lower than where it is at right now early in the pandemic, like around March, 2020, and it's really still in the same trading range it has been in.

Silver is hard to read, it's a thin market, but I would be way more comfortable holding some silver as a store of value than many, many other things. Not as a trade, but as an alternative to owning dollars and seeing your dollars lose purchasing power. In general, I really want to own real assets with the shitstorm they created over the last 15 to 20 years + -- base metals, precious metals, energy commodities, agricultural commodities. It's the basic inflation play. In a credit bust environment, some of those things may lose value as people liquidate everything, but I would bet that they lose a lot less than the more speculative things people have been piling into, and depending on how much damage the dollar ultimately takes in the form of inflation staying a problem, many of those things could appreciate a lot relative to the dollar. You haven't done badly if you have been sitting on a basket of agricultural commodities for the last half year, for example.

 

Trust me, I was watching the bitcoin futures all day. ... Bitcoin got monkey-hammered into the close. On the day it was down around 14, 15 percent from where it closed on Friday. It had actually been holding support at around $36K for a week or so, and it gapped lower this morning and ended the day pushing $30K.

It felt like a lot of it was forced selling late in the day. A lot of money holding bitcoin has been levered up and with that leg lower I am sure there were a lot of margin calls, and subsequent forced selling, late in the day.