Postscandy49 in # war • 3 days ago • 1 min readThe Americans have now lost 43 aircraft in the Iran warWith the downing of the Apache helicopter a few days ago, American aircraft losses have hit 43. Total cost: about $2.7 billion. Here is a graphic breaking down what was lost: source At some point militaries across the west will have to assess whether these expensive machines are a grand old waste of money. Especially as most got taken…candy49 in # exchange • 23 days ago • 1 min readHave just joined KlingexAfter the drama of Hive-Engine being hacked and Blurt deposits not getting credited, I decided to join Klingex. It's a new CEX that allows trading of Blurt against USDT. It's easy to sign up - you just need an email and password. You'll have to confirm the email to activate the account, but otherwise there are no KYC requirements. Here is my…candy49 in # hive • 25 days ago • 1 min readHive-Engine got hackedIt looks like ETH, Solana and BNB were taken. See below: Blurt urgently needs another DEX - what happens if Hive-Engine closes down because of the losses? I don't know if deposits are working. I did a test deposit to Hive-Engine of 50 Blurt four hours ago, and it hasn't yet shown up in Hive-Engine. Will update if/when the coins arrive.candy49 in # blurt • last month • 1 min readHow many active accounts do we have on Blurt?I was using @logiczombie's Blurtscope social graph to look at my account, and it had this bar at the top of my results: I think "Connections" is the number of people I've interacted with - either they've voted for me, or I've voted for them. Anyway, my connections number is 207 at the time of writing this post. I thought it would be…candy49 in # hive • 2 months ago • 1 min readLatest Hive drama: people wanting backpay for work they did "promoting" Hive in the last six yearsYou read that right. A hiver called Crimsonclad wrote a proposal demanding 90,000 HBD (about 1.6 million Hive at current prices) for work she has done in the last six years "promoting" Hive: Even though she clearly didn't achieve anything - if she had, Hive wouldn't have bled most of their users or lost 95% of it's value. The proposal got…candy49 in # war • 2 months ago • 1 min readThe US is going to put ground troops in Iran...That's my interpretation of Trump's TV broadcast last night. He carefully listed the time spent on other wars - 19 years in Vietnam, 8 years in Iraq etc, and said the Iran war would be shorter. The shortest conflict he mentioned was US involvement in WW1, which was just over a year (1913 - 1914). So the Iran conflict will end between a few…candy49 in # war • 2 months ago • 1 min readThe US is considering diverting interceptors from Ukraine and Europe to the Middle-EastAs Iranian drones and missiles rain down on Israel and US bases in the Gulf states, interceptors are running low. The Americans have already removed THAAD interceptors from South Korea and shipped them to the Middle East. Now the Washington Post reports they are considering removing interceptors from Europe: The weapons that could be…candy49 in # war • 3 months ago • 1 min readThese are the missile hits on US bases in the Middle EastHere is the graphic: source The base in Kuwait has taken the most impacts. Kuwait offers the flat entrance for ground forces into the province of Khuzestan, in Iran. A full ground invasion either goes from Kuwait into Khuzestan, or from Erbil in Iraq into the Iranian province of Kurdistan, which borders Iraq. The Kuwait route is…candy49 in # war • 3 months ago • 2 min readTrump tends to TACO when the 10-year Treasury yield approaches 4.5%Here is the US 10-year Treasury yield chart: source Circled in red is the yield on Monday March 23rd, just before Trump tweeted that he was "negotiating" with the Iranians. We saw this happen last year too, after the bond markets reacted badly to his Liberation Day tariffs. He reversed them within a week after the yield crossed 4.5%.…candy49 in # war • 3 months ago • 1 min readWhy does the United States have a huge venture capitalist eco-system but Europe, Canada and Australia do not?The answer is Middle East petrodollars. It works like this: The Gulf monarchies make vast surplus profits selling oil and gas to the world for dollars. These dollars are then invested in the United States. Some of it is parked in US Treasury bonds, some invested in the NASDAQ and S&P. But a significant amount is invested in venture capitalist…candy49 in # war • 3 months ago • 1 min readAmericans lift sanctions onIranian oil!!!This is a big deal. US sanctions on Iranian oil exports have been in place for a decade. That meant that anyone who bought Iranian oil faced secondary sanctions through the dollar network (accounts frozen etc). So the only people buying Iranian oil were outside this network: China and North Korea. And because these buyers were few, they could…candy49 in # war • 3 months ago • 2 min readIs Netanyahu dead?Twitter is swirling with rumours that Netanyahu is dead, with thousands of people scrutinising recent video footage released by the Israeli govt to check for signs of AI. Putting aside the AI stuff, here's the most compelling evidence something is wrong: On March 1, footage emerged of a massive emergency response in Tel Aviv. Here's the…candy49 in # war • 3 months ago • 2 min readWhy are people talking about the draft?It all started with Senator Blumenthal's comments on March 10 after he and his Senate colleagues were given a briefing on the status of the Iran war. Here is a clip: Notice the bit about deploying ground troops. The trouble is the US volunteer army doesn't have enough active soldiers for a ground invasion of a country as large as Iran…candy49 in # war • 3 months ago • 1 min readThis is why the Iranians are attacking the Gulf statesAmerican war planners appear to have been taken aback by Iranian strikes on the Gulf States. They thought this war would follow the pattern of the 12-day war last year, when Iran only fired missiles at Israel. To understand what's going on, you need to look at a map: source As you can see, they're not primarily attacking their…candy49 in # war • 3 months ago • 1 min readThe war is going badly...Yesterday, all the OSINT accounts on X were deprioritised by the X algorithms. To find them you had to search them out by name. In addition, all the Gulf States and Israel have banned people filming anything. Even the credentialed press are banned from filming. The only stuff that came out of Kuwait was video of those downed pilots walking away…candy49 in # china • 4 months ago • 1 min readWill the gold standard come back informally?Look at this chart of the Chinese government's reserves: source The reason the Chinese were holding so many US Treasuries is that the Chinese yuan is pegged to a basket of currencies - so they were holding the government bonds of their trading counterparties (USA, Eurozone, Australia etc) in proportion to the trade they did with them.…candy49 in # hive • 4 months ago • 2 min readLosses have an asymmetric impactI was pondering the impact of the 60% drop in the price of Hive and Steem in the last four months. (Do people realise how amazing it is that Blurt has held steady in dollar terms in this brutal altcoin market?) A lot of Hivers are putting their faith in some future pump, but I don't think they grasp the mathematical difficulty of it. Here is a…candy49 in # debt • 5 months ago • 2 min readThe US government is spending more on debt interest than defence for the first timeThe main reason President Trump gets to throw his weight around on the world stage is down to the might of the US military. As we saw in Venezuela. But what happens when the Americans can't afford their military any more? In the 19th Century an economist called Adam Ferguson warned that any great power that spent more on debt servicing than…candy49 in # stablecoins • 5 months ago • 1 min readHolding dollar-based stablecoins is incredibly riskyTrump's Greenland and Canada debacles have caused the dollar to resume it's downward trend. Here is a chart of the dollar plotted against G10 currencies (black line) and Emerging Market currencies (blue line): The dollar has been falling against both. Which leads me to stablecoins. In the last year people have dumped bitcoin to hold…candy49 in # hive • 5 months ago • 2 min readIt's been 3 years since I powered down my HiveI wrote a post at the time explaining my reasoning. I got a good price as I explained in the next post : When I started powering down the Hive price was about $0.90. When I received 1/13th of my coins 7 days later, the price was $0.82. Today the Hive price is $0.72, and I believe it has further to fall. Crypto is correlated with…
