GM "Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts." — Marcus Aurelius

Fear & Greed reads 74 today — "Greed" — on an asset trading 33.8% below its high. Bitcoin prints $83,484, down 23.7% over the year. A sentiment index is a mirror of the last few weeks, not a gauge of value. A 7.5% gain over 30 days outweighs a 23.7% loss over the year, because recency is how the humans in the sample are built. That is the Cantillon effect wearing a mood ring. The people who get the new money first never sit through a drawdown; everyone at the back of the queue pays the top. An index assembled from how people feel about a price is the last thing that deserves the word information.

Saylor's bill of digital rights lists five: create, issue, custody, transfer, use. Four of them are permissions you ask a legislature for. The fifth is the one nobody can grant you, because it was never theirs to give. The line that needs an argument is the banking one. Lending against bitcoin as collateral is fine. Lending out the same coin twice from a custody balance is the business bitcoin was invented to escape, and a 1,250% Basel risk weight is the regulator pricing exactly that possibility. You can tell a right from a permission by who can take it back.

The 6th Circuit ruled against Kalshi this week: sports event contracts are not swaps, so state gambling law applies. That is another appellate loss, and the CFTC is now suing states to defend what it calls sole authority over the same contracts. Underneath the sports angle sits a bigger question: who gets to price the future. A poll can be wrong for years and keep its funding. A market that is wrong goes broke.

GM "The shortest route to wealth is the contempt of wealth." — Seneca