Keep watching Copper. Copper is the choke point. We burn ~30 million tonnes a year, while only about 4 tons are being recycled. To grow global GDP a pedestrian 3% - no EVs, no “green transition,” no AI fantasy - we need to mine as much copper in the next 18 years as was mined in the last 10,000 years combined. Something worth thinking about...

Energy (not Oil, but Energy as a whole) will ultimately be benchmarked to Bitcoin, most people just haven't realised it yet.

Oil priced in Bitcoin has never been cheaper. The takeaway here is not to not buy oil but rather by oil adjacent positions that outperform the depreciation of oil in BTC terms during that same time period.

That's some serious currency depreciation right there. 😱

The relationship between energy consumption and national wealth is one of those things that’s so consistent across history that at this point the real mystery isn’t why it’s true, but why we keep pretending it isn’t. Every civilisation that got rich did so by utilising more energy. Every. Single. One. From coal-fired Britain, to oil-powered America, to modern industrial economies layered with gas, nuclear, and some renewables on top, the pattern never changes. Countries that secure large amounts of cheap, reliable energy get wealthy. Others that don’t simply are left behind. There isn’t some soft “correlation” going on, economists with no skin in the game argue about in panels. It’s mechanical — plain and simple. Energy runs industry. Industry produces stuff. Stuff creates wealth. That’s it. There’s no alternate pathway where good vibes, services, or clever financial engineering replace reliable physical energy. If we take energy away the result isn’t a slightly worse economy but rather a recession or even a depression combined with scarcity — resulting in poorer people arguing over less stuff. The Industrial Revolution is the most obvious example in recorded history. Britain didn’t become a world empire out of nowhere. The Kingdom on massive coal reserves and actually used them and then implemented a similar strategy in their former colonies. Coal powered steam engines. Steam engines mechanised textiles, iron, and transport. One worker with a machine suddenly replaced dozens without one. Between 1750 and 1900, Britain’s GDP per capita increased roughly tenfold, tracking almost perfectly with its explosion in coal consumption. This is how a small island with crooked teeth and no recognisable cuisine managed to colonise half the planet. Energy wins. Always has. Always will. Countries without coal — or without the willingness to industrialise — stayed agrarian and poor. Over time, the energy gap became a wealth gap, which then hardened into the modern developed-versus-developing world divide — which we still see today in 2026. America ran the exact same play, just upgraded the fuel and the technology. Oil discoveries in Pennsylvania in 1859 and later in Texas gave the U.S. an energy advantage no empire had ever seen. Cheap, dense petroleum products unlocked cars, trucks, aviation, petrochemicals, plastics — entire industries that literally cannot exist without oil. By 1950, the U.S. consumed roughly half the world’s energy and produced roughly half its GDP. Post-war Japan and Germany made the same point, just under way less favourable conditions. Both obliterated by 1945. And yet within decades, they were economic powerhouses again. Why? Because they rebuilt around energy. Germany secured coal and build nuclear shortly after. Japan, with almost no domestic energy, became obsessively efficient and locked in reliable imports from the middle east and developed nuclear as well. Energy infrastructure mattered. And shockingly, GDP growth tracked energy consumption almost perfectly from the 1960s through the 1980s. To be clear: this works in reverse too. The oil shocks of the 1970s weren’t merely policy moments. When energy got scarce and expensive, economies immediately went into recession. Growth turned negative right when energy tightened. Not ten years later. Not eventually. Immediately. That lesson was painfully clear: modern economies cannot function without abundant energy. Prosperity requires cheap and abundant power. Literally. China’s rise removes any remaining doubt. Between 1980 and 2020, China increased its energy consumption roughly twentyfold while GDP expanded around fiftyfold. The PRC went from 2% of global GDP to nearly 18% by becoming the world’s largest energy consumer. They built coal plants at a pace that made Western commentators clutch their pearls — because the CCP understood something very simple: industrialisation without burning enormous amounts of cheap and reliable fuel simply is not possible. They imported oil and gas at scale. They invested in nuclear. And yes, they added a few renewables here and there once they were already rich enough to afford redundancy. Energy didn’t follow growth. Growth followed energy. And this is where the current conversation still completely loses the plot, despite it being . There is no such thing as an “energy transition” in the way it’s commonly described. There never has been. History shows one thing only: energy systems stack. Wood didn’t replace muscle — it only added to it. Coal didn’t replace wood — it only added to it. Oil didn’t replace coal — it only added to it. Gas and nuclear didn’t replace oil — they layered on top. Total energy consumption always goes up. Always. Oil and gas remain the backbone of the global energy system, and uranium increasingly underpins the stable base-load that modern grids require. Renewables can and will be part of the mix in limited scenarios — but they will not replace fossil fuels. They supplement them. They sit on top of them. End of story. Wind and solar don’t eliminate the need for oil, gas, or nuclear any more than email eliminated the need for electricity. Intermittent energy cannot replace dense and reliable energy at scale. Steel mills, fertiliser plants, or global shipping (a.k.a 80% of the world’s trade) do not run on solar, wind or unicorn fart dust. If we take an honest look at the data today, nothing has changed. The wealthiest nations consume vastly more energy per capita than poor nations. Sub-Saharan Africa remains largely poor because large portions of it still lack reliable, cheap and abundant power. Energy poverty is economic poverty. The equation is brutally simple: energy powers machines, machines multiply human productivity, productivity creates wealth. No country has ever developed without dramatically increasing energy consumption. Not one. The energy-wealth relationship isn’t a theory, a preference, or a narrative — even if people would have you believe otherwise. Prosperity requires power. And the countries that secure abundant, affordable oil, gas, and nuclear energy — while layering renewables where they make sense — will dominate economically. They always have. And unless physics is getting canceled tomorrow, they always will.

Iran and the Straight of Hormuz in an Energy context People keep talking about the Strait of Hormuz like it’s a door. Open = normal
Closed = chaos That framing is already wrong. Nothing has to actually close. It just has to stop feeling boring. All you that’s needed is a tiny bit of friction. A little uncertainty. Insurance guys starting to pay attention, vessel operators starting to add some ‘just in case’ buffers and tankers slowing down because nobody wants to be the guy who ends up in the case study. That’s it. That’s the whole mechanism in a nutshell. On maps, Hormuz looks wide, but actually shipping gets squeezed into a couple of narrow lanes because efficiency is great. Global energy flows through something that functionally resembles a busy Costco checkout, and we act shocked when the line backs up. Roughly 20 million barrels a day go through there, all day every day. Plus LNG. Especially LNG. Both oil and LNG go predominantly to Asia Everyone loves the headline: “Iran closes Hormuz”, don’t they ? Sounds decisive, it’s also mostly nonsense. Closing Hormuz would hurt Iran fast and hard. Their own oil goes through there too and so do a lot of imports they actually need. Also, minor geographical footnote: the shipping lanes aren’t even in Iranian waters. They’re in Omani waters. So, the real lever isn’t closure. It’s irritation. No war needed.
No blockade needed.
Whispers, talks and rumours of a potential ‘closure’ or disruption event are entirely sufficient. Problem is, commodity markets are terrible at pricing the ‘weird but not catastrophic’, situation, especially in the first few days. Oil does have buffers (i.e. inventories, pipelines, emergency releases), but those buy time only. LNG, different story. If it doesn’t move to where it’s supposed to be, it just sits there being expensive and useless. The moment it becomes interesting, everything else becomes more expensive. So no, the Strait doesn’t need to close. It just needs to wobble. Markets will panic. Then overpay. Then argue on TV about whether it was “already priced in.” They do this every time.
 Most analysts still act surprised every time. (Source : S&P sub-service)

I keep seeing people say that Trump is “destroying the post–World War II global order”, which is then usually followed by outrage, panic, or psychoanalysis. All that might actually be true, the order is definitely cracking. But the way most people are reacting to it is somwehat strange. It’s all emotion, very little curiosity. This isn’t a defense of Trump. I don’t trust him, and neither should you. But shouting “betrayal” doesn’t tell us much about what’s actually breaking. A lot of the outrage seems glued to worst-case interpretations that get treated as fact. Alternative explanations don’t even get a hearing most of the time. Take vaccines. Trump cut the mandatory childhood vaccine schedule by 55 doses. At the same time, he kept pushing the COVID jab well into 2025, last time we checked. That alone should make anyone cautious about clean narratives. Or Venezuela. Trump “kidnapped” Maduro despite promising no regime change. That criticism is fair. But when you point out that he didn’t actually install a new regime, and explicitly refused to endorse María Corina Machado, the response immediately goes psychological. Trump did it because he’s jealous of her Nobel Prize. Case closed. Evidence optional... The problem isn’t that Trump deserves criticism. He does. The problem is the refusal to admit that nobody outside his inner circle really knows what he’s doing or why and that maybe clinging to one moralised explanation is more comforting than admitting uncertainty. After the Caracas furore, we briefly wondered whether Trump’s move had something to do with the drug war, which has been eating the American poor and middle class for decades. Then a few days later, this shows up: “Trump Orders U.S. Withdrawal from 66 International Organizations…” Instant hysteria. Trump is insane. Trump is isolationist. Trump is tearing up global cooperation. Maybe. But here’s a more interesting question: which institutions are being weakened? A huge part of the postwar global order consists of international organisations that operate with extraordinary legal immunity. Corey Lynn documented this in her series Laundering with Immunity. She lists 76 international organisations and banks that enjoy sweeping privileges under the International Organisations Immunities Act of 1945. Some examples: The Bank for International Settlements.
 The World Health Organization.
 The World Trade Organization.
 The International Organization for Migration.
 The World Meteorological Organization.
 GAVI.
 Various other UN bodies.
 The Office of the High Representative in Bosnia and Kosovo. These entities and often their officers, contractors, and affiliates, are immune from prosecution, search and seizure, taxation, and sometimes even immigration controls. As Lynn put it: they don’t operate above the law. They operate entirely outside of it. That should make anyone uncomfortable. Every U.S. president since Truman expanded these protections. Trump is the first not to. If the U.S. actually strips these organisations of their legal shields, this doesn’t mean freedom is around the corner. More likely it means chaos, selective exposure, and quiet power struggles over who gets burned and who walks. Legal immunity attracts corruption. Removing it doesn’t clean the system, it merely destabilises it. Whether this leads to real revelations or another Epstein-style dead end is an open question. There are subtle signs that U.S. and Russian interests might be converging against certain supranational structures. If so, this isn’t some moral awakening, but really more of a tactical alignment between states trying to survive a changing landscape. Nothing of this is good news though. When institutions collapse, power doesn’t vanish, it either leaves a vacuum or it reorganises. Does any of this mean freedom for people in the U.S. or Russia? Obviously not. The fiat system is still centralised, extractive, and global. Swapping managers or redrawing alliances doesn’t change that. At a global, macro level, we believe that Bitcoin is the only real exit from a system built on legal immunity, monetary debasement, and unaccountable power. It doesn’t care which flag you wave or which strongman you root for. And that leads to the uncomfortable question nobody in power wants to ask out loud: If Bitcoin keeps working… what exactly is the nation-state for anymore? That question scares every government equally. For good reason....

Klaus Schwab, the founder and longtime head of the World Economic Forum, published an article in TIME a few weeks back (available here, https://shorturl.at/B7QxA),titled : “The Fragile Foundations of the Intelligent Age”, in which he sheds some impressive crocodile tears over the erosion of trust in major established institutions and the rise of “misinformation and disinformation”. It turns out, Der Schwaben Klaus thinks that truth is important. (Who would have thunk…) In his own words : “Truth and trust are often treated as virtues, but they function as conditions: the prerequisites for coherent societies, functional institutions, and stable international systems. Without them, even the most advanced technologies fail to deliver progress; without them, democratic debate becomes impossible; without them, economic and social life slowly lose their connective tissue.” Yes Mr. Schwab, truth matters! So far, so good we’re in full agreement here: truth is the first of the foundational principles of our business as well. But from there, Schwab’s prose gets a bit strange. He laments about the good old times when * “Societies could rely on a shared understanding that truth, however contested, was worth pursuing” * “Institutions — scientific, journalistic, judicial — created mechanisms through which facts were established, corrected and publicly recognised.” Apparently this is no longer the case (again shockingly, right? 🤣) and, “that framework has weakened. … it is increasingly difficult for citizens to determine whether what they see and hear is authentic,” so “the very idea of a shared reality is weakening.” In addition to truth, Schwab is also lamenting the erosion of trust, explaining that “trust is not sentimentality; it is the operating system of social and political order.” The Great Reset has already failed spectacularly. I, for one, would have a hard time believing that Klaus Schwab, out of all people on gods green earth, is distraught about the potential difficulty citizens encounter in establishing what’s true and what’s not. In fact, his sentiment is probably related to the fact that people no longer trust him and his affiliated henchmen in the institutions that were meant to advance his Great Reset. The reason for that is rather simple: the Great Reset was promoted on an outrageous amount of lies, calculated to herd and mobilise the “hackable animals” to “build back better” and comply with a range of dehumanising, dystopian arrangements, that - if successfully implemented - would have stayed in place indefinitely. Schwab and his comrades at Davos are likely upset that when they try to convince us that: * (mRNA) vaccines are safe and effective, not everyone believes them * Russia is our enemy and we should sacrifice for wars, most people refuse * Sustainable agriculture and eating insects is necessary, again, most people say no (again what a shocker 🤣) * […insert other current lies, BS narrative here…] In fact, Schwab’s friend Ursula von der Leyen (a.k.a “Die Flinten Ushi”) said as much at the World Economic Forum while sharing the stage with him a few years back: “For the global business community, the top concern for the next two years is… disinformation and misinformation, followed closely by the polarisation within our societies. These risks are serious because they limit our ability to tackle the big global challenges we are facing.” That was in 2024, and the fact that Der Schwaben Klaus is still upset about the erosion of truth and trust, suggests that they are realising their fight for control of the narrative is being lost in real time. As he put it, “when global institutions lose trust, multilateral solutions become elusive.” As things are going, in another year or two, people will be even less willing to take up injections, send their children to war, confine themselves in 15-minute cities, or eat insects. We do need to build the future — via Bitcoin — but without a shared understanding of reality as presented by Schwab or von der Leyen, we might discard the Great Reset blueprints and build back “wrong.” God forbid this would result in a decentralised, censorship-free world with true free markets, enabled by Bitcoin, and in the worst-case scenario even create a different world marked by actual peace and prosperity. For Schwab & Company, that would be very unfortunate as it would deprive them of their most important asset: billions of “hackable animals” happy to own nothing, eat ze bugs, and slave away their years of their human experience as they used to do for the previous millennia. The sources of their dreaded “disinformation and misinformation” — the internet and free, decentralised social media will, ironically, prove to be the catalyst of a new great enlightenment. In the words of Thomas Jefferson : “Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like the evil spirits at the dawn of day.”

Klaus Schwab, the founder and longtime head of the World Economic Forum, published an article in TIME a few weeks back (available here https://shorturl.at/B7QxA), titled : “The Fragile Foundations of the Intelligent Age”, in which he sheds some impressive crocodile tears over the erosion of trust in major established institutions and the rise of “misinformation and disinformation”. It turns out, Der Schwaben Klaus thinks that truth is important. (Who would have thunk…) In his own words : “Truth and trust are often treated as virtues, but they function as conditions: the prerequisites for coherent societies, functional institutions, and stable international systems. Without them, even the most advanced technologies fail to deliver progress; without them, democratic debate becomes impossible; without them, economic and social life slowly lose their connective tissue.” Yes Mr. Schwab, truth matters! So far, so good we’re in full agreement here: truth is the first of the foundational principles of our business as well. But from there, Schwab’s prose gets a bit strange. He laments about the good old times when * “Societies could rely on a shared understanding that truth, however contested, was worth pursuing” * “Institutions — scientific, journalistic, judicial — created mechanisms through which facts were established, corrected and publicly recognised.” Apparently this is no longer the case (again shockingly, right? 🤣) and, “that framework has weakened. … it is increasingly difficult for citizens to determine whether what they see and hear is authentic,” so “the very idea of a shared reality is weakening.” In addition to truth, Schwab is also lamenting the erosion of trust, explaining that “trust is not sentimentality; it is the operating system of social and political order.” The Great Reset has already failed spectacularly. I, for one, would have a hard time believing that Klaus Schwab, out of all people on gods green earth, is distraught about the potential difficulty citizens encounter in establishing what’s true and what’s not. In fact, his sentiment is probably related to the fact that people no longer trust him and his affiliated henchmen in the institutions that were meant to advance his Great Reset. The reason for that is rather simple: the Great Reset was promoted on an outrageous amount of lies, calculated to herd and mobilise the “hackable animals” to “build back better” and comply with a range of dehumanising, dystopian arrangements, that - if successfully implemented - would have stayed in place indefinitely. Schwab and his comrades at Davos are likely upset that when they try to convince us that: * (mRNA) vaccines are safe and effective, not everyone believes them * Russia is our enemy and we should sacrifice for wars, most people refuse * Sustainable agriculture and eating insects is necessary, again, most people say no (again what a shocker 🤣) * […insert other current lies, BS narrative here…] In fact, Schwab’s friend Ursula von der Leyen (a.k.a “Die Flinten Ushi”) said as much at the World Economic Forum while sharing the stage with him a few years back: “For the global business community, the top concern for the next two years is… disinformation and misinformation, followed closely by the polarisation within our societies. These risks are serious because they limit our ability to tackle the big global challenges we are facing.” That was in 2024, and the fact that Der Schwaben Klaus is still upset about the erosion of truth and trust, suggests that they are realising their fight for control of the narrative is being lost in real time. As he put it, “when global institutions lose trust, multilateral solutions become elusive.” As things are going, in another year or two, people will be even less willing to take up injections, send their children to war, confine themselves in 15-minute cities, or eat insects. We do need to build the future — via Bitcoin — but without a shared understanding of reality as presented by Schwab or von der Leyen, we might discard the Great Reset blueprints and build back “wrong.” God forbid this would result in a decentralised, censorship-free world with true free markets, enabled by Bitcoin, and in the worst-case scenario even create a different world marked by actual peace and prosperity. For Schwab & Company, that would be very unfortunate as it would deprive them of their most important asset: billions of “hackable animals” happy to own nothing, eat ze bugs, and slave away their years of their human experience as they used to do for the previous millennia. The sources of their dreaded “disinformation and misinformation” — the internet and free, decentralised social media will, ironically, prove to be the catalyst of a new great enlightenment. In the words of Thomas Jefferson : “Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like the evil spirits at the dawn of day.”

We are The Hard Energy Fund — looking at the intersection of energy, capital cycles, and long-term trends that matter. Bitcoin is central to how we think of value, sovereignty, and resilience in complex systems. Our focus is on ideas and patterns others tend to miss.

We hunt mispriced energy cash flows—oil, gas/LNG, uranium, midstream—using replacement‑cost discipline and long‑dated contracts. Report in fiat, judge in Bitcoin. Educational only; not investment advice.