Tax the Billionaires: The Right Complaint, the Wrong Target

Posted on September 20, 2026 by hooglanda

Every few weeks a politician goes on TV and says we need to tax billionaires to pay for roads, or schools, or child care, or whatever the line item of the month is. It’s a reliable applause line. It also happens to be one of the emptiest arguments in American politics, and it’s worth walking through exactly why — because the emptiness hides two real problems underneath it.

Start with the arithmetic

We run a deficit of roughly $2 trillion a year. Not total debt — the annual shortfall, the gap between what the government spends and what it takes in, every single year.

Now price out the billionaire tax. A wealth tax or a jump in the top marginal rate pencils out, on optimistic assumptions, to somewhere around $100–300 billion a year. And the optimistic assumptions rarely survive contact with reality — valuation disputes over illiquid assets, avoidance, capital flight, the usual. Call it a couple hundred billion in a good year.

Against a $2 trillion hole, that’s a rounding correction. It’s not a funding source. If the government wanted to fund a road, it could fund the road today, with money it already spends freely without any new tax at all. The tax was never the thing standing between us and the road.

So the first thing to notice is that the whole “tax them to pay for it” framing is a costume. Money is fungible. No billionaire’s check gets routed to a specific pothole. The spending happens or it doesn’t; the tax is a completely separate lever that gets bolted onto the announcement for political effect.

What taxes actually do

Here’s the part almost nobody says out loud, and it’s the key to the whole thing.

Taxes are not how a government with a printing press “affords” anything. A government that issues its own currency is not revenue-constrained the way a household is. What actually constrains it is real resources — labor, steel, concrete, energy — and the inflation that shows up when government demand bids against everyone else for those resources.

So the honest economic function of a tax is not to fund spending. It’s to pull spending power out of the private sector, so that when the government goes and buys something real, it isn’t just adding fresh demand on top of everyone else’s and driving prices up. Spending matched by real taxes is roughly demand-neutral. Spending financed by printing is the inflation you feel at the grocery store and the gas pump.

Sit with what that means for the roads line. Taken literally — tax first, then spend — “tax the rich to build the road” would describe the anti-inflationary way to build a road. The version that feeds inflation is the one where they skip the tax, deficit-finance the whole thing, and print the difference. Which is exactly what actually happens.

But billionaire money is the wrong money to drain

If the real point of a tax is to withdraw demand that would otherwise chase real goods, then here’s the test for any tax: would those dollars have chased real goods and services soon?

A billionaire’s marginal dollar fails that test badly.

Most of a top-ten net-worth figure isn’t money circulating anywhere. It’s a mark-to-market number on stock the person already owns and isn’t selling. When a founder’s net worth balloons, it’s usually because the market re-rated shares he already held — not because he bought anything, and not because he sold anything. That “wealth” is inert. It sits there as a claim. It doesn’t bid on concrete, it doesn’t bid on labor, it doesn’t bid on groceries or diesel. It’s about the least inflationary form of money that exists, because functionally it isn’t in motion at all.

This is why a wealth-tax-for-roads scheme is doubly incoherent. To pay the tax, you’d force sales of static holdings — converting frozen, non-circulating wealth into live cash that then funds active government bidding in the real-resource economy. You’d be taking the least inflationary money in the country and turning it into some of the most inflationary. The cure is worse than the disease it claims to treat.

And even where the wealthy do deploy money, most of it doesn’t touch normal people:

Trophy assets — mega-yachts, $100M penthouses, blue-chip art — are a closed loop. Rich people bidding against other rich people for positional goods nobody else was ever going to buy. That inflation stays quarantined in its own market. You’re not priced out of a Basquiat you were never bidding on.
Land and housing is the one real exception, and it’s a legitimate grievance. When concentrated wealth does hunt yield, a chunk lands in the single-family homes, rental stock, and farmland that regular people actually need. That’s direct competition for the same asset, in a market you can’t opt out of, and it does push prices up.

But notice the scale even on the one channel that bites. That’s a housing-supply and distribution problem, measured by the flow of dollars actually deployed into housing — a fraction of a fraction of the headline net-worth numbers. It’s real. It’s worth caring about. And it’s still nowhere near $2 trillion. It keeps landing in the same place: the money-printing and the government’s own real-resource bidding dwarf every one of these channels.

The influence argument — which is the real one

Peel back “they should pay more” and you usually find a better argument underneath: we don’t want billionaires with this much power over politics. That one’s serious. But it’s a different argument, and taxation is the wrong tool for it too. The spending data proves it cleanly.

In the 2024 cycle, by the New York Times’ accounting, about 300 billionaires and their families put in roughly $3 billion — nearly a fifth of the almost $16 billion spent to elect candidates nationwide. Americans for Tax Fairness, using a narrower method, counted $1.9 billion from just 150 families. One man — Elon Musk — accounted for over $278 million on his own, close to 2% of all federal election spending in the country. And every one of these figures is an undercount, because dark-money channels keep a lot of political spending anonymous.

So the headline number is big: two to three billion dollars a cycle. Scary if you stop there.

Now here’s the number that ends the argument. Americans for Tax Fairness — a group whose entire mission is higher taxes on the rich — reports that these billionaire families each gave an average of about $9.2 million, which came to just 0.06% of their wealth.

Be clear on what that $9.2 million is. It’s not per race, and it’s not their net worth on paper. It’s the average total a single billionaire family actually wrote in checks to politics across the whole 2024 cycle — money out the door to candidates, party committees, PACs, and super PACs combined. Real dollars spent, per family, in one election. And it amounted to six one-hundredths of one percent of what they’re worth.

Now put that next to what an actual race costs, because this is where the scale becomes absurd:

A U.S. House seat. The typical House member running for reelection in 2024 raised around $2 million. Safe-seat incumbents win on well under a million. Even a genuine toss-up House race runs the candidate maybe $2.5–8 million on their own side. So one billionaire family’s $9.2 million cycle spend is, by itself, enough to bankroll the candidate side of several House races at once.
A U.S. Senate seat. The median senator seeking reelection raised about $11 million — roughly one family’s cycle giving. Only the marquee, nationally targeted Senate wars (Ohio, Montana) blow past that into the tens or hundreds of millions once outside groups pile in, and those are the exceptions, not the norm.
A governor’s race. Enormously variable by state. A normal, non-marquee governor’s race can be won in the low tens of millions (Washington’s 2024 race, for instance, ran the winner around $14 million). The eye-popping ones — New Jersey and Illinois topping $200 million — are a handful of expensive states with outside money flooding in, not what a typical governorship costs.

Hold those side by side. One billionaire family, spending a rounding error of its wealth, can fully fund the candidate side of a Senate campaign, or several House campaigns, in a single cycle — and dozens of them do exactly that. That’s the influence people are worried about, and it’s real. The point is only that it runs on pocket change relative to the fortunes.

Which is what makes ATF’s own number a trap for ATF’s own solution. Run the thought experiment. Say you strip a billionaire down to a single billion dollars — confiscate literally everything above a billion. 0.06% of a billion is still $600,000 — enough to be the dominant funder of a House race or a state legislative seat, and that’s after you’ve wiped out 90%+ of a ten-figure fortune. To actually make even a single $2 million House check unaffordable at that 0.06% rate, you’d have to grind the person’s net worth down into the low eight figures — at which point you’re not “taxing billionaires,” you’re expropriating people down to the level of a successful surgeon, and a merely-rich person still clears the political bar with room to spare.

That’s the bind. ATF hands you the very stat that shows how trivially cheap political influence is — and their own proposed remedy, tax them more, could never claw a fortune down far enough that the family couldn’t still afford to buy the seat. Political influence is that cheap relative to these fortunes. No tax anyone is seriously proposing comes anywhere near reaching it. You’d need outright confiscation down to eight figures, and even that wouldn’t do it.

So point the complaint at the right thing

If the actual worry is billionaires distorting elections, the tools that address it are structural, not fiscal: contribution limits, super-PAC rules, disclosure requirements that kill the dark-money loophole, and a serious look at the Citizens United framework that opened the floodgates in the first place. Those attack the spending directly. A wealth tax attacks a balance-sheet number that, as the data shows, has almost no relationship to how much a person can deploy politically. You could halve every billionaire’s net worth tomorrow and barely dent their capacity to write these checks.

The tax argument and the influence argument get welded together in political rhetoric because “billionaires are too powerful” and “billionaires should pay more” sound like the same complaint. They aren’t. And the cleanest proof is the spending data itself: the influence runs on a rounding error of the wealth, so aiming at the wealth is aiming at the wrong target entirely.

The thing all of it obscures

Step back and the whole “tax the billionaires to pay for X” debate does one useful thing: it keeps everyone’s eyes off the actual machine.

The government’s spending isn’t constrained by its tax revenue. It never was — that’s the whole point of the $2 trillion deficit. The gap gets financed. It gets printed. And the printing is the inflation. That’s the real transfer of wealth, and it’s a far bigger and more regressive one than any billionaire’s tax bill, because it hits everyone holding dollars and wages while asset-holders ride the appreciation.

The billionaire framing is comfortable for a politician because it delivers the applause line about making the rich pay, and the spending, and the printing — all three — while pointing the audience at the smallest lever in the room. Real taxes never come. The road, if it gets built, gets deficit-financed anyway. And the currency keeps quietly losing value in the background where nobody’s looking.

Who this actually serves

Here’s the part I want to say plainly, because the rest of this piece has been about mechanics and this is about motive.

The politicians running the “tax the billionaires” play — and it’s mostly Democrats who campaign on it — are not doing their constituents a single favor. They present it as fighting for the little guy against the oligarchs. It’s the reverse. It’s a worthless motto they never act on — a line engineered to feel like class solidarity, to harvest the votes of people who are genuinely getting squeezed, while committing the politician to nothing that would actually unsqueeze them. They say it every cycle and the billionaires get richer every cycle, which tells you it was never a plan. It was a slogan.

Look at what it costs them to say it: nothing. And look at what it delivers to the voter: nothing. The billionaire tax, as we’ve seen, wouldn’t close the deficit, wouldn’t fund the road that gets deficit-financed anyway, and wouldn’t touch the political influence it pretends to be about. It is pure position-taking. The applause lands, the segment ends, and the machine that’s actually draining working people — the deficit, the printing, the inflation that eats wages while it inflates the assets the rich already hold — rolls on untouched. Arguably the rhetoric helps that machine, by keeping the audience angry at a target that isn’t the problem.

If they meant it — if the goal were actually to reduce the outsized power of the ultra-wealthy and to stop the quiet transfer of wealth away from ordinary people — the to-do list is sitting right here in this post, and none of it is a wealth tax:

Cap the influence directly. Contribution limits, super-PAC reform, real disclosure to kill dark money, and revisiting Citizens United. That’s the lever that actually moves the thing they claim to care about, and it’s one they mostly won’t pull, because they’re drinking from the same trough.
Stop the printing. Confront the deficit and the debasement honestly, because that’s the regressive wealth transfer hammering their constituents every single day — not some billionaire’s unrealized stock. This is the big one, and it’s the one they’ll never say out loud, because it indicts the spending they campaign on too.
Fix the money itself. The whole disease is a currency that can be created without limit. Sound money — money that can’t be quietly printed away — protects the wage earner and the saver far more than any tax on the rich ever could.

Not one of those is as satisfying to shout from a podium as “make the billionaires pay.” That’s exactly the tell. The easy line is the one that changes nothing, and the things that would actually help are the ones nobody’s offering. When a politician reaches for the costless applause line instead of the lever that works, they’ve told you who they’re really serving. It isn’t you.

That’s the debate worth having. Not who pays for the road — whether the money you’re paid in is honest in the first place. And the next time a politician tells you they’ll make the billionaires pay, notice what they never mention: the donation rules they could tighten, the deficit they could confront, the printing they could stop. The slogan comes back every cycle. The levers that would actually work never get touched. That gap is the whole answer.

The S&P 500 Is a Savings Account — But Only Some People Can Open It -A true deflationary money would give everyone the inflation escape that index investors already enjoy (Deflationary Money – Short)

Posted on August 14, 2026 by hooglanda

If you hold index funds, you are already using a savings account that beats inflation. That is what the S&P 500 quietly is for the people who own it: not just an investment, but a place to store value against a dollar designed to lose it. Park money there, leave it alone, and over any long horizon it outruns the currency in your checking account. It is, in effect, a deflationary money — something that gains value by being held — sitting inside a brokerage app.

Which is worth pausing on, because the standard argument says this shouldn’t work. The fear is that if money gains value simply by being held, no one will spend it: purchases get deferred, demand collapses, the economy freezes. It is the usual case against Bitcoin, and against deflation in general.

But we can watch it not happen. Millions of people hold an appreciating, inflation-beating asset right now, and they still spend. The entire financial-independence movement is built on exactly this: accumulate an asset that compounds faster than the dollar, then spend it down to fund a life. Nobody hoards to zero — they accumulate in order to decumulate. Holding a deflationary store of value does not stop people from buying groceries, paying rent, or retiring early. It just gives them something better than cash to spend from. The spiral never comes, because people have lives that happen now.

So the S&P works as a de facto savings account. The problem is who gets to use it.

That door only opens for the roughly 60% of American households who own equities. To walk through it you need income beyond your bills, a brokerage account, and enough financial confidence to use one. The other 40% are left holding the depreciating dollar, because it is the only money they have. Inflation is a tax, and we have quietly built a system where the people best equipped to escape it do, and the people least equipped to escape it can’t. The FIRE playbook is real and it works — but it is a playbook for people who already have surplus, access, and know-how.

A true deflationary money erases that divide. A base money that simply holds its value asks for none of the prerequisites: no minimum balance, no account to open, no permission, no know-how. Everyone who holds it is saving by default — whether or not they ever buy a single share of anything. The protection the index investor buys for themselves would belong to the person living paycheck to paycheck too, in the currency they already earn and spend.

That is what Bitcoin is reaching for. Its supply is fixed at 21 million coins, so there is no issuer who can print more and dilute what you hold — the same anti-erosion property that makes the S&P attractive, without the volatility of owning companies. And it needs no gatekeeper: no brokerage, no bank approval, no income test. A phone and an internet connection are the whole prerequisite. I won’t pretend it is finished — it is still volatile, still early, still being adopted, and the stable everyday savings money is the destination rather than the current state. But the two properties that matter, no debasement and no gatekeeper, are already true today for anyone who wants them.

The S&P 500 proved the demand: hundreds of millions of people already treat an appreciating asset as the place they store their money, and the economy did not seize up. It just left out everyone who couldn’t get in the door. A deflationary money finishes the job — it turns a savings account for the few into one nobody can be locked out of.

Bitcoin Only Goes Up (And Other Things I’ve Never Said) -The Long Case for Bitcoin’s Endpoint

Posted on August 1, 2026 by hooglanda

Link to Spotify Version of this post to listen to instead of read!

I have a friend who likes to needle me. Every time Bitcoin comes up, he says: “Bitcoin only goes up.”

I have never said that. Not once. What I actually say sounds nothing like it.

Only invest what you can leave invested for at least five years.

That one isn’t even Bitcoin advice. It’s how I think about any position I take. Money you might need in two years has no business in an asset that can move 40% in a quarter. That has nothing to do with Bitcoin specifically — it’s just the difference between investing and gambling with a deadline attached.

Invest only what you can afford to lose. Assume it’s going to zero.

Expect it to drop 50% tomorrow. If you wouldn’t be fine with that, don’t invest in Bitcoin.

Read those again and notice what they have in common. Every single one leads with the downside. Assume zero. Assume the crash. Assume you might need the money before it works. That is the opposite of “only goes up.” My friend is mocking a position I’ve never held. The naive bull says the price can’t fall. I say plan for it to fall, size accordingly, and only then talk about the upside.

So let’s talk about the upside — because there is one, and it’s the whole point.

I expect Bitcoin to reach $13 million per coin, in today’s dollars, which means you don’t need to risk much to get an outsized return.

This is where people assume I’ve quietly rejoined the “number go up” crowd. I haven’t. That figure is not a moon target. It’s the output of an assumption, and it has a ceiling.

The upside is capped — and that’s a feature

Bitcoin’s price isn’t set by hope. Over a long enough horizon it’s set by how much monetary premium it pulls away from other assets — the portion of gold, bonds, real estate, and cash that people hold not to use, but simply to store value across time.

That pool is enormous, but it is finite. There is only so much store-of-value wealth in existence to migrate. Divide the share you think Bitcoin absorbs by a supply that is fixed at 21 million coins, and you get a price. At $13 million per coin, the whole network is worth on the order of $270 trillion in today’s dollars — a large fraction of global store-of-value wealth, but a fraction. Change your assumption about how much premium migrates and the number moves. What the number cannot do is run away to infinity.

Bitcoin cannot be worth a quadrillion dollars per coin in today’s dollars. There isn’t that much monetary premium on Earth to absorb. So the upside is bounded — not by sentiment, but by arithmetic. That’s what makes it a bet worth sizing carefully rather than a lottery ticket: capped, known downside on one side; a large but calculable ceiling on the other.

I’ll admit the timeline is the soft part. It might take 15 or 20 years to get there. But here’s the thing most people miss — they already have that long. They’re saving for retirement anyway. They’re going to wait thirty years regardless. If you’re already waiting, waiting a little longer in an asset with this asymmetry costs you almost nothing and could change the outcome entirely.

Where the price comes from right now

None of that describes today’s price. Today’s price is driven by sentiment and speculation. It’s reflexive — it goes up because it’s going up, and down because it’s going down. That’s not a flaw I’m hiding; it’s just what the price is in this phase.

Underneath the speculation is a floor, and the floor is driven by adoption. The people who buy every week regardless of price — the DCA crowd, people like me — don’t chase the euphoric spikes. We can’t set the top. But steady, price-insensitive buying does set a base. Historically that base has tracked something like the 200-week moving average: far below the manic highs, and Bitcoin has spent very little of its life beneath it. I won’t call it a guaranteed floor — the 2022 bear market pierced it by roughly 25% for a few months, so it’s a gravity zone, not a law of physics — but the mechanism is real. Persistent buyers put a bid under an asset that speculators periodically abandon.

So the two prices live at once: the euphoric price sentiment prints on the way up, and the adoption price the steady buyers can actually defend. The gap between them is the volatility everyone’s afraid of.

The part nobody wants to hear

Most people never engage with any of this, and I understand why. They have more immediate concerns — rent, childcare, the next paycheck. Monetary theory feels like a luxury when you’re focused on this month.

But here’s what I’d gently point out: a lot of the immediate concerns are downstream of the money itself. Asset prices outrunning wages, so a house costs more years of labor than it did for your parents. Savings that quietly lose ground every year you hold them. A whole economy pulled toward the short term because holding cash is a slow leak.

That last one has a name: time preference — how much you value having something now versus later. When your money holds its value, when a dollar saved today still buys as much in twenty years, the rational move is to defer, save, and build things that pay off slowly. Good money lowers your time preference; it makes patience pay. Debased money does the reverse. When every dollar you hold is quietly bleeding out, saving becomes a mistake and spending now becomes the smart play. That raises time preference across an entire society — and a high-time-preference society stops building for a future it no longer trusts its money to reach. Shorter horizons, thinner savings, more debt, less patience, less long-term anything. You can watch it happen without ever naming the cause.

People point at these problems and blame a dozen other things. Many of them trace back to a money that can be expanded at will. Most people never make the connection, because the tax is invisible — it doesn’t show up as a line item, it shows up as a life that costs more than it should.

You don’t have to accept the whole worldview to notice the mechanism. That’s all I’m asking anyone to do: notice it.

The long-term vision

Here’s where I think this goes.

Bitcoin is in a monetization phase. An asset that starts with no monetary value and slowly acquires it doesn’t move in a straight line — it moves in violent, speculative waves, because the market is arguing, in real time, about what it’s worth. That argument is the volatility. Every cycle, a little more of the monetary premium gets absorbed and becomes permanent. The floor rises. The speculative froth on top gets smaller relative to the base underneath it.

The endpoint isn’t a number screaming upward forever. The endpoint is boring. As the market cap grows and the premium fills in, the swings compress. The thing that today feels like a rollercoaster settles into a savings technology — something you hold the way earlier generations held land or gold, without checking the price every morning. The speculators leave because there’s no longer a fast trade in it. What’s left is money that holds its value across decades because no one can print more.

When that happens, the adoption price and the market price finally converge. There’s no more gap for volatility to live in. Bitcoin stops being a bet and becomes what it was always trying to be: a place to put the economic energy you earned this year and get it back, intact, in twenty.

And there’s a symmetry worth sitting with. The people who understand this early are the ones who get the outsized return — but they’re also the ones building the floor. Every steady buyer accumulating through the fear is being paid for being early and pulling the endpoint closer. The adoption that eventually makes Bitcoin boring is the same adoption that makes it valuable now. So early understanding is rewarded twice: once in your own return, and once in how much sooner the whole thing arrives. You’re not just front-running the monetization — you’re part of it.

And when it arrives, the question itself changes. Today everyone asks what one Bitcoin is worth in dollars, because dollars are the measuring stick. The endpoint is where the stick flips. You stop asking how many dollars your Bitcoin is worth and start asking what it buys — and under a money that can’t be printed, that answer grows every year instead of shrinking. As the world gets more productive, things get cheaper measured against a fixed supply. Your savings don’t just hold their ground; they quietly buy more of the world each year you leave them alone.

That’s the actual invitation. Not get rich in dollars and cash out — help build the thing that makes “cash out” a strange idea, because the money is finally worth keeping. Every person who understands it early pulls that day closer for everyone else.

That’s the whole thesis. Not “it only goes up.” It goes up and down violently, for now, for a reason — and the reason ends. Plan for the down. Size for the zero. And understand that the volatility scaring everyone off is simply the price of being early to something that intends to become boring.

I’ve never said Bitcoin only goes up. What I say is less comforting and more useful: assume the worst, size for it, and let the math do the rest. But once the downside is handled, you’re free to look past the price at what’s being built — a money that can’t be debased, savings that buy more each year instead of less, a future that arrives a little sooner every time one more person understands it. That’s the part worth joining. Not the trade — the thing on the other side of it. It’s early, and there’s room. Come help build it.

The Dollar’s Doom Loop: Why I Think the USD Is Finished

Posted on May 27, 2026 by hooglanda

MyWheelLife.com — May 27, 2026

I listened to 2 videos that made me want to write this

Every Bond Market In The World Is Breaking Andrei Jikh

Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics | Lex Fridman Podcast #303

I’m putting a date on this so there’s no revisionism later. Today is May 27, 2026.

The US dollar is in structural decline, and I believe we are closer to a crisis point than most people want to admit. Let me walk through the numbers — the numbers tell this story better than any opinion does.

First, Some Distinctions That Matter

People use debt and deficit interchangeably. They’re not the same thing.

The deficit is the annual gap between what the government spends and what it collects in taxes. Right now that’s running at roughly $2 trillion per year.

The debt is the total accumulation of every prior year’s deficit, never paid off. As of today that number is approximately $39 trillion — up $10 trillion in just five years.

Most of that debt was financed the normal way: the Treasury sold bonds to real outside buyers — foreign governments, pension funds, insurance companies, individual investors. Those buyers handed over real existing dollars and received a Treasury bond in return. That’s genuine borrowing. It’s not money creation, it’s not inflationary on its own — it’s just the government living beyond its means and handing an IOU to whoever would take it.

Monetizing the debt is something different and more serious. That’s when the Federal Reserve itself buys Treasury bonds by creating new dollars that didn’t previously exist — typing numbers into a computer. No real buyer, no real savings transferred. Just new money conjured to cover government spending the market wouldn’t otherwise finance. The Fed currently holds about $4.5 trillion in Treasury securities, down from a peak of $5.7 trillion after COVID. That portion — roughly 10–15% of total debt — was genuinely monetized. New dollars created from nothing.

The rest is real debt owed to real creditors who expect to be paid back in dollars that are worth something.

A Ponzi Scheme With a Printing Press

Here’s the uncomfortable truth about how that debt gets serviced.

The US government cannot cover its obligations from tax revenue alone — that’s what the $2 trillion annual deficit means. So it pays existing obligations by borrowing from new creditors. Those new creditors will eventually need to be paid back — with money borrowed from still newer creditors. The debt never gets paid down. It only gets rolled over and expanded.

If that structure sounds familiar, it should. A classic Ponzi scheme works exactly the same way: you can’t generate enough real returns to pay existing investors, so you pay them with money coming in from new investors. It works as long as new money keeps flowing in. The moment inflows slow or confidence cracks, the structure collapses.

The difference between Bernie Madoff and the US Treasury is that Madoff couldn’t print money. The US can. That’s the escape valve that makes this particular Ponzi uniquely resilient — and uniquely dangerous. Instead of collapsing suddenly when new creditors dry up, the US can instruct the Federal Reserve to monetize — creating new dollars to pay old obligations. That keeps the scheme going longer but debases the currency in the process. Existing creditors get paid back in dollars worth less than the ones they lent.

That’s a soft default. Technically honoring the debt while quietly stealing the real value back through inflation. The default doesn’t show up in a missed payment. It shows up in your grocery bill.

The Structural Math

As of April 2026, the average blended interest rate on the total national debt is 3.37%. That sounds manageable until you do the math on $39 trillion — and until you understand that five years ago that blended rate was 1.49%. The debt didn’t change its nature. The cost of carrying it more than doubled.

Interest payments on the national debt will cross $1 trillion this fiscal year for the first time in history. To put that in perspective: interest on the debt is now larger than what we spend on Medicare. Larger than what we spend on national defense. It is the second largest expenditure of the federal government, trailing only Social Security.

The Math That Should Terrify You

The United States is the largest economy on Earth at roughly $32 trillion in annual output. But the government doesn’t collect GDP — it collects taxes. Federal tax revenue runs roughly $5.6 trillion per year. That is the actual pool of money the government has to work with.

Interest payments now consume $1 trillion of that — nearly 20 cents of every tax dollar — before the government funds a single program, pays a single soldier, or builds a single road.

The squeeze isn’t theoretical. It’s already happening in every budget negotiation, every spending cut, every unfunded priority. The interest bill is eating the government alive from the inside.

The Doom Loop in Plain Dollars

The math is simple. The government spends $7.5 trillion per year and collects $5.6 trillion in taxes. The roughly $2 trillion gap gets borrowed. That borrowing adds to the debt. A larger debt generates a larger interest bill next year. A larger interest bill widens the gap further. There is no mechanism in place to break this cycle. It is self-reinforcing by design.

And it is accelerating. Five years ago the blended interest rate on the debt was 1.49%. Today it is 3.37% — more than double. The debt itself grew by $10 trillion in that same period. The interest bill has nearly tripled in five years, from around $345 billion in 2020 to over $1 trillion today.

The Doom Loop: 20-Year Projection (2026–2045)

The table below models two scenarios for how the blended interest rate on US debt evolves over the next 20 years. Scenario A assumes the rate rises 0.25% per year — gradual but relentless, reflecting ongoing refinancing at elevated market rates. Scenario B assumes a slower 0.125% annual rise. The highlighted Int/Tax columns show interest payments as a percentage of annual tax revenue — the most direct measure of fiscal pressure. Color coding: green = manageable, yellow = warning, orange = severe, red = critical.

The problem is both of these scenarios might not be agressive enough! While the Fed and Trump want to lower rates, the market is demaning higher rates NOW!

■ Under 25% — Manageable

■ 25–35% — Warning

■ 35–50% — Severe

■ 50%+ — Critical

SHARED INPUTS						SCENARIO A (+0.25%/yr)		SCENARIO B (+0.125%/yr)
Year	GDP ($T)	Tax ($T)	Spend ($T)	Deficit	Debt ($T)	Rate A	Int/Tax A	Rate B	Int/Tax B
2026 ◀	$32.4	$5.6	$7.5	-$1.9	$39.0	3.37%	23.5%	3.37%	23.5%
2027	$33.1	$5.8	$7.8	-$2.0	$40.9	3.62%	25.5%	3.50%	24.7%
2028	$33.9	$6.0	$8.1	-$2.1	$42.9	3.87%	27.7%	3.62%	25.9%
2029	$34.7	$6.2	$8.4	-$2.2	$45.0	4.12%	29.9%	3.75%	27.2%
2030	$35.5	$6.4	$8.8	-$2.3	$47.2	4.37%	32.1%	3.87%	28.5%
2031	$36.3	$6.7	$9.1	-$2.5	$49.6	4.62%	34.4%	4.00%	29.8%
2032	$37.1	$6.9	$9.5	-$2.6	$52.1	4.87%	36.8%	4.12%	31.2%
2033	$38.0	$7.1	$9.9	-$2.7	$54.7	5.12%	39.3%	4.25%	32.6%
2034	$38.9	$7.4	$10.3	-$2.9	$57.4	5.37%	41.8%	4.37%	34.0%
2035	$39.8	$7.6	$10.7	-$3.0	$60.3	5.62%	44.4%	4.50%	35.5%
2036	$40.7	$7.9	$11.1	-$3.2	$63.4	5.87%	47.1%	4.62%	37.1%
2037	$41.6	$8.2	$11.5	-$3.4	$66.6	6.12%	49.8%	4.75%	38.6%
2038	$42.6	$8.5	$12.0	-$3.5	$69.9	6.37%	52.6%	4.87%	40.2%
2039	$43.5	$8.8	$12.5	-$3.7	$73.5	6.62%	55.5%	5.00%	41.9%
2040	$44.5	$9.1	$13.0	-$3.9	$77.2	6.87%	58.5%	5.12%	43.6%
2041	$45.6	$9.4	$13.5	-$4.1	$81.1	7.12%	61.6%	5.25%	45.4%
2042	$46.6	$9.7	$14.0	-$4.3	$85.2	7.37%	64.7%	5.37%	47.1%
2043	$47.7	$10.1	$14.6	-$4.6	$89.6	7.62%	67.9%	5.50%	49.0%
2044	$48.8	$10.4	$15.2	-$4.8	$94.1	7.87%	71.2%	5.62%	50.9%
2045	$49.9	$10.8	$15.8	-$5.0	$98.9	8.12%	74.6%	5.75%	52.8%

ASSUMPTIONS & METHODOLOGY

Base debt (2026)	$39T	GDP growth	2.3%/year
Base tax revenue	$5.6T	Tax revenue growth	3.5%/year
Base spending	$7.5T	Spending growth	4.0%/year
Base blended rate	3.37%	Interest calc	Total debt × blended rate
Scenario A rate rise	+0.25%/year	Deficit	Spending minus tax revenue
Scenario B rate rise	+0.125%/year	Note	No Fed intervention modeled

MyWheelLife.com · For informational purposes only · Not financial advice

The Refinancing Wall Hitting Right Now

Here’s what this looks like in the immediate term. The US has approximately $9 trillion in debt maturing in 2026 alone — nearly a quarter of the entire national debt rolling over and needing to be refinanced at whatever rate the market demands today. Another $6 trillion matures by 2028. That’s $15 trillion refinanced in three years.

Today’s blended rate on the total debt is 3.37%. If that refinancing happens at 5% instead — which is not a crisis rate; the 30-year Treasury recently touched 5.2% — the additional interest cost on just the 2026 tranche alone is roughly $150 billion extra per year, every year going forward. By 2028, having refinanced the bulk of short-term debt at elevated rates, you’re looking at $1.3 to $1.5 trillion in annual interest — against roughly $5.6 trillion in tax revenue. That’s 25–27 cents of every tax dollar going to interest before the government does anything else.

This isn’t a projection of what might happen in some distant future. The refinancing is happening right now. The bills are coming due this year.

How the Loop Kills You

When investors begin to doubt your ability to service debt, they demand higher rates to compensate for the risk. Higher rates make the interest bill larger. A larger interest bill widens the deficit. A wider deficit means more borrowing. More borrowing at higher rates means investors demand still higher rates. The debt grows faster. The cycle accelerates.

This is the same mechanism that destroyed Greece, Argentina, and Turkey. The only thing protecting the US from this dynamic is that the dollar is the world’s reserve currency — meaning global demand for dollars is structurally baked in regardless of US fiscal behavior. Oil is priced in dollars. Global trade is settled in dollars. Foreign central banks hold dollars as reserves. This creates a captive buyer for US debt that no other country enjoys.

That protection is real. It is also eroding.

The Buyers Are Leaving

Two of America’s biggest foreign lenders are actively pulling back. China, which once held $1.3 trillion in US Treasuries, is now down to around $650 billion — a 17-year trend that is accelerating. Every bond China sells means one fewer buyer in the market, which means the US has to pay more to find a replacement.

Japan, the largest foreign holder at around $1.1 trillion, is being forced to sell for a different reason: it needs dollars to defend the yen and to buy oil. In Q1 2026 alone, Japan sold more US Treasuries than in the prior four years combined. The mechanism is vicious — selling Treasuries pushes US yields higher, a stronger dollar makes the yen weaker, which forces Japan to sell even more Treasuries to defend it. It’s a doom loop within the doom loop.

Beyond China and Japan, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, India, the UAE, Norway, and Singapore have all been reducing exposure. BRICS nations are actively building alternative settlement systems. The petrodollar arrangement that anchored dollar demand for fifty years is quietly unwinding — Saudi Arabia is now accepting payment for oil in other currencies. None of these individually are fatal. Together they represent a slow withdrawal of the structural demand that has allowed the US to run deficits that would have collapsed any other currency already.

The Trap

The Federal Reserve is sitting with an impossible choice.

If it cuts rates: bond investors, already nervous about inflation running at 3.8% with PPI at 6%, interpret the cut as the Fed prioritizing the economy over their purchasing power. They sell. Yields go up anyway. The thing the cut was supposed to prevent happens regardless.

If it raises rates: the interest bill on $39 trillion in debt gets larger immediately. Credit card delinquencies are already above 12%. Auto loan defaults are rising. Housing has significantly slowed. A rate increase into that environment risks breaking the economy.

Making this worse: the Fed under Kevin Worsh is reportedly moving away from standard core PCE inflation measurement toward something called trimmed mean PCE — which strips out extreme price movements. Convenient timing, given oil is up 60% since the Iran war started. On paper it produces a lower inflation reading, which might justify not raising rates. Draw your own conclusions about what that means for the integrity of the data.

When Does Monetization Become Forced?

Right now the annual deficit is being financed mostly through real bond sales to real buyers. But the math eventually forces the Fed’s hand. If private buyers demand rates that make the deficit spiral unmanageable, the choice becomes: let rates spike to crisis levels, or have the Fed step in and monetize — creating new dollars to buy bonds the market won’t absorb at acceptable rates.

At that point inflation becomes structural, not episodic. The dollar’s real value gets eroded not through a single dramatic event but through a slow, sustained expansion of the money supply to cover obligations that can’t otherwise be met.

We have been here before. In 1970, the US faced the same impossible math — couldn’t raise taxes, couldn’t cut benefits. So the government chose the invisible option: inflation. The purchasing power of the US dollar dropped roughly 50% from 1970 to 1980. Half of the dollar’s value, gone in ten years. During that same decade, gold went from $35 an ounce to $850 an ounce. Bond investors who lived through that decade know exactly what this setup looks like.

The most likely path today isn’t a dramatic overnight collapse. It’s a slow bleed — inflation running persistently above what the Fed officially targets, the real value of dollar-denominated savings quietly destroyed over years, purchasing power hollowed out while nominal numbers keep going up.

Where I’m Putting My Money

I hold Bitcoin in part because of this analysis. A fixed-supply asset that exists outside any government’s balance sheet is a rational place to be when the world’s reserve currency is structurally compromised. You can’t run a Ponzi scheme on a 21 million coin limit. The math doesn’t care about politics.

And the demand signal is becoming concrete, not theoretical: Iran is now demanding Bitcoin as payment for oil. That’s a sovereign nation — one of the world’s major oil exporters — actively routing around the dollar system in real transactions. That’s not a fringe argument about crypto. That’s the petrodollar arrangement breaking down in real time.

Central banks around the world bought over a thousand tons of gold in 2024 alone — choosing gold over Treasury bonds. Banks that are not sensitive to interest rates the way ordinary investors are, and that generally know things ahead of time, are making a geopolitical diversification bet. That tells you something.

I could be early. The dollar has muddled through versions of this argument for decades. But muddling through and being structurally sound are not the same thing. At some point the compounding wins.

I’m writing this down today so the record exists. Written May 27, 2026. Published at MyWheelLife.com.

Cedar Falls City Council May 18th 2026 – Bitcoin/Crypto Zoning

Posted on May 22, 2026 by hooglanda

I attended the Monday May 18th, 2026 Cedar Falls City Council meeting to make a statement on bitcoin mining.

You can view the full video here. This is linked directly to the timestamp of my statement. You only get 5 mintues to make comments.

Below is the response to many false claims from the March and April Planning and Zoning committee meetings as well as some proposals about what we should focus on writing into a common sense city code for regulations for any business.

I ended up being quoted on the local news (without my knowledge!)

Local news Article

Simple mining Held an open house the 5-20-2026 where I also spoke to KCRG about zoning rules that would make sense for any business. .

Setting the Record Straight on Bitcoin Mining in Cedar Falls

I attended the April 22nd planning and zoning committee meeting and heard a number of claims about Bitcoin mining that deserve a factual response — and a more constructive conversation about what regulation should actually look like.

I am neither for nor against Simple Mining locating here. If Cedar Falls residents decide they don’t want miners in our city, we should not have them. But decisions should be made on accurate information. I’m a mechanical engineer and financial advisor , and I’ve given three public educational talks on Bitcoin at the Cedar Falls and Waterloo libraries. I’ve done extensive research on the grid through owning an electric car and following Bitcoin mining closely. I have no affiliation with Simple Mining or any cryptocurrency company. I’ve previously been involved in local charities including the Job Foundation, providing financial education to children, and Cedar Valley Gearheads, providing cars for people who can’t afford them. I mention this because Bitcoin is something I’ve determined is genuinely beneficial to the world — enough to speak up about in a public forum where it’s currently a minority view.

What follows is my attempt to correct the factual record — and then offer what I think a productive regulatory conversation actually looks like.

Part One: Claims That Don’t Hold Up

“Bitcoin mining causes extensive e-waste”

Annually, roughly 62 million metric tons of e-waste are generated globally. Bitcoin accounts for approximately 30,700 metric tons — about 0.05% of the total, or one two-thousandth of global e-waste. That’s a real number, but it needs to be kept in proportion. Global E-Waste Monitor 2024: https://ewastemonitor.info/the-global-e-waste-monitor-2024/ — Bitcoin E-Waste Monitor: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-electronic-waste-monitor/

“Bitcoin mining is making personal computers more expensive”

Bitcoin miners use ASICs — application-specific integrated circuits purpose-built for mining — not the general-purpose GPUs or chips found in consumer computers. There are roughly 5–6 million Bitcoin miners globally, a negligible share of annual chip production. The claim that they’re competing with your next laptop purchase doesn’t hold up. Source: https://research.grayscale.com/reports/the-power-of-bitcoin-mining

“Bitcoin miners will pollute our water”

The cooling solution referenced at the meeting was described as a biodegradable, corn-based liquid with no EPA reporting requirements for spills. That claim is worth verifying with the applicant — but that’s normal zoning due diligence, not evidence that Bitcoin mining is uniquely dangerous. City code can simply require EPA-approved coolants for any industrial operation without singling out mining.

“Bitcoin mining causes cancer and air pollution”

Bitcoin miners are computers. They run on electricity. They do not combust anything, produce exhaust, or emit particulate matter. There is no direct air pollution from the hardware itself. Iowa generates approximately 63% of its electricity from wind — the highest wind share of any state in the country. If you’re concerned about emissions from electricity generation, the argument belongs at the power plant, not at the mining computers. And if that concern is genuine, Iowa is actually one of the best places in the world to host a miner. Globally, 52.4% of Bitcoin mining already runs on sustainable energy sources, and coal’s share of Bitcoin mining has fallen from 36.6% to just 8.9% in recent years. Source: Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance: https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/2025/cambridge-study-sustainable-energy-rising-in-bitcoin-mining/

“A single Bitcoin transaction uses as much energy as six homes”

This is a misleading framing. Bitcoin doesn’t settle one transaction at a time — the energy secures the entire network and every transaction batched into each block. A better comparison is gold: the gold mining industry consumed 132 TWh of energy in 2023. Bitcoin’s estimated annual consumption is approximately 138 TWh — roughly equivalent — yet gold is never asked to justify its energy use on a per-transaction basis. Gold energy source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2405851324000254 — Bitcoin energy source: https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/2025/cambridge-study-sustainable-energy-rising-in-bitcoin-mining/

“Bitcoin mining strains local power supplies and raises electricity costs”

This is the opposite of how these arrangements typically work. Large miners operate on interruptible contracts — they’re required to curtail operations during peak demand periods, which actually relieves grid pressure when it matters most. A stable, predictable industrial baseload like a mining operation helps subsidize the grid infrastructure that all ratepayers benefit from — including the capacity to run peaker plants like the new CFU facility when they’re genuinely needed. CFU stated at the last meeting that flexible industrial loads like these can help lower average electricity costs by reducing purchases during expensive peak periods. As Cedar Falls purchases more power collectively, we also gain negotiating leverage that benefits everyone on the rate.

One more thing that rarely gets mentioned: Bitcoin can actually reduce emissions

Some Bitcoin mining operations are deployed specifically to capture methane from oil fields, landfills, and agricultural waste that would otherwise be flared or vented into the atmosphere. Methane is roughly 80 times more potent than CO₂ as a greenhouse gas over a 20-year period. By combusting that waste gas to power mining instead of letting it vent or burn off uncontrolled, these operations actively reduce overall warming impact. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy acknowledged in a 2022 report that certain crypto mining operations using vented methane may, in some cases, produce positive climate outcomes. Source: https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/09-2022-Crypto-Assets-and-Climate-Report.pdf

“Bitcoin creates no value — it’s just gambling”

Whether you personally value Bitcoin as an asset is one question. Whether it creates real-world value is a different one — and the answer is clearly yes.

In Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo — Africa’s oldest national park — excess electricity from hydroelectric plants powers a Bitcoin mine. Revenue from that operation funds park infrastructure, conservation efforts, and staff salaries. Source: https://www.weforum.org/videos/bitcoin-mine-power/

Gridless, a company operating across rural Africa, partners with small hydro and renewable mini-grids to subsidize local electrification by purchasing excess power when community demand is low — making those projects economically viable. Source: https://gridlesscompute.com/ — Additional reporting: https://crypto.news/how-a-shipping-container-and-bitcoin-saved-a-struggling-african-hydro-project/

The Human Rights Foundation, a nonpartisan organization supporting dissidents worldwide, has made Bitcoin central to its financial freedom work. In authoritarian regimes — Venezuela, Nigeria, Russia, China — Bitcoin provides a way for activists to receive donations, pay staff, and operate without funds being frozen or confiscated by governments. That is not a fringe argument. It is documented, peer-reviewed, and real. Source: https://hrf.org/program/financial-freedom/bitcoin-development-fund/

Part Two: What We Should Actually Regulate

Noise concerns are legitimate zoning concerns and should be evaluated seriously — but that’s a separate question from whether Bitcoin itself is uniquely harmful. Consider the “no engine brakes” signs posted around many cities. The goal isn’t to ban engine brakes — it’s to control the noise they produce. An engine brake can be made quiet. The law should target the outcome, not the technology. The same principle applies here. Write standards that any business must meet, make the consequences clear, and let engineering solve the rest.

Audible noise

Set a specific decibel limit measured at the property boundary or at a defined distance from the facility. Don’t write an impossible standard, but a reasonable and enforceable threshold applies equally to any future occupant of the site — not just miners.

Infrasound

Sound below 20 Hz isn’t captured by standard decibel meters but can be felt as vibration at high intensities. Large cooling fans can produce it. Standard noise ordinances don’t cover this — city code should specifically address infrasound limits if this is a concern, because it won’t be regulated otherwise.

Visual screening

Concerns about visual impact — equipment, shipping containers, signage — are normal zoning considerations addressable through screening requirements, setback rules, and landscaping buffers. Nothing unique to mining here.

Water and coolant use

Mining operations typically run closed-loop cooling systems with minimal water discharge. Code can require EPA-approved coolants for any industrial operation and mandate closed-loop systems. Ask the applicant for the exact product specification — that’s a standard engineering question, not a scandal.

Cedar Falls Planning & Zoning Commission: March 25, 2026 – Bitcoin Mining, Zoning, CFU Power Plant.

Posted on April 5, 2026 by hooglanda

Separating the Issues in the Cedar Falls Mining Debate

After reviewing the Planning & Zoning meeting from March 25th, 2026 where Bitcoin minnig, Zoning and a new CFU powerplant wer dicussed, it’s clear that several different issues were being discussed at the same time. When those get mixed together, it becomes difficult to evaluate the project clearly.

I think it helps to separate the discussion into four distinct categories.

1. Zoning & Land Use

This is the most important and most durable question.

Concerns about noise, building type (containers vs. permanent structures), water systems, and proximity to neighborhoods all fall into this category. These are not Bitcoin-specific issues — they apply to any industrial use.

If the concern is that this site should not be rezoned from light industrial to heavy industrial, that’s a legitimate argument. It sets precedent and affects long-term land use decisions for the city.

2. Power Plant

There are also concerns tied to the new power plant itself — environmental impact, scale, and whether it should be built at all.

That’s a separate policy decision.

If the concern is emissions or the role of a peaker plant, those questions should be addressed directly:

When does the plant run?
What is the cost of running it versus buying power from the grid?
How often is it expected to operate?

Those are important questions, but they are not inherently tied to Bitcoin mining.

3. Governance & Process

Some of the strongest concerns raised were about process and oversight.

The city, CFU, and the applicant are closely connected, which raises reasonable questions:

Is there sufficient independent review?
Has there been a third-party analysis of costs, noise, and environmental impact?

These are solvable issues:

Independent studies
Clear contract structures
Ongoing monitoring and transparency

4. Utility Economics (Where Bitcoin Actually Enters the Picture)

Only at this stage does Bitcoin mining itself become relevant.

CFU described miners as an interruptible load:

They consume electricity when it is cheap and abundant
They shut off when prices spike or the grid is stressed

This matters because utilities buy electricity at varying prices. If a flexible customer uses low-cost energy and avoids high-cost periods, it can reduce the utility’s average cost of power.

As one CFU representative explained, this dynamic lowers the average cost of power by reducing the need to purchase expensive electricity during peak periods.

That doesn’t guarantee lower bills, but it does suggest that mining — when structured correctly — is not inherently a cost burden and may improve system efficiency.

A Simple Test

One question that helps clarify the discussion:

If this facility were in a fully enclosed building, met all noise standards, and used a closed-loop system — would there still be strong opposition?

If the answer is yes, then the issue may not be the impacts themselves, but the perception of Bitcoin.

Closing Thought

There are legitimate concerns in this discussion, particularly around zoning, noise, and long-term planning. But many of the arguments raised in the meeting were not aligned with how the system was actually described.

If this decision is going to be made well, it should be grounded in:

land use
infrastructure planning
contract design
and measurable impacts

Not generalized assumptions about Bitcoin.

Link to the Cedar Falls Planning & Zoning Commission: March 25, 2026 where bitcoin mining, zoning and he new powerplant are discussed.

I also use the below link

YouVideoToText

to generate a transcript. You can then investigate the transcipt with ChatGPT or other LLM’s.

I have also already generated that PDF if you just want to download it yourself.

transcript Cedar Falls Planning &Zoning Commission March 25, 2026 Download

Bitcoin Is Good for the World—In Ways Most People Haven’t Considered

Posted on April 4, 2026 by hooglanda

Bitcoin Is Good for the World. Here’s the Case Most People Miss.

The typical Bitcoin conversation goes like this: someone brings it up, someone else calls it a scam or an environmental disaster, and the conversation collapses into noise before anything interesting gets said. What gets lost in all that noise is that Bitcoin is quietly doing things that genuinely matter — things that have nothing to do with the price chart. Specifically:

What Bitcoin mining is doing to stabilize the power grid
What it’s doing to reduce emissions in the atmosphere
What Bitcoin is doing to subsidize the creation of green energy assets (solar, wind, hydro)
What it’s doing for people living under governments that would rather they had no financial options at all

The Grid Problem Nobody Talks About

Here’s something that doesn’t get enough attention: the modern electric grid has a flexibility problem. Renewable energy sources like wind and solar are intermittent by nature. The wind doesn’t blow on command. The sun doesn’t shine at peak demand. So grids end up with these awkward mismatches — too much power when nobody needs it, not enough when everyone does.

The traditional fix involves “peaker plants” — gas-burning facilities that sit idle most of the time and fire up when demand spikes. They’re expensive to build and costly to run.

Bitcoin miners are different.

Unlike most industrial loads, they can scale down quickly when the grid is stressed and ramp back up when surplus power returns. That makes them one of the few large energy buyers that can absorb excess power without demanding constant priority from the grid.

A Duke University Nicholas Institute report found that the U.S. grid could accommodate 76 gigawatts of flexible load — roughly 10% of peak demand — with expected annual curtailment of just 0.25%.
👉 https://nicholasinstitute.duke.edu/sites/default/files/publications/rethinking-load-growth.pdf

That matters because electricity demand in the U.S. is rising again, driven by AI data centers, manufacturing, and electrification. Traditional data centers require continuous power and add stress at exactly the wrong times.

Bitcoin mining is the opposite.

It soaks up energy when the grid has too much and steps back when the grid needs relief.

It doesn’t just consume electricity — it makes the system more flexible.

And this isn’t just theoretical.

At a recent city council discussion in Cedar Falls, Iowa, the local utility (CFU) explained that their Bitcoin mining partner actually helps lower electricity costs for residents.

Their reasoning was simple:

The miner uses excess power when it’s cheap
It shuts down when power is expensive
That reduces the utility’s need to buy high-cost electricity

As one CFU representative put it during the meeting (timestamp 2:05:57):

“That lowers the average cost of power because we’re buying a lot less.”

👉 https://youtu.be/JcxxYyh2FoI?t=7508

That’s the part most people miss.

It’s not true that Bitcoin miners automatically raise electricity prices.

It depends entirely on how the contracts are structured.

In Cedar Falls, the utility itself is saying the opposite:

👉 The miner helps lower average costs for residents.

That’s not a theory.

That’s happening in practice.

The Methane Story Is Even More Interesting

If you’ve heard that Bitcoin is bad for the environment, you’ve probably heard the energy consumption number. What you likely haven’t heard is what Bitcoin mining can do with one of the most potent greenhouse gases on the planet: methane.

When oil is drilled, natural gas often comes up with it. In places where there’s no pipeline infrastructure nearby, operators may vent it or flare it. Both are bad outcomes. Methane has a much stronger warming effect than CO₂, and imperfect flaring leaves a meaningful share unburned.

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy acknowledged this directly in a 2022 report:
👉 https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/09-2022-Crypto-Assets-and-Climate-Report.pdf

Bitcoin mining offers a third option: put that gas to work.

Companies such as Crusoe deploy systems that use otherwise-wasted gas to generate electricity on site.

One widely cited analysis estimated that:

➡️ 9,482 tons of CO₂-equivalent emissions can be reduced per megawatt per year

👉 https://dergigi.com/assets/files/2022-09-03-arcane-research-how-bitcoin-mining-can-transform-the-energy-industry.pdf

Peer-reviewed research has also shown Bitcoin mining can help finance methane mitigation at landfills:
👉 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652624029652

Instead of releasing methane, it gets destroyed — and turned into useful energy.

Bitcoin doesn’t just use energy — it can clean up wasted energy.

Bitcoin Is Quietly Funding the Green Energy Build-Out

This is the angle that almost never makes it into mainstream coverage, and it’s arguably the most important one for long-term climate outcomes.

Building a renewable energy project is expensive and financially risky. One of the toughest windows is the period after the project is capable of generating electricity but before it is fully interconnected and earning reliable revenue from the grid.

During that phase:

Energy is being produced
But there may be no reliable buyer

That’s a problem.

A Cornell-led study published in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering found that Bitcoin mining can materially improve project economics during this phase. In Texas alone:

32 planned renewable projects
Could generate $47 million in additional profit
By using Bitcoin mining before grid integration

👉 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssuschemeng.3c05445

It also works after grid connection.

In parts of Texas, electricity prices can go negative.

Why?

Too much power
Not enough transmission
Not enough local demand

When that happens, producers may be forced to:

👉 Sell electricity at a loss
👉 Or shut down production

One West Texas solar plant had to sell 10.1% of its energy at a loss because of this.

Bitcoin mining changes that.

Instead of dumping excess energy into an oversupplied market, the plant can redirect that power into mining — creating a buyer of last resort and a price floor for surplus energy.

In that case, adding Bitcoin mining increased total site revenue by 3.7%.

👉 https://finance.yahoo.com/news/theres-no-catch-bitcoin-mining-200335729.html

Bitcoin turns stranded energy into revenue.

And that makes more projects viable.

Money as a Tool of Oppression

Most people in the developed world think of money as a neutral tool. But in many countries, financial systems are instruments of surveillance and control.

That’s why the Human Rights Foundation has spent years supporting Bitcoin tools and education for activists, journalists, and dissidents:
👉 https://hrf.org/program/financial-freedom/bitcoin-development-fund/

Bitcoin allows people to:

Receive money
Send money
Store savings

Without needing permission.

In 2026, HRF announced a new round of funding supporting projects helping billions of people living under authoritarian regimes:
👉 https://hrf.org/latest/hrfs-bitcoin-development-fund-announces-support-for-26-projects-worldwide/

Not as speculation.

As survival.

The Part Most People Miss

People tend to look at Bitcoin through their own lens.

They interpret it based on what they already understand — their background, their assumptions, their biases.

Some see a speculative asset.
Some see an environmental topic.
Some see a political idea.
Some see a technological curiosity.

But that lens often misses what’s actually happening.

Bitcoin is creating a new kind of demand for energy — one that is flexible, location-agnostic, and always willing to buy excess supply.

At the same time, it’s creating a form of money that doesn’t rely on permission.

Those two things don’t seem connected at first.

But they are.

And together, they’re quietly improving how energy is used, how infrastructure gets built, and how people access financial systems.

That story doesn’t show up in the price.

But Bitcoin is slowly improving the world — one miner and one transaction at a time.

Bitcoin Is Honest Money. Prove Me Wrong.

Posted on March 29, 2026 by hooglanda

👉 View the full immersive version of this essay

₿

← MyWheelLife.com

Essay · Money · Philosophy

Bitcoin Is Honest Money.
Prove Me Wrong.

By Axel Hoogland

Every serious objection to Bitcoin has already been thought through — and answered. This is a challenge to critics to find one that hasn’t.

2026 · A challenge to skeptics · Not financial advice

“The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work.”

— Satoshi Nakamoto, 2009

What Is Honest Money?

Money, at its core, is a technology for storing and transferring value across time and space. For thousands of years humans have searched for a form of money that couldn’t be corrupted — that couldn’t be debased by kings, inflated away by central banks, or confiscated by governments with printing presses and good intentions.

Gold came closest. Fixed supply. Scarce. No one could create more by decree. But gold has real problems — it’s heavy, hard to divide, difficult to verify, and nearly impossible to transmit across borders without trusting intermediaries. The very institutions gold was meant to protect us from ended up holding it for us. And once they held it, they printed paper on top of it. And once they printed paper, they removed the gold backing entirely.

This is not conspiracy theory. This is history. It happened in 1971. The dollar has lost over 98% of its purchasing power since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913.

Bitcoin is the first monetary technology in human history that combines the scarcity of gold with the transmissibility of the internet — and does so without requiring trust in any institution, government, or person. That is what makes it honest money. The rules are in the code. The code is public. No one can change the supply schedule. No one can freeze your coins without your keys. No one can print more.

Fixed supply of 21 million coins. Predictable issuance schedule. Decentralized — no single point of control or failure. Permissionless — no one can deny you access. Censorship resistant — no one can stop a valid transaction. Verifiable — anyone can audit the entire system.

Bitcoin as Money: The State of Adoption Argument

Critics love to point out that Bitcoin fails the three classical tests of money: store of value, medium of exchange, and unit of account. They’re not entirely wrong — yet. But this critique completely ignores that every monetary technology in history went through an adoption curve where these properties emerged gradually.

The dollar wasn’t always trusted. Gold wasn’t always liquid. The internet wasn’t always fast. Pointing at Bitcoin’s current limitations as though they’re permanent is like critiquing the iPhone in 2007 for not having an app store.

The sequence of monetary adoption is predictable and Bitcoin is following it precisely:

Stage 1 — Collectible / Speculation

Early adopters buy it because they believe others will value it later. This is where Bitcoin spent most of its early years. It still has some of this character today but has largely moved beyond it.

Stage 2 — Store of Value

Institutions, sovereigns, and sophisticated investors hold it as a hedge against currency debasement. This is where Bitcoin is now. BlackRock’s ETF alone holds over $86 billion. Strategy holds over 762,000 coins — more than 3% of the entire supply. Nation states are building reserves.

Stage 3 — Medium of Exchange

As volatility dampens with deeper liquidity and wider adoption, transacting in Bitcoin becomes practical. Layer 2 solutions like Lightning Network are already enabling this. As the price stabilizes at higher levels, the incentive to spend rather than hold increases.

Stage 4 — Unit of Account

Prices denominated in satoshis. This is the final stage and the most distant — but not implausible in a world where Bitcoin has achieved reserve asset status globally.

21M Maximum Supply. Ever.

3-4M Estimated Lost Forever

762K Coins Held by Strategy

$170B US Spot ETF Assets

Bitcoin as Philosophy

Bitcoin is not just a financial instrument. It is a philosophical statement — arguably the most important one made in the field of money since Bretton Woods.

Distrust of institutions is not paranoia. The 2008 financial crisis demonstrated that the institutions entrusted with the monetary system could be catastrophically wrong, spectacularly rewarded for failure, and bailed out with money created from nothing. The genesis block was not subtle about this. Satoshi embedded a newspaper headline about bank bailouts directly into Bitcoin’s first block.

Sovereignty over your own wealth is a human right. The ability to hold value that cannot be confiscated, frozen, or inflated away without your consent is not a radical idea. It is the natural extension of property rights. Bitcoin makes that right technologically enforceable for the first time in history.

Scarcity is not the enemy of prosperity. The dominant monetary philosophy of the 20th century held that money supply should be managed. Bitcoin rejects this entirely. Its scarcity is not a bug but the central feature. Scarcity is what gives money its meaning as a store of value across time.

Rules over rulers. Perhaps the deepest philosophical claim Bitcoin makes is that mathematical rules enforced by cryptography are more trustworthy than any human institution. Not because humans are evil — but because humans are fallible, corruptible, and mortal. Code, once deployed and sufficiently decentralized, is not.

The Environmental Argument — Already Answered

Bitcoin uses an enormous amount of energy. This is true. What critics leave out is what kind of energy, and what Bitcoin does with it.

Bitcoin miners are uniquely flexible electricity consumers — they can be switched on and off instantly, making them ideal buyers of stranded and curtailed renewable energy that would otherwise be wasted. Wind farms and solar arrays frequently produce more power than grids can absorb. Bitcoin absorbs the excess, making previously uneconomic renewable projects viable.

More compellingly: Bitcoin miners are increasingly deployed to combust methane — the gas vented from oil wells and landfills that would otherwise enter the atmosphere directly. Methane is roughly 80 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 over a 20-year period. Using it to mine Bitcoin converts it to CO2, dramatically reducing net emissions. This is not spin. It is chemistry and thermodynamics.

The environmental argument against Bitcoin is a legacy talking point that has not kept pace with how mining has actually evolved. The narrative persists not because it is accurate but because it is politically useful to those with incentives to undermine Bitcoin’s legitimacy.

The Objections — And Why They’ve Been Answered

What follows is an honest accounting of the most serious objections to Bitcoin, and the responses that Bitcoin thinkers have developed over 17 years of adversarial scrutiny. These are the actual strongest arguments — tested against people who have spent careers trying to find the fatal flaw.

Objection: Quantum Computing Will Break Bitcoin’s Cryptography

A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could theoretically derive private keys from public keys, compromising holdings.

Quantum computing is an existential threat to every cryptographic system on earth — every bank, every government database, every secure communication. Bitcoin is actually among the more adaptable systems since it can hard fork to quantum-resistant algorithms, which already exist and are being standardized. This objection proves too much — if quantum breaks Bitcoin, it breaks everything.

Objection: Transaction Fees Can’t Sustain Miner Security After Halvings

Block rewards halve every four years until ~2140. At zero issuance, miners must be compensated by fees alone. If fees are insufficient, hash rate drops and the network becomes vulnerable.

This objection ignores the difficulty adjustment — one of Bitcoin’s most elegant mechanisms. If hash rate drops, difficulty adjusts down, making mining profitable again at a new equilibrium. At $1 million per coin, even tiny fees in BTC terms are substantial in dollar terms. The security budget concern disappears at scale.

Objection: A Superior Competitor Will Replace Bitcoin

Technology has network effects that shift. Something better could emerge and Bitcoin could become MySpace.

This analogy fundamentally misunderstands monetary network effects. MySpace lost to Facebook because Facebook was more useful in ways users could immediately feel. Monetary network effects are far stickier — the value of money IS the network. Gold held its monetary premium for 5,000 years. Bitcoin may have crossed a similar threshold.

Objection: Governments Will Ban It

Sovereign monetary authorities will not permit a parallel monetary system to challenge their control.

China has “banned” Bitcoin multiple times. It still trades in China. Bans on information and mathematics don’t work. More importantly, the US regulatory posture has reversed dramatically. Spot ETFs are approved. SAB 121 has been rescinded. Institutional banks can now custody digital assets. The world’s largest capital market is opening, not closing.

Objection: Bitcoin Is Too Volatile To Be Money

Something that drops 70% in a year cannot function as a reliable store of value.

Volatility is a function of market depth and adoption, not an intrinsic property of Bitcoin. Every asset becomes less volatile as liquidity deepens. Gold was volatile when its market was thin. Bitcoin’s volatility has been declining measurably each cycle as institutional participation deepens. This objection describes the present state and projects it as permanent — a logical error.

The Real Challenge

After seventeen years of adversarial scrutiny by some of the sharpest minds in cryptography, economics, and computer science — every major objection to Bitcoin has been examined and answered.

The honest answer to “what could derail Bitcoin?” is the unknown unknown — the thing no one has thought of yet. That’s intellectually serious. That’s the right answer.

The challenge to skeptics is simple: find a serious objection that the Bitcoin community hasn’t already examined in depth and answered.

Even Fidelity — one of the world’s largest asset managers — has concluded that ignoring Bitcoin is no longer a prudent approach. The burden of proof has shifted. It is no longer on Bitcoin advocates to justify owning it — it is on skeptics to justify owning zero.

Most people who try to find a fatal flaw end up owning Bitcoin instead.

The Structural Buying Pressure Nobody Is Talking About

Beyond the philosophical and technical case, there is a mechanical reality forming in markets that deserves attention. Fidelity’s 2026 research finds that Bitcoin has delivered the highest risk-adjusted returns of any asset class over both five and ten year horizons — and that even a 1-3% allocation has historically produced meaningful portfolio improvements.

Companies like Strategy have pioneered a model where corporate balance sheets treat Bitcoin as a primary treasury reserve asset, funding ongoing purchases through equity and non-margin debt instruments. Strategy alone holds over 762,000 coins — more than 3.6% of the total supply — and has structured its balance sheet specifically to avoid any forced liquidation scenario. This is a one-way accumulation machine.

This is happening simultaneously with the halving-driven supply reduction — the programmatic 50% reduction in new Bitcoin issuance that occurs every four years. Less new supply entering the market. More institutional demand absorbing existing supply. ETFs holding billions on behalf of pension funds, endowments, and retail investors who will never touch a private key.

These forces compound. They do not reverse without a fundamental change in the thesis — and the thesis has only gotten stronger with time.

The Honest Remaining Risks

Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging what is genuinely uncertain.

The unknown unknown. Bitcoin could fail in ways no one has conceived. This is true of any system. It is taken seriously precisely because it cannot be dismissed — but also cannot be acted upon. You cannot hedge against what you cannot imagine.

A catastrophic BIP. The Bitcoin Improvement Proposal process is the mechanism by which protocol changes are proposed and adopted. Conservative governance makes bad changes unlikely — but not impossible. The community’s demonstrated ability to resist even well-intentioned changes (the block size wars) suggests this risk is managed, not eliminated.

Partial success. The most likely “disappointing” outcome is not failure but incomplete success — Bitcoin becomes a globally recognized store of value held by institutions and sovereigns, reaching prices that would have seemed absurd a decade ago, but never fully displacing fiat as the unit of account for everyday life. This would be an extraordinary outcome for holders while representing a partial failure of the original vision.

Conclusion: The Game Theory of Honest Money

You don’t have to believe Bitcoin will succeed to understand why it might.

A small number of people who deeply understand the monetary system, the history of currency debasement, and the technical properties of Bitcoin will continue to accumulate. Their accumulation drives price. Rising price attracts attention. Attention drives adoption. Adoption deepens liquidity. Deeper liquidity dampens volatility. Dampened volatility enables broader use as money. Broader use as money drives further adoption.

The masses don’t need to understand sound money theory for this to play out. They never do. They didn’t understand TCP/IP to use the internet. They didn’t understand double-entry bookkeeping to trust banks. They will not need to understand elliptic curve cryptography to hold Bitcoin.

History doesn’t require universal understanding to move in a direction. It requires enough people who understand to make it inevitable for everyone else.

The question is not whether Bitcoin is perfect. No monetary system is. The question is whether it is more honest than what we have — and whether honest money, once available, can ultimately lose to dishonest money in a world where information moves freely.

If you’ve found a flaw the Bitcoin community hasn’t already answered, the world is listening.

This essay represents the author’s analysis and philosophical perspective. It is not financial advice. Bitcoin is a volatile asset. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Do your own research. Hold your own keys.

By Axel Hoogland

MyWheelLife.com

Bitcoin Is Honest Money · 2026 · Not your keys · Not your coins

Bitcoin Maps and a Simple Observation

Posted on March 22, 2026 by hooglanda

I opened the Bitcoin map inside Cash App today.

Then I opened https://btcmap.org.

Both maps showed the same thing.

A large number of businesses.

Restaurants, shops, and local services spread across the city.

For a long time, the common assumption has been that Bitcoin is mostly held, not used.

But when you look at these maps, that assumption becomes harder to maintain.

These are not theoretical use cases.

They are physical businesses that have made the decision to accept Bitcoin as a form of payment.

What Happens When a Business Accepts Bitcoin

When a business enables Bitcoin payments, something else happens at the same time.

It gets listed.

On Cash App, it appears on the local Bitcoin map.
On BTC Map, it becomes part of a global directory.

In both cases, the business becomes easier to find.

A Different Type of Customer

Most marketing is broad.

Businesses advertise and hope the right customer eventually sees it.

These maps work differently.

Someone opening a Bitcoin map is already looking for a place to spend.

That is a narrower and more specific type of demand.

The business is not trying to attract attention.

It is being surfaced directly to someone who is already interested.

A Small but Growing Effect

Each individual business making this decision is not a major event.

But the pattern is noticeable.

A few businesses appear.
Then a cluster forms.
Then an area becomes dense.

That pattern shows up on both maps.

Larger Businesses Are Starting to Participate

This is not limited to small or experimental businesses.

Steak ‘n Shake now accepts Bitcoin.

That does not mean universal adoption is imminent.

But it does suggest that accepting Bitcoin is moving from the edge toward something more normal.

Why Early Adoption Matters

There is a practical advantage to being early.

When fewer businesses are listed:

Each one is more visible
Each one stands out more clearly

As more businesses adopt, that visibility becomes more diluted.

This is true for most discovery platforms.

A Simple Takeaway

Bitcoin adoption is often discussed in abstract terms.

But these maps show something more concrete.

Businesses are choosing to accept it.
And when they do, they become easier to find.

That is a small change at the individual level.

But repeated many times, it starts to look like a system forming.

Final Thought

You do not need to assume that Bitcoin will replace existing systems to notice what is happening.

You can simply open a map and observe:

Businesses are adopting it.

And the ones that do it earlier are easier to see.

$200K vs $1.2M: A SATA + STRC Thought Experiment on Reaching F.I.R.E.

Posted on March 16, 2026 by hooglanda

For years, the standard framework for retirement income has been the 4% rule.

The idea is simple: if you want $48,500 per year of spending, you would typically need roughly:

$48,500 × 25 = $1,212,500

In other words, about $1.2 million invested in a diversified portfolio to sustainably withdraw that income.

But recently I came across an interesting thought experiment involving two relatively new preferred securities.

Before diving into the math, it’s important to note that these securities ultimately sit within financial structures connected to Bitcoin, so they carry some exposure to the long-term success of Bitcoin itself. More on that later.

Two High-Yield Preferred Securities

Two securities caught my attention:

Strategy Series C Preferred (STRC) – currently yielding about 11.5%
Strive Asset Management Preferred (SATA) – currently yielding about 12.75%

Both are preferred securities issued by companies building financial products around Bitcoin treasury strategies.

An interesting feature is their dividend timing.

STRC has an ex-dividend date around the 15th of the month
SATA has an ex-dividend date around the 28th of the month

The actual cash payment arrives roughly 15 days later, but what matters for dividend eligibility is simply holding the shares on the ex-dividend date.

After that date passes, an investor can sell the shares and still receive the dividend.

The Rotation Idea

Because the ex-dividend dates occur at different times of the month, a strategy some investors discuss is rotating between the two securities:

Hold STRC through its ex-dividend date (~15th)
After the ex-date passes, sell and move into SATA
Hold SATA through its ex-dividend date (~28th)
Then rotate back to STRC and repeat

In theory, this rotation attempts to capture both dividend streams each month.

The Yield Math

Using approximate yields:

SATA: 12.75%
STRC: 11.5%

Combined:

12.75% + 11.5% = 24.25%

If an investor pays roughly 24% tax on the income:

24.25% × 0.76 ≈ 18.4% after tax

That’d give this investor $18,400 per a year income on $100k or $36,400 per a year on $200k.

The Early Retirement Thought Experiment

Suppose an early retired investor allocated $200,000 to this strategy.

At a 24.25% gross yield, the income would be:

$200,000 × 0.2425 = $48,500 per year

Under the traditional 4% rule, producing that same income would require:

$48,500 × 25 = $1,212,500

So the comparison looks like this:

Strategy	Capital Required
Traditional 4% rule	~$1.2 million
Preferred rotation idea	~$200,000

That’s roughly a 6× difference in required capital.

Even More Interesting for Early Retirees

For some early retirees who structure their income carefully, qualified dividend income can fall within the 0% federal tax bracket.

In that scenario, the full 24.25% yield could theoretically flow through without federal income tax.

Using the same $200,000 example:

Investment	Yield	Annual Income
$200,000	24.25%	$48,500

That level of income could cover a meaningful portion of living expenses for many households.

The Bitcoin Connection

It’s important to understand what ultimately sits underneath these securities.

Both STRC and SATA are part of financial structures built around companies holding significant amounts of Bitcoin on their balance sheets.

At the base of these preferred securities is therefore some degree of Bitcoin risk.

If Bitcoin were to fail as an asset class entirely, the underlying business models supporting these preferreds would likely fail as well.

However, if Bitcoin continues to grow and remain valuable over time, these structures should continue to function as designed.

It is also possible that as demand for these types of securities increases, the dividend yields could gradually decline. Markets tend to compress yields when large numbers of investors compete for the same income-producing assets.

So the yields discussed above should be viewed as the current state of the market, not necessarily a permanent condition.

Finally there is company risk. Strive (ASST) issues SATA and Strategy (MSTR) issues STRC. Either company could fail for some generic business reason and that woudl also be a risk, just like any business.

Final Thoughts

For decades, the 4% rule has been a useful guideline for thinking about retirement income.

But financial markets are constantly evolving, and new structures occasionally appear that change the math in interesting ways.

This rotation idea may or may not prove durable over the long run. But it highlights how emerging financial instruments—especially those tied to Bitcoin treasury strategies—are beginning to create entirely new types of income assets.

And sometimes, when you run the numbers, it’s worth pausing and asking:

Could the future of income investing look different than the past?

As of 3-16-2026 I started an account to do this specifically. I will share the results in a few months or at the end of the year to see how it’s gone and if anything has changed since I started this experiment.

All prices in the below table are per share. multiple the # shares x any price to get the total amount. I started with 10x $97.22 = $972.20 and a purchase of 10 shares of SATA. I borrowed money for this experiment from a HELOC at a rate of 6.25% starting.

4-9-2026 I borrowed another $1k and purchased $2k of STRC. As of this date my current plan is to work up to $12k invested with this test.

$12k x (.1275+.115) = $2,910/year in dividends.

$2910x 22% tax = $640.20 in taxes

$12,000 x 6.25% interest loan = $750

$2910-$750-640.20 = $1,519.80/year income.
If i have to make 4 trades (2x/month + 2x sell/month) x 12 months = 48 trades/year, if the trades each toook 1 hour, which they ceratinly do NOT, but hypotentically $1,519.80/48 = $31.66/hour, if you wanted to compare this back to a wage job. Since it’s completely borrowed money and not my standard cash I think this is useful comparison to determine if this is worth the time. This also scales more $/hr with more money as the amount of time to trade 100k shares vs 10 shares should be the same. As the market matures I will continue to learn more about this.

None of this takes into account buying STRD every 3rd month instead of STRC to get a 3 month quarterly payout vs the monthly STRC payout. I will be doing that in June 2026 and keeping track of that data here also. That should significatinly improve all the metrics, in theory. Adding STRD every 3rd months will hypothetically add 13% return to the total plan. But you have to subtract 1/4 of the 11.5% since you are missing a monthly STRC payout so 11.5%/4 = 2.875% so 13% – 2.875% ~ 10% added on top. So at $12k/year x 10% = $1,200 which is about as much as the total previous plan! adding that in

(.10+.115+.1275) = 0.3425 *$12k =$4,110 x .22 tax = $904.2 taxes

the same loan applies though $12,000 x 6.25% interest loan = $750

so $4,110-$904.20-$750 = $2455.80 vs $1,519.80 for a total final increase of $936 / $12k =7.8% real improvement. and $2455.80/48 hrs = $51.16 /hr.

We will see in 12 months if this is working!

$12k also makes sense for me as it is <1% of my net worth. So I wouldn’t be in a catastropic position if this failed. Risk/reward should be considered for anyone doing anything like this. Do your own research. Not Financial advice.

4-28-2026 https://www.strategy.com/strc/vote

Proposing to Pay STRC Dividends Semi-Monthly
Strategy is proposing to pay semi-monthly dividends on STRC, instead of monthly. If approved and adopted, we believe this would lead to reduced reinvestment lag, enhanced liquidity, market efficiency, and increased price stability.

Proposed Amendment Timeline
April 17: Preliminary Proxy Filed
April 28: Definitive Proxy Filed(1) Voting Opens
June 8: Meeting Date Voting Completes
June 30: First Record Date under New Cadence(2)
July 15: First Payment Date under New Cadence(2)

STRC is planning to pay 2x / month. This would be good for the stability of STRC. But it would make it harder to do this strategy of moving between the 2 stocks, STRC and STRD each month.

Also in the month of April my purchase of STRC (20 shares) happened at $100/share but selling was $99.50 for a loss of $0.50/share. The dividend should be $0.96/share for a profit of $0.46 but that is still a lot below the goal. We will see in a couple days how this plays out. SATA is also discussing going to semi monthly payouts. If both were doing semi monthly on alternating weeks it might still allow the rotation but with 2x the work. The price might be more stable. I will continue this experiment for some time further.

5-14-2026 – SATA (Strive) has come out with the plan to pay DAILY dividends. This is a huge idea but also negates this rotation strategy. I will hearby cancel this rotation strategy for these dividends. It seems it wasn’t particualry successful since the stocks were falling and not quite recovering during the time needed to buy back for the next stock.

STRIVE – The Daily Dividend Company

Digital Credit is going DAILY

Below are the improvements on the horizon for $SATA and @Strive

What it means and why it matters 🧵👇 pic.twitter.com/7GQcZ9BNUl
— Jeff Walton (@PunterJeff) May 14, 2026

Stock	# shares	Date Purchased	Date Sold	Purchase Price	Sell Price	price appreciation	Dividend PD Date	loan interest rate	Dividend
SATA	10	3-16-26	4-1-26	$97.22	97.89	+$0.67	4-15-26	6.25%	$10.63
STRC	20	4-9-2026	4-28-2026	$100.005	$99.50	-$0.50	4-30-26	6.25%	$19.17
SATA	20	4-29-26		$99.97				6.25%

This article is for informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice.

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