GM.

Welcome to Bitcoin Therapy. We’re like your personal therapist - except we heal you with fart jokes and nuggets of knowledge.

First, happy and relaxing Sunday to 2,431 patients reading today. 👋 

I’m on my 4th cup of coffee. This week’s edition is brought to you by caffeine™️ .

Here’s what I got for you this week:

• How SBF’s dad lobbied himself a $1M/year salary

• Turns out most of NFTs are worthless (shocker, I know)

• 53% of hashrate is now controlled by KYC pools (not good)

Estimated read time: 4 minutes and 13 seconds

But first, a big thank you to Wasabi Wallet for sponsoring this week’s email and keeping this newsletter free for the reader ❤️

HOW SBF’S DAD LOBBIED HIMSELF A HIGHER SALARY

Just when you thought the FTX saga couldn’t get any worse…we get this.

Here’s what happened:

• SBF's dad was unhappy with his salary at FTX

• He wanted his son to pay him $1 million a year (instead of $200,000)

• So he pulled the classic "I'm telling your mother" and CC:d his wife into the email thread

Yup, you read that right. He literally said: "Gee, Sam I don’t know what to say here … Putting [your mom] on this.”

Lmao. You can’t make this shit up.

Now, let me recap all the shenanigans going on at Bankman-Fraud family:

1. SBF committed every fraudulent activity under the sun

2. Mom encouraged him not to disclose illegal political donations using users’ funds

3. Dad lobbied himself a $1M/yr salary and other suspicious expenses

4. Brother planned to buy the island nation of Nauru with FTX funds to build an apocalypse bunker

5. Mom encouraged him to avoid disclosing several illegal political donations using stolen customer funds

Source: FTX lawsuit

I mean, it all makes sense. Just look how flawlessly Mama SBF pulls the evil look.

Can you guess which one is her?

Say what you want, but at least this family makes a great team! At scamming, but still. Alright, praise time is over. Send them all to jail now.

Joking aside, this is a perfect example of how corrupt the US legal system is:

• FTX was a huge ponzi run by SBF

• His parents were Stanford Law professors and intimately involved in FTX

• His parents were part of donating money to the political apparatus

• 100’s of millions of stolen customer funds funneled to politicians (and will never be returned)

The result? SBF’s parents are NOT prosecuted.

Why? I see 2 options:

1. Either they’re protected by the system

2. Or they gave their son to them

It could be both, but mostly number 1.

Anyways. If this doesn’t make a Netflix series, I will be very disappointed.

LIKE TO BE WATCHED WHILE YOU POOP?

If you answered ‘no,’ congratz: you’re normal.

You know what’s also normal? Not revealing absolutely everything about your financial activity to third parties.

And you do exactly this by not coinjoining your Bitcoin. This blog explains why it’s essential for keeping your Bitcoin private and thus SAFE,

I recommend Wasabi Wallet for this. Here’s why:

1. Beginner friendly

2. Privacy by default

3. No minimum Coinjoin amounts

What are you waiting for? Take back control of your privacy and freedom.

Join 500,000+ Wasabi users by downloading it at wasabiwallet.io

OVER 50% OF BITCOIN IS MINED BY KYC POOLS

So, let’s talk about KYC. And no, it’s not a cousin of ‘KYS.’

Do you know what it is? Poll time!

I know you answered correctly. You read Bitcoin Therapy, automatically making you a super-intelligent Chad/Chadina.

KYC is a common policy that many (usually financial services) companies must enforce. Simply put, it means they need to verify their customers’ identity and what they do with their money.

And as it turns out, over 53% of new Bitcoin blocks today are mined by 2 KYC-only pools (Foundry and Antpool).

That’s not good. At all. Here’s why:

1. The KYC trend is growing globally (soon you will need to KYC yourself to buy a Big Mac)

2. KYC pools/miners can censor transactions they don’t like

3. Governments can coerce miners to censor transactions they deem “dangerous”

4. Governments can visit the KYC pool operators and force you to run an upgrade that adds 5% inflation to Bitcoin (bye 21 M hard cap)

5. Governments could theoretically confiscate KYC’d miners since their identities and addresses are known

6. If they manage to acquire over 51% of the hash rate, they can perform what’s called a 51% attack, which allows you to replace old transactions

So what can we do about this growing trend? Well, a few things:

1. Keep talking about this to spread awareness (which is what I’m doing right now)

2. If you’re a miner, only send your hashrate to pools that don’t require KYC (like our friends at Braiins)

The growing divide between no-KYC bitcoin and KYC bitcoin will create two ‘bitcoins’:

1. Permissioned - processed by KYC pools

2. Permissionless - processed by non-KYC pools

This is not good. However, I think these KYC pools are shooting themselves in the foot long term:

1. Permissioned Bitcoin has no advantages over TradFi, where you have inflation, fast and cheap payments

2. Compare this with permissionless Bitcoin, which has a huge advantage: it’s censorship-resistant and scarce

3. This will result in nobody using these KYC pools and them going out of business. No usage = no fees

Unfortunately, KYC is a growing trend in Bitcoin. This is why services like our sponsor Wasabi Wallet are important.

They don’t remove the effect of KYC, but they do give you future anonymity with coinjoins.

95% OF NFT’S ARE WORTHLESS

Nope, it's not clickbait,

Now, it's no secret that being an NFT collector is cringe right now.

But just how cringe? That’s what analytics company dappGambl decided to find out. They looked at 73,000+ (yes, there’s a lot of crap out there) NFT projects.

Here’s what they discovered:

• 95% of these projects have a market cap of $0. This means 69,795 projects are worth less than my dog’s farts

• 79% of projects failed to sell out their collections. The supply is magnitudes larger than the demand

And you would think that it’s the small market cap NFT collections that are being obliterated. BUT NO. There’s carnage across the NFT market.

Here’s the depressing stats for the top 8,850 NFTs:

• 18% of these have a market cap of $0

• 41% of them are between $5 – $100

• Less than 1% have a floor price of a minimum of $6,000

TLDR: NFTs are f*cked.

And I’m not one bit surprised: most of these NFT “collections” were cash grabs to start with.

NFT’s are an IQ test. If you bought, you failed. Oh, and you enriched some random dude with basic Photoshop skills.

RABBIT HOLE READS 🕳️……🐇

• Bitcoin.org operator Cøbra was forced to shut down the OG website for not revealing his identity in court

• Crypto exchange CoinEx published an open letter to its hackers in the hope of them returning stolen funds. “Please, senor, mi familia…”

• Bitcoin adoption is happening in Cuba amidst currency implosion

THIS WEEK IN A MEME 📅

The best time to buy Bitcoin was 13 years ago.

The second best time is today.

FROM THE ARCHIVE 📁

I bet you’ve never heard Hal Finney talk.

Well, now you have.

Shoutout to Pete for finding this absolute gem ❤️

PATIENT REVIEW 🧠

That’s it for this one. Big thanks to our sponsor Wasabi Wallet who allows us to write Bitcoin Therapy.

If you like what you read, please reply to this to this email (it helps with email deliverability). And if you don’t, you can unsubscribe below.

See you next Sunday,

Bitcoin Therapy Team

PS: Want to sponsor Bitcoin Therapy? Just reply to this email and let me know :)

PSS: Enjoy the newsletter? Please forward it to a bitcoiner. It only takes 5 seconds. Writing it takes me 5 hours