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New High: Bitcoin at $71K
Plus Ackman's Bitcoin Critique: Energy Crisis
The Breakdown First Five - Monday, March 11, 2024
Welcome back to The Breakdown First Five — the 5 most interesting and/or important stories in bitcoin, crypto, and markets to start your day.

5. Memecoin Mania
Well, that escalated quickly. Another weekend of frenzied degeneracy culminated in plans to put a memecoin on the Las Vegas Sphere. The memecoin mania has caused many industry figures to ponder what exactly we’re doing here. Others noted that the SEC has all but outlawed useful crypto assets, paving the way for a dogcoin glut. Is this a top signal? Maybe, but we’re yet to see a high profile celebrity slinging memes like we did in 2021.
Some criticize meme coin mania as embracing nihilism, and I’m not entirely unsympathetic. But the bigger issue is the government has made it illegal to put value accrual on-chain.
Imagine a world where, in 10 minutes, anyone could start a business and issue tokens, granting… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
— Doug Colkitt (@0xdoug)
4:32 PM • Mar 10, 2024
4. Coinbase Ethereum ETF Meeting
Coinbase attended a meeting with the SEC to explain their correlation data. Coinbase had filed a comment to show that spot and futures markets in Ethereum are tightly correlated, the silver bullet argument that won Bitcoin ETF approval. Rumblings from the SEC is that staff are not particularly convinced and aren’t moving rapidly as they did with Bitcoin. May 23 is the final deadline for VanEck’s product. Lack of SEC engagement makes approval questionable.
🚨SCOOP: Optimism about the @SECGov approving the $ETH spot ETFs by May 23rd is waning.
Based on my conversations with people familiar, meetings in recent weeks have been very much one sided, with issuers and custodians trying to rally SEC staff to get the process rolling, but… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
— Eleanor Terrett (@EleanorTerrett)
6:58 PM • Mar 10, 2024
3. ETF Flippening
IBIT is now bigger than Microstrategy. The New 9 are larger than GBTC. This is the new Bitcoin economy. The Bitcoin ETFs now hold 4% of supply. They passed $100B in total volume. Blackrock has seen $10B in inflows, a feat that took QQQ over a year. Wall Street is here and they’re buying as much Bitcoin as they can.
The New 9 have flipped GBTC.
IBIT has flipped MSTR.
Wall Street is now in Control.— Fred Krueger (@dotkrueger)
10:43 PM • Mar 9, 2024
2. Ackman Taking a Look
Legendary hedge fund manager Bill Ackman is taking a fresh look at Bitcoin. His analysis of how miners impact electricity supply was all wrong, but Bitcoin twitter was ready to correct it. The main point was that fresh all time highs are giving skeptics a reason to rethink their priors. With Blackrock on board with the most successful ETF of all time, it’s starting to become harder to explain a zero allocation.
A scenario:
Bitcoin price rise leads to increased mining and greater energy use, driving up the cost of energy, causing inflation to rise and the dollar to decline, driving demand for Bitcoin and increased mining, driving demand for energy and the cycle continues.
Bitcoin… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman)
9:25 PM • Mar 9, 2024
1. Fresh All Time Highs At $71k
After multiple fleeting all time highs last week, Bitcoin cemented its high over the weekend and launched over $71,000 to begin Monday. There is no longer any question, there’s no exchange outages, Bitcoin traded above $69,000 for 20 hours on Sunday and is opening its highest weekly candle ever. Up here it’s pure price discovery and the order books are thin. Going to be a big week.
#BITCOIN JUST HIT $71,000
— Crypto Rover (@rovercrc)
7:32 AM • Mar 11, 2024