Choosing among limited investment options. Russian percussion again.

20250610

YouTube keeps thrusting itself in my face. I hate it – but I submit. I never buy anything that’s advertised, but they have no way of knowing.

Since their artificial intelligence knows all about me, they are able to hammer me with suggestions that I watch stuff like this, targeted at older folks. The message is twofold. First is that, at 82, I am old. Second, there are a thousand things that as an oldster I should fear. Mostly deterioration and the diseases and infirmities associated with age. And I should of course pay for advice as to how to slow it!

This one provides seven signs to look for, indicating you are slowing. The comments show that most viewers, like me, bathe in confirmation bias. We’re not gone yet!

I suspect that most of you, my contemporaries, can still get up off the floor without hanging onto anything. Your comments seem lucid enough. Your aggravations with modern technology are nothing unique to us elderly. I imagine that the most unique aspects of my life are young kids and a level of exercise that would be unusual for somebody in their forties.

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Last night’s Russian Percussion went on for about three hours, reportedly hitting seven of the ten districts of Kyiv. It was certainly loud. The house shook. Yet, amazingly, it is not the lead story for either the Kyiv Post or online.ua. The Kyiv Independent and Ukrainian-language Unian report seven deaths throughout the country, none here in Kyiv. For all the noise, and the damage shown in photos, it is hard to believe such low numbers.

It was, as we read, mostly cheap, slow-moving Iranian-style Shaheed pilotless aircraft. The sound of their go-kart engines went all night. The machine guns shooting them down fired frequently. Eddie says our objective is to hit them over the rivers, so they don’t fall onto houses. We hear them explode, whether as a result of being hit in flight or landing on a target we don’t know.

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Six months ago, Yulia, the evaluator of my speech on investing, harshly reminded me that the investment vehicles I spoke about are not available to most Ukrainians. She was right. I’m rectifying that oversight with a speech about the limited range of options that are open to Ukrainians given their limited incomes, lack of information and currency restrictions. There isn’t much: foreign currency, precious metals and crypto. In such a small universe, Bitcoin looks pretty good.

This draft video includes this graphic about Bitcoin ownership. It shows a very lopsided distribution. Analyzing the public keys on the blockchain, one observes that the greatest number of Bitcoin holders own less than .00001 Bitcoin, just over a dollar. The number of individual public keys becomes too small to see on the graph when they own more than 10 (134,804 public keys), but those accounts hold five sixths of all Bitcoin.

A couple of big caveats here. Pointing towards even higher concentration, a single person or entity can own multiple public keys. Pointing the other way, brokers such as Binance and CoinDesk can hold Bitcoin for multiple deposits under a single public key. You really don’t know.

Another interesting graph is Bitcoin ownership as a percent of the population, by country. Its worldwide ownership indicates that lots of people face the same investing dilemmas as Ukrainians. Whether they like it or not, crypto is the best alternative they see. Such broad ownership gives you confidence. After all, what is gold but a “pet rock” or a “barbaric relic?” The thing that makes it money is – being accepted as money. It is a means of transaction and a store of value. Bitcoin is very fungible – can be traded anywhere in the world.

Techies will argue the relative merits of Bitcoin, Tether, Ethereum and others. In my view they overthink the question. People like Bitcoin because (1) it is the original and best known, (2) it is easy to transact, and (3) it has built-in inflation protection. These three reasons give rise to (4). It is because of them that it has about the best performance among cryptocurrencies. Some electrons floating in thin air are better than others.

Those are the thoughts from Lake WeBeGone, where the kids are enjoying summer vacation as Dad uses the downtime brought on by a summer cold to continue to read in Ukrainian and occasionally blog.

Graham