Following up on this, #1517354 gotta fuel the arch-boomer Siggy's wonderful books territory. (So that he can redistribute some of his boomer wealth back to me!!)

The arch-retard Fred Krueger, having gone from shitcoiner to suitcoiner to BIPtard in a single cycle, also released a hopelessly ignorant book last year: Bitcoin One Million: The Final Chapter of Fiat

Astonishingly, Krueger and Sigman hit the exact top with their publication...Astonishingly, Krueger and Sigman hit the exact top with their publication...

That's precisely on par with how hubris shit like this goes. (Anyone remember Dow 36,000?? Yes, those dudes were correct... just twenty years late... and missed the dot-com collapse right before their eyes.)

The full, unedited version that ran in print:

"For the lack of basic statistics, we have this book.""For the lack of basic statistics, we have this book."

Every Bitcoin cycle produces some new fancy-sounding model, created and advocated by some charlatan with a platform and a stunning graph. We’ve had rainbows and stock-to-flow, Metcalfe Laws and halving cycles; most don’t survive for more than a cycle, destined to gather dust in a forgotten Twitter thread. 

The power law model at the base of Krueger and Sigman’s book is a similar such phenomenon, a wholly inapplicable use of statistical wizardry in support of advancing an idea — an idea that on its own is altogether plausible, and at least believable to us in Bitcoinland. There are runaway fiscal problems, problems of sanctions and cross-border commerce, problems of affordability and monetary mismanagement and unwieldy asset markets. All of those point in the direction of bitcoin, which we can see in more people adopting it, more capital flowing into it, and more services being built. Extrapolate that out a decade or two, and we get a world where bitcoin is a dominant global macro asset. No appeal to power-law relationships needed.

Everything in Bitcoin adheres to this law, the authors say: adoption, price, or even using gold as a denominator instead of the dollar price. “You don’t see relationships like this in financial data. Ever,” (page 7), the authors write confidently. The “mathematical relationship between time and price,” they claim toward the end of the book, is “the most robust pricing model in financial history” (page 299). 

It’s reminding me of that illuminating scene in the movie The Big Short (“why are they confessing? They’re not confessing, they’re bragging”).It’s reminding me of that illuminating scene in the movie The Big Short (“why are they confessing? They’re not confessing, they’re bragging”).

When you delve into the statistics of regressing an asset’s heavily smoothed-out price level on time in log-log space, you quickly run into errors and triviality. 

In a financial credit system that nominally and structurally expands, you’re bound to produce high R-squared fits in log-log space (read: data compression). When something has been going up for a long time, you can fit a beautiful curve to it; that doesn’t mean the curve predicts anything. The authors’ R² = 0.997 doesn’t say anything meaningful about the world. It’s almost trivial, and not at all profound or indicative of a predictive relationship worthy of the name “law.”

Some cursory reasons for why tradfi practitioners would be stunned at this theatrical number include:

• R-squared in log-log space isn’t the same as the R-squared in linear space they’re used to. 
• In power laws with extreme tails, standard econometric assumptions don’t apply: To put it technically, what the authors are doing is inappropriate statistical inference on nonstationary data. 
• Tradfi operates mostly in rate-of-change (i.e., returns), not levels, thereby removing statistical stationarity. (When we do this for bitcoin, the power-law relationship goes away.) 
• Extreme rarity: Financial economics has found only a handful of well-supported power laws (Pareto, time-based volatility structures, select transaction volumes).

Now that we’ve emerged from Financial Econometrics 101 somewhat unscathed, let’s take stock of what’s good about Bitcoin One Million.

The discussion of AI and the labor market is apt and timely. The Psychology of Hodling chapter is incredible, with much-needed reminders that “hodling is psychological warfare” (page 249) and constant volatility stresses everybody’s conviction, sharpened only by pain and deepened only by understanding Bitcoin’s fundamental properties. Invoking people who left in prior cycles, the authors observe that, “They had been right about everything except their own ability to endure the wait” (page 261). Krueger recounts sentiment from the 2018 collapse, but he could have been talking about 2025-26 (page 252):

“The crash felt different because it wasn’t just about price but about broken dreams and shattered narratives. The institutional adoption everyone expected hadn't materialized.”“The crash felt different because it wasn’t just about price but about broken dreams and shattered narratives. The institutional adoption everyone expected hadn't materialized.”

We’re an order of magnitude larger in every sense — price, adoption, education, accessible services — but the feelings of despair and shattered aspirations remain the same.

The brief rundown of the Kelly criterion and how to responsibly balance your portfolio is excellent, and should have emerged way earlier. We get treated to a mostly accurate description of Strategy’s financial product and the promise of treasury companies, plus how the ETFs have revolutionized tradfi access to bitcoin. 

However, the treatment of that in the context of monetary arguments over gold (on one side) and custodial services (on the other) is schizophrenic. Gold’s shortcomings of assay, verification, and transportation require trust (page 100)... but then the authors turn around to say that Bitcoin ETFs are wonderful because “self-custody is simply too complex for mainstream adoption” (page 113), and the ETFs thus “solved Bitcoin’s adoption problem overnight” (page 121).

Fast-forward a few chapters and they switch their stance yet again, observing that Strike and Cash App are custodial services for Lightning (“you’ve traded sovereignty for convenience,” page 170) and that these “Bitcoin banks with Lightning integration [include] the same trust model as traditional banking, just with better technology.” Same thing discussing wrapped bitcoin on other chains: “When you wrap Bitcoin, you’re trusting someone else to hold your Bitcoin while you play with a synthetic representation of it” (page 172).

This flip-flopping is echoed in the writing itself, the narration confusingly switching between first-person observation and third-person analysis: It’s frequently unclear when it’s one or the other of the coauthors writing and when it’s the pair together. It’s as if the entire text is just meshed-together and unrelated paragraphs jotted down on the fly, an impression that’s strengthened by the fact that references to bitcoin’s price described as “today” range from $110,000 (page 276) or $116,000 (page 116) to $25,000 (page 240).

At one point, the author(s?) get lost in their own description of Strategy’s products, suggesting, for instance, that STRC has optionality embedded: “Holders could convert to common stock if MicroStrategy’s premium exploded.” They also state, incorrectly, that “The company could pay dividends in stock instead of cash if needed” (p. 136).

Some other errors are innocent, like several misspellings of Matthew Mežinskis’ name — a well-known, competent power law proponent and obvious inspiration for the authors. Others are absurd, like the suggestion that the Fed “prints $10 trillion annually” (page 56). Not only has the Fed barely printed that sum in its entire existence, let alone annually, it has also been shrinking its balance sheet for four years now — though broad money is some 3% above its ‘rona peak. We also learn that “every bank in America is technically insolvent” (page 73), which wasn’t even correct during the height of the 2023 bank runs (when the Fed patched up an otherwise pretty broken banking system overexposed to collapsing bond prices).

In sum, there's something deeply absurd about reading two guys’ claims of bitcoin's relentless, foreordained path to 1 million, while the coin itself is committing seppuku. All bitcoin has done for six months is disappoint and deflate — not exactly prime indications of its unstoppable path to seven digits.
 

Between now (February 2026) and when the authors published this four months ago, gold — the supposedly dead, stagnant, outdated Boomer investment asset — added four or five bitcoin market caps in value. It is true that every model breaks, sometimes faster than the ink on your digital paper can dry.

The Psychology of Hodling tests us all, and the experience of reading Bitcoin One Million while reality presenting itself very differently is yet another such test. 

If you just read the authors’ reflection on AI, inflation, Strategy’s financialization, the tradfi investing world of stocks and bonds, the psychology of hodling and using bitcoin-backed loans, it’s a pretty great Bitcoin book.  Of course, that would make it mostly redundant and not very different from every other Bitcoin book, but alas, that’s the lay of the land in the Bitcoin book landscape.

Fuck, re-reading the review now, I'm incredibly impressed by my own writing. What a chad this Book's Books reviewer is!

Here's the print-edition of The 2036 Issue, links to which and explicit mentions were a condition of my republishing the review.

Still toying with the names here, but pretty settled on "Book on Books" for now. It's clearly close enough to what I did for BM, it plays on my name, it SEOs well, and the domain is now under my control. Muhhaaaahaaaa...