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As Yen Carry Trade Unwinds, Bond and Bitcoin selloff leaves stocks unsteady https://www.reuters.com/world/china/global-markets-global-markets-2025-12-02/ As Japan increases interest rates, assets are selling off globally, to cover their hitherto low-to-no interest loans denominated in Japanese Yen. Hard to fathom the billions that have been made by international investors, on the backs of the people of Japan, suffering through currency debasement for decades. Wishing them a speedy economic recovery. > SINGAPORE, Dec 2 (Reuters) - Stocks made muted gains and traders were wary on Tuesday, following a slide in cryptocurrencies and a global bond selloff triggered by a looming interest rate hike in Japan. > ... > Bitcoin , which has been a talisman for sentiment, bounced higher after an unsettling 5.2% slump on Monday and at $87,000 is down 30% from an October peak... > > Expectations that Japan will hike interest rates later this month had surged on Monday when Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda laid the groundwork for tightening policy. > > Ten-year JGB yields shot six bps higher, and perhaps on the view that could lure home some of Japan's vast international investments, traders sold global bonds and pushed ten-year Treasury yields up 7.7 bps to 4.096%. > ... > The yen caught a boost and has stood firmest in foreign exchange markets over the past 24 hours, holding at 155.64 per dollar on Tuesday. > ... > Some investors, however, are starting to expect a more durable turn lower for the greenback as the U.S. prepares to cut interest rates further and faster than many peers. _Meanwhile_, Bitcoin whales have been [taking advantage of the sale prices](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-whales-accumulating-does-mean-133011741.html): > On-chain analytics show large Bitcoin addresses stockpiling coins. CryptoQuant data reveals that long-term non-exchange holders exploded in number and volume. These addresses doubled to 262,000 in two months and collectively bought over 375,000 BTC in the past 30 days. Analysts at BeInCrypto note that wallets holding 1,000-10,000 BTC boosted their balance by about 29,600 BTC in just one week. > ... > Whale buying often precedes bullish runs. When whales accumulate, it typically tightens supply on exchanges and creates a support floor under the price... > > Analysts interpreting current trends say this whale activity signals buying opportunity, not crash warning. One BeInCrypto report explains that despite headlines about ETF outflows and retail panic, "institutional players are quietly reloading," which is strengthening Bitcoin's support zone around $100,000. https://stacker.news/items/1298184

Cryptographer DJ Bernstein Criticizes Push to Finalize Post-Quantum Cryptography https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/11/23/226258/cryptologist-djb-criticizes-push-to-finalize-non-hybrid-security-for-post-quantum-cryptography The U.S. NSA is truly insidious and an enemy of freedom (privacy). They are now attempting to rush through a quantum cryptography standard without proper consensus from the cryptography community, some of whom raise valid concerns about what is being proposed. The NSA has [a history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG) of intentional sabotage of cryptography standards, giving themselves (and other adversaries) sly backdoor access to presumed private communications. Thank you, [Dan Bernstein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein), for [once again](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech) standing up to power and fighting for our collective right to privacy. > By 2013, NSA had a [quarter-billion-dollar-a-year budget](https://www.eff.org/files/2014/04/09/20130905-guard-sigint_enabling.pdf) to "covertly influence and/or overtly leverage" systems to "make the systems in question exploitable"; in particular, to "influence policies, standards and specification for commercial public key technologies". NSA is [quietly using stronger cryptography for the data it cares about](https://blog.cr.yp.to/20251004-weakened.html#dogfood), but meanwhile is spending money to promote a market for weakened cryptography, the same way that it successfully created decades of security failures by [building up](https://cr.yp.to/export/dtn/V3N4_10_92.pdf) the market for, e.g., 40-bit RC4 and 512-bit RSA and [Dual EC](https://cr.yp.to/papers.html#dual-ec). I looked concretely at what was happening in [IETF's TLS working group](https://blog.cr.yp.to/20251004-weakened.html#tls), compared to the [consensus requirements](https://blog.cr.yp.to/20251004-weakened.html#standards) for standards-development organizations. I reviewed how a call for "adoption" of an NSA-driven specification produced a variety of [objections](https://blog.cr.yp.to/20251004-weakened.html#callbad) that [weren't handled properly](https://blog.cr.yp.to/20251004-weakened.html#resolution). ("Adoption" is a preliminary step before IETF standardization....) On 5 November 2025, the chairs issued "[last call](https://web.archive.org/web/20251122073342/https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/tls/Pzdox1sDDG36q19PWDVPghsiyXA/)" for objections to publication of the document. The deadline for input is "2025-11-26", **this coming Wednesday**. https://stacker.news/items/1289672

Chinese molten salt reactor achieves conversion of thorium-uranium fuel https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/The-Worlds-First-Thorium-Molten-Salt-Reactor.html China seems to be kicking ass in the science & technology race. This achievement is a keystone in securing their energy future. > * China’s experimental thorium molten salt reactor has reportedly achieved sustained thorium-to-uranium fuel conversion, marking a major scientific first. > > * The breakthrough could ease China’s dependence on Russian-enriched uranium and accelerate its rise as the world’s dominant nuclear power. > > * With thorium abundant domestically, the technology could transform China’s long-term energy security and global nuclear influence. https://stacker.news/items/1288776

#Sleep scientist in this podcast drops some research findings and advice: - No screens an hour before sleep, BUT its NOT because of blue light. - its light in general at night - light levels should be kept at 30lux or lower, 90 minutes before bed. - screentime: the stimulating nature of online engagement, triggering anxiety, or watching exciting content, makes it harder to get to sleep and reduces sleep quality - melatonin merely tells your body when it’s TIME to fall asleep, it doesn’t play a role in the generation of sleep itself - melatonin will only improve the speed with which one falls asleep by about 3.4 minutes, and the efficiency of your sleep by about 2.2% - more than 3mg melatonin supplement risks morning grogginess - don’t take melatonin supplements unless you need it for jetlag or chronic insomnia. Long-term use can shrink your balls and kill your testosterone levels! - phone in the bedroom hack: if you take your phone into your bedroom, you can only use it if you’re standing up - sleep regularity is king: the most important thing is going to sleep and waking up at the same times every day - the 4 “macros” of good sleep: QQRT: - Quantity: 7 - 9 hours of sleep. The shorter your sleep below 7 hours, the shorter your life. - Quality: sleep efficiency (the % of time in bed actually asleep) should be at least 85%, and the amount of deep sleep has the largest impact on mental health - Regularity: the +/- minutes around sleep & wake times. Those with most sleep regularity (same times every day) have a 49% decrease in all cause mortality, 39% less cancer, 57% less cardio/metabolic risk than those with the least regularity. - Timing: Related to regularity; make it dark before bed. Stick to a ritual, change clothes, get ready for bed, turn off almost all light sources, signal to your nervous system that you will sleep soon. And much more! Check it out at: https://fountain.fm/episode/ruFJ36FbncR0hgH8STxb

Inception Point AI's Quiet Please podcast network produces 3,000 podcasts a week https://www.thewrap.com/ai-podcasts-hosts-inception-point-ai/ Do you listen to AI-generated podcasts? Will the [Bitcoin 101 podcast](https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/bitcoin-101--6488880) by "Nick Ledger" give the [BTC Sessions podcast](https://www.youtube.com/@BTCSessions) serious competition for listeners? Not yet. It's probably good enough for weather reports, but for sophisticated topics like Bitcoin mining, the generated verbiage sounds like a buzzword salad, with disjointed concepts and chains of reasoning coming out in random order. It's hard to listen to. But maybe my bar for coherent reasoning is higher than average, because according to the [Inception Point website](https://www.inceptionpoint.ai), over 10 million people are listening to their 4000+ shows. FTA: > There are already at least 175,000 AI-generated podcast episodes on platforms like Spotify and Apple. That's thanks to Inception Point AI, a startup with just eight employees cranking out 3,000 episodes a week covering everything from localized weather reports and pollen trackers to a detailed account of Charlie Kirk's assassination and its cultural impact, to a biography series on Anna Wintour. Its podcasting network Quiet Please has generated 12 million lifetime episode downloads and amassed 400,000 subscribers -- so, yes, people are really listening to AI podcasts. > > Inception Point CEO Jeanine Wright believes the tool is proof that automation can make podcasting scalable, profitable and accessible without human writers, editors or hosts. "The price is now so inexpensive that you can take a lot of risks,â Wright told TheWrap. âoeYou can make a lot of content and a lot of different genres that were never commercially viable before and serve huge audiences that have really never had content made for them." At a cost of $1 an episode, Wright takes a quantity-over-quality approach. > > "I think very quickly we get to a place where AI is a default way that content is made, not just across audio, but across television and film and commercials and imagery, and everything. And then we will disclose when things are not made with AI instead of that they were made with AI," Wright said. "But for now, we are perfectly happy leading the way." https://stacker.news/items/1285095