It's Cyber Monday! You know what that means:

Lunch today: Turkey sandwich. Lunch yesterday? Turkey sandwich. According to FDA guidelines, tonight’s dinner should be your last turkey sandwich. But we know that you finally got the stuffing, veggie, and cranberry ratio just right.

If you have a little turkey tomorrow, we won’t turn you in. But hey, put down those leftovers, because it’s time to bite into some news.

Espresso Shots

☕️ Binance Releases Proof of Reserves System 🏦💰

In the wake of the instability in the crypto market, it’s become more important than ever for companies to maintain a certain level of trust and transparency with their users.

This past Friday, Binance took a first step toward that goal in announcing its new Proof of Reserves system. Binance's system allows users to verify the exchange has the reserves necessary to withdraw their funds.

At first this system will only work for Bitcoin holdings. It’s a sad, but necessary addition, as users now need to be assured that… their money is actually there.

After Thanksgiving weekend, we would really appreciate if Binance released a “Proof of Assurance” system, to assure us that all of our social interactions with hometown friends and relatives were, “non-negative.” They weren’t.

☕️ Dogecoin Soars 📈 🐕

Black Friday can be a tumultuous time for markets, both physical and digital, but Ethereum, Bitcoin, and most of our other favorites didn’t move very much on Capitalism’s favorite holiday.

But that was not the case for DogeCoin, Elon Musk’s pet coin (pun intended).

Last Friday, Dogecoin rose a whopping 10.5% in 24 hours, outperforming literally every other cryptocurrency. And it hasn't stopped since, hitting $.10 on Sunday.

Though Dogecoin is still down 91% from its peak, nobody was expecting this uptick.

Sadly, the coin did not rise in time to qualify for Thursday’s Westminster Dog Show. The crown went to Winston the French Bulldog rather than a virtual Shiba Inu.

☕️ Presenting... The Crypto Recovery Fund 🥁 💰

Binance has now committed $2 Billion of company funds to its new Crypto Recovery Fund.

The Crypto Recovery fund is intended to keep the industry alive by purchasing struggling companies, and supporting the broader ecosystem.

This recovery fund obviously comes at a time when the crypto industry is deeply distressed and reeling from significant collapses. 

In the weeks since FTX’s collapse, Binance has become the defacto leading Crypto exchange around the globe, it is now joined in this rescue effort by Aptos Labs and Jump Crypto.

Look, we’re super into Binance’s Recovery Fund, but if they could just pour a little bit into my Uncle Frank’s Recovery Fund. He keeps coming at night to steal my silverware.

Spilling the Beans

Crypto Illiteracy

Everybody’s been punching down at Sam Bankman-Fried. It’s easy.

He was worth billions not very long ago and he’s become the physical representation of the mistrust and unease that has wormed its way throughout crypto.

Making matters worse - and perhaps a bit more comedic. It recently came out in an interview with author Adam Fisher that Bankman-Fried would “never read a book.”

SBF and Fisher were discussing the prominence of social media, which SBF feels that, “with this move toward lower attention spans, people just become more productive. And that is important and good.”

This caused Fisher to counter that he didn’t really engage with social media that, “reading books is the highest-bandwidth way I know to get quality information into my brain .

And that prompted this remarkable exchange.

 “Oh, yeah?” says SBF. “I would never read a book.”

I’m not sure what to say. I’ve read a book a week for my entire adult life and have written three of my own.

“I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I do actually believe something pretty close to that,” explains SBF. “I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”

Now, it would almost seem like SBF is trolling Fisher. It had Fisher himself reflecting after the interview:

“Wouldn’t someone with IQ points to spare realize that dismissing books –all books– as essentially worthless might rile a writer? Was he playing with me? Is this fun? Is this humor?

And we here at Coffee & Crypto are struggling to interpret this exchange. That line, “I do believe something pretty close to that,” reads earnestly. Does SBF really believe this or, like Fisher theorized, did he see it as an easy opportunity to annoy a writer?

We’d be ready to write this off as another piece of SBF eccentricity, but then on Saturday morning, Russian-Canadian Vitalik Buterin, one of founders of Ethereum, tweeted this:

Like a detective looking at a series of stringed thumbtacks on the map of the city, we had to ask ourselves:

Are these crimes somehow linked?

Buterin’s stance is far less agro, it’s one thing to argue that books are worthless, it’s another to ask if they’re “inherently virtuous?”

Most countries’ public education systems insist that reading = good, and admittedly, as a newsletter, that is also our official stance.

The American literacy rate is still on the decline. 17% of Americans didn’t read a book in 2021.

That number famously includes Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who despite his long avowed hatred of reading, opened a school this year! He also a closed a school this year so that's fun!

Do the top crypto leaders hate books as much as West?

Is it an attempt to troll or a genuine, “and this reading, it amuses you, earthlings?”

Only time will tell if Crypto exchanges begin to move toward “text to speech” and Orwellian “New-speak” functions across all platforms.

Can you burn books on the blockchain? I guess we’ll find out. But for now, we’ll keep writing our stuff and you’ll keep reading it.

We hope.

At the very least, we’re less of a book and more of a, “six-paragraph blog post.”

Meme of the Day

Wait - what does this meme say?

The Last Sip

Here is just a list of the foods that some of our friends and family ordered last Thursday that were significantly better than Grammy’s dry ass turkey.

• Tuna Nigiri

• Popeye's Chicken

• Microwave Salisbury Steak

• That raw fish that gollum slaps on the rocks in The Two Towers

• Soylent Green

Stay Caffeinated,

Coffee & Crypto Team

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DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.