The 2025 market tells two stories, and crypto is on the wrong side of both. Silver hit $84. Up 170% YTD. Gold crossed $4,500, up 72%. London’s bullion vaults emptied to their lowest levels since 2015. Traders paid record lease rates just to close positions. Physical silver got so tight in October that dealers flew metal by plane instead of cargo ship to meet delivery demand. The Silver Institute estimates an 820 million ounce cumulative supply deficit from 2021-2025. Central banks bought aggressively, rotating reserves out of dollar exposure. Nasdaq up 22%. Nvidia up 40%. AI infrastructure generated actual revenue, captured institutional capital, and sold a story about autonomous agents, quantum computing, and robotics that made people want to own the future. Bitcoin claimed to be both for years. Digital gold when fear rises. Risk-on tech proxy when liquidity flows. Both trades worked in 2025. Crypto captured neither. Silver outperformed Bitcoin by 180 percentage points. The “boomer metal” your crypto friends mocked delivered triple-digit gains while BTC sits down 6% YTD and 30% from its October high of $126,000. 1.6 million BTC sold by long-term OG holders since 2024. K33 Research tracked this distribution wave as decade-plus hodlers finally got their exit: six-figure prices, deep ETF liquidity, institutional counterparties absorbing size. The “$100K dump on the suits” meme became reality. Glassnode shows the 1-2 year holder cohort down 900 basis points month-over-month. The 2-3 year cohort down 1,250 basis points. The 3-5 year cohort down 550 basis points. Medium-term believers distributed into strength while OG whales took generational profits. Silver’s supply moved opposite. Mined output stayed flat because 70% of silver production is byproduct from copper, lead, and zinc mining. You can’t just “mine more silver” when prices spike. Industrial demand kept climbing from solar panels, EVs, and AI hardware. India’s silver imports hit record highs, with prices in Mumbai reaching 170,000 rupees per kilogram. The squeeze fed itself. Gold had central bank buying as a structural bid. Silver had industrial demand plus monetary demand plus a supply deficit. Crypto had… ETF outflows. BlackRock’s IBIT shed $157 million on December 23rd alone. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index sat at 27. The debasement thesis was real. Dollar weakness, fiscal deficits, Fed rate cuts, geopolitical chaos from Venezuela blockades to Nigeria strikes. Every ingredient that should have sent Bitcoin screaming higher. Gold ate that trade. Silver ate that trade even harder. Crypto watched. Here’s what the YTD scoreboard actually reveals: investors had two clear ways to express the “fiat is dying” thesis, and they chose the ones with 5,000 years of track record and physical supply constraints over the one with quantum computing FUD and whale distribution. Crypto’s identity problem crystallized in 2025. When gold rallied, Bitcoin’s correlation went negative. When tech rallied, Bitcoin lagged Nvidia by 46 percentage points. The asset that promised to capture upside in any regime failed to capture upside in a regime where everything worked. The bull case for 2026 requires believing one of two things. Either the OG selling pressure exhausts and supply stabilizes. Or Trump successfully pressures the Fed into aggressive easing and liquidity floods all risk assets indiscriminately. The first is a crypto-specific catalyst. The second is a macro tsunami where you’d want to own Nvidia and gold anyway. Silver just did in 12 months what Bitcoin bulls have been promising for four years. And it did it with a commodity that most crypto natives dismissed as irrelevant.

China destroyed its own fisheries, then exported the destruction globally. From 1979 to the mid-1990s, China’s fishery sector aimed to increase output to meet growing demand. By 1995, overfishing, land reclamation, and industrial pollution had severely depleted stocks in China’s traditional fishing grounds. The blue line shows the collapse. The four seas around China are among the world’s most heavily overfished, with indiscriminate harvests leading to profound trophic cascades. So what happened next? In 2006, the government introduced a fuel subsidy for fishermen. Between 2006 and 2014, the cost of fuel subsidies rocketed from 281 million yuan ($41 million) to 4.2 billion yuan ($600 million). Depleted stocks plus cheap fuel sent China’s fleet outward. China’s fleet now accounts for 50 to 70 percent of squid caught in international waters. With more than 800 ships on the high seas, Chinese vessels were responsible for more than 35 percent of the reported global catch. The economics are wild. On its own, distant-water squid fishing is a money-losing business. The sale price of squid typically does not come close to covering the cost of the fuel required to catch the fish. Fueled by subsidies estimated between $7.2 and $10.9 billion annually, Chinese vessels venture farther, stay at sea longer, and fish more intensively than would otherwise be economically viable. The Chinese fishing industry is the most heavily subsidized on earth, with $5.9 billion in harmful subsidies paid in 2018. Japan: $2.1B. EU: $2B. US: $1.1B. What can be done? Cut subsidies at the source. Global fishing subsidies amount to $35 billion per year, 60%+ contributing to overfishing. The WTO Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies exists but only 40 countries have ratified it; another 69 are needed. Enforce port state measures. Countries in East Africa created FISH-i Africa for information sharing and enforcement, resulting in denied landings and millions in fines. Require vessel tracking. Chinese vessels often operate with tracking systems deliberately disabled. Target seafood imports. The U.S. Coast Guard and Argentine Navy began joint exercises to combat unlawful Chinese fishing. From North Korea to Mexico to Indonesia, incursions by Chinese fishing ships are becoming more frequent and aggressive. China’s armada in North Korean waters forced out smaller boats and led to a 70 percent decline in squid stocks. Every dollar of fuel subsidy keeping an unprofitable trawler at sea is a dollar spent depleting the oceans for everyone else.