It sounds paradoxical, but let me explain how logical it is to be skeptical.
Everything can be learned, but not everything can be taught. You can’t be trained for specific knowledge once you have become irreplaceable and, as soon as one becomes irreplaceable, they are too busy to be even hired. You don’t have to be the founder of a Web3 startup to understand this, but it helps to recognize conviction when people are making the trade of a decade.
Nation-states considering Bitcoin for payments, countries accepting it for essential natural resources, and an overall environment that just realized that 30% of jobs can be done remotely during an era of innovation. It is hard to see the most powerful reformation in front of everyone’s eyes when it transcends an evolutionary period where disruptive innovation is no longer a reason to poke fun at, nor something you have anything to win against by the sole act of fighting.
Every single rational individual on Earth knows for a fact that war doesn’t solve anything. In the same way, the topic of human lives should not be at the center of official speeches persuading millions of people into believing what they say.
One can argue whether the claim that current inflation is because of the war that is taking place right now; but the currency debasement we are seeing right now makes certain things inevitable. Productive and responsible regulation seems an oxymoron nowadays, just like rational treasuries.
The current state of inflation is the problem of inflation. Indeed, what we are observing might not be inflation, but currency debasement. Inflation is caused by demand-pull.
War is not demand-pull.
This is not the 1970s, but the 1940s.
In 1937 we were in Quantitative Easing and 0 interest rates for 7 years in response to the crash.
Afterward, the FED tried to raise interest rates and the next thing you know is that war is the solution for every monetary issue during problematic economic situations. Dropping bombs in a dessert does not seem a viable solution either. There must be better remedies for the problems that are created by bad monetary policies. The idea of solving the current situation with 25 basis points seems comical…
Bitcoin is not getting any better, forget about that. That’s not the goal though. The fact that 1 BTC equals 1 BTC shows that the denominator just keeps getting worse. It is not even worth looking up whether Bitcoin has ever been in a bear market in Argentina, Turkey, or using Rubles as the denominator. Indeed, It did have a bear market in dollars when people forgot how valuable it actually is.
Whenever an individual is in debt, there are 4 choices I can think of:
- Pay it back (could we pay back the debt if we take the overall wealth indicators of the leading country?)
- Restructure debt, but someone has to take the other side.
- Default on debt. NGMI…
- Debase the currency as the only way out: which means that the price of money (gold, bitcoin…) goes up.
The mental model of specific knowledge dictates that intellectual property is leveraged by being 100% devoted to the cause of uniqueness, a.k.a becoming irreplaceable (so good they can’t ignore you).
This essential and custom knowledge is at the bleeding edge of knowledge itself. It cannot be mass-produced, and it is driven by inner passion and curiosity. Oftentimes, this can be implemented following the soft skills that are extremely hard to acquire later in life. Neither age nor years of experience are relevant at this point.
Once we take salaries out of the equation, free is overpriced, and once we remove the experience bias, age is meaningless for the recruiter. One can only be successful after failing so much.
We are all familiar with ICO mania and the Internet bubble. Since 2017 and the increasing number of Computer Science graduates, portfolios have become overweight on developers, but underweight on the main goal of learning how to code, which is problem solving. Can devs do something?
Something great?
The silent geniuses, those that nobody knows what they are doing with their 24-hour daily check, where are they?
World leaders have reached a point where disruptive innovation is causing an unnecessary fight. I don’t know if the US executive order concerning cryptocurrencies regulation was a turning point or a joke anymore, but it seems to acknowledge that ownership is the first step towards the actual censorship-resistant property.
First slowly being laughed at, then being fought for money-laundering and, all of a sudden, we have apes making faces at currencies, DAOs challenging Decentralized Lobbies Organization, and 2-cents being thrown at anonymous-driven Twitter accounts that prove the ignorance and open-mindedness of politicians who keep doubling down on the number of grey hairs.
Here is how an exodus plays out with a flat interest rate curve (2-year money is the same cost as 30-year money): either we are heading for a recession and the interest rates will never go up after being raised 2 or 3 times, or the non-economic non-market actor holds on by printing more money into the system.
Whatever the case, currencies continue to weaken: second and third-tier currencies approach collapse as the first tiers start to weaken by almost 50%. If we go back to the theory of money, gold is not perfect: it has a half-life of 35 years (that’s a lot if you compare it to USD’s half-life of 10 years, which now has a half-life of 5 years after inducing other currencies to an even lower half-life).
The reason the economy was stable appeared to be because the economy was growing about 2% every year and the supply of money was increasing at a similar rate. When both of these things peg you realize that it is almost impossible to grow more than 2–3%/year over the course of a long period of time.
Under perfect money we have deflation, under gold, we have constant prices, under fiat money we have rampant inflation and, at the end of the day, governments remain fixed on estimating purchasing power based on CPI data.
I am pretty sure most analysts can come up with good correlation data for bitcoin against the Nasdaq, against the color of the sky… but if they keep trying to find a correlation with anything, all I can’t avoid thinking of is that perhaps it is not correlated to anything.
On a more profound note, one’s inner motivations are the drive of an obsession. Infinite leverage is thrown at demonstrated wisdom: knowing the long-term consequences of your decisions and knowing how to capitalize on that.
At the same time, just like in poker, you don’t want the market to know how good you are. Being a no-one in a sea of nobodies means that the person’s job consists of building a reputation without letting others know.
But in the end, everyone knows that you know.
Inspiration is all that’s required for bullish momentum, and your scarcest resource is always time. Anything you can do to get more time is a green candle for a future breakout. When inspired and convinced of the upwards trend, those who aren’t in the market go all-in. Don’t expect perfection when the balance starts leaning on the high-chance side. Just remember that you don’t know what you don’t know while the market knows that you know.
“They said this, and he said that”,
but the numbers just keep trembling and all the trader can do to position himself is to read their minds. “The Lords of the Money” by Christopher Leonard teaches you that, when you print money massively, the richer get richer because their assets go up in nominal digits while the poor and middle classes get hammered at the expense of their time and labor.
Everything works sometimes, but not everything works at all times. All it takes is to be right once, that’s the difference with a swing for a home run. Everyone is welcome to Web3: big door in, small door out. Learning in public has a cost, and you don’t want to be a bot’s exit liquidity when the spread on the divergence of the market participants’ learning curve gets larger.
Mass adoption during a changing world order
The fee-less cost of learning goes on forever, and the education cost no longer pays off when the free choice means being exposed to unequal outcomes. It turns out that mentors are the best recruiters and that young people are no longer terrified by important people. Take the network effects of that and subtract the over-educated dumbness that moves the prices on the market.
The result is that recognizing talent and encouraging learning ends up paying off a lot more than a blind hire.
Being constructive means reminding the world that there are millions of people who are pro-crypto, and there are zero who are anti-crypto. There should be no controversy when such an obvious innovation is endorsing unforeseen ways of running an economy. Regardless of the number of attempts thrown at slowing down extraordinary disruptive change, today we have the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, all big money managers, all hedge funds…
The speculation over Switzerland, Honduras, El Salvador, Russia… is not a 1-year thing. We are in the stage of adoption where there is fear and reluctance to change. However, the inertia of cryptocurrencies should start to be measured on a monthly basis. Otherwise, we won’t realize what exponential growth actually means (take 20 linear steps across the road and you get to the other side, but take 20 exponential steps and you have gone around the world not only once, but twice).
If we take the amount of commodities exports using the dollar as treasury reserve we would be propping up a hundred trillion dollar currency that keeps inflating a considerable amount every year. If we were to switch that treasury over the course of a decade to CNY the situation would not be getting any better.
If we switch to gold we would start talking about a 12 trillion dollar currency. Now take Bitcoin and less than 2 trillion dollars enter the table. Luckily for 2% of the population, the other 98% are not rational enough to understand that a country that is heavy on the export side should start exporting and switching their cash flows into Bitcoin and start making billions of dollars on a first-mover advantage.
I even forgot to mention above that bitcoin has a half-life of forever and promotes a mass exodus in evacuation from real space to cyberspace. The money goes from analog to digital and from unencrypted to encrypted. That’s correct, the only place where you can run for money insurance is to encrypt your wealth on a network beyond nation-state control and keep it cryptographically secure while being censorship-resistant. Exactly, you can save and not have your assets devalued.
By the way, what’s the cheapest price of gas you can remember? Worse quality of gas and housing prices being up at the same time is not explained by war. Instead, currency debasement appears to be the reason behind the higher costs of owning houses and driving to places.
Here’s dictatorship 101: create a problem, impoverish the masses, make the value of the dictator’s assets go up (because the dictator inflates the currency), and then you hand them free stuff to buy their votes.
Welcome to 2022, a year where reasonable intelligent people have concluded that there is engineer-perfect money out there while 98% of people still don’t know what money actually is.
Politics and institutional effect are the butterfly effect of being knocked on the head and start making something that everyone wants and yet nobody does.
It takes is clarity, courage, and conviction, but the best way to read others’ minds is by executing. Play a lot and don’t over-expose your education to external risk-free value acquisitions. When most start “researching” a topic, they think they need to read everything about it. They fill their head with other people’s thoughts, leaving no room for their own. This is not a good setup for an inner categorization of feelings.
The sovereign individual should be independent enough as to differentiate between an emotion and an impulse, and Bitcoin does not fix that. When you read it thoroughly and don’t get distracted by the noise, you finally understand what the whitepaper entails.
Pick the brains and ask relentlessly.
Scarcity only enters Web3 whenever its bold claims stop diluting the market. Believing in original innovation and disregarding financial products for the highest bidder is what sustains decade-long narratives. Human attention is reached by keeping the user’s in mind. Transposing Web2 successes to a sovereign ecosystem can only burst the bubble. Somewhere in there is where Web3 core builders decoupled from the moral of community contributors.
Mistakes compound too, and you would not want to be the one spreading the words. A writer is the one who writes first, and I believe in what I write. If you don’t have the writer’s knowledge or experience, the reader can’t find the shortcut in the reading. Read thoroughly and experience the compound effect of putting in the hours.
Understand the game and your reactions during the game. Don’t get distracted by “they”, and understand the numbers. This is a social game, and the trader’s success is the result of confidence during execution, not the perfection of the indicator. Knowledge takes years to acquire, but action is immediate. If you don’t take the emotion out for further analysis, then there is nothing in place for helping yourself and improving self-awareness in the context of a social persuasion game. Sentiments can be categorized to avoid confusing intuition with impulse.
Once you have trained yourself for having an opinion about everything you start daring to make hypotheses. Once you network hard enough, all it takes is to be right once, a pinch of luck, and, after you find what you are good at, ALL-IN. You can have freedom, or you can have equal outcomes. You can’t have both.