Cages
Daily Ramble
Change is in the air here in Portugal. The government just released new guidelines with a clear timeline for re-opening the economy. No idea if it’ll work or not, but the news has the neighborhood buzzing with excitement. I’ve talked with more than one neighbor who is surprised that my biggest miss during the lockdown was the simple pleasure of drinking an espresso in a cafe. “How Portuguese of you, Kent!”
What I recognize now, after listening to a helpful podcast (which I’ve unhelpfully forgotten…), is that our desire for living a more efficient life has stripped out a lot of banal social interactions. The trips to the post office, mall, cafe, etc.… if we could cut them out, we were freeing up time for other things in life. While that’s true, on the other side of the teeter-totter sat human interaction. And it turns out the little moments of swapping pleasantries about the state of the sky both lift our moods and keep us from crawling walls, as my Israeli neighbor astutely put it yesterday.
I don’t have a lot to complain about having a roof over my head, food in the fridge, a loving family, and friends to speak to. But cabin-fever feelings of wanting to bite and scratch have definitely crept to the fore at select times these last couple of months. I know it’s not just me, as reports of domestic violence and divorce have risen. The cherry on top is the complex dance we’re all walking as friends and family exist on a continuum of COVID fear ranging from the let’s-all-hug-it-out to the I’ll-sell-my-right-arm-for-the-vaccine. Even the odd social interaction on the street has the undertone of social dance to sort out placement on the COVID tribal affinity spectrum.
We’ve still got a few weeks before the cafes are open again for coffee, though I suspect we’ll see some cafes conveniently ignoring the guidelines to open early. But once we do, we’ll start getting the broader social interaction we need to keep from crawling the walls. And maybe, just maybe, those time-sucking social interactions won’t be a time suck any longer.
Favorite Thing on the Interwebs Today
Bitcoin Price Prediction
Yesterday: $53k - $60k
Today: $54.2k - $60k
Weekend: $49k - $67k
The smooth sailing of my price predictions over the last couple of weeks came to an end today. The price of Bitcoin has moved up to its previous all-time high but has failed to punch through. Momentum has faltered right at a peak resistance zone while funding is extremely high. All that is to say, if there were a time for a pullback to recharge momentum, it would be here. It means we’re likely to see price dance from $54k - $58k for at least another day. In some ways, this is good to see momentum recover, but in other ways, this is the type of place where a sell-off can trigger a landslide. I can’t see a breakdown below $46k, but the doors to that possibility open with a loss of $54k. With the weekend ahead, I can imagine we see some volatility with fewer players trading. My bottom line prediction: we see price retrace as much as $52k before popping through the $60k psychological resistance sometime next week.
Bitcoin Ed Bite
Q: What is Gresham’s law?
A: The law states that good money drives out bad money.
The idea comes from ancient times when coins were the dominant money minted from gold, silver, and bronze. When the coin minter wanted to create more money without using precious metal resources — inflation — they would dilute the amount of precious metal in each coin using an inferior metal. As a result, merchants and consumers would horde the high-quality coins and spend the low-quality ones — good money driving out bad money.
Photos like this suggest Gresham’s law in action.
Thanks for reading,
Kent
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