Hulk Time?
Daily Ramble
When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the ancient 80s version of The Hulk. You know, the meek Dr. Banner that explodes into a big-green, tank-eating machine when pissed off. Dr. Banner wasn’t always proud of his actions when his lid flipped, but The Hulk never cared, though he did have somewhat of a moral compass. Where are you going Kent? I see encryption and internet technology causing individuals to hulk out. This trend isn’t going to be a pretty process, just like the actions of the Hulk, but the anger being unleashed through our collective hulking-out is going to bend the long arc of history towards individual freedom.
Allow me to justify myself by reaching back into the beginning of humanity’s last societal phase shift 500 years ago: the end of the feudal age and the beginning of the nation-state (shout out to the Sovereign Individual). We can thank the technology of gunpowder getting into French citizen’s hands leading to the French Revolution as the beginning of the shift. If we want to go back further, we can say the spread of gunpowder came on the heels of the printing press’s spread of education. No matter. The nation-state’s unparalleled fundraising capabilities gave rise to the greatest armies and destruction we have experienced on the planet. So much so, that the nation-state’s violence game has likely ended at nuclear stale-mate — we just can’t go bigger and survive ourselves.
Now, we are in the midst of our next phase shift. Almost everyone can feel it — I’d be surprised if you can’t. It’ll probably take another 500 years to come up with a clear definition for what we’re shifting into, but, at this moment, let’s call it the Encrypted Seas. Funnily enough, Alan Turing, who created the first computer to decrypt the Axis’ communication channel arguably ending WWII, planted the seed of computational encryption technology. Ironic that what ended the last global hot war, the defining characteristic of the nation-state, is likely going to end the nation-state itself.
What are the Encrypted Seas? They are what the originators of the Internet envisioned when TCP/IP — that protocol you’ve vaguely heard of that is responsible for all internet traffic — became a thing. Back in the early days, it was a bunch of pot-smoking, Grateful Dead stomping, freedom-loving hippies and anarchists who could see that global instantaneous communication was going to liberate individuals. The darker side wasn’t obvious then: transparently communicated personal data was going to imprison online identities in walled gardens where everyone behaves the way they think others will accept. Online virtue signaling and cancel culture are the swan songs of the current centralized internet.
Ok, but what are the Encrypted Seas? They are the digital ocean, where an individual captain’s their anonymously encrypted identity like a ship at sea. Separating dirt reputation from cloud reputation will sound scary at first — just like the first Facebook users felt scared using REAL identities — but in the long run, I believe most will embrace it. Doing so will allow the individual to free themselves from the trappings of societal mores, simultaneously destroying virtue signaling and cancel culture. What we’ll see is the good, bad, and ugly of human expression and unleashed in a forum outside the constraints of physics limited only by imagination. Online business models will be turned on their ears, and new ones will arise, as the data to market and sell won’t be freely available but a privilege individuals choose to share.
If you want a glimpse of this future, hop on Twitter and jump into crypto crowd (known as CT) where you can see cartoon characters hulking out with their newfound anonymous freedom of expression. Since we left our spear chucking days, if there’s a historic arc in play, it’s for individual freedom. We’re on the cusp of humanity’s biggest Hulk out moment. Things are going to change at a breathtaking rate once more individuals seize that freedom. The pendulum will swing too far, and things will break we don’t want broken, but when the pendulum of humanity settles, it’ll be a much more liberated future.
Favorite Thing on the Interwebs Today
Take a moment to let this sink in: the narrative of Bitcoin’s potential has not changed in 12 years! Some will come to the party late, but we’re all going to join it.
Bitcoin Price Prediction
Yesterday: $42.2k - $53k
Today: $43.6k - $53.2k
Tomorrow: $40k - $53k
The bulls and bears seem to have come to at least a temporary stalemate in price at $50k. The bulls will need to hold the price above the $44.8k low for a while to see the confidence return to the market while the bears will take some shots to drive the price down. I suspect we see the recent low at least retested, if not a sweep as low as $38k, before continuation. But the fact that the price is bouncing up from the lows of $44.8k yesterday makes me think there’s a tentative bottom happening. We’re not out of the woods yet, but we’re in a much better situation than this time yesterday.
Bitcoin Ed Bite
Q: Why does market cap matter for pricing tokens?
A: Because it limits the price potential of an individual token.
Let’s use DOGE as an example. You’ve likely heard of DOGE through Elon Musk’s memes. DOGE has a market cap of $7B and Bitcoin has a market cap of $944B at the time of this writing. There are 128.5B DOGE tokens, currently trading at a little more than $.05 each. If the price of each token were to go to $1,000, like someone might naively think just based on comparing Bitcoin’s price with DOGE, the market cap would be $128,500B making it 136x more valuable than the Bitcoin network.
See the logic error?
Thanks for reading,
Kent
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