Hunger
Sunday Ramble
It’s been a quick minute (or three weeks) since I’ve rambled. Between prep for Bitcoin 2022 and the crash and burn afterward, I’d squeezed my creative juices dry, deciding it was better to focus on health than crank out something poorly thought out. But I’m back at it this evening as I’ve been stewing on the Bitcoin 2022 experience.
The revelry with my Sazmining team and other Bitcoiners at Bitcoin 2022 was a palpable and exciting experience. The reception of our new Bitcoin mining platform was incredible — we signed up a ton of people on our waitlist and had very little negative feedback about our offering. So much so that we had a Senate candidate sign-up on our waitlist, multiple VC firms headhunting us ahead of our Series A, and one billionaire took our CEO to dinner the final night, all but throwing money at us. “Exciting” may have been an understatement.
But all of those experiences aside, the one that’s stuck with me most was during the first day of the show while our executive team walked to a lunch meeting. Our Uber driver couldn’t be bothered to find us, so we hot-footed the 15-minute walk to our destination. As we passed by a McDonald’s, a tall African American man in his mid-40s cried out in pain for someone to feed him. He cursed the three of us for having so much and being unwilling to help as we walked by. Yes, I continue to feel guilty for not taking the 20 seconds to grab a few bucks out of my wallet to help him.
It’s easy to judgementally shrug off an experience with a beggar as someone that should get a job, get his sh*t together, and bugger off. We’ve all experienced the common beggar enough to know the cat and mouse routine. But this was different — the pain in his voice was real hunger. The juxtaposition of that real hunger with the Bitcoin 2022 event we were attending was jarring. Here we were espousing the idea of accumulating bitcoin through Bitcoin mining to protect individuals from the evils of inflation — while not 1/4 mile from the event, a prime example stood crying for help.
I hope that man was not the canary in the coal mine, but I'm sure he was with a solid chunk of the American populace living paycheck-to-paycheck. It’d been all of 3 months since I’d last been to Miami, and already the prices of most food items seemed to have increased by at least 10%. It doesn’t take too much of that before individuals living on the margin are forced to choose which meal of the day they’ll be skipping. Hunger has a funny way of driving individuals to throw caution to the side and lay their physical well-being on the line to satiate the hungry critter living in their gut. If you’ve not seen what’s happening in Shanghai right now, it’s utterly disturbing. So much so that I won’t conveniently link to videos of it.
More importantly, very few of us who are economically sound understand our history well — inflation is a driving force for civil disobedience, regime change, civil war, revolution, and war itself. In 1793, Marie Antoniette supposedly said, “Let them eat cake,” when a servant told her the trouble in the streets was caused by locals lacking bread. Along with many others during the French revolution, she died on the guillotine not long after that poorly attributed quote happened — by masses driven to revolt by starvation. Moral of the story: when there are too many hungry bellies for too long, it’s a recipe for societal upheaval.
I’d be lying if I thought the situation would rectify itself in the US anytime soon. Agricultural products don't get cheaper when energy and fertilizer prices shoot through the roof, which most will likely only grasp when it hits their wallets. And while the Federal Reserve is attempting to reign in the inflation, interest rates are still at a paltry .5%, while the official inflation rate is at 8.5%. I’m not too fond of the odds of that gap closing before more people are hungry. And that’s a horrible thing to say. I wish it weren’t so.
But there is a solution — stock your pantry and move your money into Bitcoin. History paints a stark picture for those that don’t heed its rhythm of monetary debasement and societal knock-on effects. Bitcoiners like myself only sound looney until we don’t. There’s still time, but the clock is ticking…
Rad Things on the Interwebs
Bitcoin Price Prediction
Weekly Range: $34.3k - $46k
The pesky neverending range we broke out of a few weeks ago is back. In the last couple of weeks, the price went as high as $48k before dropping as low as $39k last week. That’s not an encouraging sign for the bulls, but all is not lost. As long as we see $38.5k hold this week, we’re still in a bottoming pattern. Should that fail to hold, the door opens to lower prices, but I don’t see $34.3k breaking unless there's a disastrous event. That’s the bearish side, which appears more probable at the moment. The bullish side would be to see the price break up over $40.5k in the next day or two, then begin its push towards $46k. In other words, we’re most likely going to range between $38k and $46k this next week.
Bitcoin Q & A
Q: Do I have to hold Bitcoin to take advantage of the Bitcoin network?
A: No
As much as it’d be best for everyone to hold Bitcoin, thanks to Strike's technology, it’s now possible to utilize Bitcoin as a monetary network without ever having to touch Bitcoin itself. Consumers pay in dollars, and the merchants receive dollars, but in between the consumer and merchant, the dollars are transformed into Bitcoin, zipped across the Bitcoin network, and converted back into dollars instantaneously and for fractions of a penny. Goodbye, 3% merchant fee!
Keep your eye on Jack Mallers, CEO of Strike. He’s a one-man army on fire to convert the world to Bitcoin.
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