Lost in Time
Daily Ramble
I’m not sure why the idea of time itself captures my attention, but when my mind is idle, I find it to be the maypole around which my thoughts tend to swirl. It’s a fascinating concept to grok. I suspect that’s because the angles by which we choose to look at time changes the concept of time itself. Or maybe it’s my continued fascination with physics which still doesn’t have a better definition of time than the ancient Egyptians come up with as a “continuum”.
Let me give you some examples of how time wriggles and changes on observation. If you were to board a rocket and head to the outskirts of the cosmos at extreme speeds, then return to earth a year later, more than a year would have passed on earth. True stuff. Here are some more. Does the movement of heavenly bodies create time itself? If not, and we weren’t orbiting the sun and spinning around on a planet, what would we use as a measuring stick for time? If instead, we were off on a ship in the cosmos, what would we reference for time — the black hole in the center of the current galaxy we travel? And if we did, how would that relate to time in another galaxy? I think you can begin to see how the concept of time moves from static to fluid to a gaseous dispersion across my mental map.
What I have concluded about this sticky wicket, is that time frames must be clearly scoped to talk like with like. Example time. Let’s start with human scope. 100 years is about right for maximum relevance. 25 years for generational. And 7 years for our individual time horizons. Microbial time frames are hours. Atomic time frames are in nanoseconds. Geologic time frames are in the millions of years. Cosmic time frames in the billions. When we get galactic, we’ve got to introduce the speed of light to have a time frame that we can comprehend. The point being it makes no sense to talk about the movement of the earth’s tectonic plates while using microbial time frames. But the fact that you were able to shift your time perspective to understand the examples is uniquely humans — as far as we can tell.
This has been more of a meander than a ramble today. I don’t have any conclusions drawn on this, and may never, but I know I’m in good company — there are lots of ancient and modern structures scattered across the planet trying to capture a definition of time. If your head hurts a little thinking about these things, well yeah, mine does too. Let’s stop, huh?
Favorite Thing on the Interwebs Today
I had no clue those slippery fellas got to such a ripe old age. Talk about a generational pet!
Bitcoin Price Prediction
Yesterday: $47.5k - $57.5k
Today: $42.2k - $53k
Tomorrow: $40k - $53k
The bears continue to run with the price since our sell-off started at $58k. The price has been run down as far as $44.9k since yesterday’s newsletter went out. It’s clear that the pressure is on the bulls to step up and show some strength here, but given the strength of the bears in the last 24 hours, I suspect we are going to pull back further to retest perhaps as low as $38k on this healthy pullback. Healthy pullback? Absolutely, sentiment in the market was getting over the top since Elon Musk’s announcement of Tesla purchasing $1.5B earlier this month. The price can’t always go up and shaking out the late buyers with hands too weak to hold is the way large players accumulate more Bitcoin during bull cycles. All in all, this is 100% normal market behavior — weeks of stair-stepping up in price, a couple of days riding the elevator back down, then grinding back up again to repeat the cycle. If for some reason we break below $35k, signifying a pullback of more than 40%, my tune will change.
Here’s a chart I pulled from Swan Bitcoin for context. You don’t need to read a price chart to read the red numbers. Those were all the pullbacks during 2017s bull rampage where the price went from $1000 to $20k. Welcome to the reality of a free and unregulated market!
Bitcoin Ed Bite
Q: What is Bitcoin’s market capitalization (market cap) and how is it calculated?
A: Bitcoin’s market cap is $888B at the moment of my typing these words. It’s calculated by multiplying the number of circulating bitcoin by the current price.
There are currently 18.6M bitcoin in circulation. The remaining 2.4M will be mined between today and the year 2140. The Bitcoin protocol defined the mining schedule at its launch and cannot be changed.
The current market cap of Bitcoin is: 18.6M * $47.7k = $888B
Tomorrow, we’ll get into why market cap matters for pricing tokens.
Thanks for reading,
Kent
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