Nuance
Daily Ramble
Nuance is painful. The word’s French roots even cause the first syllable to feel foreign in my mouth. It refers to shades of things. A nuanced view doesn’t see black and white but a spectrum fading from blacks to greys to whites. Nuance doesn’t fit into a sound bite, a 140 character tweet, or a two-minute news clip. And nuance has been totally lost as our hamster wheels turn ever faster. Not just lost, but demonized… “how dare you consider that person as something other than a monster for having said something despicable 10 years ago!”
It was just after George W Bush’s re-election that I read a tract that’s stuck with me. It was about a French cultural anthropologist who had come to the US to study Americans before the 1900s. If memory serves, it was Guns, Germs, and Steele’s author writing about Tocqueville’s findings, but I couldn’t pinpoint the source this morning. No matter — it doesn’t take away from today’s Ramble (though I’d be happily reminded if someone knows).
The take away from his travels I found stunning, and still find stunning. After traveling to various parts of the country, he concluded that three defining characteristics are uniquely American.
Americans like things in black and white.
Americans like things optimistic.
Americans readily identify with the common wo/man.
At the time of reading the passage, I thought, “if George W Bush doesn’t just check all those boxes, I don’t know who could.” Now, another 15 years on, I’m not convinced the last two points hold. I don’t know what to make of truisms holding for more than 100 years then changing, but the first point seems more clear than ever: Americans like things in black and white. Let me prove it: how many Americans appreciate a French film? Is that a deafening silence I hear? Is it surprising that Americans don’t like French film when nuance is its bedfellow? Not at all. I can barely stand them myself.
But that’s just it. If none of us can sit through the discomfort of not knowing, which is where nuance lives, how can we get past seeing each other as cardboard cutouts? I’ve got no answers. But as an escaped fish from the American tank, I can’t help but watch the morbid cardboard show of team red versus team blue play out in dispassionate curiosity. How else do people move from cardboard cutouts to human again except through an appreciation of nuance?
Favorite Things on the Interwebs Today
Really, you don’t need a bigger garage.
Bitcoin Price Prediction
Yesterday: $52k - $56.5k
Today: $51.5k - $57k
Tomorrow: $51.5k - $60k
After rising almost 19% in two days, Bitcoin’s price is taking a bit of a breather today. Well deserved, I say. The trend continues to be a reversal pattern, but it won’t be 100% confirmed until we clear $57.6k for a day. I suspect we’ll have at least another 24 hours of bouncing between $52k and $56k before we see the push up towards $60k. With more big-time financial institutions jumping on the Bitcoin bandwagon by offering Bitcoin access to their clients, and efforts to provide regulatory clarity in the US underway, it’s hard to see anything but more future upside. Even Tesla selling 10% of their holding worth $272M was a bullish signal to the market. It validated to other corporations that they can move in and out of Bitcoin quickly — one less friction point removed for corporate adoption.
Bitcoin Q & A
Q: Do I lose my Bitcoin if I lose the wallet holding them?
A: No. Unless…
When you set up a wallet to hold your own Bitcoin, you will be provided with a backup phrase to recover your funds. As long as you have the backup phrase, your funds can be easily recovered. If you lose both your funds and the backup phrase — generally 12 or 24 individual words — then your Bitcoin is gone.
Because the passphrase provides access to your Bitcoin, it is as valuable as your Bitcoin! In an age where we are used to resetting our password by clicking a button, it is hard to overstate the importance of the passphrase. I have unfortunately seen, and heard, too many people lose their Bitcoin because they lost their passphrase. This is not the fault of Bitcoin but the fault of the individual not understanding the critical nature of the passphrase. Learn from others’ mistakes and guard your passphrase as if it is your Bitcoin — it is!
Thanks for reading,
Kent
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