Spring
Daily Ramble
Portugal has cabin fever. Not the land, but the people. What started as a trickle of moaning and groaning about the ineptitude of government lockdowns for February has graduated into a flood of ignoring limitations and unsanctioned opening of businesses. At least around us.
How the Portuguese handle rules and regulations is one of my favorite aspects of the culture: look it right in the eye, acknowledge it, then go around it if it’s in the way. I first noticed this with street parking near Lisbon. If there was an inch of parking space available, legal or illegal, it was taken, until the GNR (police) came and gave tickets swatting the cars away…. but like any well-bred fly, those cars would land back in those parking places after enough time had passed to erase the ticket swatting from memory. What’s particularly unique about this approach is that it seems to happen in unison. It’s like there is a Portuguese gene that activates when the collective agrees that something is amiss and simply starts ignoring the rule.
That gene, if it exists, was firmly in compliance with the lockdowns the first go-round last year and even during the first couple of weeks of the latest lockdown. But somewhere around the time the sun cast out the rainy winter weather, the gene flipped to non-compliance. If there’s one thing impossible to regulate it’s keeping the Portuguese out of the sun. I’m not sure an act of God would even work. Let’s just say that when there are problems here, they’re solved by soaking up the sun on the beach. Literally.
Regardless, the combination of sun, declining COVID cases, and lockdown-induced cabin fever have tripped the collective non-compliance gene in the culture. Masks are flopping around, businesses are unofficially open, spontaneous social gatherings are happening, and the police seem to be avoiding confrontations with the law they're meant to enforce. Basically, spring is here and we can’t get enough of it, regs be damned.
Favorite Thing on the Interwebs Today
In case you thought a meteor destroyed all the dinosaurs thousands of years ago…
Bitcoin Price Prediction
Yesterday: $45k - $50k
Today: $48.6k - $52.7k
Tomorrow: $47.3k - $55.8k
The bulls are still in charge and look to be running with strength now. Since the newsletter yesterday, the price of Bitcoin pulled back to the $47k region I’d mentioned watching, found support, and pushed up to $52.7k, about $500 higher than I’d anticipated. It looks like we’re finding some solid resistance here, which couldn’t be healthier. Again, the longer we can go sideways, the stronger this region becomes for support during future pullbacks. If my read of things is accurate, we’re going to see price pull back as far as $48.6k before continuing its journey upwards. The charts are one thing, but the fundamental news coming out on Bitcoin continues to show that the institutional adoption is still in its early stages. Paired with Bitcoin continue to flee exchanges means the supply shortage situation is not changing anytime soon. Buckle-up, once we break $60k, even if it takes another 2 weeks, we’re going places.
Bitcoin Ed Bite
Q: Is Bitcoin destroying the environment?
A: No. It may even prove to be the antidote for global warming.
A tremendous amount of press has come out deriding Bitcoin’s energy use, stating that we’re going to boil the ocean and hasten global warming. This is my favorite pet peeve thrown at Bitcoin by no coiners and new coiners. Only those who do not understand what Bitcoin is, and its value, engage in an unnuanced discussion of Bitcoin’s energy consumption.
Why? Because Bitcoin is becoming the base layer of money on the internet. The only way it makes sense to compare energy consumption is by comparing it to the equivalent base layer money in the dirt world — the US dollar. I don’t have to supply any numbers for you to realize the amount of energy Bitcoin uses is a fraction of the energy it takes to run the US dollar banking system, print green stuff on dead plants, and militarily enforce the dollar’s dominance in the world.
But taking fair comparisons aside, when was the last time you considered the energy consumption of aluminum smelting, video gaming, or data centers — all of which consume more energy than Bitcoin? You haven’t? Why not? Because we societally value these activities enough to discount their impact on the planet.
Lastly, and this is only anecdotally, but every Bitcoiner I know has reduced their personal consumption once he/she realizes the bitcoin they own is a fraction of the 21M that exist. Any selling of their Bitcoin is a reduction of their fraction of ownership in the hardest money humans have devised. Since consumption is the base driver of global warming, adopting Bitcoin seems like a pretty good way to use human greed to reverse global warming…I can think of no better incentive, in fact.
Thanks for reading,
Kent
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