Daily Ramble
The weekends give me time to think, making my Monday rambles a bit deeper. You may want to skip below the fold if it’s too early in the week to think.
When it comes to tech, there is a certain type of person that’s attracted to it. We’re the curious monkeys trying to sort out how to make and use new tools. But the type of tech that attracts us says a lot about us as individuals, which I find even more fascinating.
At the bleeding edge of tech, there are roughly two major camps: artificial intelligence and crypto. Artificial intelligence (AI) is being built using algorithms that can “learn” from mass amounts of data. For example, a self-driving automobile learns to drive by ingesting data from cars driven by people until it gets the hang of it and removes the need for a driver (gross oversimplification but you get the point). Crypto — Bitcoin is a solid mental place holder — is the way to share information across the internet with individuals you don’t trust. Think of it as a mathematically provable and uncheatable internet-based system.
At some point, these two camps will overlap. How they overlap is of utmost importance though. Let me explain: the internet of today has become centralized and dominated by a few powerful companies. If AI were to do anything more than auto-balancing our financial portfolios, these all-powerful companies will wind up dominating our lives in unimaginably Orwellian ways. Why? Because AI will be smarter than us and shareholder profit motivations will cause these companies to squeeze us for profit. We know because we can already see that Facebook and YouTube algorithms have tweaked our social fabric. Crypto decentralizes the internet and makes the individual the source of power online. Bitcoin as a decentralized source of money is one example, but decentralized computing, data storage, internet domains, and social networks are developing too. AI layered on top of a crypto driven internet will be a powerful force, but layered on the internet before the widespread deployment of crypto is dangerous. Ready Player One anyone?
It may not be conscious to most in this arms race, but this is a race for humanity’s future as a species. Are we going to enshackle ourselves or free ourselves? A lot comes down to the people developing these technologies and the camp they choose. Does my Scottish last name give away my choice?
Favorite Thing on the Interwebs Today
Over the weekend, the New York Times published the newest research on the movement of the tectonic plates dating back one billion years. Tectonic plates are the hard shell around the earth’s core on which both ocean and land rest — the turtle’s back.
If watching it doesn’t prove the earth is a living organism, I don’t know what would.
Bitcoin Price Prediction
Weekend: $34k - $42k
Today: $36.3k - $42k
Tomorrow: $34.4k - $50k
The price action of Bitcoin over the weekend left nothing to surprise. We hit the top of the range reaching as high as $41k before pulling back as low as $37.4k. Since then, we’ve been grinding back up. All this looks like typical price behavior before Bitcoin breaks back into blue sky territory and likely into the $50k+ region. I suspect it’ll take at least another day for that to happen given the decrease in volume, but I will be surprised if we don’t break decisively above $42k by week’s end.
Feedback requested: is my description of price action helpful or do you prefer to simply see the predicted price ranges?
Bitcoin Ed Bite
Q: What is hyper-bitcoinization?
A: Hyper-bitcoinization is the term coined to describe Bitcoin becoming the global reserve currency.
It’s called hyper-bitcoinization because it’s anticipated that it’ll occur suddenly when it does, i.e. hyper. At that point, Bitcoin will have moved from emergent money to money itself. Being money, it’ll be used as a unit of account for pricing, a medium of exchange for moving value between individuals, and a store of value allowing individuals to store their life-force (individual time dedicated to providing value for others) for the future.
Hyper-bitcoinization is also the realization of the first stage of Bitcoin’s full potential.
Thanks for reading,
Kent
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I personally like your price prediction description. I don't always understand it but figure enough repetitions means I might absorb by osmosis at least a little more.
The living, breathing earth is amazing. I've been thinking for some time that it's pretty arrogant for us humans to think we have so much influence that we could actually reverse any climate trend Mother Earth wishes to impose. She brings us to our knees pretty often. Which isn't to say we should allow ourselves to be poor stewards. Perspective can be a good thing.