Timekeeping
Daily Ramble
Time has been on my mind. Why? This morning, I listened to a podcast where Nagin Cox, one of the NASA scientists running the Rover missions, described how they began to live on Martian time to stay in sync with their mission. Yesterday, I read a piece by Gigi, an anonymous Bitcoin philosopher, where he described how Bitcoin operates as a timekeeper without a clock. No Buddhist Koan here — Bitcoin ingeniously solved timekeeping without a clock and with no one in charge.
My constantly noodling mind hasn’t been able to let up on a thread that I find weaving between these and other timekeeper events in human history: the timekeeping device synchronizing a group of humans creates a separate collective reality. A simple example is a sports match. For the NASA scientists running the Rover missions, they and their families began to consider themselves Martians because they were in-sync with the daylight hours of Mars but out of sync with Earth’s daylight hours. In past times, villages would operate based on the chiming of the clock in the village square to coordinate their daily activities. It wasn’t until the railroad crossed the American West, when people constantly missed their train stops, that it dawned on us that each village was operating independently — there was no master clock synchronizing the villages’ mechanical clocks. The engineers on the train then became the master timekeepers for the nation.
Where am I going with all this? My mind is mesmerized by the idea that we could be stepping into a collective time shift as Bitcoin is adopted. Hear me out: I’ve said before that I suspect Bitcoin may become the anchor in our social fabric as our institutions are torn apart by the knowledge and manipulation the internet and social networks have respectively unleashed on the world. Because Bitcoin creates a consensus roughly every 10 minutes without anyone being in charge, it offers a sense of knowingness and certainty that we crave as a species. If that comes to pass, then the drumbeat of new blocks created every 10 minutes becomes the new “clock” globally synchronizing human activity. Wild. That’s as far as I’ve thought it out.
Now back to chasing Naia around the house.
Favorite Thing on the Interwebs Today
A history lesson worth knowing.
Bitcoin Price Prediction
Yesterday: $43.8k - $48.4k
Today: $42.8k - $50k
Tomorrow: $44k - $54k
We had our dip yesterday to $43.8k on the nose, but no springy action from buyers aggressively stepping into the market. Instead, the price has just ground up slowly but surely. All indicators point to a continuation of the bull trend in the days ahead with the possibility of a mild dip before heading up to $50k. At the moment, it’s looking like buyers are slowly chewing up the sellers’ supply. If we can clear $48.3k again, we’ll be at $50k in a hurry.
Bitcoin Ed Bite
Q: Is Bitcoin going to be regulated out of existence?
A: Doubtful.
But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter if every politician in existence outlaws the thing. It will keep running. Why? Because there is no off switch.
Will it cause the price to drop if Bitcoin is outlawed? Maybe. India, China, and Zimbabwe all tried outlawing it just to create a black market in their states where Bitcoin traded at a premium. Every day that goes by, the network of people using Bitcoin grows, the understanding spreads, and the idea of a form of money outside political control hardens into society. Even more critically, the snowball has started to roll quickly at the corporate executive level in the US. It will not be easy to regulate Bitcoin out of existence when the virtual oligarchy running the US has a vested interest in Bitcoin.
Regulation around Bitcoin is THE fear for this cycle. Understanding the game theory of Bitcoin adoption is how to keep strong hands while we climb that wall of fear. And we will.
Thanks for reading,
Kent
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