Tobacco
Daily Ramble
Our family has a relationship with Tobacco. Notice it’s a proper noun? That’s because it’s an important relationship in our life. For most people reading this when I write the word Tobacco, I’m sure you instantly visualize a cigarette drooped from the edge of someone’s yellow-toothed mouth with a stench wafting into your nostrils from the far corners of the earth. That’s not Tobacco — that’s a cigarette stuffed with a distorted and devalued plant wearing a chemical bath meant to keep people puffing.
What I’m talking about is the leaves of a pungent plant, carefully grown, cured, and fermented under the canopy of the Amazon. It was a plant revered across both North and South America far in advance of Western European arrival. I’d go so far as to call it THE plant of the Americas. Western Europeans loved it so much that early settlers purchased enslaved Africans to produce tobacco at scale on the cheap. The jump from the indigenous to western settlers lost something in translation though.
I met my wife working at an Amazonian retreat center in 2014. Through the indigenous traditions practiced there, we learned a lot of what was originally lost in translation. Native traditions, the world over, have a belief system that all entities, plants like Tobacco included, have a spirit. Through this knowledge, we learned how Tobacco can be used as a purgative, an energetic cleanser, and an archetypal father figure. El Padre, or the father, is another way of speaking about Tobacco.
In today’s society, where so much of the western world is plagued by a loss of the adult father figure, a proper relationship with Tobacco, used mainly as a juice rather than smoked, can do a lot to heal our society and harmonize our relationship with our life-sustaining blue marble as we float across the cosmos.
If Ana and I can profitably work within the confines of the law to help spread this wisdom, we’d love to have a part in helping to restore what was lost in translation in the 1600s. More info as we learn more…
Favorite Thing on the Interwebs Today
These images are chock full of symbolism surrounding the origins and evolution of Bitcoin. File under “VERY COOL”. (is cool even cool to say anymore?!?)
Bitcoin Price Update
Yesterday’s price range prediction: $17.2-$18.7k
Today’s predicted price range: $17.2k - $18.7k
Yesterday’s price held and consolidated in the low $18ks after an initial drop to $17.6k where buyers stepped up. Today, the bulls look to be losing steam as the price continues to go sideways but flirts with breaking down lower. I’m expecting that if the bulls don’t hold their own here, we’ll see the price potentially drop as low as $17.2k before going sideways again to see if a floor can be found. What is clear is that until we see buyers step up in force, the short term trend continues to be down.
Bitcoin Ed Bite
History, hashing, and blockchain construction — we’re progressing nicely this week towards the goal of explaining Bitcoin mining. Today, I’m going to describe how a Bitcoin miner creates a new block to be added to the blockchain. Recall from yesterday that each block in the blockchain is sequentially added and cryptographically linked.
But how is a block created? A block is created by a miner selecting a set of transactions from the waiting pool of transactions, adding in the hash of the last block to link it to the blockchain, then racing to be the first to solve a math problem. If the miner is the first to solve the math problem, it can broadcast it to the Bitcoin network, and in exchange will be rewarded with newly minted Bitcoin, called the block reward. Currently, the block reward is 6.25 Bitcoin, which at this moment, is valued at approximately $114k! The flip side is that the math problem is very energy-intensive, costing more than $22k in energy alone to earn the block reward.
So yeah, tomorrow we’re going to talk about that crazy math problem.
Thanks for reading,
Kent
Got questions? Comment below or reply and drop me a line!
If you’re not on the email list, subscribe now — just this newsletter, no advertising.
Me? I offer personal and corporate Bitcoin Implementation Strategies: setup, investing strategy, security, tax management, and inheritance. Contact me for a free initial consult.