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SUCK IT BTC SNOWFLAKES

The speaker list for the (BSV focused) Coingeek Conference June 8-10 has been updated.

Looks who’s been added.

Mr AntiFragile himself, Nassim Nicholas Taleb is now listed as a speaker at Coingeek. Predictably, Crypto Twitter has erupted in fury. It’s hilarious.

Mr Taleb has been very critical of BTC for a long time. He’s recently been seen roasting small blockers like Erik Voorhees:

The BTC cancel culture is in full effect crying about Taleb’s scheduled appearance. They succeeded in scaring Gary Vaynerchuk (weak sauce) from the last Coingeek conference. Something tells me they won’t have the same luck this time around.

If Taleb will be joining, what are the chances of additional surprise speakers?

What do you make of Taleb speaking at the BSV focused Coingeek conference?

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Paint By Numbers TA

I have a few indicators that I consider my gold standard. These indicators have proven to be reliable over long timeframes. They are slow moving and are never wrong for very long.

Markets swooned fast and hard but zooming out gives us a better idea of what these large moves mean. Where are the current prices in relation to the 200 DMA? This gives us some grounding on risk reward going forward.

BTC went parabolic from 12k to 64k hitting the overbought red line multiple times.

As BTC formed a topping pattern on the daily cloud (chart below) it created a bearish TK cross on May 3rd at $53k before diving into the cloud to signal uncertainty and finally confirming support breakdown and bear mode at 44k. BTC needs 48k to regain bullish trend (price back above cloud).

On May 11 BTC price dove into the cloud to close under 50k.

I signaled this breakdown with:

When ETH broke above $2800 I declared it was now leading the market. Similar to 2018 ETH peaked ~4 weeks after BTC.

Despite a 50% correction ETH still hasn’t touched it’s 200 DMA. The 200 DMA acts as a magnet at all times on price. For this reason I suspect the market has more downside as ETH is the the current bellwether.

The counter to this is that ETH found support on the top of the daily cloud. However, to maintain bullish trend price must STAY above cloud which would mean ETH $3300 by July. Watch for any breakdown of ETH into the cloud as an omen the entire market has further downside near term.

Greed is a powerful drug. I broke some of my trading rules and went light on my sells into the height of the bull. It’s a lesson to learn. Unfortunately I’ve learned it more than once! As usual, I find my personal guru Jesse Livermore had the right answer all along.

When someone asks me about trading I tell them to pick 1-2 indicators and a single timeframe and trade it like a robot. It’s harder to do than it sounds.

There is a lot of news in the markets I’m not going to cover. Stick to the daily charts and be patient. I don’t think Crypto is out of the woods yet.

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CRYPTO MURDERED

BTC -45%
ETH -45%

Who could have seen this coming?

I posted this when BTC was at $56k

I’m glad to see the crash happen. There is so much malinvestment in shitcoins the entire market is distorted. DOGE to $1? Get the fuck out of here.

My only regret is I did not sell more during the bull run. I knew the crash was coming but I fear it will last much longer than I anticipated. Possibly 2+ years.

I’m watching $38,500 on BTC. Failure to hold this area for 24 hours means a retest of the lows and opens the door to $15k. That would be 75% retrace from the high. Isn’t crypto fun?

Maybe you’ve been paying attention to Elon’s tweets on BTC? He’s going through a learning curve. Do you see where he’ll end up?

 

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The Problem is Choice

The Matrix trilogy explores universal human themes of questioning authority and the hero’s journey to enlightenment. The protagonist starts out unaware he is trapped in a simulation to being fully aware of reality and a master of his own fate.

The Matrix is an updated exploration of Plato’s Cave allegory. Let’s take a brief look at the main themes of The Matrix and Plato’s Cave to see if there are any lessons for us in crypto markets.

Inside Plato’s Cave the prisoners see shadows cast on the wall by the puppeteers (similar to being trapped in The Matrix). The prisoner’s entire reality is based on the shadows. There is no concept of reality outside of the cave.

If the Crypto ecosystem is Plato’s Cave then there is no concept of reality outside of the puppeteers “number go up” narrative. It’s a grand show and the prisoners are quite content to watch it.

How do you identify a BTC maxi puppeteer? Lazer eyes!

Everyone starts out in Crypto as a prisoner in the cave. The puppeteers above are engaged full time in casting shadows that instruct prisoners to HODL and that Layer 2 is the answer to scaling BTC. Here’s an example of a puppeteer promoting buying pizza with MasterCard to support BTC. Does using MasterCard to buy pizza help BTC? Why not just use BTC?

Followed by this gem a few hours ago:

Pomp would like you to buy pizza with MasterCard to support BTC so you will ignore that BTC is no longer suitable to be used as a payment method. Hence the saying, “BitCoin is an IQ test”.

A minority of prisoners see Pomp’s shadows on the wall and then take on questioning what they see. They do independent research. They examine the facts free from the distractions of the shadows. They start to ask, “What is the Matrix?” Then, they slowly climb out of the cave and see the world for what it is. They break free from the Matrix.

The rest buy pizza with MasterCard and think they are making a difference for BTC.

I assert Crypto is currently comprised of 99% prisoners.

In Matrix Reloaded The Architect says:

Denial is the most predictable of all human responses. But, rest assured, this will be the sixth time we have destroyed it (Zion) and we have become exceedingly efficient at it.

Given this BSVUSD shorts chart you can see Bitfinex traders (backed by Tether) have become exceedingly efficient at destroying BSV price.

 

See the similarity?

Later in that same scene Neo is given the choice of saving humanity or saving his love interest Trinity. The Problem is Choice.

This aligns with the choice in Crypto. 4,000 Shitcoins promising their own version of financial Zion. You can have a different Trinity every night of the week, simply buy the latest pump and dump and you will move through your daily life, bank accounts and IRS taxes like Neo dodging Agent bullets. The Problem is Choice.

All that is required to continue living in the Matrix is to deny reality. Deny that Crypto is all a Ponzi with near zero real world usage. Deny that Tether is a scam, deny that $50 fees on BTC and $400 fees on Ethereum are irrelevant, deny that MasterCard is happy to see Crypto fail and deny that Michael Saylor is clueless.

It’s simple if you can look past the shadows. Bitcoin Scales or it Dies.

In The Matrix Cypher meets with Agent Smith to betray the human race. After 9 years in The Matrix trying to make it he wants to “remember nothing”.

 

Unfortunately there are a lot more Cyphers than there are Neos in the world.

The goal of the puppeteers isn’t to support peer to peer electronic cash. It’s to destroy the one coin that has the possibility of scaling for the entire world so their bags can go to the moon.

There is a game theory scenario called Prisoner’s Dilemma. In this scenario two prisoners are isolated and questioned regarding their alleged illicit activities. The only way the prisoners avoid jail is to, without prior agreement, tell the same story. Crypto is currently full of prisoners telling each other the same story. They see it’s to their benefit that the Ponzi continue. They don laser eyes on their Twitter profile and hang out in Whalepool chat rooms confirming their biases based on the latest Saylor tweet.

Any global solution must scale. The puppeteers never talk about scaling. Ignore the shadows and do your own homework or forever be a prisoner in a cave.

 

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DOGE Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

DOGE is up 10,000% in 100 days. $1 in DOGE in February is $100 today.

FinTwit has discovered DOGE and they have fallen in love:

DOGE is worth a good laugh but when FinTwit accounts start addressing new people in Crypto about the merits of DOGE I find that to be peak lunacy. I responded with exactly the answer to what he doesn’t understand and I promise you no one watched the video because that would require effort and an investing timeframe beyond 24 hours.

MeekMill is up 15% on his DOGE from yesterday. Congrats to him. But don’t be fooled, this will not last and for every dollar made someone will lose (except the exchanges, they always win and that’s why Coinbase lists so many Shitcoins).

This is beginning to resemble a carnival. “Step up and place your bets. Everyone is a winner!”

Look around for a serious project. One that is attempting to solve the problems that matter.

I have gone from being a crypto champion to a crypto curmudgeon. I’ve seen what’s possible and what’s at stake and I can’t unsee it. At times I wish I could.

If a joke coin like DOGE can threaten the market cap leaders with lower fees and faster transactions what does that say about the merits of BTC and others?

Till this resolves I’ll attempt to regain my good humor and remember, every DOGE has it’s day.

 

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A Primer On ETH

Vitalik Buterin was a barely 21 year old contributor with Bitcoin Magazine when he approached BTC Core about ideas he had for computation on BTC. By this time BTC was under control of Blockstream who were not interested in Vitalik’s project so they blew him off. Vitalik took his ideas and created Ethereum because his project was hamstrung by the limits Blockstream imposed on BTC.

That is the origin of Ethereum in a nutshell. BTC was being throttled and op codes (pieces of script present since the beginning of BitCoin) were being removed so Vitalik created Ethereum to fill the gap with ability to do computations.

I will give credit where it’s due. Creating Ethereum was a bold step from Vitalik and quite an accomplishment for his age. However, Ethereum is fundamentally flawed. Ethereum requires Gas to run computations. ETH has no halting mechanism so the ETH network will run a transaction computation until the gas attached to the transaction is exhausted or the transaction completes. This is very problematic for a global network. Fees are high, scaling is non existent and ETH is flirting with structural changes that hardcore ETH devs are skepitcal will ever launch.

The success of Ethereum and Litecoin led to an explosion of Shitcoins. We have thousands of coins and just as many “Crypto experts” with YouTube channels. The entire market is built on getting everything wrong about BitCoin. I estimate less than 5% of the “experts” understand what they are talking about.

What’s been missing is the knowledge that BitCoin is Turing Complete. Turing Complete means using native BitCoin script you can calculate any calculable number. This includes creating Smart Contracts or any other type of transaction. BitCoin can do it all as originally designed and does it in a way that avoids the problems of Ethereum.

BTC was not a hobby project. It was a decades in the making intellectual masterpiece. Well, until Blockstream got involved.

The problem is that BTC was stripped of it’s functionality, limited to small blocks and saddled with high fees by Blockstream so they could promote their own products. Here is the Blockstream white paper for reference of their vision for BTC in 2014. Enabling Blockchain Innovations with Pegged Sidechains

BSV removed the limits imposed by Blockstream and restored the missing op codes because there was a small group of people who understood the true power of BitCoin. BSV can do everything any other coin can do at low cost, nearly instantly and at large scale.

Do you understand now why I have been pro BSV on this blog through all the bullshit since 2017?

Ethereum is enjoying a lot of publicity and ridiculous gains at $3,000+. However, the truth is spreading about BSV vs Crypto and Ethereum. BSV will soon overtake all of it.

Here’s an Ethereum dev talking about Craig Wright and BSV. It’s a very good collection of videos spanning several years.

My timeframe for BSV assuming dominance is off by more than a year. Meanwhile BTC has gone on a huge run. It’s disgusting to watch if you understand what is at stake: honest money.

Maybe I’m a fool to be optimistic that the game isn’t rigged. Is the idea of a global honest money an unrealistic idea or will it be … Just Like Heaven?

 

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Memes Are The New Money

Viral images/videos are, at their essence, data. Sometimes this data travels the world many times over to the point it becomes a part of a culture’s shared experience. Today there are few opportunities to monetize a meme or any form of unique data on the Internet without access to large centralized platforms like Instagram or YouTube. The “network effect” benefits the network provider, not the content creator. TikTok is simply a new version of a record label.

According to LifeHacker:

The biggest TikTok influencers—ones like Charli D’Amelio (101.5 million followers), Michael Le (42.4 million followers), and Josh Richards (23.4 million followers)—all made at least $1 million in 2020, according to Forbes. However, most of that money is earned through the sales of merchandise and sponsored content for big brands, rather than ad revenue. In fact, TikTok only recently started to share ad revenue through its Creator’s Fund, which content creators have criticized for being underfunded, as they claim it typically only provides a few dollars per day.

They key here is that the biggest TikTok content creators do not make the majority of their revenue on TikTok yet TikTok is worth Billions. Many other examples include celebrities who, in addition to having a platform on Youtube, Twitch or TikTok, add an OnlyFans page so they can more easily facilitate receiving payments for their content.

This is all the early stage of something much, much bigger. A “new paradigm” where value is transacted peer to peer.

New markets begin with price discovery. During price discovery markets are very inefficient but eventually trend towards efficiency as they mature. To get my point across while being meta:

I assert we are in Medieval times with regards to monetizing data. There is a long road ahead to ending the centralized plutocracy where our personal data is a profit center for faceless and powerful elite. The key to breaking free is the stranglehold financial institutions have on transacting value. To be clear, I’m not much of a data conspiracy theorist nor am I anti-banks, but I do foresee a shift and a new world ahead.

Let’s look at some examples. First up is “disaster girl”. She’s 21 now and is selling an NFT for $500,000. Does that make you feel old? Does it make you feel poor? Does it make you feel old and poor?

Take a moment to ponder this transaction in context. NFTs are a new and extremely inefficient market fetching outrageous prices. What’s the point of owning a piece of viral internet history? How does it provide a ROI? In the future, each web page featuring a meme, or any piece of data that has value, could be monetized per view, if there were a low cost and efficient way to process a micro transaction.

TikTok could implement advanced revenue sharing per page view if they could get their head around the incentives. They probably won’t, but the next TikTok definitely will.

Another example of market discovery would be the NBA’s NFT collection:

The NBA’s Golden State Warriors have become the first major professional sports team to sell its own non-fungible tokens. These tokens, or NFTs, will be officially licensed digital memorabilia the team is calling its “legacy” collection. An NFT is a verifiable digital asset vouchsafed by blockchain technology.

You could be the owner of a GIF and a provable chain of custody on a blockchain that may or may not exist in 5-10 years for a few thousand dollars. What a deal!

Again, I point back to the fact that new markets are very inefficient. The craze for NFTs are like the craze for Beanie Babies. I can’t predict the future, and I don’t anticipate the death of NFTs, but I do think NFTs will evolve quickly and the value in owning a limited edition manufactured GIF will be very low in the future and likely near zero.

What will have value in the future will be original content and links to physical assets. Musicians publishing new songs, artwork and funny cat videos. Markets will move towards an efficient solution. I believe that solution will mature as we understand that data is the new money.

A meme is a particular yet valuable type of data. But rather than selling an NFT of a viral moment the world will move to a pay per view model. A fraction of a fraction of a cent per web page view creates an Internet based on value incentives. The Internet will transition to a series of micro transactions that are so small they are barely noticeable but, in aggregate, will add up to sustainable direct revenue to the content creator and will bypass the blood sucking middlemen. Content creators will be on the top of pyramid rather than the bottom.

 

Markets do not stay inefficient for long and we are on the cusp of the biggest market shift  in human history. The market for data.

The first platform to explore this market and capitalize on it will see wild success in the future but it will not be a platform deriving their revenue from traditional online sources.

NFTs will find their proper place. They will be used to track unique objects in the physical world. They will be used to transfer ownership of houses, cars and anything of value. In the future “disaster girl” would prove her ownership of her viral picture with licensing fees routing directly to her BitCoin wallet. It’s a big leap but I see markets solving this problem within a few years. Creators can build a content library that generates revenue for a lifetime.

The reason that valuing content in this matter has not already happened is we have had no way to interact peer to peer for small transactions. The third party processing costs were such that it was not efficient, or so we were told. YouTube is valued in the billions but the top 1% of 1% only make $20M. That seems like a pretty efficient revenue generator for YouTube but doesn’t scale per view? The barrier to entry is…..small transactions.

This is changing, if you know where to look.

Bit equals data.
Coin equals money.
Data is the new money.

BitCoin combines data and money.

HODL till your heart’s content but if your coin of choice can’t be used for micro transactions I suspect you’ll be on the wrong side of history.

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