The US government is shutting down (for the 14th time since the 80s), meaning governmental agencies are forced to close or cut non-essential expenses as a result of not being approved funding by the Congress.
I haven't followed the discussions to see why this particular shutdown happened. Government overspending is an issue in many places around the world, but I imagine in the US is even a bigger problem because of the hegemony of the dollar as a world currency over a long period, and the habit of issuing debt without any cap, knowing they would be purchased by someone who wanted USD.
This shutdown appears to be the reason for the surge in the price of crypto today. That shows, once more, that crypto benefits of the issues in the fiat systems. It is the same with the growing M2 supply to which BTC appears to correlate, even if not perfectly.
There is the reverse too. With the growing influence of stablecoins in the crypto space, fiat (USD, in particular) becomes a factor to consider, as a weight that needs to be pulled by crypto at times. So, there will be growing bidirectional influence. Some may think crypto is too small to influence fiat systems, but Tether currently is a Top 20 US Treasuries holder, having more of them than Germany, for example.
With that in mind—and with the recent escalations on the "who's got the bigger guns"' front—I have to wonder how the end of the year will look like. I believe in a serious uptrend in Q4, maybe the end of Q3 too, but these individuals who are called world leaders are playing with matches around a gas station, likely intentionally. Who knows what will happen if the gas station goes boom... Nothing good, I believe, for anyone, but a few.
Anyway... I have my goal to have 5000 in HBD savings by the year end, and I'll keep that going. But no more than that... until I know more.
Governments are on their course to become more and more totalitarian, even in the so-called democracies. I don't want to think about what will happen if a bigger war starts... So, I'd rather stick to more of the freedom money than fiat, even though the crypto space is also on route to being controlled (in its majority or the ways that matter for a higher adoption) by bigger players from the legacy system, with a few that grew in the crypto world (not in the fiat world) and got adopted out of necessity by the old system.
That being said... Today is Hive Power Up Day. Like always (in recent years), I powered up some HIVE. As I've been doing every day last month. I don't know what's in store for HIVE price-wise, but I'm using something in this ecosystem every day, and that matters to me.
Missed July, probably by a day or two... Other than that, things are looking good.
Happy HPUD! Hopefully, we'll see some interesting things at Hivefest, coming up in two weeks...
