Context
On the evening of February 4th, I was deep in an e-mail thread with a close, skeptical friend, trying to explain to him the value I see in cryptocurrency while the price continued dropping, and he said
"Hey, man - you really should consider a career in sales, you know, spaceX rockets and shit. You could sell an asteroid to the moon."
It was half compliment, half jab, and for some reason it sparked a disproportionate response, a pouring forth of ideas that have been simmering in my skull for months.
This is that response.
The concept of a career is obsolete
Work has value proportional to its impact; fair systems reward labor accordingly.
Limiting the social valuation of individual human consciousnesses to a single vector/line/plane reduces net productivity in the system. Specialization and focus are obviously valuable, but "choosing a career" is ridiculous. Economics 2.0 doesn't care if your last project was artistic or philosophical or scientific or legal or political or literary, if you're on a specific track and improving within its bounds.
It rewards labor proportional to the value of the labor.
It's the intersection between the two schools of philosophical, political, social, and economic thought that have been warring for the last century, a way to reconfigure the world to account for the truths inherent to both.
On the one hand
Humans need to be rewarded for their work, and not all work is of equal value. Only the market - the collective perception - can place a value on labor through the exchange rate to the fruits of other labor. Therefore the market must be unregulated, allowed to emerge and evolve naturally, and the individual must be sovereign, for its ability to create new goods and invent new markets is what drives the whole social organism forward and upward.
On the other hand
Markets become corrupt and unfair, humans are not objective judges of value, the open market is close (perhaps too close) to Hobbes' state of nature, and causes harm as individuals grab what they can by any means necessary. Therefore some authority must regulate the market, or better yet just centralize the whole thing under the state according to some externally imposed theory like oh say Marxism, and kill anyone who dissents. The individual cannot be sovereign, because individuals are flawed. The individual must be subject to the state, because that works out so well, fosters a great creative environment, tons of innovation (hey Russia how's that economy? Oh, still fucked from last century's little 'communism' experiment? Cool, cool.)
The answer:
A system for every category of human value, with its rules baked into its very structure, built into the algorithmic requirements that enable a given transaction or series of transactions to be recorded, distributed across a decentralized ledger where everyone has their own copy and everyone's copy always matches, period.
From those we can build metasystems for the exchange of value between categories, an exchange which has a value in and of itself and is governed by certain rules.
That enables systems of immensely greater complexity. For example, many of the projects are implementing decentralized governance - the construction and alteration of programmatic bylaws determined by human consensus.
Self organizing, self propagating, continuously improving global organisms linked by a neural network where each node is a human brain, their interactions determined by algorithmic protocols.
The next step in evolution doesn't obsolete us, it combines us.
The same way atoms combine quarks.
Molecules combine atoms.
Simple chemical cycles combine molecules.
Early cells combine simple cycles.
Later cells combine functional, but limited early cells.
Then cells max out their capacity for maintaining equilibrium at scale and have to find ways to combine...
We maxed out our capacity for maintaining equilibrium at the animal/pack scale and began to find better ways to combine - protocols for sharing information - language.
With language, we can pass down our temporal discoveries for the next generation to use as a foundation. This allows us to build inferences, ideas, and understanding of the universe iteratively, without killing the implementation. When DNA was still the lingua franca of evolution (funny, that the phrase has outlived its initial meaning), a mistake always meant death, and nothing could be tested without commitment.
Words enable humans to abstract potential from actual and run implementations in collective simulation space, evaluate whether they fit with the body of past experience, current understanding, and individual desire before actually acting.
This allows us to create iterative technology, which has continued to yield more and more effective channels of communication/information transfer across space and time while simultaneously reducing the net suffering and total longevity of the original human animal.
I believe the current cross-cultural insanity is the result of the internet's absurdly rapid growth - every cell in the global body suddenly wired up to the newly formed, totally novel nervous system in the span of a cosmic eyeblink with no protocol for evaluating their output - just a sea of random seething chaotic impulses in every direction, a painful, sad, happy, jubilant, depressed, enraged seizure with no grasp of 'meaning' or 'purpose', no set of rules for grappling with this new dimension of existence.
Cryptocurrency is the emergence of the protocols, organically, driven by belief and consensus and hard work.
Each well-developed cryptocurrency is a representation of value within a system built for a specific purpose. Each is like an organ or organelle, uniquely valuable to the whole because it fulfills a specific function. The token is the relative weight used by the nervous system to evaluate the work, status, and importance of one social organ against another.
Author's note: This was written Feb 4, near the very bottom (I hope) of the recent correction. Plenty of the predictions that follow are wrong - I'm no soothsayer, just an idiot with an internet connection - but it felt disingenuous to edit them out after the fact.
This morning the continuous flood of FUD (fear/uncertainty/doubt) in the mainstream media has evaporated - it's not there. Poof.
We've hit market bottom, but there's also a transfer of power happening from Bitcoin to Ethereum, and nobody knows quite how that will play out. If it continues, it will certainly be very profitable for ETH investors, and for investors in a selection of well-developed smaller projects.
A lot of the crazy perturbations in the market over the last few weeks feel like the result of Ether breaking the critical 10% BTC value point (1ETH = 0.10BTC), which it's been trying to do for almost a year. It finally broke through, now no matter how the beast has bucked and struggled, ETH isn't letting go of its relative advantage. (Author's note: hahaha what a silly thing to write. Thank you, hindsight, for helping me see that I'm an ass. Shit...)
The market prediction for years has been that there will be an event called "the flippening", when ETH's market cap outpaces Bitcoin's. At that point, the majority of exchanges will likely list smaller tokens as ETH currency pairs instead of or alongside BTC pairs. It's supposed to happen eventually, and recently we've been accelerating toward it fast.
In the next few weeks, two events are guaranteed:
Robinhood Crypto will open. Robinhood is a smartphone stock trading app that saw huuuuge adoption by the youth - specifically the 18-30 segment. Huge. Immense growth potential. They've created a cleverly named "Robinhood Crypto" version, and they've currently got more than a million users waiting for access, with a rolling release scheduled sometime in mid-february. One million new crypto investors. The doors will open to a market that initially contains only BTC and ETH. Given the recent relative price history of the two coins, I think new investors will prefer ETH, though BTC's name recognition could be a factor.
Canada's first crypto-based Exchange Traded Fund will go live on the TSE, an adoption milestone in my book.
The way I see it, the market is looking to recover. It hit bottom two days ago, and has been held there artificially against increasing bullish (buy) pressure by the continuous stream of FUD, especially the coordinated move by banks to VERY publicly ban crypto purchases from credit cards, and the shill/botnet reactions/retweets/responses that paint the banks as good friendly trustworthy happy friends who just want to protect ye loyal consumers from the bad scary volatile crypto market, mmkaaay?
I think it's important to recognize that this move by the banks indicates that people are using credit cards to buy cryptocurrency. Enough people taking out short term loans to purchase long-term investments that a group of banks actually took notice, got together, and put a halt to it.
Buying crypto with a credit card means betting against an 18-20% short term interest rate.
That is an extraordinarily bullish signal for traders, but to banks it's a legitimate threat in two ways.
The market could just crash further, the investment could be worthless, and the bank would not recoup its credit card loans.
The market booms, and a fair segment of the population wipes out their existing debts, while proving crypto's value as an investment vehicle.
Both are existential threats to traditional banking - it's only natural for the banks to take action.
Now the FUD is gone and the only news on the horizon is the addition of millions of new investors to the market.
It's all going up, and the best projects will go up most.
While we're talking price, I think it's important to keep in mind that while Bitcoin has dropped 55% from January of this year (from ~20,000 to ~9,000 USD/BTC)
That on January 1st of last year the price of 1BTC was $968
Where it remained fairly steady until March
At which point it doubled every month or two until peaking just under $20,000 in late January/April
This "crash" is down 50% over the last couple months
But it's still up approximately 1,000% over the last year and 100% over the last 6 months.
It's just a correction. Once it's over, the upward trend will continue (although it may be ETH, not BTC leading the pack)
The main regret of most cryptocurrency investors
is that they didn't buy more when it was last this cheap.
It's just... I just firmly believe that buying crypto is the best thing that anyone with access to dollars can do with them right now. Interest rates are climbing, the S&P isn't looking pretty, the Trump administration seems to be imploding, trust in traditional economics & structures, especially fractional-reserve banking, is at an all-time low and dropping through the floor...
It's a perfect storm for the better solution to emerge and gain massive adoption. People who buy in when the waters are muddy, when everything is unclear and the market is down.... they're going to end up really fucking wealthy, and I'd like you to be among them.
So I'm not trying to sell you something. I'm imploring, begging you to buy this beautiful beautiful dip, because it has the potential to fix your financial problems outright, and because it is right.