It is the year 2023 where I live. I cleaned the house and my wife baked a cake and made Olivier salad. Our daughter helped her mother. The cat was nervous when the fireworks started but is calm now that the fireworks seem to be over.
The year 2022 not only saw the onset of an everything bear market but the start of the most dangerous crisis in Europe since World War 2. Consumer price inflation had started going up already before the end of 2021. In 2022, central banks raised key interest rates and stopped their asset purchasing programs, which sent equities and crypto tumbling.
The summer saw an unusual rise in the price of fuel. In Finland, 95 octane petrol cost €2.5 per liter at the highest. Since then, the prices have come down significantly and are currently around €1.78 per liter. The government rescinded the obligation to include a certain percentage of biofuels in petrol, which caused the prices to go down by 20c per liter. The rest of the decline was caused by market conditions.
Electricity was and still is much, much more expensive than it was a year earlier. The energy component of electricity prices was commonly around 5c per kWh last year. While it has varied wildly depending on the supply of wind-generated electricity, the daily average has been about an order of magnitude higher since last summer. A price ceiling of 20c per kWh set by the government to curb the mad profits the power companies are raking in and protect consumers is on the table. The Olkiluoto 3 nuclear reactor, already a national laughing stock, encountered yet another problem a couple of months ago. That is sorted now and its power output should be increased from around the current 400 MW to the planned 1600 MW in February. Wind power has been installed at a rapid clip in recent years, and thanks to it, the average price of electricity is not totally out of control.
Finland would've had sufficient generating capacity had a few older coal-powered plants been kept operational. However, that would've required investments, which did make any economic sense before February 2022.
I would say that the combination of the delayed construction of Olkiluoto 3, a 1600 MW PWR type reactor delivered by the French company Areva, and the cessation of power imports from Russia that had bridged the gap left by Olkiluoto 3 was the reason for the price shock of 2022.
The good news is that LNG imports, the unusually warm winter weather and efficiency gains have caused the price of gas in Europe to crash below the January 2022 price. That is very good news for industries dependent on natural gas as an energy source as as well as a raw material.
Demand flexibility will be increasingly important on the electricity market going forward. That will require investments by consumers as well as energy producers. As the share of wind power grows, it will become increasingly profitable to store energy produced by wind power plants as heat or as electricity. The electrification of the automobile fleet will help alleviate price fluctuations caused by short terms supply fluctuation. Heat storage systems can make use of virtually free electricity at times of surplus.
The year 2023 will likely see inflation gradually die down with the onset of a recession. Companies will generate less profit and unemployment will increase. I believe equities and Bitcoin will not go down much further this year. Many altcoins may yet have ways to go before they reach their market cycle bottoms. But it seems unlikely to me that Bitcoin would go down much further than yet another 10-15 percentage points.
The social media sector is in turmoil. The end of 2022 and the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk has sparked much, much more mainstream interest in alternative platforms than ever before. This is very encouraging. Mastodon is a big winner. But Mastodon cannot solve the problems people expect it to solve. Instead of one dictator at the helm, each Mastodon server is a dictatorship run by its owner. Because the ideology of Mastodon is not to fund itself through ads, each Mastodon server will either be run by volunteers, which means they can't scale, or by an entity with deep enough pockets to afford a large scale operation. Trouble is, no entity will fund a Mastodon server with millions of users without expecting to use it to push its own agendae.
If a social media platform is to be censorship-free and have a method to incentivize individuals or entities to run the infrastructure at the same time, there is no alternative to blockchain and a native cryptocurrency to pay block producers to maintain consensus and run the infrastructure.
Hive's ultimate victory is guaranteed. It is only a matter of time. While it can be frustrating to see the masses bounce from one inferior alternative to another, it is a sad reality that they may have to exhaust them all before they adopt the best alternative. What's extremely exciting, however, is that the masses have awoken to the shittiness of Web 2.0 and that they are actively looking for alternatives.
The cat's favorite place. Those gnomes are usually found somewhere on the floor in the morning.
The Olivier salad. Popular in Eastern Europe. Invented by a French chef in Moscow in the 19th century.
The lingonberry cake. We had sparkling wine and I've been drinking porter as I've been writing this. Hope I'm still coherent. :D
Happy New Year everyone! Massive profits be upon you all!