There’s a meme propagating throughout Crypto Twitter at the moment, courtesy of Bankless, that “Eth is Ultra Sound Money”. Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin even weighed in positively after listening to the Bankless podcast with Justin Drake from which the meme was birthed.
Drake, an Ethereum core developer, makes a very compelling case that Ether should be considered “ultra sound money”, building on the concept of “sound money” frequently lauded by Bitcoiners. The idea here is that the deflationary mechanics of EIP-1559 and the transition to Proof-of-Stake in Eth 2.0 …
Spilling my thoughts to declutter my head
Eth is ultra-sound money…?
Great, catchy meme; can’t work out whether Justin Drake is a genius or a hopelessly unpragmatic optimist who misunderstands both human nature and the importance of proof-of-work. Regardless of its presently centralised situation, I have a feeling that there is something fundamental about PoW that is more ‘correct’ than PoS… I’m working on the theory.
Regardless of ETH the asset, I’m mind-bendingly bullish on Ethereum the network. Love to see it!
Ethereum killers can not kill Ethereum
Network effects and embeddedness are something Charles Hoskinson can’t understand. Polkadot will succeed because it seeks to complement — not outcompete — the biggest and most relevant player in…
Tesla has bought $1.5bn worth of Bitcoin. Big news. This sent the price of #BTC to a new all time high, touching $45,000.
Among the buying frenzy that ensued, many people missed a key point from the SEC filing in which Tesla disclosed their purchase:
“Moreover, we expect to begin accepting bitcoin as a form of payment… we may or may not liquidate upon receipt.”
This tells us 2 very important things.
- Tesla plans to accept payments in Bitcoin
- Tesla may choose not to convert those payments into dollars
This makes enormous claims for Bitcoin as both a store of value and a medium of exchange.
Critics of Bitcoin often say Bitcoin has no “inherent value” versus fiat money or traditional reserve assets like gold.
What they miss is that…
The financial cosa nostra has shown us its true colours again. It has demonstrated its contempt for the the man in the street. They exploit him to fill their pockets, and they don’t like it when he starts making some money of his own.
The boot is on the other foot
Over the last week, shares in GameStop (GME on the NYSE) rocketed up in a bull run somewhat engineered by amateur investors on Reddit. Users on r/WallStreetBets initially saw the stock as undervalued, and looked to make a quick buck. The tip spread like wildfire, and as demand for shares shot up, so did the price.
It then became apparent that the stock had been bet against by several large hedge funds. …
Janet Yellen has been selected as Joe Biden’s Secretary of the Treasury. Let’s call a spade a spade — there is a deeply entrenched financial establishment, and it needs to go.
Janet Yellen has received millions of dollars in speaking fees since her time at the Fed. “Speaking fees”. Conflict of interest or not, this is the latest example of the rampant nepotism and technocracy that govern the world economy. Too many unelected officials have far too much power over our economic lives, and we need to take back our economic sovereignty.
Bitcoin offers a way out. I’m going to discuss three aspects of the global financial hegemony that are being challenged by cryptocurrency, and how we can (and perhaps should) modernise our entire financial system accordingly.
1. Credit: no banks = everyone’s a winner
As Bitcoin approaches $40k for the second time this month, we’re continuing to see huge institutional resistance.
This week the IMF’s Christine Lagarde said Bitcoin was conducting “funny business”, alluding in particular to money laundering. This is the kind of hypocrisy that underlines exactly why people are moving away from the entrenched financial establishment and towards crypto.
Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan, and HSBC, stalwarts of the same banking mafia Lagarde represents, were implicated last September in $2 trillion’s worth of money laundering, stretching from 1999 to 2017. $2 trillion! Whatever money does happen to be laundered through cryptocurrencies (an estimated…
With the recent closure of Debenhams and Topshop, brick and mortar retail seems to be in the death throes of its current iteration. This century we’ve seen substantial declines across Britain’s high streets, due to pressures initially from shopping centres and then from online retail. Now it appears that some of the stalwarts of the old guard have been beaten out of the picture. Could this pave the way for a return to a more communitarian high street?
My hope is that big-biz online retail proliferates so much that smallish brick and mortar stores become untenable for large conglomerates. We’re…
Cryptocurrency is this generation’s dot com bubble, and so far this year we’ve seen some crazy market movements, the most recent trend being steeply downward from the $40k+ all-time-high. But I don’t mean bubble entirely in the pejorative.
We are seeing a huge explosion in adoption of an extraordinary disruptive technology. This presents us with the potential to be involved in a global financial revolution, and to reap the rewards as well.
But as the Financial Conduct Authority has said this week, investors should be prepared for losses as well as profits if they want to enter into this brave…
I love buying stuff made in Britain. For many reasons.
We make some cool stuff — think Bentley, Burberry, Bovril — and I like the idea of continuing the legacy of heritage brands that mean a lot, or have meant a lot to this country at some point.
But we don’t really make anything here anymore. This creates a twofold problem, whereby a) we have a bloated management and bureaucratic sector and b) we don’t actually generate much stuff of actual value. …
I’m not going to stop using Amazon tomorrow. If I did, my girlfriend wouldn’t be getting much for Christmas, and life would be a lot less convenient for me. I am, however, trying to be more mindful of my economic life. Not in the gloomy sense of “oh Christ, I bought an HDMI cable off Amazon, I’ve killed a baby” — instead, I see in front of me an opportunity to express my support and excitement for things and people that I like and care about.
I’m trying more and more to give my money to people with half-decent ethics…
Refonomy
I’m interested in exploring microeconomic reform and decentralisation. Mainly through Bitcoin.
