No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit. — Helen Keller
Dear Friend and Subscriber,
I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving :-)
Did you know that it was impossible to build the Golden Gate bridge?
At least that’s what they told the engineers and architects who wanted to build it.
But they didn’t reckon with Joseph Strauss — the dreamer architect.
He dreamt of building a bridge two times longer than the Golden Gate, and he drew up plans for it too.
When the bid came to make a bridge from San Francisco to Marin, he jumped on it and said:
“I can build that bridge for 17 million dollars!”
Later the state of California raised 31 million dollars.
Joseph Strauss not only built that bridge on time, but UNDER budget.
What happened to men like Joseph Strauss?
One project that has been underway since 2009 is called Bitcoin :-)
And now that it is gaining traction, massive traction — Hillary Clinton just can’t shut up about it.
In a desperate bid for relevance, the queen necromancer is touring the state-owned media channels and “offering” her opinion.
“Bitcoin could ‘undermine currencies’ and destabilize nations! Whäää!”
But, like a good Star Wars movie — there are always the good guys.
Another Luke Skywalker, and now my favorite Senator, Cynthia Lummis, posted the most epic tweet this week:
Is Elon Musk an Idiot, a Genius, or Both?
You know, just when I want to like Elon Musk, he goes and does something stupid.
Oh how virtuous Elon.
You know, I would praise him if it wasn’t for his Bitcoin “pump and dump” a few months ago, where he was pumping Bitcoin on Twitter and then all of a sudden, he dumps it by not accepting Bitcoin as payment for Teslas anymore because “Bitcoin wastes electricity,” — what a jerk!
What's going on here?
It's called “pacing and leading.”
1.) The first step in persuading somebody is to “pace” them: you show them that you are on their side. After you have gotten their confidence you 2.) redirect them:
Elon Musk tweet #1: “We now accept Bitcoin as payment for Tesla automobiles.”
Followers: “Yeeeaaah! He’s on our side! See how cool he is?! Just like me!”
Elon Musk tweet #2: “Tesla has suspended vehicle purchases using Bitcoin.”
Followers: “huh?”
This was no coincidence, this was just persuasion 101, and expert persuaders like Scott Adams were not surprised at all.
So, YES, Elon Musk manipulated (i.e. bitch-slapped) his followers, because he thinks that Bitcoin wastes electricity.
How about a knee jerk emotional reaction? Elon's a real Marxist pr**k!
Because energy is not a zero-sum game.
Did you know there's actually something called waste energy? Did you know that China had an energy SURPLUS?
And did you know that a lot of Bitcoin mining is done with surplus electricity?
All of these things are ignored when it comes to this ridiculous marxist environmental argument.
We should categorically refuse all of these ridiculous marxist arguments
— because they all boil down to Marxism!
Yes, Marxism.
Marxism supposes the zero-sum game.
That is: there’s only a finite amount of energy, and you are not worthy of that energy.
You see how that works?
“Bitcoin wastes energy” is the same thing as saying Bitcoin doesn't deserve energy.
What else wastes energy?
How about all of those escalators running at the malls 24-hours a day? How about all of the water parks in the world, pumping millions of gallons of water every minute, for what? How about the millions of gamers out there “wasting” electricity on video games — for what?
Do you see what's happening here? This is the Marxist argument! — where you pitch one person against another — class warfare!
That is the cornerstone of Marxism, and that's why we should categorically reject all of these ridiculous arguments about carbon footprints and “Bitcoin wastes electricity”.
If you want me to expound on this, just reply to this email with a resounding YES, and I will.
But I try to keep each newsletter down to 2,000 words, so I’ll just leave it here for now; An Affectionate Message to Elon Musk: This is what I think about your silicon-valley-marxism:
More Bitcoin News
El Salvador announces Bitcoin City — with NO taxes!
The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele announced his plans for a “Bitcoin City.” A Crypto Acropolis with no income, capital gains, payroll or property tax! He proposes the sole tax to be a 10% sales tax!
Sounds like heaven? Read more here:
PRO: https://coingape.com/el-salvador-announces-bitcoin-city
CONTRA: https://coingeek.com/el-salvador-Bitcoin-city
What’s The Problem with Ethereum?
TLDR: high transaction costs
The average cost of an Ethereum transaction is $70 to $100!
This is way too much for any blockchain.
If I want to send you $5 of ETH it's going to cost $70?!
Who’s going to use a blockchain like that?
In all fairness, this problem exists for every blockchain.
What happens when too many people jump in the pool?
Now the dev's at Ethereum have tried to address this problem by changing to proof-of-stake. However, it doesn't seem to be working, and the exchange fees are still going up up up.
Time is getting short for the Ethereum dev’s to “do something”.
Big platforms like BlockFi are forced to change their fee structure:
So ETH is having massive scaling problems as GAS fees rise...
“Ethereum culture suffers massively from the Founder's Dilemma. Everyone is already far too rich to remember what they originally set out to do.” — Zhu Su
“It doesn’t matter if Ethereum is a security anymore because the only people who can afford to use it are accredited anyway.” — Ryan Selkis
And yet, the “non technical” world of users doesn’t seem to care.
OpenSeas is the biggest NFT market place in the world and uses the Ethereum blockchain...oh wait...
When the GAS fees rise on the blockchain, the MINTING fees rise on the OpenSeas platform.
Question:
Why does it cost anything to mint an NFT?
Other platforms do not have any fee at all (or it is a fraction of OpenSeas fee).
And OpenSeas takes a cut when the NFT sells...so...
What’s stopping users from moving to cheaper and better platforms?
There are other platforms which are technically better, cheaper, and easier to mint on, but lesser known:
NFTs
This is a big deal - can a court BLOCK A TOKEN?
TLDR; YES.
Somebody got the idea to make a “JRR TOKEN”...they used all of the BRANDING of the Hobbit and JRR Tolkein.
It turns out — somebody wasn’t happy!
Just because an author died 77+ years ago, doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want with his “stuff”.
JRR’s estate promptly filed in court for copyright infringement — turns out, they do care about his intellectual property.
“The JRR Token’s Twitter account and YouTube channel and website have since been deleted.” Boom! Game Over!
Institutional Adoption
Is Australia waking up?
After a slew of American politicians jumping on the Bitcoin bandwagon, Australian Senator Jane Hume jumps on:
“This is an asset class that has captured hearts and minds, but beyond that — whatever you might personally think — it’s a technology that’s not going away any time soon.”
Price action
Check out Cathy Wood’s take on the current Bitcoin price here.
Funny: When pressed if she would buy or sell — she can’t give tips — so she says “I would be more bullish than bearish”. Probably would get too much heat from her company if she gave an actual tip!
I recommend TRADING VIEW for the best charts, not only for coins, but for stocks too.
There’s a cool part of the chart called TECHNICALS — where they show and explain the different methods.
Remember: I fully agree with Scott Adams when it comes to this stuff:
“All those price predictions are just Astrology plus graphs.” — Scott Adams
Bottom line: If you need to time a trade, you are not investing
Biden Appoints Powell
President Biden has appointed Jerome Powell to be the next fed chair.
What does this have to do with Crypto prices?
Well: Jerome Powell has made it clear that he wants to regulate stable coins AND he is working on a CBDC (! as seen in CryptoRevolution#5)
But at the same time he will not ban Bitcoin or support a blanket ban on cryptocurrency. Since Jerome is not an “anti crypto” type, this might trigger a BULL RUN in December. With emphasis on “might”!
Best Post of the Week
Jordan Peterson posted his opinion in an EPIC TWEET!
And, he just did a seriously MIND BLOWING podcast with the author of “The Bitcoin Standard” Dr. Saifedean Ammous — MUST WATCH!
That’s it for this week my dear HODL’er.
Take care and watch out for those Turkey left-overs!
Sincerely,
Eric
P.S. Did you claim your free copy of the DEAD SIMPLE Bitcoin tracker?