Sunday Summary, FEB01
A week in review from the Editor
Supported by Proto and Bitkey - a part of the Bitcoin ecosystem at Block, Inc.
You’re confused—Maybe mad.
Bitcoiners are feeling a growing cognitive dissonance watching the current financial environment.
Gold is ripping, silver is ripping. Rare earth metals are following suit. Bonds are moving. AI is taking over the universe; datacenters are popping up like wildflowers. Yet Bitcoin, the most transformative monetary technology of our lifetime is flopping on the pier like a landed fish—uselessly.
And everyone has a theory, a reason, some kind of explanatory mechanism more convoluted than the last giving a grand explanation to the current price performance.
It’s probably just the Fourth Turning interacting with the Strawberry Milkshake Theory.
Save yourself from the chartists and line drawers, and recognize the truth of the matter.
Today’s price is noise.
In a very real way Bitcoin has already “won,” ETFs are approved, institutions are investing in it, and financial services are exploding. This is real progress and these are milestones worth recognizing.
Why then, isn’t it doing what we want?!
Are we simply too confident in our winning, or is there something else happening?
The risk of myopia.
When you love something, you want to hold it close, you want to study it, and you want everyone else to appreciate it.
Like the puppy love of two teenagers sitting together on the bus (they just started dating official-official last week), half-absorbed in the other, two hormonal amoebas awkwardly gelling into a single entity, contorted into an oblique semi-permanent hand-hold-hug posture.
We get it guys, you’re in love. Now back up a little bit, and get your feet off the seats.
When you get too close to something you’re likely to miss what else is going on around you (or, miss your bus stop).
There’s always a bigger fish.
Bitcoin is not the reserve currency of the world. It is not the reserve currency of the U.S. economy. It is not even the reserve currency of most S&P 500 companies.
Sure, bitcoin is very large.
But we are small-t trillion and there are very big Trillions out there.
There is always a larger bank or fund buying, holding, or gasp, actively selling. There are liquidity pools the likes of which we have never swam in. Bitcoin may no longer have floaties on in the shallow end, but there are a couple orders of magnitude from the kiddie pool to blue liquidity oceans (and we need to at least try the high-dive a few times first before we head out into open water).
You would think we would know this already.
Anyone who has attended their local meetup has experienced this firsthand.
They are always different types of people in the crowd, the newbie, the developer, the nouveau riche, the eternally confused but glad to be here, and somewhere in the back, present at every meetup, the very quiet whale.
It’s never the loudest person. It’s never the one leaving in a flashy car. It’s surely not the guy with a brand new Rolex.
Like clockwork, as the months pass and you get to know and befriend your various meetup attendees, your perspective shifts.
Who exactly is that quiet guy in the back?
Sorry, what did you say you were doing in 2012?
Ah, and you work on independent projects now?
Big fish stay quiet.
There’s no good that comes from being flashy, presumptuous, or a braggart.
Big fish know they’re big fish, and the biggest of them all are not looking to be known for simply being big fish.
Visibility makes you a target, and the last thing someone wants after working, earning, investing, risking, and succeeding, is to then find themselves in the crosshairs of those who might harm or take advantage of them. There’s a lesson about quiet power that can only be learned when you actually block out the excess noise and listen instead of speaking.
Whether at your local meetup or operating in multi-trillion-dollar markets, the principle is the exact same.
The current ‘price panic’ is the lesson.
The simple fact that analysts are running to their charts and the most ‘hardcore’ bitcoin advocates have lost interest or turned to doom and gloom, is in fact the signal that we are not the big fish we might think we are.
When we’re the big fish, we’ll know.
And we probably won’t have to talk so much about it.