Metaworse
Having the extended family in farming across me & my partner's side is great for having opportunities for hands-on nature adventures for a non-green-fingered moi. However, those farmers within this family sphere who are monetarily less fortunate also then become our struggle. In some ways the below is a thought experiment that allows me to understand what a central bank must be feeling.
- main source of income
- salary
- main buckets of expenses
- living costs of immediate family
- taxes
- non-compulsory assistance expense for less fortunate folks in extended family
- medical bills
- farming expenditures
The above needs to balance out (i.e. at least net to zero). If it goes into negative then we are eating into our savings or about to lead myself to ruin. Extrapolating further if we stop non-compulsory assistance then we are leading someone else to ruin. We must strive to keep us in this delicate equilibrium whilst ensuring we keep at least the non-compulsory assistance receivers abreast of the fact that money doesn't grow on trees and they must attempt to secure other avenues of funding.
The pickle above, without any pure knowledge of inner workings of central banking or monetary policy is the only way I can understand what must keep some folks awake at night. We as the general population perceive our governments to be forever resilient with pocket full of monies. Someone must be giving that money to our governments, and even those sources of funding must have some constraints. In this wonderful perpetual money feast we have forgotten the lesson of frugality. The respect that money deserves has slowly eroded away. The reasons for this could be many; yet I wonder if one of them are the level of debts that we as students attained from the get-go. When I leave university with debt that runs in multiples of my earnings then maybe I will be willing to attempt any lottery ticket in order to extricate myself from it. I wonder if the whole crypto world didn't get so expansionary just when we as students started to get charged exorbitant amounts from universities. Maybe this was the outlet that allowed us to see an exit. However, now that the genie of disrespect for money is out-of-the-bag any sort of debt forgiveness schemes will just make matters worse. What if, all along we been running around as central bankers playing with our personal balance sheets hoping to one day enter Valhalla with chariots of gold (or bitcoin in my case)!!!
This leads me to my 2nd thought. Why do I listen to Morris Sachs' podcast and others like Market Huddle even when majority of time they are anti-crypto or continue with same old anti-Tether etc tirades. Largely, because its become fashionable within folks of my age or younger to dismiss the older generation as bunch of loonies. We want to make a better world and be true to Lord Satoshi whilst paying homage to Hal Finney but we fail to do basic maths. Satoshi, Hal and even Zooko Wilcox, co-founder of Z-Cash (privacy coin) who recently gave a talk to Swiss National Bank are all older generation.
The path ahead will be futile if we don't realise that we are standing on the shoulders of giants and sometimes its better to listen (even if we disagree) as opposed to simply being ignorant of dissenting talking points. One can only hope the current implosion of firms like Voyager, BlockFi, 3ACs will help to wash away the gambling characters riding on the coat tails of hardworking Satoshi acolytes and with it the maxi-mania (aka crypto fundamentalists) we have gathered both within the BTC & ETH worlds.
During this weekend's MacroVoice (ep. 333) Harley Bassman says; "in the grand scheme of things your life is transitory". This made me realise how I spent last 2 years talking about Metaverse and new Defi platforms but have missed the plot.
Crypto as it stands is still largely trying to make 1st world better whilst there is still vast developing & under-developed world which has a long way to catchup. For instance, I sent $600 to my grandmother in 3rd world country. After a month I get $540 refunded. I find out that thanks to some FATF rules (or their interpretation) apparently my grandmother must have a mobile number otherwise they simply reject my transfer whilst eating $60 in fees.
Moreover, I don't need 10 different DeFi platforms to do partial things just like I don't wish to buy NFTs in games only to have to start to list these as immovable assets like a house. There must be greater interoperability, integration & transmissibility of my Metaverse assets. I am happy to wait in this transitory life to at least see these things appear instead of demanding them for tomorrow but false promises & scope-creep needs to avoided.
For example: Vitalik is already selling the day dreams of bigger & better ETH but the merge is still only "tentatively" scheduled for September 19. He says he wants to do following post merge:
- split up the network into smaller pieces
- shrink node size (reduce storage demand)
- reduce network congestion through removal of historical data
If you notice, merge is being sold as environmentally friendly, yet all the 3 items above are not going to be part of merge. They will occur over a span of rest of decade. So indeed over time ETH could become easier to manage, more decentralised & ESG-compliant however by than I feel G of ESG might well be very centralised. After all, how many of you own 32 ETH and run a ETH node or validator?
Talking of Governance, we are already seeing interesting votes being conducted on various DeFi platforms (e.g. Lido) where VCs (e.g. Dragonfly) wish to buy tokens but without any lock-up period because apparently they aren't allowed to buy illiquid assets!!!! They were about to win the vote until some crypto anons made noise on twitter that led to other anon whales to step in and block it.
Lastly, regarding crypto anons; it is very amusing to see Coinbase come out with insider trading of its own employees & subsequent SEC fight. One aspect of this whole drama that shouldn't be forgotten is that Coinbase's own mobile application was leaking data for quite a while (e.g. they have a token popularity metrics widget; and couple of hours or days prior to Coinbase listing a new token; this widget would start to show the token)! Additionally, its amazing to see twitter posts being shown as evidence in legal documents; especially when it is the anons pointing out to Coinbase that its insiders are up to no good.
Interesting Reads:
Venkatesh Rao
Arthur HayesArthur Hayes
