Crypto is the #1 Pick

Daily Bits

  • You can now use PayPal when stacking sats on Coinbase — though the transaction fees are almost etherian (4% on top of the 1.5% CB fee).
  • Coinbase is purchasing Skew, a data analytics company that will help provide data for institutional customers.
  • DeFi lending protocol Notional raised $10 million led by Pantera Capital.

What’s Popping?

(Crypto x Pop Culture tidbit)

With the #1 pick of the NFL draft, the Jacksonville Jaguars selected Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence. What does this have to do with crypto? Well, Lawrence, who is a VERY highly touted prospect, is taking his $22 million signing bonus and investing in bitcoin, ether, and, *sigh*, dogecoin through a partnership with Blockfolio. Lawrence joins other NFL players Russel Okung and Sean Culkin in accepting BTC as salary.

Recommended Reads

  1. Presenting the best titled thread of the week: “The Bull Case for the Bull Market”

2. Who disrupts the disruptors? It sounds like it crypto may be the answer…

Laura’s Daily Listen

(this could be an Unchained/Unconfirmed pitch or just any pod)

If you have been around in crypto long enough then you have almost certainly encountered MetaMask, the browser extension turned wallet that is popular in the crypto space. This week I interviewed Dan Finlay, co-founder of MetaMask, to talk about how the company’s daily active users QUINTUPLED in just six months.

The Rabbit Hole

(Trending/Prediction/Future Show Topic/Niche Idea)

Ether may have hit a new high each of the past two weeks, but the web 3 leader is not the only blockchain making moves. Both Solana and Binance Smart Chain have each been garnering headlines (in token price and development) in the past week… mark your calendar for May 25th, when a podcast on just this topic will be coming out.

Crypto Daily

Daily Bits

  • The world’s hardest form of money blasted to an all-time high today, hitting $63,729.5 and melting the faces of plebs everywhere. If this is breaking news to you -> then you either 1) don’t have crypto, in which case, you are probably wandering why a plebs face is melting 2) you are one of the few HODLers who does not check their crypto portfolio every negative five seconds.
  • Michael Morell, former CIA director, published an independent paper that basically said the U.S. needs to get its crypto shit together. To put it in a Forbesian manner: “Morrell made it clear that there will also be severe geopolitical repercussions for the U.S. vis-a-vis China if it wastes energy and resources chasing a ghost as opposed to leveraging blockchain, and fintech more generally, to build the country’s technological and economic base.” In a shoutout to Yellen (comma) Janet, he also made it quite obvious that the whole bitcoin-as-illicit-drug-money argument is overblown now that advances in blockchain analysis makes it possible to crack-down on, well, payments for crack using Bitcoin.
  • It seemed to be a theme for regulators to make snappy announcements about Bitcoin today. Hester Pierce, I call her crypto mom in my head (most people know her as SEC commisioner), unveiled a new “safe harbor” program for crypto tokens that would give a 3 year grace period for developers to work on DeFi projects without worrying about those pesky federal securities laws.
  • On Coinbase Eve, like Christmas Eve, except with everybody’s 3rd favorite centralized cryptocurrency exchange, Brian Armstrong and Co. gifted 100 shares of COIN (roughly worth $25,000) to all 1700 of its employees. Coinbase finally IPOs (DPOs?) tomorrow, btw, so, ya know, watch out for that.

Terrific Tweets

  1. As the youngest of the millenials (shoutout to my fellow ’98ers), I vibe with this tweet. When I am like 74 years old and I drive my hovercraft to the Bits and Bytes Coffee Shop, my caramel macchiato is going to be like 3 bajillion dollars because, ya know, we have printed 30% of the money supply since I graduated high school and pretend like it hasn’t happened. Luckily, I bought BTC before $20k.

2. This dude out here guessing the price of BTC like every time. I am so bullish. *looks up how much you can get for a kidney*

3. Read this in a Dwight Schrute voice

4. The head of something important at Fidelity has some great thoughts on BTC and you should stop what you’re doing and read his thread.

5. If Paul Revere were a HODLer driving a Tesla through the payment rails of America, he would be proclaiming “The Institutions are coming, the Institutions are coming.” Everybody should buy Bitcoin. That’s the statement.

Content is King (2 longer reads to finish it up)

Most of the time when I read things on Crypto Twitter they make sense. I can understand 280 characters. When I read most longform stuff I get lost because 1) charts are hard 2) big words are confusing 3) I understand neither economics or finance at a very high level 4) nobody cares about technology besides when it doesn’t work sooooo. Anyways, I say all that, and, well, I have to recommend that you read this paper by Dylan Leclair on the Long Term Debt Cycle and Rise of Bitcoin:

With Coinbases IPO coming up tomorrow and everyone getting ready to moon (looking at you Dogecoiners), I thought Decrypt did a great job describing some of the “secrets” from Coinbase’s early days — when they were not so gosh darn buttoned up.

Check out the article here: https://decrypt.co/66315/7-secrets-from-coinbase-early-days-before-coin-ipo

Final Thoughts

If Bitcoin reaches the all-time high but you weren’t looking at your portfolio to see it… did it really happen?

-Kram

Daily Blog Playground

Daily Bits

  • Binance is launching a platform for users to buy/sell tokenized shares of… stock? As of today, users can purchase Tesla (as little as 1/100th of a share) for the low, low price of using a centralized exchange — the trades are commission free. The centralized little tokens will even qualify holders (not HODLers cuz we’re talking stocks here) for returns + dividends.
  • HSBC, one of the worlds largest swindlers, I mean banks, took its anti-crypto stance another step further by banning customers from trading MicroStrategy stock. Customers were already banned from transferring fiat to/from cryptocurrency exchanges. HSBC explained its decision by saying it “has no appetite for direct exposure to virtual currencies,” which seems… outdated given recent events.
  • Galaxy Digital, led by Mike Novogratz, filed for a bitcoin ETF today. The SEC is reviewing 2 applications at the moment while 6 other applicants are already queued up to be most likely swatted away without explanation because the U.S., inexplicably, wants to continue letting Canada be the most crypto-progressive country in North America. Boom, hows that for a run on sentence.
  • Biden and his officials are officially spooked that the recently released digital yuan threatens the dollars’ dominance (editors note: they should have thought about that before making the money printer go brrrrrr to the tune of $1.9 trill).

5 Phenomenal Tweets (ok they’re kinda cool but phenomenal was alliterative)

  1. If you haven’t checked out the Cyber Hornet King’s interview with a toddler, well, then you need to drop whatever you are doing (don’t actually drop your phone though because that would defeat the purpose) and check it out.

2. Speaking of the Cyber Hornet King, Saylor’s bitcoin ETF, I mean company, announced that its paying board members in bitcoin because MicroStrategy is full of big ballers. Russell Okung, the NFL player who took his salary in BTC like six months ago and is now mega-rich instead of super-rich, tweeted out a pretty good response:

3. TIME Magazine announced a partnership with Grayscale, you know, the biggest digital asset manager in the universe, for a new video series on the crypto space. The catch… Time is getting paid in BTC by Grayscale and will HODL that fake internet money on its balance sheet. This, in itself, is pretty damn cool. This next tweet, however, got me even more excited!

4. The NYSE announced that its minting a few NFTs for some reason. Hayden Adams, creator of NYSE 2.0, I mean Uniswap, had a pretty funny response.

5. Nobody liked this tweet I sent out which kind of hurt my feelings but I noticed that we hit a monthly low in ETH gas fees. Not sure why this was the case, but I was pretty excited to ape into some Uniswap trades for the low, low fee of about .004 ETH.

Meme of the Day

16 Crypto Memes ideas | memes, cryptocurrency, funny

Parting Thoughts

Today was a pretty fun day. BTC is crushing it around $60k and ETH having a party above $2,100. Uniswap was the big gainer of the day, shooting up from $30 to an eye-popping $38 dollars, making Unicorns everywhere cry sweet, sweet rainbow tears of joy (disclaimer: my bag is about 10% of Uniswap).

Besides that, I’m keeping an eye on Coinbase’s IPO that is set for Wednesday.

Until next time,

Kram

BTC = 40k and I’m Sweating

I have checked the price of Bitcoin approximately 1 million times in the past 24 hours. The price is moving faster than I can comprehend. BTC crushed 37k, 38k, and 39k in like 32 hours or something wild like that.

The price is getting so ridiculously high that my girlfriend even sent me a text asking me about buying Bitcoin.

I sent her back this meme and a referral link to Coinbase.

Then I realized that Bitcoin had HAD LITERALLY DOUBLED IN PRICE SINCE I screenshotted the meme on December 15th. In under a month, Bitcoin totally ruined my favorite meme. I need to add an extra zero to that 20k I guess.

shouts to CoinGecko

Anyways, today is pretty fun. Here is what I’m reading:

  1. With the BTC price soaring to the moon, the IRS is obviously interested. The whole tax situation in crypto is super weird. I’ll link you to an article giving a bit of advice on whether or not you should report your holdings.
  2. Dan Held came out with a new newsletter today (hahahahaha I love terrible sentences). He wrote about a few of the biggest qualms people have with BTC, such as energy use, Tether, and black market capabilities. I found it to be a rather interesting read. I wish he had gone more in depth, but I liked it as a quick breakdown of Bitcoin’s supposed shortcomings.
  3. Kraken came out with a year-in-review crypto report. It’s a brief briefing (I’m killing it on the short sentences), only about 20 pages. They do good work explaining what happened with Digital Assets in 2020 without getting too crazy or too complicated.

Hope y’all have a wonderful day. Keep checking that price.

-Kram

Bitcoin Poetry

Tis a beautiful day to be a coiner. The price is mooning, the alts are popping, and the government is going a little crazy.

Here is a quick list of the digital asset happenings over the last few days. After that, I made some poems because I enjoy doing weird stuff like rhyming BTC and Free.

  1. The OCC just gave Digital Assets a high five. I’m not smart enough to break down the “interpretive letter “written by Brian Brooks (the head of the OCC and former C-level exec at Coinbase), but I am smart enough to know that when the government starts using terms like “stablecoin” the crypto markets should go wild. This seems like a step in the right direction for Ethereum and digital assets in general.
  2. Nothing is going right for Ripple. They are under attack from all sides. Talk about a Byzantine General’s Problem, am I right? (if you get this joke you are a true nerd, congratulations!) I think the SEC is going to rip apart Ripple, pun intended. The problem comes down to Ripple owning the nodes that are in charge of their token, XRP. They are not decentralized like BTC and Ethereum, which is why the SEC can come after them so easily.
  3. Russel Okung got paid in Bitcoin and he plays in the NFL. That is wild! I literally turned on Sportcenter a few days ago and saw Adam Schefter talking about Bitcoin. I hope this becomes a trend. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Spencer Dinwiddie be the next athlete to get paid in some sort of digital asset.
Haiku:

Bitcoin just hit

an all time high once again.

36k, yay!

Acrostic:

Bretton Woods and dirty fiat

Instigated a period of money printing

That will probably never stop. You should

Consider

Opting

Into the

Network of freedom

Limerick

There was once a man named by Fiat Fred

A life of stonks and inflation was what he led;

Til he found BTC

which set him free

And now his name is Austrian Economics Ed

-Kram (1/06/2020)

Answering My Friend’s BTC Questions

1. Since supply is always going to be limited, other than demand what are other factors that makes the price/value of Bitcoin fluctuates?

So this is one of the hardest questions to answer in Bitcoin because it is such a speculative market.

One reason I think the price has been so volatile over the past 10 years because of how small the crypto industry is. While the current market cap of Bitcoin is around $650 billion, which is quite high (though nowhere close to Microsoft’s $1.32 trillion dollar market cap), in the past ten years the the market cap has been under $300 billion dollars. This may sound like a lot, but it’s not (gold is $12 trillion).

With such a small market cap, Bitcoin has been very susceptible to the whims of large Bitcoin holders buying/selling (which creates huge swings in price depending on whether they buy or sell). In the crypto world such big holders are called whales and they are a problem.

Furthermore, Bitcoin is a new technology and with the rise in new technology comes a lot of difficulties. Bitcoin has had a ton of issues on the exchange side (getting the right licesnces, security of exchanges, etc) that has caused mass hysteria within the industry. Check out this story if you want to learn more about the early exchanges and Bitcoin. When the tech fails or the infrastructure fails, Bitcoin has seen the price dip like crazy.

In regard to Bitcoin volatility on the upside, which is the good kind of volatility, there are many factors that push demand. Here are a few of the narratives that have pushed the price up.

-Bitcoin as Digital Gold

-Bitcoin as an inflation hedge

-Bitcoin as monetary freedom

Besides these narratives, there is also the halvening every four years (which further decreases supply), a large influx of institutional investors, and a never ending supply of countries fucking up their monetary system.

2. Why is Bitcoin so volatile compared to the stock market? If Bitcoin were to crash, what would be the sole reason for that or could there be many possible reasons?

I spoke at length about Bitcoin and volatility above. I will also link to this article which puts Bitcoin’s volatility in perspective. While BTC has been very volatile over the last 10 years, 2020 has been relatively tame and may foreshadow a future where BTC is somewhat stable (post price discovery phase).

To answer your other question, about why Bitcoin would crash, well, the possiblities are endless.

This may sound like a scary answer, but I would say the same thing about the current fiat system in the US (which has only been around since the 1970s… which isn’t that long ago).

Here are a few reasonable ways that Bitcoin could fail or crash:

  • a large group of miners (the people who protect the network) could get together and initiate a “51% attack.” This would be crazy expensive (roughly $355 billion in electricity + equipment) and is probably not feasible at the moment. This was a larger threat when Bitcoin was a smaller network, as it was easier to override. Now it is so big that a 51% attack is almost out of the question.
  • China or the US could outright ban the use of crypto. They couldn’t break or destroy or sue or take over Bitcoin because nobody owns it, however, they could just make a law that shuts down BTC in their own country. This would suck and the price would probably dip like crazy. However, digital assets just got a high five from the OCC and China looks like it is going to be in the crypto space for the long haul.
  • there is a huge bug in the system that has yet to rear its ugly head. At its core, Bitcoin is code, and if the code is flawed, then the system is flawed. So far, Bitcoin has proved sturdy, almost infallible, but there is always a chance that it fails.
  • something better is invented that is more secure, faster, and easier to use. Bitcoin is the first, biggest, and most secure crypto out there, but it is a growing industry and I doubt there will not be a competitor at some point.
3. How often do people steal other’s bitcoin? *I know you made a digital wallet a few weeks ago or whatever*, but if that is what you are supposed to do, then how many people who own any Bitcoin actually make this wallet and what even is it?

So I do not have an exact answer to this question. An article from 2018 reported that $1.1 billion in Bitcoin was stolen over the course of the year. A Forbes article in 2019 puts the number around $4 billion a year. That is a lot of Bitcoin, I do admit.

Authors caveat: check out this website that says the total amount lost from internet scams in 2020 was around $150 838 567.

Whenever there is money involved, scammers and hackers will come. Just like you get the email from Princes in Arabia asking for monetary assistance, you will get DMs and emails asking for your private key and exchange related passwords. Be careful and you should be fine.

Check out this link if you want to know more about wallets.

When it comes to digital wallets, they are mostly safe and easy to use. A digital wallet is just an app that lets you store your Bitcoin, just like you have apps to store your money (banking app, Venmo, Robinhood, etc). Most people have digital wallets and don’t even know it, they just call them apps. There are about 1 million live bitcoin wallets right now.

The most secure way to hold Bitcoin is in a hardware wallet, but that is for more advanced holders (anything over 1% of your portfolio in my opinion).

I’ll put the reminder here for you to be sure to back up your private keys offline (never type them online or on your phone) and to use different passwords when setting up an account on your preferred exchange.

I can’t assure you that your Bitcoin will be safe, but neither can I assure you that your money is safe when you use a mobile banking app. It’s sort of the same thing.

4. Since Bitcoin is “used as a currency” yet people don’t use it as a currency right now because of how valuable it will be in the future, when do you expect bitcoin to be used like how money is used today? Or do you never think this will be the case?

I really don’t see Bitcoin being used like cash. I think it is digital gold: used as a store of value, hedge against inflation, and a way to move large amounts of money securely and quickly.

I honestly think “cryptocurrency” is a pretty useless word and can be misleading to people just entering the industry. I see Bitcoin as a digital asset. Bitcoin is a network of computers securing 21 million pieces of value.

How you use those digitally scarce pieces is up to you and only you. Labeling such a system as a “currency” is much to simple. It would be like calling the internet the intermail just because email was one of the first popular use cases for the internet.

Bitcoin could end up being a currency (just as gold is kind of a currency) but it is already so much more. It is a network, a system of trust, a new kind of technology, the first successful form of digital scarcity, and a reserve asset.

5. After reading this, I feel as though you primarily focused on the positive sides of BTC and that it would be pretty rare for you to lose your initial investment if someone were to invest in BTC. For a beginner, when reading what you wrote and then reading articles about ‘You should only invest money in BTC that you would be okay with losing’, I feel pulled in both directions. What do you have to say about that?

This is my favorite question because it gets at the core of the “should I buy bitcoin” issue.

Here I am talking about Bitcoin as this revolutionary invention. Digital Gold! Internet Money! Blockchain! 21 million!

And in the next sentence I am like “oh don’t invest too much or you will lose your ass.”

That is confusing. I am sure you want a straight answer.

Well, I am not going to give you a straight answer, because what you do with your money is on you and you alone.

If you are going to purchase some Bitcoin, start small. Just get a little bit of it and see if you like the experience. See if you can understand a digital wallet and seed phrases and all of that stuff.

Do your own research before you do anything more than purchase a few hundred bucks.

The moral of the story is that people have lost A LOT of money in this space due to scams, bad trades, ill-timed purchases, and the loss of private keys. There are horror stories. Just type into Google “stolen bitcoin” and you will want to throw up. It’s a dark and scary place sometimes.

I can’t guarantee the price will continue to rise. BTC could get hacked or banned or something even crazier than that. You could lose your private keys or have your identity stolen or something even worse. I don’t know the future.

But I do know this:

Bitcoin was up ~350% in 2020.

Bitcoin was the best performing asset of the last decade.

I am writing this article as Bitcoin sits at an all time high of $33,000.

Could a crash be imminent? Probably, based on the past volatility of BTC.

But could another pump be imminent? Ummm, yes.

Guggenheim’s CIO is calling for $400,000 BTC.

JP Morgan puts the number at $146,000.

Citibank thinks Bitcoin could hit $300,000 next year.

So go stack some sats. Just a few. Just for funsies.

Is Cryptocurrency a Bad Word?

According to the Google search bar, a cryptocurrency is defined as:

“a digital currency in which transactions are verified and records maintained by a decentralized system using cryptography, rather than by a centralized authority.”

I have a few questions about this absolute meat grinder of a sentence. I will write them below.

  1. didn’t we learn to not define a word by a word in like second grade? A cryptocurrency is a digital currency? That wouldn’t fly in middle school and it shouldn’t fly now
  2. why do i feel like the only thing missing from such a disgusting definition is a word like “synergy?”
  3. who wrote this and have they ever heard of a blockchain?
  4. can we agree to never put decentralized and centralized in the same sentence ever again? (after this one of course)
  5. if this definition doesn’t work for Bitcoin but also doesn’t work for Ethereum but also doesn’t work for Ripple, then, ummmmm, what’s the point?

Cryptocurrency is a word that makes no sense when talking about what Bitcoin and Ethereum and DeFi has become.

I think calling them cryptoassets would be fine.

Cryptocommodities would be meh.

Digital assets is on a better track.

Anything with “currency” on the backend is languishing in the early 2010s.

The problem is that the world of cryptocurrencies has evolved into a world of tokenized networks specializing in different sectors of finance.

Bitcoin is a digital savings mechanism. BTC takes the characteristics of gold and moves it into a digital and decentralized network where supply is finitely capped and each transaction painstakingly audited.

Ethereum is a decentralized contract platform that allows parties to enter into digital agreements with automated transacting capabilities without going through a middleman.

DeFi allows for lending and loans and trading in a decentralized cloud on top of the Ethereum contract platform.

Callling these things “cryptocurrencies” would be like calling the internet a “intermail.”

The internet took off because of email in the mid-late 90s and then boomed from there. We do not call the internet “intermail” just because email was the first popular use case.

Just because these digital assets were first introduced as currencies doesn’t mean that is how they will always be.

So I vote for the end of “cryptocurrencies” and the birth of “digital assets.”

Let’s get classy, San Diego

Best Stay Classy San Diego GIFs | Gfycat

Digital Asset Prices

Bitcoin: $33,969

Ethereum: $1,075.29

Ripple: going to zero ew

Uniswap: $6.27

-Kram

Why Do We Need Defi? (12/18/2020)

Imagine you are standing in line at the bank. Yeah, that’s right. Put in those headphones with actual wires, blast some Britney Spears, and imagine that it is a dreary Tuesday afternoon in the early 2000s.

Look around. What do you see? Probably some drab furniture, burnished in colors like burgundy and maroon, a few people aimlessly milling about, some buttoned up men and women named Jeff and Karen with nametags and fake smiles, and, of course, the huge vault in the left corner of the room. Ya know, the big metal one that hides all of the money behind the reinforced steel + locking mechanisms.

You’re waiting in line to open a savings account at Wells Chase of America Bank and maybe get a loan to buy a car. Your new job is across town and it would be pretty nice to not take the bus everywhere. You’re young and broke, like most twenty four year olds.

The line is long. The person at the front is waiving their hands in the air like they just don’t care except by the tone of their voice it sounds like they really ~do~ care. So you wait. And wait. And look longingly over at the coffee maker in the back right corner of WCoAB, but you don’t want to leave your spot in line, so you try to make eye contact with Karen Paolinsky, the lady in the sweet pantsuit going around asking if people the really helpful question: “have you been helped yet?” If someone says yes, she nods and pats them on the back, if someone says no, she points toward the line and says “why don’t ya head over there, to the line that hasn’t moved and probably won’t move until hell freezes over, and wait to talk to an associate.”

Sometime between “wow these appetizers are taking really long” at Chili’s and “oh my gosh it’s only the fourth inning of this baseball game?” you get to the front of the line.

You’re excited. Pumped. Thrilled.

Gary Valumpoppy, rocker of a nice mustache, looks at you. Then looks back down at the papers you handed him outlining your identity, address, and small amount of wealth. He continues looking. Maybe he types something into his computer. Maybe he writes something down. He definitely looks up and asks you “is this {certain} piece of information correct?” Then he looks back down.

Your leg starts to bump and fidget. Who is this guy, to make or break my financial circumstances? This guy is really prepared to deteremine whether or not I can afford a car? You start to understand the concept of waiving your hands in the air like you just don’t care except really caring because you’re mad at the financial system.

Gary V, no relation to Gary Vee, after much rumination and deliberation, is ready to talk.

“I’m approving you for a savings account. $500 minimum, .5% APR, and a checking account that allows for debit card transactions. It’s a no-go on your loan. You don’t have the credit history yet, nor the funds to cover a loan, even a small one. Any questions?”

I bet you have so many questions. But you can here the people behind you fidgeting. Gary Valumpoppy doesn’t seem that interested in explaining the finer details on how he came to the conclusion that you basically get no interest and no loan on your money.

So you leave, like a dog with its’ tail between its’ legs, and go home to your small apartment. With a shoddy little savings account, a debit card that is basically another form of cash (so not that helpful), and no way to buy a car without crippling your savings/future.

The early 2000’s were a tough time for anybody trying to interact with financial services if they were young, poor, or didn’t fit neatly into the perfect credit history mold… but here’s a dirty little secret: the 2010’s were just as brutal.

I will not go into the DETAILS. Details are so boring. Just know that it is an innificient system, that banking. It’s hard to get good information, it’s harder to get good compound interest, and it’s even harder to access financial tools.

Decentralized Finance, aka de-fi, has changed the game.

Come back on Sunday to learn more about how DEFI works.

-Kram

Moon Shots and IPO’s

December 17th, 2020 might just be the day Bitcoin hit mainstream. The first successful attempt at wrapping money onto the internet found itself blasting through 22k, trending on Twitter, hotly debated on MSNBC, and, of course, celebrated on the Twitter-sphere. It’s a good day to be a coiner.

Big News of the Day:

  1. Coinbase, the brainchild of Brian Armstrong and regulatory darling, filed for IPO earlier today. This is going to be huge. Their most recent evaluations were somewhere between 7-12 billion (dollars).
  2. Guggenheims CIO argues that Bitcoin should be worth $400,000 based on their metrics. That is a lot of fiat. Minerd (the CIO) believes that rampant money printing by the Federal Reserve and Bitcoin’s native scarcity should continue to push the price of BTC upward

-Kram

Blockchain: A Cool Word and a Cool System (12/16/2020)

The moon inched closer this morning as Bitcoin rocketed upwards from the doldrums of early teens into the roaring 20s. It is truly the a good time to be a Bitcoin bull, bull, bull. With such wanton enthusiasm and extraordinary glee in the air, tis the season perhaps, I felt inspired to go back to the basics. Because what is Bitcoin beside a revolutionary new way to store value on the internet?

Bitcoin is nothing without the technological backing of blockchain. Woah, now that was a wordy sentence.

Blockchain does three things super well. (LIST TIME… I LOVE LISTS)
  • Blockchain tracks ownership of goods (aka data). Items on a blockchain are immutably and irreversibly owned (don’t make me bring up forks right now, put ur damn utensils away and keep reading). What does this mean? It means that any piece of information on the blockchain cannot be copied, stolen, or recreated without the entire system breaking down. For Bitcoin, this means that Bitcoins can only be owned, spent, and transferred by a single person (or entity) to another and then that person, and that person alone, can own, spend, or transfer said Bitcoin (ok they could also leverage that baby out for a mortgage, give it away in a stupid twitter thing to get followers, or pull any other wonderfully odd crypto shenanigan).
  • Blockchain sounds cool. Hahahah, just kidding. Well, I mean, it does sound cool and makes you sound smart if you use it in a sentence. Any sentence. It doesn’t even need to make blockchain (see, I proved it by replacing “sense” with the word blockchain and you just went with it). The name is so cool it gets its own section on this list. I make the rules. Deal with it.
  • Blockchain decreases slippages. Uh-oh, big words again. What the heck is slippage? Slippage is error. Slippage occurs when you have complex structures with multiple points of connection. At these points of connection two things usually happen: the complex structure gets bogged down and clogged OR the complex structure starts getting rid of information in order to run on time. Think of any inefficient system. Struggling to come up with one? Here are some examples: sending money overseas, voting for our President, tax documents, and ordering at Subway. A blockchain clears up these complex structures by creating a system of person-person (peer-peer, entity-entity) transactions.
    • Sending money overseas is as simple as clicking a button and waiting 10 minutes (for the blockchain to do its blockchain thing), instead of the weeklong, bank-bank-custodian-bank-custodian-bank-bank-each-takes-their-own-percentage-cut thing that is generally accepted as overseas wire transfers.
    • Voting for our President is as easy as confirming identity and hitting the “Screw it, Kanye West 2024” button, instead of watching middle aged white men touch their maps for three days straight.
    • Tax documents can be automatically filed based on your digital holdings tracked… ON THE BLOCKCHAIN… so instead of manually printing out a piece of paper and doing your taxes and doing them wrong so then doing them again… it just does it automatically and you can go take a nap. You don’t even have to log on to turbotax. How exciting.
    • I DON’T KNOW HOW SUBWAY ORDERING CAN BE FIXED BUT IF SOMEONE CAN COME UP WITH A BLOCKCHAIN IDEA THAT WOULD BE NICE BECAUSE I AM TIRED OF GOING UP TO THE FRONT OF THE LINE AND WONDERING IF I SHOULD TELL THEM WHICH BREAD I WANT OR WHAT KIND OF SANDWICH I WANT OR WHETHER I AM GLUTEN FREE OR NOT OR HOW LONG MY SANDWICH SHOULD BE.

-Kram