Crypto must live in the Southern Hemisphere: it has decided summer starts in November. Price movements are heating up and on Discord and Telegram channels the evenings stretch on forever. The bulls are running, and to the faithful, the land of milk and honey beckons.
We are back, baby. Bitcoin at time of writing has peaked over $100,000. The crypto market is worth more than the GDP of France, and Bitcoin recently surpassed the value of the world’s silver. ‘Analysts’ (never trust analysts) are predicting million dollar BTC this decade.
Where Bitcoin goes other coins are sure to follow. Speculative excess has broken out on a scale that will dwarf the last mania. A lot of people are going to get very rich and, despite all the green lines, a lot of people are going to lose everything – again.
It’s this last point that must give us pause. Did any of us really learn anything from last time? Will we, freshly zested by the hope of something better, and further crushed by the harsh truth of our lived realities, be able to resist the neon promontory of coloured cute coins and the 100× gains they offer? Probably not. The world has, over the last four years, become ever more divorced from the expected patterns of our childhood. The unapprehendable blaze of stimuli has cooked our brains into a fine soup.
Sensible investment and steady action is not the way the new generation want their lives to unfold. Hard work no longer seems to result in success. The only dream left is the get-rich-quick dream of glamour, excess and risk. They want monkey tokens. They want dog coins that have become initialisms for actual government agencies. They want a final bacchanalia before AI takes over and the nukes start to fly.
Trump’s victory at the election and the raising of Musk to the heights of power has let slip the doges of war. The crypto market suddenly has rabid supporters right at the top of the U.S. government. Gensler will almost certainly get fired as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. In short, crypto bros have accomplished state-capture – and that is reflected in one of the fastest institutional buying frenzies ever seen.
It’s not all speculation. Winter was a time of BUIDLing; the utility of crypto was quietly proven, the efficient wiring of decentralized systems-administration governed by democratically available access control tokens became stronger, more effective, and more applicable to digital realities. DePin networks, foreign exchange, distributed databases, edge computing, data management, sovereign identity, crowdsourced AIs, voting systems – the list goes on and on.
In the dark of winter these projects were raised and tiled. And though they were built on the shifting sands of speculation, their foundations are sturdy. The incorruptible blockchain establishes a measure of control and order to the chaos of the virtual world and its effects on the real. Over the coming months and years, blockchain technologies will become a daily feature of everyone’s lives. And that means they’re going to be worth something. Yes, even the squirrel coins.
Institutions have their bags. Have you? This is not financial advice, merely an observation. Soon none of this will matter anyway, we will resolve ourselves in the Singularity as points on a celestial graph – so we might as well have fun while we’re here.