A Problem of FUNdamentals

Wir haben geträumt von einer besseren Welt. Wir haben sie uns so einfach vorgestellt. Wir haben geträumt. Es war 'ne lange Nacht. Ich wünschte wir wären niemals aufgewacht. (Die Ärzte, "Revolution", 1994)

Recently I run across an interesting post (well, actually I came across it quite long ago, then I lost it, and only recently I found it again).

A funny "Millenial" article, really. Years ago I already knew that something like that would be said (and pretty much it has already been said somewhere, but I simply missed it). Well, to reinvent the wheel in a square form and call it "success" is fun indeed.

You know, DOGE was a nice shitcoin once, it even had a "use-case" of a kind. It had nothing to do with ideas, FUNdamenentals, adoptions, technologies, or other bullshit. DOGE was a very cheap coin with a relatively stable price, low transaction costs, and a wide presence at faucets and exchanges. Shortly, DOGE was very handy for transferring pennies back and forth quickly and with little overhead. Call it "medium of exchange coin", "value transfer coin", or whatever you call it pseudomonically. Everything was just fine with DOGE -- until Mr. Musk, his Twitter herd, the Reddit mob, FUNdamentals researchers, and other flocks of the feather came and fucked it all up... Now DOGE is just yet another hyped Pump&Dump shitcoin with a single address holding 28% of the supply (I wonder who it could be?). It's fun to play the P&D musical chairs game with it now.

Well, the ideas. People can indeed gather around an idea. I would even say that the crazier (or even dumber) the idea is, the more people it can gather, and the better it can be monetized. For example, you can hardly gather a lot of people into a "Probability Math Supporters Group", and it's even harder to monetize it to some decent level. But look at pop-music or soccer fan groups -- a lot of people, a lot of fun, and a lot of money. Or look at "cyber-sport", celebs fans on Facebook, or Youtube "influencers".

Actually, I have an example of a fun idea that changed the world a lot. It's Linux. About 30 years ago Mr. Torvalds started it just for fun and its "early adopters" came in just for fun, not really expecting to conquer the Galaxy or earn shitloads of money. Today Linux is backed by all major IT companies (Microsoft included) and its existence changed the IT-sphere quite considerably (even if Windows home users don't know about those millions of Linux servers that power their internets and curse Linux every now and then). Interestingly, Mr. Torvalds personally didn't benefit much from his idea. He has some reputation within the IT-sphere, secured job offers, he's probably "financially independent" by now -- but his Linux profits are nowhere near to those of BTC's early adopters and he can't get some extra US$ millions by baking another 6666 shits out of thin air. Actually, nobody profits directly from Linux itself.

Imagine we took the money component out of DOGE's (or any cryptocurrency's) idea and left it backed by fun only -- for how long will it stay on these FUNdamentals? Like it or not, the idea of a "new financial world" implies a (fiat) money component -- for all "cryptocurrencies" it was like that almost from the very beginning, and the further the idea goes, the more important the money component becomes.

Fun is a strong emotion indeed, not only DOGE coin, but also casinos and soccer fan clubs can guarantee you that. But there're emotions that can drive people even stronger. Greed, for example. Greed, especially if mixed with overconfident ignorance, can bring a lot of people together and do wonders. Many years ago, in Russia, I had a chance to watch how it may look off-line, it wasn't a big hype dollar-wise (the Russians were a rather poor nation at that time) but people-wise the offline mobs looked quite impressive.

Without people, without adoption around ideas that most people think are crazy, none of the tech in crypto matters.

Indeed, who would you sell your un-adopted high-tech shitcoins to? It strangely reminds me that Russian MMM's leader once said something like "We all will become rich together if you keep buying my tickets and don't sell them". Maybe we should just fuck all the "technology" part out of the equation altogether?

"So do you basically mean that BTC is a mere Ponzi and we should steer clear from it?", you might ask.

Well, BTC (and other cryptocurrencies, for that matter) is technically a Ponzi indeed. FUNdamentals (hype, in other words) are pretty much the only real fundamentals they have. However, it's not a mere Ponzi. "Quantity makes new quality", as one old Commie (Lenin? Marx? Engels?) once said. Today I would call it a phenomenon (I can't find a better word in my Eglish vocabulary), I.e. a Ponzi with unusually vast economic, sociological, philosophical implications. This phenomenon created a whole new world that I would call pseudonomics i.e. "economics that exists in hyperreality". Supply and demand, market capitalization, yields, volatility, dividends, fundamentals, options, futures, allocation, diversification, support, resistance, loans, collaterals, carry trading, "IPOs" -- shortly, all that "world economy" jazz, only "Wild West-themed" and hyperreal. I will not go deeper into this right now, I only want to note once again that so far the "cryptocurrencies" (and "blockchain technology", for that matter) have made good progress in solving various math puzzles, but haven't come any close to solving any real problem. It would have remained a pure game of mind for a chosen few -- if there had been no real money and greed involved... You might say that my so-called pseudonomics has already made some people rich quickly, facilitated unaccountable money transactions, and opened the world of wild speculation to anyone with an internet connection -- all in a funny "gamified" way. Right, but the problems I mean are poverty, hunger, pollution, economic instability, wealth distribution, flawed politics, and so on. Look at Mohammed Yunus (no matter how controversial he and his projects are) and compare the real-life outcomes to those of any FUNdamentally backed shit.

However, I don't say that anyone should steer clear from crypto pseudonomics. I'd say quite the contrary, actually.

First, it's simply not my business to push someone anywhere. I'm not paid for it, I don't want to be responsible for it, and the last thing I'd want to do is to play Kassandra. Second, people of my age should have their own brains to know who and what to ask. If they still haven't, it's a good opportunity to buy some at a relatively modest price. But I don't want to advise them anything myself. Third, I'd say that the young have nothing much to lose, but a lot to gain (if not money, then some experience, at least), and I don't want to discourage anyone from trying an opportunity. Anyway, "no country for old men", as Yeats said and the Coen brothers filmed. No matter what the old men say, it's the young who shape the future and will live through it. Ok, go shape it the way you like then, I'll be just happy if it becomes better, even if not for me. I'd only beg not to lecture me on any bullshit before you achieved that.

I've seen how fun shapes a whole industry in like two decades. I've seen how greed drives tens of thousands of people into the streets. I've seen things you people never believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.

Ok, ok, I haven't seen the last two yet. Nevermind.

What I basically mean is that the DOGE pump is indeed based on (the one and only) FUNdamentals and "Mr. Musk's twitter hype" is their name. Otherwise, DOGE would have stayed at $0.002 forever as long as it could maintain its faucet-jerking "use-case" and nobody would give a fuck about its ideas or technologies. And I wish it would, really.

BTW, do you still believe the GME squeeze was about how fun-making around-idea-organized retail guys beat the Wall-Street? Jolly good then.

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