Shovelin' FUD

It snowed a "fair bit" overnight, which meant we had to do the snow work in order to get the car out of the driveway. While only about 20 centimeters fell, that is approximately 2 centimeters of rain and unlike rain, it doesn't drain away anywhere, it just sits. Because it has been consistently coming down the last couple days already, it has been mounting up and we now have a banked channel to move from the front door to the car and the car out to the road.

Speaking about shoveling, one of my colleagues made the "how is your crypto doing" comments at the recent BTC drop down to 32,900. The only time he mentions anything is when he sees it in his news feed and it is bleeding heavily. I asked him if he was finally considering to buy, because it might be a decent point.

A couple days later he asked again in front of a group of people and I asked if he had bought, which of course he hadn't. With a sad face I said, that is a pity - it is up almost 20%...

People get so caught up in the day to day price of everything that they fail to see the overarching trends. This guy has been cycling the same conversation every up and down for over two years, yet still hasn't recognized that Bitcoin itself is up 1000% in that space, but because he is only focusing on the percentages down, he isn't paying any attention to the percentages up.

This is because in general, the ups happen much slower than the downs, so it can gain 1% daily for 100 days to be 270% up (compounding) and then fall 50 in a week - to still be 30% up over that period of time. Because the small gains don't make the news, to the casual observer of FUD, they don't realize, but over the space of a couple years they don't see how much of a change from the start of their FUD shoveling it has moved.

The last 3 years for BTC:

The last 3 years for total crypto:

The total market hos outperformed BTC by about 10% on top, which is due to the growth of many new tokens along the way to add additional mass. However, if you aren't paying attention to anything other than what the media FUD is telling, then you have no idea what is happening in the industry, or how it is going to affect your daily life. The people who talk about the future - seem insane. But, the "insane" are always the ones who are the early adopters of new tech that leads to new industries, because they are the ones who are outliers in general.

I remember back in about 1995 and a year or so before I got my first ever PC, I was talking to a guy at school who was building a PC with a dual Pentium (there was no motherboard suitable at the time as far as I know) in his bedroom. I had no idea what he was talking about, but - he seemed insane to me. Of course he wasn't, he was just well ahead of the curve for a 16 year old and was someone who understood stuff in an area that most people didn't understand or have much experience with at all.

And this is an interesting thing about crypto, as it lays in several "skill" domains and unless one has direct experience with it, it is hard to really understand what is going on. For instance, most financial people are scared of crypto and see it as a joke because it isn't tied to "anything real" as if the derivative market is. Tech people see it as a joke too, because they see how rudimentary it is in comparison to what has already been developed. However, most people don't understand when those two domains are tied together in the way they are through tokenization models, let alone the social interaction aspects layered throughout.

While, they see those who take part as insane, those who do start to interact across the domains start to realize that Bitcoin isn't tied to nothing, it is "physical" in the digital sense, as it is tied to a specific location like real estate. And those crazy NFT images sold aren't what is important, it is the ownership of usable assets as in Splinterlands that is where the value lays.

But, people find it all too complex to get involved, much like I did back in 2011 or so when I could have bought 30 odd Bitcoin for a couple hundred dollars, but couldn't work out how to and instead went out drinking with the money.

Who is insane?

New industries are always going to be ridiculed by those who don't understand them enough to see a future, because without that foresight, they all look ridiculous. They are basic, random, messy, broken and far from the polished older industries that are so familiar - but in time they innovate, they mature and they mount up - like snow falling in the driveway.

Get a shovel, start digging - build a way through.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]