Super Secret Sources

Back in high school, part of my English classes (not language learning) was a semester on Bias in the Media and I think that it had a pretty profound effect on my mindset throughout life. Do not trust them. There are so many "discrepancies" in the way they report that either twist or completely omit the truth, aiming for maximum audience baiting and minimum effort.

And, this was thirty years ago.

Yes. I am old.

I'll never reveal my source!!

_{Because, I don't have one.}

While I am sure that there are plenty of idiots out there who did take extremely large risks on the markets, you'll often notice that in clickbait articles like this that are made to trigger the fear mechanisms in the audience - there is no source. It is the way that many of the articles "source" their material now, using social platforms as if they are accurate and trusted pieces of information and acceptable and statistically relevant indicators of social temperature.

Who is they?

The social platform landscape is built for attention-seeking, not truth. It is made to drive engagement, not statistical fact. It targets emotional reaction, not analytical reflection. There is so little "trust" that can be put into anything that is said online, because not only does everyone have their personals agenda that skews their perspective provided, they are also anonymous and generally what they have said is unverifiable, meaning there is no reliable skin in the game. When it is coming from Twitter or Reddit, even the "support" that a post gets is not to be trusted.

Yet - because the media has printed it, those reading assume that there has been some due diligence performed, some kind of fact checking. But, this is very, very rarely the case, as they know that with the level of content and the speed of flow through, the chances of them being pulled up on it are very low and, the consequences incredibly slight. They have next to zero accountability for what they print. It is like an extreme form of beta software releases with the intention of crowdsourcing bug detection, but they have absolutely no care in improving the product. Instead, they just keep releasing buggy code constantly to a userbase that doesn't rely on the software for their daily bread.

However, unlike an operating system that is used to run a PC or support a business, this code does impact on our daily lives in many ways, including speeding the breakdown of informational integrity across and between groups. This affects our opinions, beliefs and therefore, the decisions we make going forward. This includes our investment decisions.

These articles trigger that primal fears of loss that dwell in all of us and because they make us consider and feel that loss, they warn us away, even if we wouldn't be silly enough to take a $400,000 loan to buy crypto. Our fear of being like "these idiots" will often outweigh our analytical considerations on a balanced and effective investment strategy - moving smaller amounts of disposable income into crypto, whilst investing the majority where we feel "safe" holding our funds.

But, remember that while Bitcoin is down and the FUD is swirling, darling tech companies like Atlassian are also down, with that one losing 60% in the last 6 months to mirror the losses on Bitcoin. Netflix is down 70%, Microsoft and Amazon down 40% - These are considered Bluechip stocks that offer a stable investment strategy - but those numbers tell a different story. Apple is down 20% this year and Alphabet down 40 since November too.

But those crypto investors are crazy!

There is an industry shakeup happening that I believe is going to take the tech industry to new heights, as the transfer from traditional industry increases. However, there is a "last hurrah" happening for many of the traditional portfolio stocks, driven by a very timely shift in geopolitics that enables them to extract all they can, before dumping out and into the new industries.

Sometimes it is good to look at what the world's largest investors are doing and there is an interesting fund out there in Norway, the Norwegian Oil Fund - the world's largest sovereign fund that holds almost 2% of all stocks on earth. In the coming years, they are looking to stop investing into oil, but that doesn't mean they are going to do it yet. With an energy crisis deepening, they are going to take their time no doubt. But, their goal is the same as all funds - maximize shareholder wealth, with the shareholders being the Norwegian people in this case.

Oil is stalwart and will be for some time, but value is driven be demand and scarcity and while the demand for oil isn't going anywhere soon, the demand for many other products are shifting, as cultural behavior shifts. One of those shifts is the way and what information we consume and, how we spend our time, with far more focus being given to sitting behind screens in digital worlds and far less on the "real world".

The digital world is obviously primed for borderless interaction and as such, is suited to digital tokenization that is able to transcend local conditions to some degree. Of course, through various smart contracts, the localization needs can be counted, but from the user level, not much has to be done. This means that a lot of the middleman services will end up being DAO managed services, with far less overhead and the potential to better distribute the wealth that passes through their gateways.

What is going to enable all of this is effective information management and what is going to be highly intere4sting, is that once more of this information becomes transparent, webs of trust increase their efficiency and impact on what that information is, where it has come from and, whether it is suitable as supporting content for a viewpoint. This fundamentally changes the world of "news" reporting, because essentially all content could be rated on-the-fly to give a confidence score for the audience and perhaps if too low, would be omitted by the code before it even hits the eyeline.

I wonder how much of the current content would pass an accurate "trustworthy" test.

I have my suspicions.

But I am biased.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]