Saturday, January 2, 2021

So the genie is out of the bottle. Today, the cryptocurrency that started it all leaped at least a whopping 14% before pulling back. The big daddy of crypto has been going on tear since December and surpassed its December 2017 all time highs.

So what is causing this almost four thousand dollar ($4,000) jump in a single day? What in the actual world? Well for one, it’s a new year and likely people have some extra cash from the new year and stimulus of $600 has also hit a lot of people.

The coin prices have diddled around $30,000 as it approached the new year and then erupted past and beyond this climactic boundary in spades. In the last few hours it has played around with the $34,000 boundary as investors have been sleepless, wide eyed and incredulous with belief while bears and shorters have pounded their computer stations, flipped their desks, pulled out their hair and threatened to defenestrate their furniture out the window after missing out on the boat when the price dropped massively during the height of the 2020 pandemic during March of last year.

In true fashion, FOMO panic has been hitting a fervid frenzy in the final weeks of 2020 crossing into 2021 as people and mostly institutional buying has caused a literal shark feeding frenzy to lap up and buy up as must crypto before the train leaves the station. However as reported on a few BTC news sites, a short squeeze is imminent as price keeps rising while supply is slowly on the decline.

You don’t need to be a university economist to know that high demand and low supply will cause more and more irrational desire to gather and HODL. The 2020 toilet paper panic should have taught you that it will only be a more coveted commodity like masks, gloves, cleaning supplies, and gloves. Perhaps the whole covid run on supplies was a slight of hand to get us plebs to buy up med supplies while institutions and savvy financial gurus went after stocks and other high rising assets. While many people were worrying about bread and where their next rent payment was going and stability of job, the people that had the financial wherewithal and investment mindset could drop a few grand on a couple satoshis, weis, gweis and millis on crypto capital. As reported on Coindesk, Jim Bianco, a macrostrategist said “Bitcoin makes TSLA (Tesla) look like it is standing still”. Tesla, for the record has been up at least close to 700% at the time of writing.

At first it was just isolated buying in 2017 with individuals and the loonies and dreamers so to speak trying to buy and get in. Banks were not on the same page and often discouraged buying with credit cards and getting involved in investments even in vehicles such as trusts and other blossoming ETF options. There was a securities debate as more regulators want to crack down and get their envious hands on the juicy pie. Soon social media and tech giants started salivating and seeing the potential, aka the money factor and soiled themselves wet with anticipation hoping to cash in and start their own digital money ecosystems to literally lock in on the ability to monetise and tokenize everything.

But not so fast said the naysayers, the gold bugs and the legal entities. They wanted their pound of flesh and their cut off the top, worried that they wouldn’t be able to know exactly what you are doing with your money at all times. Lot of industries want to know where and how that money is being spent and impose a money flow cap when moving funds to stop supposedly “suspicious” transactions. Though it could be argued if you’re a business owner and big baller you might be moving several K’s and G’s a day, y’know? Tech giants got a consortium of big players such as auction pay escrow entities, banks, credit card companies and overseas financial institutions to get into the game.

But it came with a bit of backlash for tech giants such as FB since its privacy policies were already under heavy scrutiny. Legislators said “but muh money” when they learned things were mostly decentralized with P2P money but had the FB CEO as the poster child and fall guy for “daring” to consider having its own digital tokenization option when others hadn’t even gotten in the mix. “How can we get ours if we can’t regulate it, take our cut and seize and sanction” was the thought and thus their project came to a major stand still and became a driftwood dead log project in mere weeks. Although they are trying to overhaul their ideas, it left many partners with a nasty taste in their mouth as they said basically they can go their own way and do it better. People also were not keen to being potentially locked into a digital money system that could have privacy leaks as well as potentially penalize them in any way. Black Mirror social credit system? Possibly, but that’s still miles away. Although you can see that now with tokenization of dating sites already and people earning digital diamonds and rewards for live streaming with fans or gamified sites.

Also tons of people have been buying on one popular exchange that was trying to protect its end users from information gathering. This exchange like many others has had the ability to change to US dollars and cash out. And it also has been wildly popular in the states as a quick novice experience for getting into the space and sometimes get extra crypto benefits.

2020 also was the beginning of the infinite money printing machine as Wojaks became the meme du jour cranking out unlimited supplies of fiat cash from the Treasury printing press, spilling out $1200 and $2400 stimuluses with extra $500 per child. Heck, it was a great year to get money if you had a big family. And lots of people found it more cost effective to sit on their bum and cash an unemployment check and gov money than trying to ‘risk their lives’ for a deadly respiratory virus raging in their local community. Scared alright, that they would have to go back to their regular lives when they could get paid better and eat better from the comfort of their computers and watch and trade and make better bucks in this digital economy. Around the same time of Covid, 5G was being rolled out and unlimited data caps were being lifted everywhere. That meant not only could you watch your digital wallets, make cash on YouTube and work your Fiverr and Mechanical Turk from the comfort of your couch but also you could likely sign in to work or school remotely on your iPad or laptop and still be Zooming. And with everything remote and no traffic, you could do your UberEats and delivery as well if you needed to without having to see another human being.

It’s true that unlimited printing of money has some worried about all time low interest rates as bonds are essentially garbage and dumping grounds with no return lately. Scarcer assets have elevated and crypto has often been referred to as digital gold. Perennial bulls like Pompliano have gladly welcomed crypto newbies into the space while certain gold bugs that are regular bears and Debbie-Downers of the digital space have tried to inject reality and a down-to-earth voice of some reason to the newbies in a failing attempt to spur debate at the cost of coming across as a comical rube. Who is said to be right? Well, there is no reason to not have both physical assets and digital assets after all, there’s space and money for investing in it all. We say do your own research, but don’t be left behind in the lurch. Better to invest and get in the space than be totally wrong and not have invested at all. This is especially crucial and critical if you were a savvy millennial that got in and saw the writing on the wall a decade ago. Fresh faced Erik Finman years ago for example made a bet on the digital space and came out ahead and now is laughing his way all the way to the bank and rolling in cash and Instagramming/ Tweeting it. But that’s old news.

Some of the biggest news to come out of this industry is that regulation is coming with financial sectors trying to push to know every little detail about your accounts and where you have it and if it’s overseas and foreign. While this flawed logic is doomed to slow innovation in certain countries, other countries with more open thinking and tech savvy will be able to stay one step ahead of others in innovation and financial acuity for its citizens and people. The hope is that no one nation will have too much influence from any one nation and have better independence and sovereignty for its own financial industry and purposes.

In other news, privacy coins are starting to disappear from some exchanges as regulatory bodies are spooking and causing a chilling effect of sorts to these businesses rather than risk having their businesses shuttered. Currency regulatory bodies don’t want you to be able to move your own self made money because then there’s less leverage against an individual or country. Ever play the game: if you do this then I’ll get you and reward you with a cookie later? Or if you don’t play nice with Timmy I’ll take away your toy? The argument is that you’re paying into the system and reporting to prevent bad uses of funds by other bad actors. But the problem is you can’t opt out of this service. Ever have a checking account with overdraft protection? The service allows you to buy something right now but then you get charged a fee later. At least you can opt out of that service in some instances.

It’s all a game of I rub your back, you rub my back as companies do extra reporting because the bigger players want it that way. But for some, you-win-some, you-lose-some is a option that should be available and is slowly being phased out because some are too comfortable with safe assets rather than taking a risk that their assets might fluctuate wildly or could take a loss. As with any investment even stocks, loss of capital can happen. It’s in your brochures and in your plan policies usually. But that’s how the game is played. That’s how casinos and lotteries work, and that’s how many investments work. You’re banking on a profit that may or may not happen.

Right now digital assets are essentially distributed code representing money. And the code is law meaning once the code has been distributed, everyone runs the same program saying there’s only 21 million of a particular asset. Or 84 million in the case of LTC. And code is also free speech while privacy (or essentially the lack of speech of manifestation of an idea) is also just as important. The fight to deanonymize and eliminate and remove the innovation of digital assets is just as dangerous as the fight to unencrypt, mass phone harvest and surveil and encroach on personal information.

When you look at the fact that a high level analyst whistleblower who gave up a lot of income, took a paycut, and risked legal troubles just to reveal a secret covert program to gather information about people and in some cases allow employees and contractors not much older than college aged have access to so much data on a people and in some cases be able to pass around personal photos of people that may be attractive (“a job perk” as was said) … and other people at these organizations said to protect people that ended up using a more expensive program which had less privacy and these people risked legal protections and a good job and for what? So they could be seen as against their country then you have to wonder what’s going on.

Lately XRP has had some woes as its prices have tumbled and see-sawed after some regulatory actions have passed judgement on it as to whether it’s more of a security or not.

Other coins have made the news like Dogecoin when Elon Musk tongue and cheek tweeted about this Shibaru themed coin which is not a limited-supply coin and thus more of a fun playful example crypto… when the space was for gamer nerds and people that just wanted proof-of-concepts and to delve in the land of magic internet money before everyone got serious and greedy and commenters started flooding the space.

As stated before, the reason the crypto space has been returning to all time highs and then spiking from there seems to be renewed interest and FOMO and more buying in major exchanges followed by more institutional buying, many CEO’s and former naysayers capitulating and admitting they may have been wrong (and possibly secretly stacking, HODLing and pushing into the space).

There are many big players in this arena. So how does a crypto or digital newb get into the space and learn more? The best place is the Internet of course.

• Start by doing a search engine search for the big crypto coins and the publications, news and articles and other media.
• There you will see many big names and people that either write about it or talk about it. They are people you should remember.
• Then also look deeper in the rabbit hole and also who they follow and others that are perhaps bloggers, social media influencers, or run their tutorial videos and you can follow them and learn more about the lingo and other major players.
• There are books on Amazon also that talk about the origins and more about the commodity or digital asset, why it was created, “who” actually created the particular digital asset.
• You can also look up whitepapers on assets in some cases.
• Be careful because there are major scammers and bad actors in this or any space exploiting the fact that it’s money / financial and that you’re a noob and know nothing about it except “money number go up”. If you are new then be very careful about where you are sending money to because unlike other assets once the money is gone you don’t have a third party backing you up in case of fraud. This can be good and bad. Good in that you’re totally responsible for your actions. Bad in that if you are thoughtless you could expose yourself and all your assets for the taking. Risk and reward is something to balance in any asset.
• Consider trying to find some local people that you trust to get you started in your asset buying and don’t put more information out than needed. Some people for instance have bought digital hardware for instance and the company was really popular and became a target for hackers looking to financiall gain through phishing. Similarly. If you are online don’t tell people how much or post pictures where you have money despite it being tempting to brag because many people have had accounts compromised from posting too much on social media. And especially especially don’t post private key information or really anything at all. Treat money like money or money like your sex life, it’s really none of any one else’s business. Mum’s the word.
• Don’t forget to back up your information somewhere. Keep copies offline, air gapped and the heck away from cameras and things that can skim or bluetooth/wifi hack. If major corps and companies and gov entities can be hacked, then what hope do us peons and amateurs have against a skilled hacker? Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket.
• 2FA or multifactor authentication is super important. If major companies and major state players are using this to secure their infrastructure then are you any less important than them to use this industrial grade encryption for your enterprise. Use 2FA, learn it, get yourself a hardware token or authenticator app. See our other web security articles on our site.

In short, if you don’t control your money and your investments and assets who else will? 2021 is here, the best time of life is now. Take control of your time, and your future and your money. Get going.