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This was post was originally sent to the Flarnchain Readership, on June 9, 2021.
It has been edited for spelling errors and clarity.
Happy Wednesday Everybody!
Hope you are all enjoying the wonderfully muggy weather. What. A. Week. There are several interesting things that happened last week, and not nearly enough time to talk about them all tonight. That said, I would like to at a minimum, give my thoughts on overall market sentiment. The Crypto-Market in the near short term is showing signs of weakness, in terms of Technical Analysis and in terms of current levels of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) regarding the capabilities and strength of Bitcoin. This reflects poorly on the cryptographic / token economy / web3 market as a whole from an overall market sentiment perspective, but in the long run, is meaningless. Likewise, in the past 24 hours, the price of Bitcoin has increased by a whopping 13.2% as of the time of my writing this sentence (11:38 PM central time). The reasons for such general fear, uncertainty, and doubt are vast and far too difficult to explain in the amount of time I have tonight. What comes to mind includes a variety of headline news about Bitcoin in the past week.
- A former US president made headlines for the first time in a while, calling Bitcoin a "scam". Well, if it takes one to know one... that's definitely not a good sign.
- The FBI announced that they "cracked" the private key of a Bitcoin wallet, or at least that's what some news outlets incorrectly reported. I'll chalk this up as either a very severe misunderstanding, or absurdly well-choreographed market manipulation as described by Wyckoff, et. al. I think Poe's Law... or is it Moore's Law.. whatever, one of those laws that somebody is always quoting on Reddit basically describes this idea of:
Don't attribute stupidity with malice. Sometimes the most obvious explanation is the most accurate. Sometimes... people just aren't perfect, they make mistakes. They break a law, or fib a little to protect their friends, or maybe they just don't always know all that much.
Regardless, if the FBI cracked the cryptographic private key of a Bitcoin wallet, there are far bigger fish to fry than Bitcoin. Basically, any financial or secure electronic system that is dependent on cryptography (pro-tip: all of them), no longer matters. To put this in perspective, instead of me trying to explain this, allow me to quote Reddit user /u/BreakingBaIIs:
I did a back-of-envelope calculation that showed that it would be faster to mine all the remaining bitcoins 6 billion times than it would to crack a single private key using brute force.If the FBI found a way to efficiently crack a private key, that would mean they solved the most important math problem humanity has ever faced, that P=NP (in the affirmative). What they could do would go far beyond breaking all of the Internet's security protocols (which they could do). They would be able to solve all the mathematical theorems that humanity has ever worked on for thousands of years, plus many new ones we never thought about, in a matter of days or hours. They would be able to efficiently create superhuman AI using modest computational resources.
- Last here, but certainly not the last of the headline news, we saw the Bitcoin conference this weekend, where 50,000 tech bros and gals descended upon Miami Florida to talk about Bitcoin. Here's some highlights:
- Tony Hawk owns Bitcoin, and has since 2012 - tight
- Dogecoin fan jumps on stage and rips off his clothes, to reveal a Dogecoin shirt - cringy, but funny
Wow
- Michael Saylor (CEO of Microstrategies, a publicly traded company that replaced all of its cash with Bitcoin) and Max Keiser (I guess another big time Bitcoin guy) ran around the stage basically screaming like a couple of animals, culminating in Mr. Keyser yelling out "We're not selling! F*** Elon!" - gotta respect the energy... but... jeeze...
Next Time I'll post links to to the actual video.
In theory, a crypto-currency conference, which attracted the likes of Tony Hawk , Floyd Mayweather (didn't know how to read a crowd, shilled some coin called "Ethereum Max", and got booed by the crowd, lol.), and Ron Paul, should be interesting and good for a global crypto-currency.
Something like this brings together a cross section of all types of people, and shows us that people from all over the world and from all different types of interests and backgrounds have a vision for the world where Bitcoin becomes the global reserve store of wealth, or dare I say, global reserve currency?
Instead maybe it was just a bit too weird for the mainstream. For what it's worth, the price of Bitcoin dropped significantly this weekend.
This leads me to the topic for tonight's Flarnchain.
El Salvador The Country of El Salvador is located in Central America. El Salvador is a small country in Central America, that shares borders with Nicaragua and Honduras, as well as a Southern coast with the Pacific Ocean.This is the El Salvador flag:
A horizontally striped blue-white-blue national flag normally incorporates the national coat of arms in its center. The flag has a width-to-length ratio of 189 to 335.
This weekend, the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bekele, announced legislation that would make Bitcoin legal tender in El Salvador. Legal Tender. Mr. Bekele (not to be confused with Kenenesia Bekele, the world-class Ethiopian runner who previously held the world 5k and 10k records), in a show of solidarity amongst other Bitcoin true believers, changed his twitter profile to give himself red laser eyes, a common thing that wealthy Bitcoin hodlers have done recently to join in solidarity with the Bitcoin movement.
Whoa, dude... That is pretty intense. I did not edit this photo. I promise. Sometimes reality is waaaay weirder than fiction.
The whole laser eye thing felt a bit cringy to me... but now that the president of El Salvador has accepted Bitcoin as legal tender, and then gave himself laser eyes... I have no choice.
Wow, this did not turn out. I'll try again later.
Anyways, the legislative body of El Salvador passed the piece of legislation that makes Bitcoin legal tender in El Salvador. Like, Bitcoin is real money in El Salvador, supported by the federal government of El Salvador. What a time to be alive. The reason why defining Bitcoin as legal tender in any country is a huge deal, includes, but is not limited to the following:
- Not Capital Gains - This law would allow transactions without triggering capital gains taxes.
- A country with Bitcoin in its treasury - By holding Bitcoin in their federal treasury, they are making a bet on Bitcoin's future. This could be the first domino. No country wants to be the first, but also, no country wants to be the last, to adopt Bitcoin.
- Could Bring Significant Investment into the Country - As described by another Reddit user whose username escapes me (hope to attribute this quote someday) " If the next ten years look anything like the last ten, attracting people in crypto means attracting wealth to their country. If BTC hits $100k, half the fortune 500 would be bitcoiners. "
- Could Trigger a Sort of "Crypto Arms Race" - If Bitcoin works for El Salvador (and possibly other Latin and south American countries), it's going to be tempting for other countries to jump in. Countries like China and the U.S. will be watching each other. Any hint that the other country is acquiring crypto, will push jumping in just to not be front-run. Ultimately both countries may jump in based only on the rumor that the other is.
Those are just four big reasons why this is such a big deal. I anticipate talking quite a lot about El Salvador in future Flarnchain newsletters. This leads me to my next topic:
Updates!
Huge updates brewing this week.
Shoutouts
First and foremost, I'd like to thank everyone who has sent me messages this week. I really appreciate the feedback. There was general feedback, commentary, and some disagreements. I love it. I also received, I guess at this point, a tip about a very interesting live-streaming crypto project by the name of THETA Network (Think Twitch, but for crypto.) I am interested in doing a deep dive on this project, the THETA coin, and the TFUEL token in a future newsletter. Regardless, THETA pumped (increased in value) by 13.8% this week, so uh... thanks for the tip! I don't own any Theta, but it's definitely looking like a very promising project.
I think the Theta logo kind of looks like a Mahjong piece or domino.
The Flarnchain Development Team
Regarding Flarnchain development, I have been learning some things about software development, thanks to my good pal and godfather of my daughter, Goonda. First, I learned that I needed to download a bunch of things like:
- Chocolatey (a package manager),
- Microsoft Visual Studio Code (basically windows Powershell but with MOAR POWAH).
- Node JS
- A bunch of other stuff. I pretty much was lost after the first 10 minutes of software engineering.
These are the logos of two of the programs I downloaded.
I downloaded them by using a CLI (command line interface).
This made me feel like a hacker.
After I learned all that stuff about Chocolatey (mmm... chocolate) and Node JS, I helped (watched) Goonda create a Blog for the flarnchain.io website.
Look at that. Beautiful.
It was truly awesome stuff. Now that we have the pieces in place, we can begin updating our website and adding pages. We can carve out a little digital space for the Flarnchain to live, and breathe, and grow up to be a real thing one day. Thank you to Goonda for showing me how he built this website from scratch. He used a Kubernetes Cluster, and he wrote some scripts. He also created a Github repository and taught me how to do my first commit of code, where I watched the website page actually change. I put the word "hotdog" on the slash page of Flarnchain.io. It made me feel very powerful. Also, Goonda was kind enough to share his avatar, Goonda, with me in advance. I look forward to Flarncoin and Goondacoin living together harmoniously in an interoperable blockchain paradise.
Goonda is a woodland creature. Part mushroom, part slice of bread.
Take a look at our website here: https://www.flarnchain.io Goonda and I intend to add new and interesting features to the website in the coming days. I also created what I tried to describe as a "roadmap" for where Flarnchain is headed. Goonda did not like the idea of me calling the below abomination a "roadmap" so, I'll give it the next best name. A Flarnmap. You can see a rough draft of this roadmap below:
If you look reaaal close, you will see the following.
- There are 4 columns, 4 distinct Phases.
- Each column has 3 boxes.
- Each box has 52 dates. Each of those dates is a Wednesday.
- Today's date has a dotted box around it because it is today.
- Also, there's a big fat formula error in phase 4, which results in us going back in time.
The first thing you might notice is that I'm going back on my word from Flarnchain #1, where I suggested this was going to be a 10-year time horizon. Turns out, 10 years doesn't divide easily into 4 phases, so my new long-term plan for this experiment is now 12 years. That's pretty much all I've got for tonight. As always, I have a lot more things to say, but just not enough time to say it all. If you read it this far, thanks for reading! Hope you enjoy the rest of your week.
Flarn
