This will hopefully be my last post about the crypto bubble for a while. I feel terrible about myself for spending so much time being distracted by trying to convince people not to “invest” money that they can’t afford to lose into gambling on chance, but I also feel oddly satisfied too, as if I completed an important task that wasn’t on my calendar but had to be done at a high priority.
I also feel like engaging with this topic acted as a form of therapy, helping to release pent-up anger about how previous recessions were managed. More importantly, I have a book recommendation: Boombustology: Spotting Financial Bubbles Before They Burst by Vikram Mansharamani (2011). I bought this book about 5 years ago and saw it in my Kindle library and thought it’d be a quick reread.
I saw most of my arguments from earlier blog posts repeated, including George Soros’s theory of reflexivity and one that I didn’t cover in my original posts, Minsky moments. I went back and added a paragraph about Hyman Minsky’s theories to my earlier post, The Great Bitcoin Bank Heist.
What I wanted to mention here was the explanation I found in the book for why I was so obsessed with trying to “steer” people away from a great danger. Humans, like many animals, tend to be pack animals when moving in groups, much like birds or bees. For bees, only a small percentage have to see the “wiggle dance” and follow the scout back to the flowers, and the rest of the bees (who couldn’t see it, because beehives are very dark) don’t know where they’re going, but the leader bees within the swarm get everyone to the destination.
I’ve noticed that the crypto enthusiasts write very long, philosophical essays, all with the intention of trying to convert others to the idea that Bitcoin is literally energy, which is absurd. Money isn’t a physical property of the universe, but a social construct. Value changes depending on supply and demand at both a macro and a micro level. By wasting vast quantities of electricity on speculation, people have bought into a mental virus that wants to replicate itself: the idea that they’ve found a new money better than the currencies we already use. It doesn’t make sense if they can’t convince the entire world to use it, so they’re on a mission to convince the entire world.
Either way, my swarming here is done for now. I have many other things that I want to post on my blog, particularly related to my exploration of different CPU architectures, from Alpha to Z, but I wanted to write one more post to recommend Boombustology and to recommend that you too find ways to be a leader within a larger swarm, to try to steer your piece of society, by way of the humans within your circle of friends, towards a better future, even though you probably won’t be recognized for it until later, if at all.
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