Elaine Thinks About Signaling and Destroys My CryptoKitties Dreams
Her piece was written a couple weeks ago i.e. at least two cryptocurrency price tumbles ago.
Think of a waveform, but not the smooth, soothing shape of a sinusoid. Rather think of a faux quasi-periodicity with just enough regularity to trigger a mirage of pattern recognition, just enough to suck you in, across the event horizon of speculation into the madness of Hunter S Thompson:
"Still humping the American Dream,
that vision of the Big Winner somehow emerging from the last minute
pre—dawn chaos of a stale Vegas casino. Big strike in Silver City. Beat
the dealer and go home rich. Why not? I stopped at the Money Wheel and
dropped a dollar on Thomas Jefferson—a $2 bill, the straight Freak
ticket, thinking as always that some idle instinct bet might carry the
whole thing off. But no. Just another two bucks down the tube. You
bastards! No. Calm down. Learn to enjoy losing....
-Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Excuse me.
From Elaine's Idle Mind:
by ElaineFeb 25 Bitcoin as a Display of Wealth
I just spent three weeks in bed with the flu from hell, which means I not only missed Bitcoin’s untimely death, but also its subsequent resurrection. Did everyone remember to buy the dip?
Gold is actually useful for some things, like
filling teeth and making pretty jewelry; that's not most of its value,
but it does provide a tether to reality, along with a 5000-year history
9/
Had I been alert and conscious, I might have worried for a bit. Paul
Krugman doesn’t know anything about anything, but I’ll grant him this
one: There’s nothing to backstop a cryptocurrency’s value! If people come to believe that Bitcoin is worthless, it’s worthless. There’s no tether to reality . If only Bitcoin could be used to make pretty jewelry!
One of the greatest tragedies of modern money is the decoupling
between a store and display of wealth. Or, more accurately, the societal
decoupling between wealth and status. For most of human history, the
functions of display and storage were condensed.
Even before people wore clothing, they wore piercings and tattoos. A
full-body ink job isn’t transferable, but it’s a sort of proof of work.
Tribal tattoos on a mummified Scythian chieftain, 500 BC.
As societies increased in wealth, both people and objects became
specialized in their functions. Stores of value were selected for their
resistance to corrosion and theft. Displays of status optimize for just
the opposite. The more unwieldy and vulnerable the display, the greater
the power it conveys....MUCH MORE
. If only Bitcoin could be used to make pretty jewelry!
