Monday, January 24, 2022

Mean Girl: FT Alphaville's Jemima Kelly Takes No Prisoners Among The Crypto Bros.

And either she or Jamie got off a little alliteration, three-beat style: "Fijian Fyre Festival of crypto"

From FT Alphaville:

The halvening, but probably ultimately even better for bitcoin.

Not sure if you’ve heard, but things aren’t going so well in the land of crypto. No we don’t mean the Cryptoland otherwise known as the Fijian Fyre Festival of crypto, we mean the land on the internet where laser eyes and rocket emojis and Y chromosomes proliferate.

As we write this, the “market cap” of crypto — a rather absurd metric as we have said many a time but the metric that is used nonetheless — is just half of what it was just two months ago, around the $1.5tn mark. A halvening, if you will, but not quite as advertised. 

Bitcoin, the king of the land, is changing hands at just over $33,000 — about 51 per cent down from the record high it reached in November. Ethereum, the wise sage, is trading around $2,200 — about 54 per cent down since November. Dogecoin, the court jester, is under 13 cents, having lost 82 per cent since May. Meanwhile Elon Musk, the omnipotent technoking, is throwing around terms like “crypto scammers” as if Tesla hadn’t bought $1.5bn of bitcoin; or the car company wasn’t accepting Doge as a form of payment.

It has, essentially, all gone Pete Tong. 

But, pah! Everyone knows that crypto goes through several such “corrections” every year. Let’s look at the bIgGeR pIcTuRe here. Given that this is a market that will obviously continue to rise for perpetuity, what difference does a halving or a halvening really make in the grand scheme of things?....

.....MUCH MORE

Cruel in 'da Ville. Hmmm...there's a nickname in there somewhere.