Bull and bear markets mean something different at a two trillion dollar market cap.
You've gotta understand we're turning an enormous ship here. A bull/bear event *now shifts the destiny of nations* not just your college/house/retirement fund. It's a dramatic world-shifting tide
What does that mean?
Well, we still don't have fundamentals - it's almost impossible to evaluate what bitcoin *should* be worth. Everybody's evaluating it based on what it will be worth in future.
That paradox is the most dangerous thing in crypto. We *desperately* need utility
I *started* @mattereum to solve the utility problem, by the way: you wanna buy houses, cars, gold, vacations, wine, art, you name it *in a crypto-native way* we do that
Not "turn your BTC into dollars on the fly". I mean we sell physical stuff *as a cryptographic rights bundle*
@mattereum And that paradigm? Buy the NFT of a thing, become legal owner of the thing? Just the start
The insurance contracts which guarantee the stuff is real are moving on chain soon. Then an identity layer
We are going to fix this utility thing and safeguard two $trillion of innovation
Crypto-native interfaces - APIs - to real world commerce are the single most important innovation in the blockchain field, and we are by far the global leaders in this work. We know *exactly* how to glue the physical and the digital together so that courts will accept our process
So when you buy it with @mattereum, it *stays bought*.
There's no doubt about the underlying legal rights, there's no "dude vanished into the night with my crypto and it turns out it wasn't his house to sell me."
None of that. Strength in depth multi-layered legal ownership.
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God, I'm tired of trying to persuade people not to destroy their world, and to take care of the victims of prior attempts to destroy it.
People want to stay asleep at the wheel, in their comfy little ruts, even though they are two wheels off the cliff already.
It's Panic Time!
What does it take to move people's attention off their wallets or petty political rivalries on to the core question of the day: how do we regulate technology so that it doesn't destroy all of our lives?
That's the core issue: global warming, mass surveillance, combat robots.
I ploughed this territory 10 years ago, and published Mother of Hydrogen, an SF novel about how the human race survives nanotech and biotech wars, and manages a rogue AI problem.
I want to talk about why I'm so bone-deep hostile to the "consciousness movement" while being a life-long meditator.
First, an appropriate soundtrack for this little bit of thinking
Thread on.
So the consciousness movement has basically two phases which are relevant to this discussion. Pre-nuclear bombs and other existential risks, and post-nuclear bombs etc
The movement slips over that historical discontinuity with very little notice but something fundamental breaks.
Before the invention of the nuclear bomb there is no potential for human beings to destroy the plane of existence we occupy.
It simply wasn't a thing. We could cut down a tree, but we could not extinguish all life. Once that became possible, there was a half-assed attempt to fix
I find myself wondering this morning how many people actually get my work - here we are, 20 years in to me continually writing, teaching, communicating, building - and I can't tell if a lot of people get it and are mostly quiet or if very few people actually got it.
Which is it?
It probably helps if I define it: here is my best short summary.
1) The human race is currently running the world like a death camp for poor humans, and particularly for the other species we farm or drive into extinction.
2) Fixing this situation is possible, but requires will.
That's the core thesis. Then,
3) It is possible, by mass collaboration using any available mechanism (open source, markets, new religious movements etc.) to live without this continuous catastrophic violence.
Grams of CO2 per dollar made is the essential problem.
We can either reduce the number of dollars made, degrowth, or we can reduce the amount of CO2 per dollar through renewable energy, energy efficiency, and maybe technologies like carbon capture.
260 grams per $: it's a lever
Now let's talk about carbon budgets. Earth's natural processes bind about 16 gigatons of CO2 per year, roughly 2 tons per human.
Humanity emits about 40 gt per year say 5 tons per person. Top 10% Americans are at about 70 tons per year, a quarter million dollars earned at 260g/$
You know how we got into this mess? Dumb fuckers who *knew* global warming was The Crisis of Our Age and prioritised trivial social justice concerns over planetary survival.
If 2020's Black Lives Matter protests had been about fossil fuel driven global warming annihilating agriculture in Africa, a hell of a lot more black lives would have been saved - along with lives of every other kind.
American police being pigs is a confined issue. CO2 is Famine
And I am *fucking over* being polite about this.
your. cause. is. irrelevant. garbage.
We are *unbelievably fucked* on climate, and its going to exterminate hundreds of millions, poorest first, in nearly all of the scenarios we face going forwards.
Am I a climate activist dreaming he is a tech CEO, or a tech CEO dreaming he was a climate activist?
How many years do I have to make money to convert into humanitarian research and materiel at this point?
I'd been gambling on another 5 years. I don't know if we have that long.
We could get *completely* smashed flat by a genocide-level heat event in a poor country, one where people can't cool down in their cars when the AC gives out, and tens of millions could die.
The infrastructure for "walk out of the heat" has not yet even started seriously.
I know how to do it, roughly - umbrellas for shade as people walk, hexayurt rest stations, trucks with water. Shopping trolleys and similar for the disabled, old, and young.
You can move millions if you keep trucking in water to the people marching.