Cutting edge tech rarely sits still, so why is ESG slowing things down?
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to modern fascism, the twin flames of government and corporate working together to monopolise control.
Big tech that pulls in the majority of eyeballs are all in bed with government. At the same time, ESG (Environmental, Social, & Governance) punishes companies such as Chevron to take responsibility for say Amazon’s trucks if those trucks are not conforming to ESG’s standards. That’s like telling McDonald’s to take responsibility for anyone who eats a Big Mac. This is all spurred from ESG’s wave of “woke morality”.
Lyd Alden was recently quoted as saying: “When the Bitcoin network’s electricity consumption gets to a point where it is using enough methane to more than offset its estimated CO2 contributions, and thus ends up being net-negative for greenhouse gas effects, that is going to be pretty awkward for the ESG critics.”
The entire energy market in Europe is falling apart because of severe ESG caps on energy production. For every unit of gas production that’s reduced, the slack is picked up by Russia and China. ESG should stand for Export Soviet Gas. Methane which is a form of carbon is 80 times worse for global climate change than carbon dioxide, yet we think we’re helping the planet by shifting production to Russia and China.
Major companies such as BlackRock gain state favors in China by forcing companies to adopt ESG practices in the United States. This weakens the US because the Chinese companies are not forced into the same ESG standards which are uneconomic.
Web3 metaverse
While the Web3 metaverse is not immune to such heresies on an individual or communal basis, its decentralised beating heart reduces the odds of global mass monopolistic control towards zero. The bottom line is cutting edge tech rarely sits still but instead evolves at an exponential pace because sheer demand makes such new creations impactfully economic.
In consequence, crypto/blockchain/Web3/AI are all exponentially evolving due to the vast number of individuals who are building and creating regardless of where the price of Bitcoin/crypto goes.
Indeed, many have leapfrogged from their high paying roles in Silicon Valley to blockchain/crypto and Web3 development as they share in the transformational impact of far greater freedoms and efficiencies that crypto enables. #vitalikbuterin #jasonlowery #erikvoorhees #nickszabo #sambankmanfried #francissuarez #changpengzhao #andreasantonopolous #estebanordano #gavinwood #edwardmoncada #josephlubin #tylerwinklevoss #etc
Nothing greener than nuclear
The ESG movement opposes not just fossil fuels but also nuclear energy. Vanguard’s ESG funds exclude nuclear companies. We have reached a point where the appearance of virtue becomes more important than being virtuous.
The virtuous action that results in economic benefits is being quashed by leftist “woke” virtue signalling that carries highly uneconomic consequences that is largely responsible for soaring inflation.
The end result of the ESG Industrial Complex is not about climate change, but an attack on human productivity in the West relative to other parts of the world.
Russia has a long history of outlasting its opponents through cold, harsh winters. The Russia-Ukraine conflict will drag on through the winter which could spark a revolution in the EU as many families will be unable to heat their homes. With electricity and gas prices spiking, it’s going to be a long winter.
On freedoms
Crypto counters corrupt nation-states. It drains power from authoritarian regimes. Cutting edge technologies have proven their enormous first order effects as they ride their respective S-curves. But there are also higher order effects when it comes to crypto.
The Web3 metaverse is where a larger portion of the population will spend their time transacting value, communicating, and creating. When we look back centuries ago, there was no separation of church and state. Given where the world sits, separation of money and state is now undergoing intense scrutiny. While Web3’s use case is freedom to communicate, Bitcoin’s use case is freedom to transact. It separates money and state.
You can’t create more of Bitcoin beyond what is allowed by its code which has never been violated, ie, no double spend, etc. Bitcoin is a store of wealth not in the absolute sense of being stable, but in the decentralized sense that it is governed by code that no one can break. No central bank can manipulate how many Bitcoin are in circulation. Unlike central bank-controlled fiat, it cannot be inflated away.
Traditional fiat has and always will be devalued by central banks. Bitcoin cannot be devalued in this manner. Its growing network effect and hash rate has increased its value against fiat over every cycle, thus even with its two -94%, 87% and -84% corrections, $1 in Bitcoin in 2010 is worth millions of dollars today ($21k / $0.007 avg cost in 2010 = $3 mil). That said, Bitcoin and altcoins remain risk-on investments thus remains speculative until it matures which is still at least a decade off.
Black swans
All that is to say that nothing is 100% guaranteed. Nothing says Bitcoin won’t go to zero, though the odds are becoming diminishingly small with time due to the network and Lindsey Effect.
If electricity or the internet is cut off by governments, VPNs, mesh networks, and serverless circumvention tools which do not rely on third-party servers were all designed to deal with this and continue to be developed. Governments are the slow animal in the herd.
Protecting internet access is integrally linked to freedoms of expression and association and forms a crucial part of global democracy and human rights. Better tech is always being built to deal with such nation-state interventions. But if we assume “argument ad absurdum” does not apply here, a global shutdown of the internet and electricity implies no more metaverse and a world that is nearing its end in which case, Bitcoin/crypto is the least of our concerns.
Cutting edge tech is never static
Despite the current and past crypto bear markets, transformations are taking place as many have migrated into crypto. The total value of digital assets as represented by crypto in the form of DeFi, gaming, the metaverse, DAOs, dApps, and NFTs, among other tech was just several billion dollars back in 2016.
Its total value then peaked at just under $1 trillion by the end of 2017 before undergoing a nearly -90% correction by the end of 2018 due to tighter monetary conditions. M2 shrunk momentarily.
Global tightening
We are currently undergoing the mother of all global tightening conditions due to the extreme overreach by the Fed and other central banks due to COVID. I therefore expect the value of cryptocurrencies (digital assets) to fall substantially further from current levels.
While I’ve been suggesting a major Bitcoin low of roughly $11k, this may become “$11k and pray” suggesting wick lows well under $10k (as we saw in Jan-2015 when Bitcoin hit $150) unless some black swan crisis materializes which forces the Fed to start printing trillions like they did during COVID.
Dead bat bounces are standard during bear markets. The current bounce rests on the hope that the Fed will “only” have to hike by 50 bps instead of 75 bps in December.
But so what? The hikes have been and will continue to be historically huge at least out to December. Then once the Fed halts or reduces rates, that is still no guarantee a bottom will have been reached if 1930-32 and 2000-2002 are any guides.
In both cases, the Fed hiked rates too far so had to quickly reduce rates. Despite this, massive bubbles had formed much like the one we are in today so had to be unwound, resulting in two of the deepest and prolonged bear markets for the major averages.
(͡:B ͜ʖ ͡:B)
Dr Chris Kacher, PhD nuclear physics UC Berkeley/record breaking KPMG audited accts in stocks & crypto/bestselling author/top 40 charted musician/blockchain fintech specialist. Co-founder of Virtue of Selfish Investing, TriQuantum Technologies, and Hanse Digital Access. Dr Kacher bought his first Bitcoin at just over $10 in January-2013 and contributed to early Ethereum dev meetings in London hosted by Vitalik Buterin. His metrics have called every major top & bottom in Bitcoin since 2011 to within a few weeks. He was up in 2018 vs the avg performing crypto hedge fund (-54%) [PwC] and is up well ahead of Bitcoin & alt coins over the cycles as capital is force fed into the top performing alt coins while weaker ones are sold.
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