Macro+Crypto Market — Weekly Recap
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First post of the year, I want it to be about #BTC and about onchain analytics. I must sound like a broken record by now, hopefully because things take time to play out. I remember feeling the same back in 2018–19.
The MVRV score, a measure of market value relative to realised investor value has been one of the core metrics to identify tops and bottoms in the crypto space. Naturally one could argue #bitcoin has never evolved in this current monetary environment.
Nevertheless, with the amazing evolution of the #crypto space over the past decade with bitcoin adoption, #DeFi growth, #NFT creations, #stablecoin spread and more, I can’t help but feel like this is a train headed further forward and with unstoppable momentum.
Not financial advice, of course, but I have been averaging in (probably too soon and too aggressively, in hindsight) into BTC and will continue to do so. #bullish
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My new year resolution…
I typically look at the year’s focus later in January, on my birthday, but this year, there’s a habit I’ve taken on late last year that I’m committed to maintain: journaling and mood tracking.
I’m using an amazing app call ‘Daylio’ which allows you to easily upload a picture, and/or write a few lines, and/or select some of the day’s activities, and/or select a mood that best describes the day.
The effort is minimal as maybe one day you could literally just click on a mood icon. Other days, you might feel more motivated and write an introspective paragraph on a thought or worry or reason from gratitude.
I love how it’s helping me keep a consistent record of my life, things I do, mindsets, people, etc.
More importantly, it also shows mood stability and habits that contributes most to your good mood. For me? Surprisingly as an antisocial “citadin” (born and raised in the city and shying away from big social settings) the key factors are “nature”, “friends”, “meditation” and “yoga”.
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Picture shared on Twitter by MacroAlf showing the population growth/decline by age-band in the past and over the next 50 years. This is a key point in Chinese demographics and something that will impact the world economy in more ways than one.
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An interesting -although maybe a tad over dramatic- take on the lack of interoperability in gaming and metaverse projects. The idea is that being able to take your digital property or identity across chains is the only way to go. I tend to agree.
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Interesting to see that for the longest time, #gold doesn’t match inflation in the US. That being said, we’re definitely there now and probably due for some moves higher. Let’s see.
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From Ryan Selkis in his 2023 thesis report: “It’s easy to be bullish in times of euphoria. But you only see who’s got staying power when the tide goes out. It’s been a bad year in many respects, especially for the greedy, the levered, and the unethical.
The long-term builders may have been temporarily hurt by association, but they haven’t been the ones who perpetuated frauds or fleeced investors. These innovators (open-source software and infrastructure developers) will be here long after the trash (opaque lenders, trading bucket shops, ponzinomic promoters, “genius VCs,” and paid hype men) from this cycle are long gone.
And good riddance!
Beneath the wreckage is a stronger foundation than we’ve ever had before: $10s of billions in capital, an influx of world-class talent, four years worth of demographic change towards digital natives, and dozens of “zero-to-one” innovations in crypto scalability and application primitives.”
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More of a layer-1 enthusiast than the whole #NFT craze… but… Ryan Selkis is making a decent point on the growth potential and where to invest (platforms versus specific projects)
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When friends tell me long-term buy-and-hold diversified allocations with averaging on pullbacks is the boring kind of investing….
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It do be like that 😅😇
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Keeping track of dApps that actually incur revenues. Seems like OpenSea, dYdX, PancakeSwap, Looks Rare and GMX are leading the way.
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THE chart to look at right now . For years, the US price index for fertilizer has been a leading indicator of US food index. This is only part of a broader picture but you can see similar trends on shipping costs, used car sales, rents, energy and -on a less fun note- jobs. All shared by AndreasSteno on Twitter.
Inflation will probably surprise people to the downside, this year.
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Ryan Selkis from Messari: “There’s a reason Satoshi disappeared.
It’s unlikely global authorities will like technologies that make their jobs harder. I’m not talking about bitcoin’s pseudonymous nature (crypto is notoriously easy to track with forensic tools like Chainalysis). But I am talking about how challenging it is to freeze or seize bitcoin at scale.
It’s not popular with the Chinese Communist Party or the Canadian Government alike for the same reason: It’s incompatible with dragnet financial surveillance and the one-click financial deplatforming that authorities covet.
That’s why you will typically hear bitcoin maligned as a tool for terrorists, money launderers, and rogue states, even though it’s a rounding error according to the data we do have. It may be politically ex- pedient to draw attention to the outliers and negative anecdotes, especially when financial experts within the government refute those narratives based on hard data. They certainly never praise the tech when its same attributes allow refugees in wartorn countries to raise money in times of distress. Or people to survive financially during a total currency collapse, such as the current awful situation in Lebanon.
For instance, the Treasury Department itself knew that there wasn’t a realistic risk that Russia could use cryptocurrency to evade sanctions at a meaningful scale. For bitcoin to do that, we’d be talking about multiple orders of magnitude larger flows of money than would be possible to conceal on a public ledger like bitcoin’s. When it comes to evading U.S. sanctions, Russia is almost certainly going to turn to digital assets, but it seems more likely to be the digital yuan, given recent trends.”
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“Today, mining creates a carbon footprint that’s about the same size as tumble dryers and about a third the size of gold mining. It’s also significantly less energy intensive than the global banking system or the militaries that secure it. Not exactly a global killer.” — Ryan Selkis
Also, bitcoin miners are “the dung beetles” of the energy world. They’ll eat energy that no one else wants or can use. The trend towards leveraging wasted and stranded energy sources continues. Bitcoin miners have been increasingly co-locating to capture flared methane, stranded geothermal energy, coal refuse, and even recycled waste tires.
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