Twenty Twenty Vision
2020 has been a hell of a year: and it’s only February. In the USA, Donald Trump faced both impeachment and a very public ridicule campaign from (real) billionaire Michael Bloomberg. The world had fears of war with Iran and the coronavirus from China. Even those who never watched a game mourned the loss of Kobe Bryant. Thousands of Australians lost their homes, farms and possessions in horrific bushfires. (True to form, Australia’s Prime Minister was taking a vacation in Hawaii whilst his people were losing their homes and lives.)
Retail sales continued to slump, with dozens of big-name companies closing thousands of storefronts and laying off tens of thousands of staff. With major world economies still floundering from the decade-old GFC, global interest rates hang at record lows or even below zero. Further ‘Quantitative Easing’ (or “printing money from nothing”) is planned to assist the rich to temporarily pump up stock prices whilst the working class shmoes wait for the myth of trickle-down economics to rain down on them.
If you cannot see the hilarity of trillion-dollar corporations bankrolling billionaire politicians to pretend to represent ordinary voters whilst legislating to help the wealthy avoid paying 2% taxes, you have not been paying attention. The fact is that almost every nation on earth is in massive and unsustainable debt (but to whom?). Those in the 1% engage in lowering the minimum wage in real dollar terms through legislation, incarceration, inflation, or flagrant wage theft.
The government claim they cannot afford universal healthcare or a universal basic income, however, they can budget trillions of dollars on weapons which are either unnecessary or which fail to work as intended. Additional payments to the military black hole either go missing or end up in the pockets of political friends, further increasing inequality.
This is why the world continues to need decentralised financial instruments and cryptocurrency. The so-called experts on Wall Street are not necessarily smarter than you, and not necessarily as experienced as your older neighbour who lived through the last couple of recessions. Rallies and protests such as the “Occupy Wall Street” movement achieved essentially nothing after the first GFC in 2008, but protestations and rebellion did give rise to cryptocurrency: a money by the people and for the people.
Is Crypto the AntiChrist? In 1998, several years after the internet had started to be used by mainstream business instead of just nerds, a Nobel prize-winning economist (Paul Krugman) said “By 2005, the impact of the internet on business will be no greater than a fax machine.” Pay close attention, because you should have just learned two things:
- Economists can be wrong, very wrong indeed, and
- having limited vision or limited intelligence is no barrier to becoming an economist or a Nobel prize winner.
We share the infamous economic bad call at this time, because Mister Krugman has also said a few bad things about bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Not content with labelling cryptos with the usual tags of scams or pyramid schemes, he actually used the word “evil”. We are guessing that being a heretofore celebrated economist he is not an English scholar and he probably fails to grasp the irony.
For centuries, the Catholic church called many things “evil”, including any religion which was not theirs, any king who failed to pay money to the Catholic pope and any woman who started a business selling natural cures or therapies. Hopefully, in today’s more enlightened society, the Catholics have relaxed their view of what constitutes “evil” and do not wish to burn all the Hindus, Moslems, Buddhists, pagans, Protestants, medical doctors or natural therapists.
Calling something “evil”, doesn’t make you right or good, it merely means that you place yourself on the other side of where you are looking.
Those who believe in the power of prayer may cast the ‘evil’ stone at other forms of healing; whether they be homeopathic, psychosomatic or allopathic. Some scientific doctors may look at religions who refuse vaccinations or blood transfusions and call the parents of dying children ‘evil’. Many Christian conservatives have called homosexuals evil in the past. An alternate view is that trying to “fix” someone by “praying the gay away” is an evil form of cult-like brainwashing and non-Christlike unacceptance.
When they go “Lo!” we go “Hi!” It’s easy to dismiss Mister Krugman as a foolish man with limited vision and outdated ideas, so we shall. A single Bitcoin is no more evil than a single dollar: what matters is what you do with it. Donate a bitcoin to a bushfire charity and you’re a great person doing a grand thing with good money. Use a dollar to pay a bribe and you’re a bad person doing a terrible thing with corrupt currency.
We do not believe that government currencies are evil, however, government currency can be manipulated very easily by powerful people who do not have your best interests at heart. As cryptocurrencies are (mostly) not controlled by governments or a single institution, they become notoriously difficult to be used as a tool of manipulation or oppression.
Whilst Trump loves to whack other countries with sanctions, using the US dollar as a weapon of war, nobody can bully your Bitcoin. You can use your crypto anywhere, in any country, at any merchant who accepts it. You can cross national borders with inordinate amounts of digital cash, ignoring the government-imposed $10k limit, and you can send any amount of digital gold to any recipient, anywhere in the world.
You can see why some world governments or the 1% trillionaire elite would call cryptocurrency “evil”, as it outside of their control. If you hear a prize-winning economist (or a shill journalist) claiming that cryptocurrencies are evil, it’s a safe assumption that they have chosen to (or are paid to) stand on the wrong side of totalitarian control.
Only a dictator would feel the need to control the finances of every citizen, including where they spend it, where they can transport it, and how much it is worth. Most people do not think of how a dollar is artificially constructed by a quasi-non-government-organisation such as a reserve bank, or to what extent the artificial dollar’s value can be controlled by the same quango bank manipulating interest rates or currency trades.
There was a time when an Australian dollar equalled a US dollar; there was a time when it exceeded it, and there was another time when it equalled around fifty cents. Those who travel often or those who watch the last sixty seconds of the evening news will know that currency fluctuates every single day. This is not your vote at work, to make your life better, but the machinations of a super-wealthy elite cabal who think that if they can control your money, they can control your life.
To a large degree, when it comes to dollars, this dictatorial billionaire belief system is correct. To an even larger degree, cryptocurrency totally gives the elite powerbrokers the middle finger, and gives you your freedom.
When the crypto world flips Throughout the early days of 2020 things have continued to be highly volatile in crypto-world, but compared to all the financial and political shenanigans of the broader world, things look decidedly better for cryllionaires.
Some old crypto favourites have plummeted by 80% to 90%, including 2019 darlings Enigma, Salt, Ark, Zcash, ByteBalls and Augur. Some wallflowers have re-emerged and some have grown stronger.
Although crypto-grandfather Bitcoin slumped to almost US$3000 during 2018/2019, he has more recently revisited US$9000. If you were brilliant enough to buy the dips then you may have made 300% (spoiler: almost nobody did). If you have been HODL’ing since $17 000, then… well… you’re still down around 50%, but at least $9k looks a lot better than $3k.
Our BostonCoin portfolio is profitable on many more coins now that the script has flipped on crypto. Mass adoption is coming closer everyday, more large institutions are buying in, more projects are being recognised and the market at large is gaining a deeper understanding of cryptocurrency.
How did we do in the first days of 2020?
Bitcoin 104%
BAT 123%
Binance 168%
ChainLink 264%
Lamden 343%
Celsius 375%
BudBo 1009.2% (yes that’s correct: over a thousand percent gain)
BostonCoin is up 50.1% since last month. We did not achieve stellar results because we are geniuses (or Nobel prize-winning economists). We simply did a lot of research, and we had a lot of faith. We had faith that the projects into which we invested would stay around for the long haul. We had faith that the market would eventually see the value and let go of the panic. We had faith in our team and the research we had done.
If war is declared later in 2020, if coronaviruses kill millions or even if markets panic again next month, we will still have faith. We believe in the projects, we believe in the research, and we believe in what crypto stands for: money by the people for the people, and freedom from malevolent manipulation by dollarized dictators.
See you next month
JB
BOS NAV at 29/01/2020 31.11855
BOS price 34.2304
