Demand. Over the last five years, the supply hasn’t really changed that much. But demand really has. The price has increased from about $1,000 per Bitcoin to about $50,000. And the total value (market cap) of Bitcoin has grown from about $15 billion to $1 trillion over the same time period.

Human behavior. Human behavior is driven by incentives. And when those incentives involve money, it turns humans into computer programs. They will do exactly what’s required to protect and grow that money. Investors in Bitcoin cross all geographies, age, culture, religion, and financial sophistication. All that’s required is an internet access device, and an internet connection. Large institutions and many people in the technology industry have invested in Bitcoin. It really doesn’t matter why. All that matters is the financial, technology, and future generational “builders” have a direct monetary incentive to see Bitcoin be successful. At $1 trillion dollars of value, it’s one of the most valuable “companies in the world”.

Collectors. Because Bitcoin is relatively rare, because it is a store of value, and because it can be exchanged for other things of value around the world 24x7x365, there are a variety of collectors who would do whatever they can to collect as much Bitcoin as they can.

Non-zero value. People have lost access to their Bitcoin, which means even if they wanted to, they cannot sell it. As such, there is no way for any human or machine on the planet to collect all the Bitcoin. And it also means it can’t be sold to drive the price down to $0. This doesn’t even take into account the people with incentives in Bitcoin that, if the market crashed all the way to $1, wouldn’t immediately invest a large amount of money into Bitcoin and collect as much as they could, thereby driving the price back up.

Loans. There’s a simple trick the wealthy use for tax planning purposes. The invest their money in appreciating assets like stocks and Bitcoin. Instead of selling those assets to get cash to pay for expenses in their life (e.g., a house), they take out a loan with a bank using those assets as collateral. Thus, the assets continue compounding, they continue to earn money, and pay off the debt in the future. Or sell some of the gains in the future to pay down the debt. The trick is earning a return at a higher percentage than the debt rate.

Conclusion. Collect as much Bitcoin as you can because it has a limited supply and at some point it will not be available to trade any longer. It will become rarer and rarer making it nearly impossible to find a willing seller. Take out a loan for immediate cash needs with Bitcoin as collateral. Should your situation get dire, you can always sell the Bitcoin to one of the ravenous buyers. Put the Bitcoin into a trust in South Dakota. Add your family as beneficiaries and pass it down over generations. Don’t unnecessarily stop the compounding.

Risks. People and machines no longer want to collect or use Bitcoin, or no longer value it at all. Everyone who was a believer collectively agrees it’s not worthwhile any longer. The power law and category king theory does not continue to hold in this one industry.

--Sean

Disclaimer. I’m not a registered investment advisor, don’t have a CFA (though I sat for the first test), I’m not a CPA or an attorney. As such, please do not consider this investment advice.

Can we talk about “gas” for a minute?

It seems there could be a deeper reason that the transaction fee in Ethereum is called gas. In the real world, people buy gas(oline) because it enables them to travel from one place to the next. In either case, gas is an enabler, where you pay a small tax to do what you want to do.

Within Ethereum, as at the gas station, you pay a chunk of money up front for a bucket of gas. But unlike real-world gasoline, Ethereum gas isn’t used over extended periods of time.

In its purest form, I see Gas as a Platform. You should pay-per-continued use just like on AWS.

Let’s extend the analogy further.

The gas you pay for using Ethereum does not represent something you use over time as you travel from A to B. It’s a one-time transaction fee you pay the miners for minting or purchasing an NFT. It’s more like a door. However, embedded deep within that NFT purchase is code that can be changed.

So the possibility exists to make a “Streaming NFT” with “Streaming Gas”. Now there’s a business model Wall Street can get behind, and what I believe, is an inevitability of where the world is heading. Let me explain.

Can you explore a smart contract, or code for that matter, as if it was a 4-dimensional universe? Not yet. It’s just a file with text. Code is caught in flatland.

But perhaps that's the vision for what could be a Web3 x Metaverse crossover. Most futurists assume that you can transport your NFTs between individual universes (i.e., you can take them with you), even though they’re currently trapped in individual chains like Solana or Ethereum. The vision is that your NFTs can cross the thresholds between universes. Today, that means crossing between websites that integrate with Metamask (more or less). But maybe that thought experiment is not yet fully shaped.

Perhaps we need to go deeper.

Maybe the NFT is the portal through which we dive into our 4D experience. And you become the NFT itself.

Imagine 100 years a few decades from now. You have artificial general intelligence algorithms living inside blockchain transactions. They operate on your behalf, work by embedding pointers to distributed systems running a combination of CPUs, GPUs, and Qubits that are generating photo-realistic 4D worlds, in real-time, and streaming the visuals, emotions, and otherwise to your human connectome. Sensory input + cortical processing + motor output. You are experiencing the Matrix, just-in-time, as it is being created.

Look outside right now. Look at how real it all looks. Crispy.

Thus, the NFT is your ticket, your portal, your ferryman into the realm of the future. Wonka’s golden ticket, if you will, turning the balloon inside-out and carving your own unique energy pathway through the connectome of hyperspace. Life is a fractal, after all.

So, in this world where the bits are changing as they are experienced (quantum, remember?), you need machine money to keep the engine running. The only way to die in the metaverse is to, quite literally, run out of gas.

If you’re an investor, a futurist, or a pragmatist, what this means is that you need to architect ROI engines that acquire more gas than they take to run. In fact, we could substitute gas for its physics counterpart: energy. Said differently: energy engines. And all that’s left is to add a storage mechanism.

The deeper you go down the rabbithole, the closer you get to one fundamental truth. Namely, that:

ethereum://0xabEFBc9fD2F806065b4f3C237d4b59D9A97Bcac7/6644

Principles for Navigating Human Behavior

And lest you get lost, we’ve begun publishing principles for navigating the metaverse of human behavior. The school of the internet is a master at teaching human behavior.

https://twitter.com/seanmeverett/status/1470114582442262537?s=21

Invent, create magic, thrive.

-Sean