Ba weep, granna weep, ninny bong! For those of you not in the know, that’s a universal greeting. This is Colton from Hedgehog, the investment app providing one of the easiest ways to get broad exposure to the digital asset sector with a single deposit.
It’s beginning to get cold outside, but the market is still heating up. The days are getting shorter, but the positions are getting long-er. While many at home are putting on their favorite yuletide records, the market is still setting YTD records. Forgive the dad jokes, it turns out I’m gonna be a dad next summer! Let me tell you about the world I’m hoping my son gets to grow up in:
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Coinbase released a new ad that seems to capture the angst of my millenial contemporaries, growing up in a world ravaged by Baumol’s cost disease, where pressures from globalization and automation have been gradually increasing competition for jobs, and now rising interest rates and weakening economic indicators are threatening to make the American Dream even harder to attain.
Strangely though, they don’t really give you a lot to hang onto for how things are gonna be different under the Coinbase regime. Maybe it’s an ad for their new money links product? A re-skin of Venmo and Paypal’s products seems like a pretty crummy update to the system, ngl.
The people’s network
<p style="line-height:22px;margin-bottom:15px;font-size:15px;font-family:Helvetica">On the other hand, Helium has been pushing their new $20 unlimited data 5G plans pretty heavily, and that’s an application of crypto I can get behind. I’ve spoken about Helium before, and full-disclosure: I’m a bag-holder; but I think it’s a really elegant solution to the problem of physical network infrastructure and the challenge of installing 5G-compatible radios, which are notoriously short-ranged compared to LTE, in all kinds of environments, from dense urban areas where it can be difficult to get rights to put up a tower at ground-level, to small rural towns where offering service might not make sense for the major cellular providers.
This is the perfect storm for crypto to create valuable public goods: individuals can deploy small amounts of infrastructure for tokens, the tokens can become more valuable as demand for the bandwidth on the provided infrastructure increases, and anyone can plug into the network to participate, whether you’re Joe Schmo, T Mobile, Dish, or an independent service provider. There’s absolutely no reason that we can’t create open source SIM cards and distributed identifiers that allow your devices to seamlessly hop networks, or peacefully enforce contracts without the threat of police or military intervention.
Nascent nations
And some nations are already on the forefront of adoption. El Salvador recently reported that their investments in Bitcoin are now officially profitable. Could Argentina be next on the adoption curve with the recent election of Milei? Miami already has their own loyalty token for residents to get perks around the city, why not Buenos Aires?
These sorts of applications are only going to grow in usage as the UX around crypto gets easier and the courts continue to support the interpretation of smart contracts as valid enforceable covenants among traditional governments. Once you have government-recognized home titles on an NFT market, you can do some interesting things like attaching cash flows to the title, or for those who like radical markets, creating liquid SALSA houses.
Imagine a town that wants to build an airport starts sending every land title owner in the area a fraction of all ticket sales, and when the owner sells the land, the cash flow automatically changes with them. These are the sorts of conveniences afforded by having a common database with a common clock and interface, and it’s only the beginning of something even more exciting that I like to call metanations, in contrast to network states. But that’s a story for another time.
I’ve been hunkering down for the holidays in Idaho with my wife’s family, and one of our employees found his way to Fiji to visit his wife’s family. Where are you trying to brave the winter?
Keep hedging,
— Colton