Blowing Bitcoin Bubbles That Sorta-Kinda Pop

Dear friends! Merry new year! This is going to be a big year for the decentralized lands, are you ready? I hope this email helps you understand the landscape and opportunities! If you'd rather not get it, let me know :)

Quick poll first: how many of y'all have any cryptographically encrypted digital currencies? Which ones?

If you don't and are still interested in this newsletter, let me tell you - things get a lot more interesting with some skin in the game. You also get to feel how early all this is technologically. Viscerally feel the pain people talk about when they mention bitcoin transaction costs. So let's get you a couple coins if you don't have any already. :)

So we've come a long long way together dear friends, in the month since I've last written. We've seen Ethereum's network get completely clogged up by virtual cats:

• https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/944016819538493440 - https://news.bitcoin.com/ethereum-blockchain-congested-cats/

Whiel the market cap for Bitcoin has gone from 180 Billion to 320 Billion and now sits at 235 billion dollars. While the total market cap for all cryptocurrencies is now at 600 Billion USD - which is almost a doubling from just a month ago.

My close ones. Play this as the soundtrack to the following text
C.R.E.A.M -

Cash rules everything around me. It is as true for the Wu-Tang Clan[2] in the 90's as it is for us today. Market forces moves mountains (literally, we blew apart mountains looking for gold and coal). We are in the middle of the greatest transfer of wealth the world has ever seen. The rules for how the world is manipulated through incentives are being rewritten into code. There are thousands of people who had no understanding of what money is, what it means to be off the gold standard, who are waking up to see the matrix for what it is. A programmable land where we made up the rules and where we can make up new ones. I know my writing is long, I know there may be many ideas that are might seem complex. I encourage you to deepen into this learning opportunity to learn as much as you can from how money works, to financial management, emotional control, active participation and beyond. The "get rich quick" scheme is the lure that brings new people into this revolutionary world, and the people that spend the time to understand. This tweet storm is a pretty good start: https://twitter.com/naval/status/877467629308395521
And this curmudgeon is awesome to follow: https://twitter.com/cryptodemedici/status/947385600046399488

Since we last spoke growth of bitcoin didn't match any linear charts, it was parabolic, freaking everyone out. Nothing that big should move that fast. With all this growth comes everyone. Bitcoin has a strong culture of bitlievers who will hodl no matter what, they sit on their hands and scoop up scarce coins into their trezor wallets driving the prices up for everyone. And after thanksgiving dinner, where milleneals convinced their parents that they were missing out on a gold rush brought prices up from 10,000$ to 20,000$. What is going to happen now! The entirety of #crypto-twitter was in awe! The masses now were drawn into the fray, everyone wanted to know - will bitcoins be our Tulip mania?! PS, that never really happened [1]

So what is a bubble? Let's ask Webst... aww hell no. A bubble in this context is traditional and conservative power structures throwing FUD (Fear Uncertainty Doubt) into the popular conscious to dissuade any more new money from exiting fiat into the cryptocurrency market place. Is bitcoin appropriately priced at it's current 13,000$ish? Too high? Too low? Who knows?! What utility does it provide and how can we identify bubbles? Well, thank goodness woobull created an indicator for just this purpose
http://woobull.com/introducing-nvt-ratio-bitcoins-pe-ratio-use-it-to-detect-bubbles/

The basic idea behind Woobull's metric is that the amount of money flowing through bitcoin's networks is related to it's actual price, correlating people transacting with productive value. Could be right. Who knows, Willy is also the guy who made this awesomeness:

- http://woobull.com/the-10-000-year-view-of-cryptocurrency/

For those interested in trading, I'm sure you're curious about his approach: https://www.coindesk.com/just-400-willy-woos-magic-math-insane-crypto-returns/ . If you want to get in on the high risk coins, you can check out these exchanges, link has a referral, which means I make a tiny bit, use them if you'd like, it wont hurt you any :) https://www.cryptopia.co.nz/Register?referrer=bilalg and also https://www.kucoin.com/#/?r=18dtQ

I love it, in life sometimes you have to take a few thousand steps back. Some helpful books to get this sort of perspective: Sapiens followed by The Seventh Sense. Your welcome!

Now charts are aggregators of human emotions (greed, hope, belief) over time, and you can see recurrent patterns in it. One of the amazing things to learn is how markets work and their relationships to our greed, like a sensor to see the invisible and perhaps unbelievable. Do we reliably act like this? Yep! That's why monk's (and computers) make good traders. And why I really like this hilarious dude on tradingview: https://www.tradingview.com/u/alanmasters/. Here's a poem he attached to a recent trade:
"Today I went to the future, to see what it was like.
It was blue, it was green, no… It was LIGHT.

I loved the future but in the end I always come back.
Why is it that if we all want to be in the future, we always live in the present and can’t help but to think about the past?

Forget about the future, the future is the present because with the present we create.
So if you want to have a beautiful, rich future.
Start living it today.

Namaste.
"
Thanks Alan, you wild spiritual trading creature!

Now emotions need triggers to cascade into trends which we can observe on the trading charts. After we boomed upward in an unbelievable manner

What does parabolic mean? Here's a numerical way to see it:
Wheeee Bitcoin starts 2009:
$0000-$1000: 1789 days
$5000-$6000: 8 days
$6000-$7000: 13 days
$7000-$8000: 14 days
$8000-$9000: 9 days
$9000-$10000: 2 days
$10000-$11000: 1 day
$11000-$12000: 6 days
$12,000-$13,000: 17 hours
$13,000-$14,000: 3 hours

we had an event come that was bound to shake things up.

The Wallstreet peeps were coming to join the party. They don't sit on their hands. They short markets. That a long with all sorts of shenanigans which are hard to make out, yet you can find evidence of in price (XRP boost, BCH boosts) led us to discover our top for 2017 at 20,000 usd per bitcoin. And since then... well, it's been dropping:

-https://twitter.com/CryptoHustle/status/947095636935135233
http://www.cmegroup.com/education/cme-bitcoin-futures-frequently-asked-questions.html

Well, what happened to another asset when futures started trading?

"On April 16, 2007, UxC and CME/NYMEX issued a joint press release announcing the introduction of on and off-exchange traded uranium futures products on the CME Globex® and CME ClearPort® electronic platforms on May 6 for the May 7, 2007 trade date."
-https://www.uxc.com/p/data/nymex/NymexOverview.aspx

Now this is kinda strange. Although looking at that graph makes me wonder... seems like uranium is quite undervalued these days ;D!

For someone else's opinions on the the great bull run of 2017 read this great article: http://www.runtogold.com/the-great-bitcoin-bull-market-of-2017/

Ok if bitcoin isn't a bubble? What the heck else could it be? Well, it seems there is another model for it, it's called a technology adoption curve:

- https://twitter.com/stellabelle/status/941818563219808257

Turns out you can also plot various tech companies against parabolic curves as well: Amazon and Google both fit. Reason it is so big is due to network effects encompassing masses, we live in a connected age and money is a form of communication where we "talk" about what things are valuable to us.

During the run up, it surpassed India as a global currency:
-https://twitter.com/TraceMayer/status/941773697605603329

What? How is that possible? What will happen to the world powers? The domination of USD upon the world? Well, my friend Vinnay has some answers and I have some listening to do: https://twitter.com/leashless/status/941501389687214081

I would love some help looking more into the aspects of crypto currency that speaks to a most pressing matter, our rapidly melting icecaps and deteriorating spaceship earth. I've gotten some questions about the fear that BTC will consume so much power it will make some nation states seem conservative. Well, let's consider the industries (not including the military deployed to protect and expand the asset) it takes to support a currency:

• https://twitter.com/Beetcoin/status/940181560392904704

This is not enough, so there's good news: coins like Solarcoin (https://solarcoin.org/), HumanIQ, Faircoin, POWERLedger, CureCoin, Foldingcoin, and others that are utilizing the system to directly do good either though science or incentivizing green tech. I believe that there is an opportunity to make this tools even greener, many coins, including the very popular ethereum, are moving to masternodes and proof of stake rather than running computation for instance. There's also the transition potential for all the computation happening to serve great good, like creating access to supercomputation with https://golem.network or using computational cycles to fold proeins, an essential step in the process to curing alzheimer's[3], cancer and other illnesses.

If you made it here and are still craving some learning. Please keep digging here:
https://lopp.net/bitcoin.html
and here:
http://charts.woobull.com/
and if you want to share ideas with me, please join the slack here:
https://join.slack.com/t/coinist/shared_invite/enQtMjgwNzY3NjQxNzYyLWU0ZmQwYzNhZDUzYmFhNDJiN2Y4YTZlMTI1OGUyYTc3MDY0MzE3YWEzZTUyNDAxZWFlYTIzN2NlYzc4ZGJiZDU
I love crypto twitter and just tarted an account to start engaging more there, follow if you'd like: https://twitter.com/numipacha
Steem will host these articles so they're easier for you to share as well:

Coming up next week! Is Bitcoin money? And if so... what KIND of money? Did you know there were different //kinds// of money? http://lexicon.ft.com/Term?term=m0,-m1,-m2,-m3,-m4

AND

DUn DUN DUNNNN

I'll reveal a pretty damn good hypothesis for who Satoshi Nakamoto (bitcoin inventor) is, and well... at least for me, it doesn't dissapoint! So stay tuned!

Please, if you found this helpful, I put a lot of time researching and gathering content to making this. I'd appreciate any ideas, insights, content, connections you might have :) - also tips are most welcome. And like I said anyone who doesn't have any crypto, please go to myetherwallet.com and make an address and send it to me so :)

BTC: 1LUDqVTUqW6ETnQK9vxsMvWWSaGWLBC45e
ETH: 0x1072eae22edfe8003d1a582159bb8ead6658a75d
DOGE: DPqaHF3EREdahXaJGJFbqjNK1WqiWRSKXP

I'm sorry for any mistakes in grammar, spelling, concepts, and none of this is advice.
Except for this, here, let's get practical:
Consider using decentralized exchanges and get your funds into crypto without Gov's watching: https://bisq.network/ and some more trading advice: https://www.docdroid.net/6acfHMo/practical-guide-to-crypto-investment-2018-helping-the-early-adopters-free.pdf
Protip++ don't say I didn't hook it up. Oh, one last thing before I go.

Shout out to the tEpliest Rhett (https://twitter.com/HeyRhett)! Our main man, who's reviving the zclassic currency and transforming it into the Bitcoin Private fork. I was holding since privacy coins are going to be interesting for all the newly minted millionaires and I was lucky to catch this: https://news.bitcoin.com/trading-tip-the-wall-absurd-profits-from-zclassic-a-k-a-bitcoin-private/

You da man Rhett, hope you know I really appreciate all your hard work and help over the years and would still love to see where I can contribute even a single line into BTCP! Hugs!

+Bilal Ghalib
January 1st 2017
Share with those curious :)

1: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-tulip-fever-180964915/

2: By the way Ghost Face Killer has started his own crypto company, haha! https://www.investopedia.com/news/wutang-clans-ghostface-killah-launch-cryptocurrency/

1. Really google? You'll choose this image?