GM,

00000000000000000 - roughly the string length at the start of each block. It varies, of course, that’s the point.

All over the world, in basements, offices, and - these days - in volcanos 🌋, machines whirr and purr and whine and break figuring out just how many zeros there are and, answer plucked from the infinity orchestra of glistening transistors, the rewards cometh.

In 10 months, they will come less. Suddenly there will be a lot less to go around, and everyone will still want more. Then the excitement will begin. Then the mania will start. Drooling luddites flinging their pensions at things they barely understand.

Pay your ape tax.

You’re different though of course. You only have ‘blue-chip’ crypto. An endlessly useless term that applies differently depending on who you ask and what blockchains their wallet points to. But unless you have a working knowledge of Reimann’s Hypothesis and Euler’s Totient Theorem, all you really know is what you’ve been told.

All people know is what they are told. So make sure you’re saying the right things.

There has, over time, been a curious disconnect between what crypto actually is and how it’s spoken about. Crypto is no longer a peer-to-peer value system, but a fucking lifestyle. We’re not snooty about it, why would we be? We love the turbulent screams of an NFT Discord, the meme-soaked mayhem of a top-end Telegram chat, the cut and thrust of Twitter’s amplified stage. We’re apes just like you.

But isn’t it a slight cause for wonder when what is - at its heart - a fairly dry mathematical construct, and bit of sysadmin for a increasingly messed up world, a non-traditional tonic to the age old problem of value capture, organization, and deployment, has become a neon-edged promontory where hyperpersons galvanise the masses to participate in extreme crowdfunding for glorified databases? Where houses are traded for receipts, receipts that point to (non-permanent) pictures which are stored in those databases. Databases that require hundreds of millions of dollars of human activity to competitively upkeep?

Mad isn’t it? Great - isn’t it? Who cares about gardening or having kids or writing novels when our smooth brains can just play the Great Game of Numbers with one another for the right to eat caviar.

You’ve already given in, that’s why you're here. You’re above such nonsense, you stride like a colossus - yada yada. Tell yourself whatever you like. All everyone else knows is what they get told - so let’s tell everyone something great.

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