But for all that Prince Charles and Princess Diana had one of the most extraordinary marriages in human history, the show does well to suggest how it might have been simultaneously sad in extremely ordinary ways: it’s a point poignantly made, in particular, through a conceit in which fictional couples whose divorces were stamped on the same day detail their own marital breakdowns. And while there had been some speculation that this current series might prove the very worst of PR for the new King, in fact, on top of championing his progressive values and work with The Prince’s Trust, its arbitration of the Wales’ marriage feels very equitable. One scene between them that sticks out for its unadorned sadness comes in the penultimate episode when an attempt at a truce, made over a plate of scrambled eggs in Princess Diana’s Kensington Palace flat, suddenly descends into recrimination: here, the show suggests, were two people that, through no singular fault, simply could never have been compatible.
As for the performances? They are, this time round, a very mixed bag. Inevitably it becomes harder for each new round of actors taking on royal duties to convince, as what happens on screen converges with more and more viewers’ real-life memories. Regardless, some performances here really just don’t work. That applies to Lesley Manville as Princess Margaret, who brings a strangely prim, pinched quality to the famously larger-than-life royal sibling. Equally, West as Prince Charles is all wrong: where his predecessor Josh O’Connor disappeared into the role, perfectly capturing the prince’s unworldly diffidence, among other things, West isn’t able to quell his roguishly assured star charisma.
Those actors who fare better, by contrast, are ones who don’t themselves have such an established persona to conceal. The relatively little-known Claudia Harrison follows Erin Doherty as another inspired choice for the Princess Royal, a perfect balance of severity and warmth, while Jonathan Pryce as Prince Philip offers a masterclass in creating a convincing impression of a person without looking anything like them, and Debicki pretty effectively inhabits Princess Diana using a more obviously studied mimicry (the eyes directed upwards, the ethereal, slightly wooden intonation). And as for Staunton? At first, she seems all wrong for the part, somehow both too naturally bullish and too knowing. Yet, as the series goes on, she’s a performer of such intense conviction that the question of how much her Queen is really the Queen becomes increasingly less important.
Come the final episode of this series, a sense of déjà vu takes hold, as Tony Blair (Bertie Carvel) arrives in power and Princess Diana is seen packing her bag for a visit to Mohamed Al-Fayed’s yacht, where she will encounter his son Dodi – because, of course, in its due-to-be-final next series, The Crown is set to cross over with The Queen, Morgan’s fine, Oscar-winning 2006 film about the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death, which was the first fruit of his interest in Britain’s ruling family. I suspect the comparison with that rather more sophisticated work will do The Crown no favours at all – though regardless of that, as an incontrovertible TV “event” that is also a fail-safe controversy machine, it will undoubtedly have the world rapt until the very end.
The Crown series five is released on Netflix on 9 November.
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This is an opinion editorial by Bitcoin Bible, a writer, editor and artist with 25 years of experience in the digital domain.
Art has always had a special relationship with our culture. It has been a constant, enduring through war, industrial revolutions and evolution. It takes many forms, and for a long time, art has been made with whatever tools we’ve had to work with — from the earliest cave paintings to the modern canvas. Now, however, it seems that art has taken a new form — the digital realm.
Digital art is everywhere, and it has triggered a revolution of sorts. No longer is art restricted to paper and pen — now we can create incredible products on the computer, fashioning art from pixels and special effects.
Image source: Author
A Multi-Faceted Industry
Nobody can deny that the world of digital art has grown substantially in the last two decades. Once upon a time, people were creating simple images in MS paint. Nowadays, the rise of NFTs has led to substantial interest in digital art.
NFTs in particular exploded into popularity back in 2017. When a blockchain-based game launched with the support of Ethereum, players could collect NFTs of their cats.
This pretty basic premise set the tone for what NFTs could do. People now use them to purchase representations of objects that exist in the real world. Art, music, game assets, and even videos are bought and sold using NFTs. The blockchain keeps a record of every transaction, and if you purchase the NFT, then you become the owner.
Bitcoin is a core part of this revolution because it has become one of the biggest payment methods on offer. As the largest cryptocurrency out there, Bitcoin is used to pay for so many different things including digital art.
Image source: Author
Art Created And Sold Online
It’s not just about the NFT world either. We’ve seen a massive uptake in people who are creating digital art and selling it online.
There are entire art pieces that are being created and sold entirely online. It is not exactly surprising to consider that people are using digital software to create artwork, and then selling it on sites like eBay. This kind of art is incredibly popular, because it does offer up a lot of unique opportunities for designs that aren’t conventionally sold elsewhere, and it also means that practically anybody can get into selling art.
Image source: Author
A Brand New Culture
So, it is safe to say that a brand-new, exciting culture has emerged from digital art. There are now entire communities that are working together to create art that is based in the digital realm. To this effect, there are a number of different art competitions, including the one currently running by Bitcoin Bible.
There has been a fantastic uptake in the number of people that are beginning to explore the Bitcoin art community for themselves as a result of these kinds of competitions. They are helping to propel adoption and awareness around Bitcoin. It also helps a lot with bringing traditionally physical artists into the digital world. A typically struggling artist may find that they suddenly have a wealth of tools and resources to use in the online world.
Image source: Author
What Does The Future Hold For Digital Art?
So, what will the digital art industry do in the future? What is the next step for a juggernaut that has propelled itself to the highest levels of the public consciousness?
Well, we think that growth is inevitable. The idea of digital art will continue to move forward, and will continue to grow, even in the midst of progression is thrilling.
“Bitcoin is extremely powerful and misunderstood. Art is also extremely powerful and misunderstood. That’s why we thought this pairing would perfectly synergise to help spread bitcoin and the creative genius of artists all across the world…
“The point of art is to make the world a better place. The point of bitcoin is to make the world a better place. The artist uses paints to do this, and bitcoin uses code.” — Deacon Kennedy
You now cannot prevent the growth of digital art, because it’s picked up such momentum that it can only continue to permeate culture even more. Furthermore, we think that it will become even more intrinsically linked with cryptocurrency over time, which is nice. Bitcoin will undoubtedly continue to be a key payment method, which will work well in the long term as its adoption continues.
Obviously, it’s difficult to immediately tell what that will mean for digital art as a whole. It’s important to recognize that the culture does grow and develop, and whether or not digital art will outpace traditional art or exist in the same space remains to be seen. They are going to collide eventually, arguably, in quite a big way, because digital art is a new contender for people’s interests, and traditional art is obviously a very fixed, established way of creating.
Image source: Author
Final Thoughts
So, digital art is something which is growing all the time. It’s a big commodity now, because people like the idea of getting modern, fresh takes on art. After all, art is, at the basic level, a very interpretive medium.
Modern art takes many different forms, which is why things like digital art are becoming so popular, because there are no restrictions anymore. People are free to create whatever they choose, using any kind of tool that they have available, and that’s amazing.
What we are now seeing is people creating digital art from every corner of the world, putting it online, and then selling it either as a single piece or as an NFT. There are competitions popping up everywhere, and these competitions are having such a big impact on spreading the potential of digital art, pushing that envelope out into the world.
We truly are witness to a digital renaissance when it comes to art, and this is fantastic. There is no limit to what can be achieved with digital art, and it is simply a case of experimenting further, figuring out what combinations of things can be used together, and then using these brand-new resources to generate something new and amazing.
Anybody can start with digital art, and that’s fantastic. There are no limits, there’s no restrictions on how you create, because art is in the eye of the beholder. You could sit down at a computer today and create a digital art piece by tomorrow. That is art in the truest sense of the word, so it’s not exactly surprising that a digital art revolution is happening before our very eyes and it should be embraced in every way.
This is a guest post by Bitcoin Bible. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
This is an opinion editorial by Holly Young, Ph.D., an active builder in the Portuguese Bitcoin community.
Way back when people thought the earth was flat, it was more or less here, in Portugal where I am writing this, that people thought that the earth ended. And if you look out to the sea, you can understand why, as the gray Atlantic stretches as far as the eye can see to America in one direction, and to North Africa in another. Names referring to the edge of the earth (“Fisterra,” “Finisterre”) are common along the Atlantic coastline.
Image source: Author
Portugal’s visa process, for those of us who are not European, although somewhat slow, is manageable and does not necessarily involve parting with too large a slice of your Bitcoin stash. A D7 visa, for example, requires only that you display means of income or passive income (and yes, they consider holding Bitcoin as a means of passive income) and the equivalent of two years of minimum wage on your bank account.
For anyone who has ever visited, I hardly need to expand upon the charms of Portugal. The climate, beautiful landscape, food, incredibly friendly and warm culture all speak for themselves. It is much less focussed on keeping up appearances and status than its Mediterranean sister countries, Italy and Spain. For those keen to live a healthy, outdoor life, be it hiking, surfing, motorbiking or horseback riding — you name it, Portugal is paradise. For those wanting to raise a family here, it’s generally a safe environment, with low crime rates, decent healthcare, some outstanding international schools and a lively home schooling or alternative schooling community.
There is something about Portugal’s history which lends it to being a Bitcoin haven, too. The country was under a dictatorship from the mid 1920s until the mid 1970s, meaning that political oppression and censorship are still very much living memories amongst the local population. Poverty was the norm here, especially before it joined the European Union in the ‘80s, and still Portugal remains one of the poorer European countries.
An influx of Bitcoiners inevitably brings more affluence with it, nourishing the local economies. Portugal’s history, attractive lifestyle and Bitcoin-friendly tax laws make it fertile ground in and of itself for a Bitcoin community.
And then you have the types of people which Portugal has always attracted as immigrants.
Those of us who have washed up and put down roots here in Europe’s deep south do, it seems to me, have some common characteristics. Many of us came to take our children away from the rigid and constrictive school systems of Northern Europe. Many have bought land and are keen to move towards self sufficiency. Many are digital nomads, looking for community — this is especially true further north, in Lisbon. Many are people who work with their hands and make goods to sell. In general, Portugal draws and has always drawn a freedom-minded crowd, when it comes to immigrants. And I can tell you from experience that these people are natural Bitcoiners. Orange pilling here is preaching to the choir, even though many had never heard of bitcoin. Ask them if they would like a decentralized, deflationary, censorship resistant money and the answer is a resounding, “yes!”
None of us know, of course, what the future is going to bring, but whatever it brings, it seems that we should not underestimate the human value of our peer-to-peer network. What I enjoyed the most about the brief period I spent at Bitcoin Beach in El Salvador was the international crowd who wanted nothing more than to talk Bitcoin over dinner. But the benefits of having an active Bitcoin community are not only social ones. We can all see that difficult times are coming with hyperinflation and shortages — for these issues, only parallel economies provide a realistic solution.
During COVID-19, some friends of mine set up what they called a private market on their land. In no time, the first 10 stalls had expanded and there were several hundred shoppers when I visited. Stalls sold local honey, mushrooms, clothing, biochar burners, eggs, meat, jewelry, local liquor, candles and brass ornaments. People offered circus workshops for children, clothing repair — there was live music and a festive atmosphere. Initiatives like this are perfect for introducing bitcoin as the ideal currency for a parallel, local economy, with all the advantages offered by Lightning. As Bitcoiners, we need to actively grasp these opportunities. I’ll be holding a “Bitcoin for Beginners” workshop in the short term, organized through the Telegram group for the market.
On a beach down on the southern coast, Meia Praia, the first green shoots of Bitcoin Beach Europe are starting to sprout. So far, it’s just one little beach bar. But if you go to Bam Bam Beach bar on a Friday evening, you will find live music and an active, international crowd of Bitcoiners there, swapping tales and paying for their cold beers with Lightning. Other initiatives are slowly springing up too. The farm shop owned by a dear friend of mine also accepts sats as payment. A pizzeria down on the south coast in Burgau does too. So does a steakhouse in Almancil. One by one, Bitcoin businesses are appearing and flourishing.
To the European Bitcoiner, the U.S. looks like an enviable hub of Bitcoin meetups, with a tempting array of get-togethers on a regular basis, especially in Nashville and Austin. Here in Europe, we have to work a little harder to get our Bitcoin contact time and our Bitcoin chats in. But there has never been a better time for European Bitcoiners to gather and start holding meetups, information sessions and to start building communities.
Family is first — community is a close second. Just as the integrity of family relationships requires time, effort, commitment and attention, so too does building and keeping a community. Portugal provides the welcome we need for a European Bitcoin community and economy — it has the potential to be Europe’s Bitcoin heartland. But the most vital thing is that we all do our best to contribute to the orange tsunami which hyperbitcoinization will be. “Build back better,” say our politicians, and I wholeheartedly agree — by defunding their regimes, by opting out, by buying bitcoin, by helping those around us to buy bitcoin and by building the community we want to live in ourselves, from the ground up.
This is a guest post by Holly Young. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
Drake on his phone, maybe posting porn? Photo: Cole Bursto (Getty Images)
Hello, welcome to the end of the week. I’m here to send you off into the night with the news that rapper Drake has posted a bunch of anime porn, aka hentai on his main Instagram account. The account has 124M followers, for the record, which is more than the entirety of Crunchyroll’s viewership in 2021. The porn is seemingly part of his marketing push for his new album “Her Loss.” Just one more thing the rapper has done recently that’s caught the eyes of the internet and made a lot of folks stop and go “…What? Why?”
Let’s take a quick detour before we hop straight into the hentai posting to provide some context. Today, Drake released a new collaborative album with 21 Savage. To help promote Her Loss, the new record, Drake and 21 Savage have been on a wild whirlwind marketing blitz complete with a fake promo for a non-existent NPR Tiny Desk Concert starring the duo and a completely fabricated Vogue cover. Weird stuff! But last night, Drake decided to take his marketing of Her Loss to a whole new level, and uh…just posted straight-up anime porn on his main, official Instagram.
As of 6:15 EST p.m. the photos are still up on his Instagram story. He posted four different hentai images last night accompanied with various English captions, including “Mood at midnight” and “Goodbye my dear husband.” Enough posts, in other words, that the porn doesn’t seem to be a mistake from a random image he found or something. Here is a censored look at the images:
If you want to see the fully uncensored pics, click here, but just know that they are full-on hentai screenshots. So if you are at work or around prudish family members, be careful.
G/O Media may get a commission
The album hasn’t been out long, but it’s led to some controversy involving Megan Thee Stallion. In one song on the album, Drake seemingly references a reported 2020 shooting involving Stallion and Canadian rapper, Tory Lanez. Allegedly, Lanez shot Megan Thee Stallion’s feet when she tried to walk away from an argument. In the song, Circo Loco, Drake appears to reference this event when he raps, “This bitch lie ’bout getting shots but she still a stallion.”
Megan Thee Stallion, another known anime connoisseur, has since commented about the song and its lyrics, tweeting: “Stop using my shooting for clout bitch ass n—-! Since when tf is it cool to joke about abt women getting shot!”
After the Dobbs ruling and before the midterm elections, Gloria Steinem sat down with “another crazed magazine woman,” Vanity Fair editor in chief Radhika Jones, for a wide-ranging conversation on reproductive rights, Ms. magazine, and the upcoming elections.
“In a real sense, if you don’t vote you don’t exist,” Steinem said, an especially meaningful reminder when the right to abortion is no longer federally guaranteed.
Steinem, a contributing editor to the November issue of VF, has been an activist, organizer, and often the face of the women’s movement for over a half century, as well as a writer and founding editor of Ms. magazine, which celebrated its 50th anniversary this year.
As Steinem mentions to Jones in their conversation, she can never tell if it’s a good or bad thing that we’re still talking about reproductive rights well into the 21st century, but here we are regardless. “Either we make decisions over our own bodies or we’re not living in a democracy,” Steinem said. “It is fundamental. Women or men, we need to be able to decide the fate of our own bodies.”
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
“You can’t take it with you” — how often have you heard that?
It’s an oft-abused phrase employed, usually within the context of a person amassing wealth or assets beyond their needs. What it speaks to is intent, and that’s what building multi-generational wealth is all about: growing your assets to pass them on to future generations.
We’re not just talking about money and other valuable items, though. There’s far more to it than that.
Right now, in the West and throughout the world, we’re experiencing deep financial uncertainty. Especially since the crash of 2008, we’ve been on an increasingly fast treadmill of debt.
Most Millennials and Generation Z in America identified home ownership as the prime marker for success. Increasingly, though, they are being priced out of the housing market altogether. Two-thirds of non-homeowners cited affordability as why they didn’t own their own home.
There are, of course, several factors that have gone into this situation. It boils down to a total lack of focus on building generational wealth. Now we could lay that at the feet of consumerism; far too much emphasis on instant gratification, not enough on the journey of life and deferred gratification for greater future reward.
Certainly, that’s true to an extent. We buy on credit now more than ever (I’ll get to why that’s bad…but not why you think, shortly). We seek shortcuts and outcomes rather than journeys and experiences. But as with everything in life: the answer lies in more than one factor.
Right now, we’re experiencing the perfect storm of destabilizing geopolitics, recessions, war and cultural norms that don’t favor multi-generational wealth.
We’ve cultivated this sense of wealth being about what you can demonstrate to others. It’s all about “flex” culture (as the kids say). But this belies the true nature of what it means to be wealthy.
What is wealth?
I’m not going to say something as predictable or demonstrably untrue as: “wealth has nothing to do with money.” That kind of platitudinal soundbite is also part of the problem. We’re not holding ourselves accountable for what we say publicly. Money is absolutely a component of wealth, there’s no doubt. But it also doesn’t paint the complete picture.
A “wealth” of something simply means that you have an abundant supply of it. For example, you can have a wealth of knowledge. It comes down to how resourced you are as a person and how valuable you can be as an individual to the broader community.
We’ve done ourselves a cultural disservice in emphasizing money. Not that this is some kind of anti-capitalist rant! I’m a serial entrepreneur, after all. We do, however, need to steer the conversation towards other forms of wealth to heal the current pain we find ourselves in.
For multi-generational wealth, we must take a more holistic approach to life
Millions of dollars in the bank won’t serve you if you have to sacrifice your mental well-being and time with your family (or a family, for that matter) to achieve it. My vision of multi-generational wealth is not about one generation falling on their proverbial sword to bring it about.
My approach is about breaking these “molds” into which we constantly try to force ourselves. I want us to ditch the ‘cookie-cutter’ approach altogether and really examine what we have to offer future generations beyond just accrued capital.
Thanks to inflation, the money that you leave behind for your kids will be eroded by the sands of time anyway.
Our education systems throughout the west offer pitifully little education when it comes to money management. We need to start teaching our kids how to handle money properly if we want to build generational wealth.
That starts with understanding how to use debt properly!
We’re used to buying things on credit, usually having been fed the ridiculous line about how it frees up your capital to earn money. Given the rates that most retailers and third-party lenders charge, that’s total garbage.
You find me a savings account or investment portfolio that will give you the level of return that will match or exceed what they’re charging!
That said: we also need to avoid the trap of thinking that debt is inherently evil. It’s not. It just depends on how you use it.
Consumer debt (i.e., buying consumables with debt) is a terrible idea because you’re servicing debt on something that is losing value. Hence why you can leverage your capacity to service debt, for example, to become a lender yourself essentially. That’s how a lot of other successful entrepreneurs and I make a lot of money.
From an entrepreneurial perspective, educating your kids about how debt works is a massive leap toward building generational wealth.
This means educating yourself — no bad thing. I would encourage you to break the old habits and stigmas around debt for your own sake. Learn to identify the difference between consumer debt and the debt you can leverage.
The most important advice I can offer to you as an entrepreneur that will help you build multi-generational wealth is to…
Find your ‘why’!
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how” — Friedrich Nietzsche
This is always the first port of call for anyone I coach in business. It’s the single most important thing to teach your kids if you want them to build on your legacy.
You must understand what’s driving you and why. That takes serious introspection and hard work. You will need to weed out all the programmings you’ve been fed since you were a kid that is keeping you motivated by the desires of others.
We think that so much of what drives us comes from us. More often than not, however, we’re being driven by what someone else expects of us. When we don’t confront this proactively, it leads to mid-life crises.
The stark realization that we have less time left than we’ve had throws into sharp relief all of the things we’ve valued and how little we actually did for ourselves!
Don’t let that be the legacy you leave.
Get your head around the life that you want to lead. Be an example to future generations and build your resources (money, knowledge, health, energy, etc…) to be of maximal service.
Being of service to others ultimately builds true wealth, after all.
This is an opinion editorial by James Collins, a financial professional with experience in various asset classes.
As I sit here writing this piece, I search for the words to best describe my thoughts on the present state of the world. I couldn’t seem to find words to express my vantage point until I landed on Clockwork Orange. Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 dystopian crime thriller, “A Clockwork Orange,” presents ranging views of individualism and freewill to authoritarianism and force. The parallels between some people’s idea that we are headed toward a global totalitarian state known as the “Great Reset” and the intense level of response to the blatant use of force by The State and power in numbers expressed in the counterforce of the “Great Awakening” fit firmly in the scripting of “A Clockwork Orange.” We have a heightened global awareness of these buzz words like Great Reset and Great Awakening, but what I believe is the best descriptor of these connected, yet conflicting, ideas of global magnitude is the “Great Confusion.”
The Great Confusion stems from an underlying absence of the inverse, which is clarity. I believe if we as humans desire to grow as a species, we must sync to a global baseline level of objective truth or 100% clarity.
“Bitcoin, Clockwork Orange” is my musing on how clarity through money removes us from the “Great Confusion.”
To find clarity, we must sync to a global baseline of objective truth. What can we use as the baseline? It must be something that everyone can agree on, regardless of spoken language and geographical location, like mathematics and physics. Whether in the United States or El Salvador, two plus two will always equal four, and there is no place on earth where humans can jump off a building and fly; gravity will win. These objective truths are the perfect baseline for humans to build upon as a strong base layer.
“Mathematics is the base layer of language” — @FossGregFoss
On January 3, 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto released a decentralized system of peer-to-peer electronic cash in the form of Bitcoin, and that has changed our world forever, giving humanity clarity in the form of money. The Bitcoin network and its unit of account, bitcoin, flips upside down everything we once knew about finance. The time-value of money is the core principle of finance — that money today is worth more than money tomorrow. The current time-value of money only exists because a central authority can alter the volume of currency within an economic system at any time. Due to the central control of money creation, the saying is that governments can always print more money to handle their debts, so they have a risk-free rate. This risk-free rate is the base rate added when layering other risk factors when analyzing an investment in other bonds or equities. A central authority’s ability to alter the underlying money supply and affect these rates means they can affect everything in an economy and completely distort price signals. If looked at through its most sinister lens, controlled issuance of money supply in traditional finance is how central authorities keep their population on the road to serfdom; people work exponentially more onerous for a currency growing exponentially weaker, thereby being robbed of their time expressed through destroyed purchasing power.
“Finance is the time value of money. Bitcoin is the monetary value of time.” — @Lisa_Hough_
Satoshi Nakamoto solved the ills associated with time theft through currency debasement by discovering absolute scarcity using technologies that leverage the objective truth of mathematics and physics to back a natively digital supply by time itself, the only absolutely scarce asset we possess. Paraphrasing the work outlined in Chapter 2, Bitcoin is Time in Gigi’s “21 Lessons,” the Bitcoin Network is a decentralized timestamping server that uses asymmetric cryptography to create causality in cyberspace. Those causal events (known data needed to create a hash of that known data which is linked to the next block) link together by giving them meaning through entropy or the randomness, in the form of no one in a decentralized system knowing who is going to win the next block reward and which transaction will be hashed into a block to create the particular Merkel root defining a point in time that resembles an absolute now in the digital realm. Discovering a method of determining the “now” or “time” in a decentralized adversarial system is what allowed Satoshi Nakamoto to solve the centralization of time-keeping of the ledger to prevent double spending, as well as definable “time” in cyberspace, which is necessary for the determination of “when” transactions occurred.
(Bitcoin is simply a transaction-based ledger where the transactions are the spreading of ownership of the units of time encapsulated in bits called satoshis by signing continuous digital signatures to this append-only distributed timestamp server). The entropy of asymmetric cryptography creates an irreversible arrow of this “now” time, creating a legitimate past, present and unknown future. As mentioned, the objective truth of physics also comes into play through the unpredictability expressed through the same asymmetric cryptography in mathematics applied to the physical exertion of energy within proof-of-work consensus to solve the cryptographic puzzle, therefore emitting more bitcoin into circulation. Proof-of-work is essential to the underlying value of bitcoin because it runs physical computation, the only native form of energy transfer in the digital realm with no way to cheat it. Through an asymmetric cryptographic function, proof-of-work creates a scenario where the time taken to brute force the answer over the almost nonexistent time to verify the findings is expressed via computationally time-derived bits.
Finally, Nakamoto utilized the difficulty adjustment in block height or Bitcoin’s native clock to connect this computational work of time-exertion back to our physical world by using a cryptanalytically stable problem, allowing for a speed limit on the time expressed between our physical world (an average 10-minute block time) and the digital realm (a difficulty adjustment every 2016 blocks). The finality of this time-derived speed limit connecting our physical world to the digital world allows the absolutely scarce hard-cap of 21 million bitcoin expressed in the Bitcoin Core source code to be upheld.
No matter how much energy or computation you throw at the network, you can not speed up the emission schedule, and more energy does not mean more bitcoin; bitcoins underlying value is not computation through energy intensity but computation through energy exertion measuring the time asymmetry made possible through one-way cryptography.
“When you have scarcity in money, you have abundance in everything else.” — @JeffBooth
In conclusion, humanity is in the midst of the Great Confusion — some people think we are headed towards a Great Reset while others believe we are in a Great Awakening — and some don’t care. This lack of focus and attention is due to overwhelming noise and misdirection.
The signal we are looking for can be found at the depths of our oldest social structure, money, which has now been transformed through objective truth in mathematics and physics into the perfect signal. Bitcoin leverages that perfection to invert everything we know about finance and money. Satoshi Nakamoto used objective truth in mathematics and physics to bridge a synthetic digital time and space to our physical time and space in a decentralized manner allowing for coordination of when an absolute volume of costly unforgeable bits of digital time interlock with our physical efforts of computation.
The discovery of absolute mathematical scarcity with an intrinsic value of inescapable costliness in the real physical world linked to the heartbeat of a synthetic time in block height controlled by the cryptanalytic stability of the difficulty adjustment, a physical world time-based adjustment, is the most crucial discovery in monetary application of all time. Bitcoin is the unstoppable march of time-derived money wrapped in mathematics and physics, defining a pure price signal. Tick tock next block.
This is a guest post by James Collins. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
Sarah Schachner, one of the most prolific and well-known composers working in video games, has issued a statement today saying that she will no longer be creating any music for Modern Warfare II or Warzone.
Schachner, whose credits as a composer and musician include the Assassin’s Creed series (Unity, Black Flag, Origins & Valhalla), Far Cry, Need for Speed, Bioware’s Anthem and Call of Duty games (Infinite Warfare, Modern Warfare & Modern Warfare II), posted the statement on Twitter, saying that she “can no longer continue to compose music” for Activision’s latest shooter.
“Over the past couple of months the working dynamic with the audio director has become increasingly challenging and I don’t see any path forward”, the statement says. “As of now, I am unsure of the status and release plan for the soundtrack as it’s been taken out of my hands.”
Those soundtrack plans have been the subject of fan curiosity ever since the game’s release, since it’s rare for a major blockbuster like this to come out and not have its official album accompany it. Schachner’s statement suggests that her “challenging” dynamic with the audio director (which Variety reports is Stephen Miller) is at least partly down to this soundtrack release, as she adds “what will be released on the soundtrack is not my artistic intent in regards to mixing and mastering”.
You can read the full statement below:
I am sad to say I can no longer continue to compose music for MWII / Warzone. Over the past couple of months the working dynamic with the audio director has become increasingly challenging and I don’t see any path forward. As of now, I am unsure of the status and release plan for the soundtrack as it’s been taken out of my hands.
While I don’t have any control over how the music is presented in-game, what will be released on the soundtrack is not my artistic intent in regards to mixing and mastering. Mike Dean was a part of the creative vision for the album as well as mixer Frank Wolf. We have soundtrack masters in hand from Mike which unfortunately you will never get to hear.
I would like to acknowledge the incredible hard work of the audio team as a whole, and I hope you still enjoy it because I put so much work and effort into it. The score features some wonderful performances by musicians Baseck, Brain Mantia, and M.B. Gordy. I’m truly appreciative of the outreach so far and I feel a responsibility to the fans to remain authentic in my approach with the game and its sound which I have been a part of creating for many years.
This is an opinion editorial by Jacob Kozhipatt, a YouTuber and writer.
For the uninitiated, The Silk Road was a darknet marketplace where users bought and sold all manner of products, including those considered illegal — most often drugs.
Supporters argued that the Silk Road leveraged technology to create markets necessarily divorced from the corruption of governments and big banks. For critics, the marketplace was an enemy of The State, that facilitated the sale of illegal substances that decimated countless lives.
For Bitcoiners, however, the marketplace was the first example of bitcoin being used as an actual currency — a mixed legacy as the website popularized the alternative currency, but also created a stigma surrounding digital currencies that lasts even today. So what exactly was Silk Road, and why did it play such an important role for bitcoin?
What Was The Silk Road?
The Silk Road was created and run by Ross Ulbricht. He created the marketplace in 2011 as a manifestation of his libertarian philosophy, rooted in the ideas of Austrian economists like Ludwig von Mises. Ulbricht believed that governments inherently utilize force to impede an individual’s sovereignty — a sentiment he believed manifested in the United States’ War on Drugs.
Ulbricht believed the American War on Drugs cost American taxpayers billions of dollars and was a greater instigator of violence than drugs themselves.
Ulbricht alluded to Silk Road and his motivation for creating it on his Linkedin profile, writing he sought to create an economic simulation that would show the governed first hand how to live in a world without, what he describes as, “the use of excessive force.”
It is important to note that the Silk Road explicitly forbade the sale of products or services, “who’s purpose is to harm or defraud,” e.g., child pornography, weapons grade plutonium or stolen credit cards. The U.S. government, though, reported that hacking services were available on the website.
An intriguing aspect of Silk Road was the professionalism it took in presenting its illicit substances/services. While the drug trade is notorious for violence and the selling of fake drugs, the Silk Road let dealers sell their products through the mail and let buyers know if the product they bought was coming from a legitimate seller, as the Silk Road employed a seller review system akin to other e-commerce sites like Ebay or Amazon. While some were fans of this, others like New York Senator Chuck Shumer, were outraged at the seemingly causal nature of buying drugs through the platform.
In October of 2013, Silk Road was shut down. At this time, the website had over 100,000 users and had thousands of transactions, amounting to tens of millions of dollars exchanged, every day. Ross Ulbricht was soon convicted of seven crimes and received a life sentence in prison, without the option for parole.
Bitcoin And The Silk Road
Central to Silk Road was the concept of buyers and sellers hiding their identities. Two technologies served as the marketplace’s agents of anonymity: the software Tor, and the cryptocurrency bitcoin.
Users would utilize a Tor browser to access the dark web, where their IP addresses, amongst other digital locators, would be hidden from third-party surveillance.
While hiding one’s digital address was important, it didn’t solve the problem of transacting anonymously. One’s identity could still be discovered through mainstream centralized payment processors, like Visa and Mastercard, who both work with the government to identify users engaged with illegal activities. This is where bitcoin played an important role.
At this time, bitcoin was still a nascent technology with few knowing the forensic accountability that the blockchain provides. Thus, bitcoin served as a means of exchange on Silk Road. Tens-of-thousands of users would exchange millions of dollars in bitcoin to purchase items on Silk Road.
When Silk Road was shut down, 70,000 bitcoin (now worth: $1.3 billion) was seized from the website. A Vocative report detailed the volume of sales of drugs that had occurred on Silk Road: Marijuana transactions totaled more than $46 million on Silk Road, while heroin sales were worth about $8.9 million; cocaine amounted to $17.4 million.
Impact Of The Silk Road
The story of Silk Road has lasting effects on bitcoin and the greater cryptocurrency landscape.
Silk Road was the first example of bitcoin’s ability to be used as an actual currency — a true financial facilitator of exchange between individual parties. Silk Road collected revenues of roughly 9.5 million bitcoin since 2011, a jaw-dropping amount as only 11.75 million bitcoin existed at the time. In other terms, 80% of all bitcoin in existence went through Silk Road at the time it was shut down. Within two hours of the news of Ulbricht’s arrest becoming public, the price of bitcoin tumbled from $140 to $110.
To this day, Silk Road is often used as an argument by cryptocurrency critics to show that bitcoin is primarily used as a facilitator of crime. This is best demonstrated through New York’s steep regulations, specifically the BitLicense, which was set in place in 2014, shortly after the conviction of Ulbricht. Senator Schumer specifically called out Bitcoin for its use on Silk Road stating: “[Bitcoin is] An online form of money laundering used to disguise the source of money, and to disguise who’s both selling and buying the drug.” This reputation has proven to be a lasting one, as Duke professor and former Federal Reserve regulator Lee Reiners as recently as 2021 argued that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies should be banned for their use in facilitating crime.
Obviously, bitcoin bulls, like Tim Draper, vehemently disagree with this perspective. They argue that bitcoin’s immutable ledger actually makes it easier for the government to track criminal activity done via bitcoin. For example, the $4.5 billion hackers of Bitfinex, Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan, aka the “crocodile of Wall Street,” were outed to government officials while trying to launder their stolen bitcoin because of their blockchain transaction history. Moreover, many new cryptocurrencies market themselves anonymous alternatives to bitcoin, arguing the first cryptocurrency’s privacy components are insufficient.
Many bitcoin believers view Ross as a hero for the movement and actively campaign for his release in a movement called “Free Ross,” run by Ulbricht’s mother, Lyn. Lyn Ulbricht mentions that the national perspective on drugs has changed since the conviction of Ulbricht. Marijuana, the most popular drug sold on Silk Road, is more normalized in modern Western society. U.S. President Joe Biden recently announced that all federal marijuana convictions would be overturned by the government, and urged legislatures to reconsider the federal perspective towards marijuana.
It is often people on the fringes of a society that first adopt new ideas and technologies. Many of the early 2000’s YouTube content creators, like Jeffrey Starr or Lucas Cruikshank, were members of the LGBTQ community. In Chinua Achebe’s famed novel, “Things Fall Apart,” the first members of the Igbo Tribe to convert to the then-novel idea of Christianity were the disaffected misanthropes of the tribe. Similarly, the first people to popularize bitcoin were — for better or worse — drug dealers and users who inarguably are on the fringe of our society.
This is a guest post by Jacob Kozhipatt. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.
However, 1950’s Sunset Boulevard, and Gloria Swanson’s starring performance as Norma Desmond, had proved the story of a scorned, delusional older woman could be powerful. And in the shadow of Alfred Hitchcock’s enormously successful Psycho (1960), Warner knew that low-budget horrors centered around reclusive eccentrics, who carried baneful secrets, could still shake up audiences. If you believe 2017’s Feud – Ryan Murphy’s television drama that explored Davis and Crawford’s love-hate relationship – Warner (played by Stanley Tucci in this limited series) was just excited by the prospect of being able to watch the dailies over a morning coffee, howling with laughter as the friction from his two leads burned on to the projector.
Released on Halloween 60 years ago, What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? defied all of Warner’s low expectations. Although it didn’t necessarily resonate with critics immediately (“This isn’t a movie, it’s a caricature!” wrote the Chicago Tribune in a scathing review), it notched up five Oscar nominations, and drew in diverse audiences who were deeply compelled by the film’s depiction of a toxic sibling rivalry and two women desperately fighting to escape self-imposed cages. Made for $900,000, it took in $9m at the box office (which – adjusted with inflation – would amount to $90m today).
Davis plays former child star Baby Jane Hudson, who has gone from smugly tap dancing on sold-out stages and demanding ice cream as a screaming schoolgirl diva, to becoming a washed-up loner. Despite the passing of Father Time, Jane still garishly dresses like her nine-year-old self, complete with pigtails and a face full of white powder that struggles to hide the wrinkles. Davis perfectly tows the line between misplaced childhood innocence and scornful anarchy, her split personalities the result of a life that was once full of glamour, and is now desolate.
Meanwhile, Crawford plays the less imposing sister, Blanche, who escapes Jane’s oppressive shadow to become a successful (and much more graceful) Hollywood star in her own right, before a mysterious car accident destroys a once promising future. As a shivery has-been confined to a wheelchair, Crawford grounds the film, setting off Davis’s high theatrics and providing a constant target for her character’s unhinged jealousy. Whenever Crawford and Davis are together on screen it’s explosive, emotional, and impossible to look away.
A lot of the enduring fascination with the film (which in 2021 was preserved by the US Library of Congress for being “historically significant”) springs from the drama of these actresses’ infamous off-screen rivalry. Reports at the time suggested that a scene where Jane viciously assaults Blanche with a series of devastating kicks wasn’t really acting at all. Meanwhile according to Davis, Crawford, perhaps bitterly angry she had been overlooked for a best actress Oscar nomination in favour of her co-star for a film she had championed long before Davis was on board, allegedly used her Hollywood connections to ensure Davis lost out on the gong at the 1963 Oscars; that was a charge Crawford herself denied. “Joan did not want me to have that Oscar!” an elderly Davis exclaimed in an interview with Barbara Walters years after the dust had settled.
The Baby Jane-a-likes that followed
But beyond all this gossip and conjecture, the most significant legacy of What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? can be found in the films it spawned. In the years following its release, Hollywood started producing a string of so-called “Hagsploitation” movies, which like Baby Jane, provided veteran actresses including Barbara Stanwyck, Tallulah Bankhead, Shelley Winters and Debbie Reynolds with villainous, yet deliriously camp roles within horror that ensured their careers could keep on rolling. (This sub-genre has gone by other names including “psycho-biddy horror”, “hag horror”, and “Grande Dame Guignol”, all of which similarly revel in the idea of women developing a lunacy sparked by old age.)
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
As an entrepreneur or business leader, there are myriad reasons why you should care about goals: They help lead you in the right direction for your vision; they motivate teams and hold them accountable; they help leaders make decisions, clarify priorities and eliminate day-to-day distractions.
But most importantly, the measurement of goals will help you track progress and explain the direction of your business to funders and other opportunities for financial capital — and the best way to do this is to include goals in your strategic plan.
A strategic plan captures and communicates your goals to various audiences. The strategic planning process includes a document that summarizes your vision for the future of your organization and lists the goals and objectives to reach that vision. The result of this process is not only meeting the goals you were seeking, but also achieving greater organizational capacity, hitting your mission, generating greater revenue and being more financially secure. Here’s how to do it right.
You’ve likely been hearing about goals since you were a kid. They’ve been taught and promoted to you by your teachers, counselors, coaches, bosses and so on.
As a result of all of the different inputs, you have likely learned different definitions of goals. In fact, I bet that if you ask members of your team to define a goal, then you’d get a variety of different answers — and that’s a major problem.
One of the challenges that I frequently encounter as an obstacle to successful strategic planning is the varying definitions of goals that team members have. When your team members define goals differently, they approach goals and performance with different perspectives and ends in mind.
So let’s get everyone on your team on the same page with a common definition of a goal.
I take my goal-defining guidance from the world of sports. In soccer, for example, a goal happens when the ball crosses over the goal line. In hockey, a goal is scored when the puck crosses the line. There are numerous other sports examples, but all of them provide crystal clarity for when a goal is scored.
Applying this concept brings me to the following simple definition of a goal: a specific and measurable desired achievement.
Over the years, I’ve found the SMART acronym to be quite useful. My definition above highlights the specific and measurable elements of the SMART acronym.
Most of the time, the “A” in the acronym refers to either “achievable” or “attainable.” While that works, I think “accountable” (or even “assignable”) is stronger. All too often, I see teams create goals that don’t have people identified as being accountable to them. And, not surprisingly, the goals don’t get completed.
Regarding the “R,” as in “relevant,” your goal should be taking you in the direction of a long-term vision.
One other thing: I like to add a “goal topic” to the beginning of goals on a strategic plan since it helps readers get a quick idea of what the goal is about. For example, when setting a goal of receiving a specific score on a staff survey, I’d use the goal topic of “staff engagement.”
When developing your goals for your strategic plan, ask yourself the following questions:
Is it specific?
Is it measurable?
Does it have accountability?
Is it relevant?
Is it time-bound?
You’ll know you’ve got the right goals for your plan when the answer to each of those questions is “yes.”
There are two different types of goals that you can develop for your strategic plan: results goals and process goals. Results goals are accomplished when a specific metric has been achieved. Process goals lead to the completion of a plan, process or system.
That said, you may be wondering about how you can measure process goals. Those goals are complete when you have a documented process in place. Sure, it’s not a number, but it’s still a measurable achievement.
This leads me to a very important piece of guidance. Several years ago, I started to notice that organizations I worked with that were really succeeding in strategic planning utilized a high percentage of process goals. In other words, they created and achieved goals that helped them develop capacity-building processes. So, be sure to consider including process goals in your strategic plan if you want to create the changes you’re seeking.
I recommend having goals on your strategic plan that are organization-wide that have a completion timeline of several weeks to one year. You can also list action items, the individual tasks of the larger goals, that will take a shorter amount of time to complete.
In summary, it’s critical that you and your team have a common approach to how you write strategic goals. This guidance will help your organization solidify its strategic plan and achieve greater success.
This is a transcribed excerpt of the “Bitcoin Magazine Podcast,” hosted by P and Q. In this episode, they are joined by Erik Dale to talk about how bitcoin can be used as a defensive weapon and the positive effect of Bitcoin’s incentives on the alignment of morals across humanity.
Q: I need you to defend your claim that Bitcoin is a weapon.
Erik Dale: You try to drag me into these “Jason Lowery” conversations.
P: Choose your words carefully, sir.
Dale: But this is the best way to become popularized in Bitcoin, right? If you wanna go on a lot of podcasts, just say something like this. So you know, Jason is a security expert … I’m maybe sort of a philosophical linguist and the way language shapes the way we see things and the way we understand and conceptualize things and so on.
I am definitely one of these people who use language in very broad senses. And so when I conceptualize Bitcoin as a weapon, weapons have two functions: To attack or to defend. Traditionally today, maybe the blurring of the lines is stronger than they have [been] and attack of aggressive weapons have had a huge advantage in the last 500 years with scaling. They have been able to scale much more than any other kind of weapon. Shields not so much, but guns, yeah. Bigger and bigger, stronger and stronger, all the way until we can annihilate the fucking planet.
And so you’ve had a very big imbalance between this defensive and aggressive weapon and what Bitcoin defends of course, the thing that it defends is the thing that people might want to take from you. The very motivation for war. The very motivation for conflict itself. So not only is Bitcoin defensive in the sense that it reduces the incentive to cause aggression or conflict, because potential profitability is much lower, it’s much harder to take the bitcoin, even if you take the country. But it is also a tool where if somebody does take your country, it is indeed something that you can bring with you to anywhere else or send to somebody else or whatever. And thus defend and protect that life energy, that life force, regardless of how tough your assailant might be. Of course, it’s not a perfect theory, and again this is not an angle that I’m particularly interested in. This weapon thing is just like I use it this much with much less thorough thought than some people have.
She sees this legacy reflected in present-day German horror films such as the Netflix hit series, Dark: “You can better understand those kinds of German scary movies, and their 1980s roots, if you read Gudrun Pausewang.”
Even Pausewang’s admirers concede that the books can be painful. “It was so overwhelming, this scenario, so huge, that I didn’t know how to cope with it, as a child,” says Rémi, recalling the effect of reading The Last Children of Schewenborn. Then again, she argues, it’s a realistic depiction of how children experience systemic meltdown. “Her texts encourage readers to engage with big questions: the environment, anti-nuclear issues, but also, especially in her later years, the Nazi era, Fascism, dictatorship and political radicalisation.” And by rejecting a heroic narrative, one in which the child might triumph through some individual act of bravery or cunning, Pausewang places the responsibility squarely on the adults, and the system they created. (She also had less subtle ways of getting that message across: In The Last Children of Schewenborn, the children scrawl “Cursed Parents!” on a wall, and one of them cries: “The bomb is your fault!”.)
Overall, Rémi says, the question that haunted Pausewang remains hugely relevant today, at a time of climate change and conflict: “What did we inherit from the past, and what are we passing on to the next generation?”
Given that I am a member of Generation Pausewang, re-reading The Cloud for this article did make me reflect on how her gloomy outlook shaped me. I devoured her books as a child and teenager, and admire her commitment to truth-telling. But I also wish she had, perhaps, broadened her view of human nature just a little, and allowed for the possibility that people do sometimes choose to be brave, hopeful, altruistic and forgiving – and thrive. Of course, Pausewang would have found that suggestion naïve, and worse, patronising. As she once said, at the age of seven she already disliked books with a happy ending, and felt the writers didn’t take her seriously. She promised herself: “If I’m ever going to become a writer, I will take my readers seriously, regardless of whether they are six, 16 or 60. And I did become a writer, and I do take my readers seriously.”
Sophie Hardach is a journalist and writer living in London. Her latest novel, Confession with Blue Horses, was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award.
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This is an opinion editorial by Jacob Kozhipatt, a YouTuber and writer.
The phrase “October Surprise” is used in politics to describe a last minute, paradigm-shifting event that occurs a month before an American election. For example, in 2016, the FBI reopened their investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server, an event which many argue led to her loss in the 2020 election. In 2020, then-president Donald Trump contracted COVID-19, just weeks before the November election.
Bitcoin markets are in need of a shakeup. 2022 has been a tough year for the price of bitcoin. Right now, bitcoin sits ~65% below its price just one year ago, a far cry from the six-figure price prediction that models like “stock-to-flow” and long-time bulls, like Tim Draper, predicted.
Some hope that the appointment of England’s new cryptocurrency-friendly Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, could be a major positive change. Sunak, considered by many to be an ally of innovation, declared a year ago that he wished that the United Kingdom would become a “global hub for crypto-asset technology.”
Can Rishi Sunak’s election be the necessary “October Surprise” to push bitcoin forward?
Bitcoin Regulation In 2022
One of the most important questions going forward with bitcoin is: How should governments regulate it?
So far, the United States is a mixed bag. While some legislators — like Senator Cynthia Lummis — are pushing for bitcoin-friendly regulation, others like Senator Elizabeth Warren are pushing for far more critical legislation.
While the perspective of the American federal government on bitcoin is currently being debated, right now many states already have anti-bitcoin laws in place. For example, the financial capital of the United States, New York, has the most stringent rules against cryptocurrency due to its BitLicense. The existence of the BitLicense means that bitcoin enthusiasts are prevented from taking part in many innovations. Even mayor-elect Eric Adams had to resort to alternative, costlier means to get his first three months salary paid in bitcoin.
Many investors, like Shark Tanks’ Kevin O’Leary, argue that this uncertainty of regulation is causing many to avoid the space. This is where Sunak could be a game changer.
Why Rishi Sunak Is Good For Bitcoin
The United Kingdom’s new prime minister Rishi Sunak can be seen as an ally for bitcoin. Sunak’s youth and Stanford pedigree make many feel as though he is open to new technologies — especially one as lucrative as bitcoin. As Finance Minister, Sunak pushed for tangible pro-cryptocurrency legislation. He supported the “Financial Services And Markets Bill,” which, according to Coindesk, is widely seen as cryptocurrency-friendly, as it pushed for increased acceptance of stablecoins.
Moreover, there are competitive advantages for Sunak embracing cryptocurrency. The established laws in America in tandem with the uncertainty towards future laws, means many in the world’s largest English speaking country are looking for alternatives. This is where England could capitalize.
The bitcoin community is digitally nomadic in nature — as seen by the migration of enthusiasts to locations like Malta and Portugal. If Sunak were to create incentives for bitcoin companies to move to places like London it could siphon capital and talent away from America.
Finally, with the United Kingdom’s growing deficit problem, the nation desperately needs outside-the-box type solutions. Nothing would be more outside of the box than for Sunak to make London the bitcoin capital of the world.
Why Rishi Sunak Could Be Bad For Bitcoin
While many Bitcoin fans are excited for Sunak’s leadership, some express concern about the authenticity of his support for cryptocurrency.
Many point out that Sunak’s wealth and pedigreed education makes him part of the “establishment,” and innately against the rebellious and alternative nature of bitcoin. A prominent YouTuber, Wendy O, compared him to SEC Chair Gary Gensler. Gensler, who taught courses on digital currencies at MIT, was originally seen as pro-cryptocurrency. However, since his appointment, Gensler has frequently criticized the space and urged for increased investor protections.
Sunak’s support of central bank digital currencies (CBDC) also troubles Bitcoiners. People like Matthew Kratter, of the popular show Trader University, argue that CBDCs symbolize everything that is wrong with government money. For Kratter, the CBDC’s are inherently centralized and encourage state surveillance of individuals’ finances — something many Bitcoiners see as going directly against the ideals of bitcoin. Kratter went so far as to call Sunak’s vision for a U.K. CBDC a “spycoin.”
Will Bitcoin’s Price Go Up?
Sunak entered office at a time of unprecedented financial hardship in the United Kingdom. With an ever increasing deficit, the weakening of the pound, a cost of living crisis and widening wealth gap, it might be safe to assume that bitcoin and cryptocurrency aren’t at the top of his agenda.
While we cannot predict his relationship with bitcoin, it should be noted that just the idea of a pro-bitcoin prime minister could be enough to spike the asset’s price.
At this early stage, it is impossible to predict how Sunak will directly impact the price of bitcoin, but as of now his background shows him to be an ally to the oft-maligned industry.
This is a guest post by Jacob Kozhipatt. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
You are a business owner but aren’t in the tech industry, so why would you need to focus heavily on adapting technology in your daily workflow? Some people may say you don’t need to. However, I’m here to put a bug in your head and prove how technology is critical to any business across any vertical. And that includes you!
We know technology can be intimidating. It also can be complex, and there are seemingly endless options. So, is it worth the cost, integration headaches and question if you are picking the right ones? Yes! Here are my top three reasons to focus on technology, and I’ll explain how to integrate it into your business:
1. Not applying technology means you could face a technology deficit
Let’s face it, not having a line item in your books for technology and software subscriptions means your company will hit a point where you can’t grow any further. Whether your marketing team will be missing major data points for essential customer acquisition or your efficiencies will eventually put you behind, your competition could pass you by (we’ll get to this one more in the next point). No matter the roadblock you will hit, the point is your growth will have to slow down or halt. You don’t want to wait until that point to use technology once the train has left the station without you!
No matter your business or vertical, your most valuable resource is your team. How can you empower your team to work smarter, not harder, and ultimately produce the best results? The answer is with the right technology! Even if your staff has been set in their ways and doesn’t want to learn a new program, you must pick the right operational systems and offer proper training. A minor setback in the learning curve will mean a huge uptick in productivity.
I once ran into a mid-sized company that was technologically behind due to not prioritizing this aspect of its business. This inadequacy caused marketing and sales to lag compared to its competitors. I likened their technological powers and abilities to taking a knife to a gunfight.
If a company can increase its operational automation in the marketing space, that would allow it to understand its target customer and truly understand how to sell to its market in an efficient and results-driven way.
A data warehouse and congruent CRM would allow this business to properly segment and hit goals for its best marketing demographic more accurately. Identifying, understanding and addressing low-hanging fruit, such as abandoned shopping cart funnels, is crucial.
When you are focused on results, technology almost always needs to be integrated to increase efficiencies and drive sales in the long run. And it’s always easier and cheaper to integrate the right technology early to ensure your team is trained and using it along the way!
3. You’re increasing your footprint of liabilities without the right technology
I’ve seen every range of technology integration, from the tech-savvy millennial CEO who relies on data and analytics for every business decision to the companies that don’t integrate it at all and still use a pen and paper within every significant department. However, if you are closer to the latter, you are potentially putting your team at a huge safety risk. If you have only minimal or wrong technology, you could be putting your customers, reputation and finances at risk too!
I’ve even seen clients using only a single source for major bookkeeping and documentation, like Excel. One wrong move or fat-fingered mistake can change your calculations completely. Or worse, delete everything! If that isn’t risky, I don’t know what is.
Technology can feel overwhelming, which is often why we hear people stay away from adding it to their daily workflow. However, there are simple ways to make that change. Start with finding a company to give you a technical audit — which is often cheaper than you might expect. Take their advice and then apply it in chunks.
You may not need to go from 0 to 100 in the first week. You can slowly add, integrate and manage critical technology into various departments as you feel comfortable. And as I mentioned earlier, a key to tech success is training! Empower your team to take the tech leap with you and work on this together. Everyone can learn a new trick, and it could even be fun! Finally, ensure that you have a base infrastructure to make the ideal environment for success. This includes having the basic technology hardware and compatible systems in place.
Take this article as your sign to take the first step and better your business with tech!
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion(DEI) and environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) policies are more than just feeling good about ourselves. Diversity drives innovation, and companies that innovate in today’s fast-paced environment are the ones that come out on top. Socially-responsible companies are attracting more demanding consumers. But the more diversity we bring to a team, the more potential for crossed interests and differing opinions about what social responsibility implies, which can quickly escalate into conflict.
This is where building solidarity comes in.
Solidarity is not thinking and behaving exactly the same. It’s rallying support as a team, welcoming and respecting open communication even when opinions are different, and agreeing to the course of action that best considers the company and its people. Fostering solidarity, not sameness, is the key to unlocking the benefits of a diverse team.
Welcome the benefits of embracing diversity as a team
Everyone has differences, and the more diverse backgrounds, upbringings and histories we bring onto a team, the more opportunities for differences to exist. But from boards and management teams to organizing a charity fundraiser event, embracing group diversity brings more perspectives, ideas and alternatives that spur innovation and improve productivity. Diverse teams focus more on facts and process them more carefully, resulting in smarter decisions.
A 2015 McKinsey report found that embracing diversity also improves the bottom line. Companies in the top quartile of ethnic and racial diversity in management were 35% more likely to have higher financial returns over the industry average; companies in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15% more likely. Diverse teams that work well together outpace the competition.
Companies seek to advance diversity at all levels. Still, for those diverse minds to work well together as a team, they need solidarity — “unity, association, reciprocation, a good community or social interest, gratuity, justice and respect for human dignity.” With a culture of solidarity, companies can more successfully implement DEI and ESG initiatives that reduce social and economic inequality within the organization, improving efficiency, productivity and the company’s reputation.
Building and encouraging team solidarity requires an established set of values around personal responsibility to contribute to the effort. Sincere acknowledgment and mutual support build a culture of community, which can foster solidarity, but solidarity cannot be forced. It is a co-responsibility for the moral well-being of all others as equal partners on a common mission. Each person with their individual and collective interests needs to embrace solidarity around acknowledging and respecting our differences while arriving at decisions that best serve the collective “we.”
People pick up on culture fast through the example of their leadership, so leaders should demonstrate acknowledgment and support of diversity to build that sense of solidarity in their teams. There are many worlds of thought with which I disagree, but I work hard to respect them and be understanding of the background from which they originate. So much of our foundational backgrounds embed themselves into who we are today. While I can’t even begin to fully understand every person’s background or how they got to where they are, I can at least respect the fact that it played a part in creating them, even when we disagree.
We can also build a community culture by recognizing the dynamic interdependence between all team members, emphasizing the need for dialogue, compassion, and understanding across a team. Start by making sure everyone feels they belong.
We just had our annual meeting, where everyone — those stationed outside Minneapolis and some even outside the country — comes home to the “mothership” to celebrate everything in Clearfield. We start by discussing the upcoming year, host lots of learning during the day and hold parties every evening. Especially in this new hybrid world, bringing everyone together is critical to maintaining their sense of solidarity.
When I became a grandma, I developed a new perspective to understand inclusion in the face of diversity better: Look at people as babies. My six-month-old grandson is slightly over 19 pounds, while my 15-month-old is approaching 20 pounds. The older one is small for his age, while the younger one is big. To look at them, they seem totally different. And yet, I look at them as very much the same. They are both my grandsons, with the same potential for growth despite their differences. When we look at babies, whether grandchildren, children, or someone else’s children, we so quickly look at them and see their potential. Each one is equally capable of becoming the next future star performer. If we can see the potential in babies, why can’t we still see it when they grow up to become adults?
As leaders, seeing equal potential in everyone allows us to respect what their differences can bring to the team — as team members, seeing our peers full of potential will enable them to achieve their best for the benefit of the rest of the company. Look at someone and think about whose baby they were. Imagine someone caring for them, praying for them and trying to open doors for them; someone who saw them brimming with potential. Encourage others to imagine the same and help instill diverse teams with a greater sense of oneness and unity.
As former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon put it, “A world of peace and solidarity can only be accomplished by acknowledging and celebrating [sic] our diversity.” Diversity and inclusion are more than just inviting people in: We need everyone aligned around creating an environment where people feel comfortable being their authentic selves and bringing those diverse perspectives to the table. Leaders need to build it into their team culture, but it also comes down to individual employees to take on their responsibility. Once someone takes charge, solidarity can quickly start to spread.
Given that Cyberpunk 2077 came out nearly two years ago, you might think there’s little left to discover and document ahead of the game’s first and only planned DLC, Phantom Liberty. But right in the heart of Night City lies the beginning of a riddle that has left fans scrambling to unravel the mystery since the hunt began in 2020. It all starts with a single statue and a six-digit alphanumeric sequence: FF:06:B5.
Cyberpunk 2077 players caught on to the FF:06:B5 mystery early on in the game’s life, but the answer has remained frustratingly out of reach despite many elaborate theories. The mysterious six-character sequence is found on a statue where monks can often be seen praying or meditating. The search has involved rigorous number-crunching based on the initial hint, maps that chart the location of repeat instances of the same statue, and deep dives into spiritual concepts and real world history, among other attempts to find the solution. Following the trail is dizzying to say the least. But every step of it is intriguing, even if you’re not sure you’re on a trail to begin with.
Few concrete, undeniable facts and trails have surfaced outside of initial observations, a good chunk of which are documented on r/FF06B5, a subreddit dedicated to cracking the titular mystery (as well as other secrets found in Cyberpunk 2077). Theories and speculation go over the deep end real fast with this mystery, so if you find yourself struggling to keep your head on straight, you’re not alone. As is said in the “Newcomer Sticky” of FF:06:B5’s subreddit, “Without concrete proof that one [theory] is more viable than another, it’s difficult to give this community and newcomers a direction to look.”
No one is certain what the solution is, or if any of the proposed theories and documentation are even on the right track. If you want to get a look at the origin of the mystery for yourself, you can find the first and only truly confirmed “hint” right in Corpo Plaza. Located northwest of the massive roundabout and near the Corpo Plaza apartment, is a statue known to FF:06:B5 mystery hunters as FF:06:B5 Prime “D3.” A multi-armed statue holding a giant sword with two hands, and a sphere in one of its left hands, it has the six-character sequence in bold across the front. It also has a strange forking symbol that many suspect either relates to V’s lifepaths, the branching nature of the game’s story, or even ancient numbering systems. This statue can be found in multiple locations in the city, though not all have the alphanumerical sequence. Miniature versions of the statue, complete with the sequence, also appear in the game’s recently-added apartments that are up for sale.
Screenshot: CD Projekt Red / Kotaku
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Despite the mystery, a few reliable observations and likely starting points have been established by the community:
FF:06:B5, when used as an HTML hex color code, translates to “shocking pink,” or as the community refers to it (and often the mystery itself) “magenta.”
The sequence looks like a portion of a MAC address and/or matches other kinds of code sequences found elsewhere in the game.
NPC monks gather in front of the D3 “Prime” statue. They can be heard chanting as well as repeating one particularly intriguing line of dialog: “My apprentice! Your throat chakra is blocked! Activate the meridians on the roof of your mouth.”
Paweł Sasko, Cyberpunk’s lead quest designer, confirmed that this isn’t a case of smoke where there’s no fire. He acknowledges that it is indeed a mystery worth looking into, likely with a specific meaning and solution—and one he has turned down every opportunity to shed light on, even when asked directly.
There’s also somewhat of a sixth fact to consider: After update 1.5, the text on D3 “Prime” changed from red to yellow. What that could possibly mean is anyone’s guess.
All theories more or less sprout from these confirmable observations. What follows depends which avenue you choose to pursue and how lost in the weeds you’re willing to get. You can check out some of the connected threads in the community’s mind map, which traces not only connections within the game but also connections to works of pop culture and spiritual concepts that exist outside of the game. Anything that can have a number, color, or thematic concept attached to it seems to be up for exploration. Trips through Reddit threads and Discord conversations point to any number of possibilities. Everything from complex readings into spiritually to matching the code to Windings fonts, of all things.
One example of the rabbit hole that can ensue from following a potential lead includes attempting to connect the mysterious “Zen Master” side jobs to FF:06:B5. Given the presence of monks at the D3 prime statue, the monk’s meditation quests seem like a natural place to look. These side jobs involve meeting a lone monk who takes you through a meditative brain dance. When pulled apart for clues, things get a little interesting.
Screenshot: CD Projekt Red / Kotaku
As charted out in the mind map, players have figured out that the amount you can choose to donate to the monk after each meditation session increases in order of the Fibonnaci sequence starting at the 12th position. Not only that, but each quest is named after specific works of art such as John Lennon’s song “Imagine,” Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” Rūmī’s “Poem of the Atoms,” and “Meetings Along the Edge,” the title of a piece that appears on the collaborative recording project between composers Philip Glass and Ravi Shankar. These have their own numbers to contribute with release dates, song length, and more. Trailing sets of numbers and thematic relationships seem to be a common end result of many theories and the game is more than happy to provide such speculative fodder.
Occurrences like the Zen Master and the weird math hidden in the details have become the meat and potatoes of intense speculation that blends number crunching with concepts of spirituality with the game’s own lore and references to pop culture. It’s hard to keep track of it all. Does it directly relate to the main FF:06:B5 mystery? Another mystery altogether? Or none at all? While some trains of thought seem more convincing than others, the game is filled with dozens of opportunities to trace lines where there might not have been any in the first place. Yet, it always seems like certain clues are too hard to ignore. Why does one striking in-game ad in particular seem to not sell a specific product (or contain other versions of it as all other ads do, confirmed via datamining)? I found myself wondering why said ad seems to bear some resemblance to the mysterious symbol on the D3 Prime statue and on the jewelry worn by the monks who meet in front of D3 at the same time of day, every day. Am I seeing things or am I on to something?
The scope of the city, the frequent themes of identity and reality woven throughout the game, it all creates a spiral of possible solutions to a weird statute that has been resistant to the most audacious efforts to crack it.
Given the clear esoteric nature of the mystery, others have turned to investigating Misty, her shop, the game’s tarot cards, and all other appearances of religious and spiritual concepts and iconography. The glyph found in Misty’s shop contains strings of numbers and letters that can be connected to form a larger sequence, broken up into pairs similar to FF:06:B5. It also bears resemblance to graffiti found near the final Zen Master quest.
Screenshot: CD Projekt Red / Kotaku
The NPC monk line concerning the “throat chakra” seems to also be somewhat promising, as some speculate that the answer to the mystery lies in following the request to “activate the meridians on the roof of your mouth.” A couple of recent posts to the mystery’s subreddit are following patterns of blue, based on the traditional color of the throat chakra and how that matches the giant blue circular glass “roof” that covers a portion of the road in Corpo Plaza.
Despite the impressiveness of the documentation that’s been gathered in pursuit of this mystery, it’s hard not to get discouraged by how many lead to dead ends. And when every little thing in the game can seemingly be related by some extension, it’s easy to start getting paranoid.
Every time I felt like I was ready to give up on one of the possible theories or speculations, there’d be a small connection I’d struggle to dismiss, or documentation of alleged clues that drew lines to other oddities in the game, such as the constant repetition of the “no future” graffiti. But after sifting through so many long strings of speculation and theory, it’s hard not to deny the fun in finding something tucked away in Cyberpunk 2077 that no one’s pieced together yet.
This is an opinion editorial by Daniel Batten, a Bitcoin ESG analyst, climate tech investor, author and environmental campaigner.
Growing up in the ’70s, our local council tried to put a rubbish tip into our coastal New Zealand community. The whole community came together — not just to fight a common enemy (and win), but to discover the power of what is possible as part of a grassroots movement, which is impossible alone. In years to come most of that community, including myself, would go on to become voices for humanitarian and climate justice.
Starting young, my first environmental action at age four. From Thursday Magazine, 1974.
Fast forward to October 2022: I would never have imagined I would be part of a community of environmentalists defending the environment against Greenpeace USA.
A period of intensive data analysis six months earlier had led me to the inescapable conclusion that Bitcoin was a net positive to the environment, but powerful forces were at work to hoodwink the world’s environmentally-minded through a seemingly orchestrated misinformation campaign. The misinformation was strong enough that I initially fell for it myself.
“Bitcoin uses too much energy,” has become the new “immigrants are taking our jobs”: the incantation of vested interests and the hoodwinked who, wittingly or unwittingly, stoke the fires of populism with sound bites over sound analysis.
What we are seeing is not new.
We saw the tobacco industry influence medical opinion for many years about the safety of smoking. We saw the print media criticize the environmental credentials of the internet, predicting it would cause coal factories to fire up worldwide. Today, it’s unsurprising that central banks that want their central bank digital currencies (CDBCs) to be the future of digital currency, not Bitcoin (which disintermediates central banks), should happily fan the fires of doubt about Bitcoin using environmental credentials as its attack vector.
In this historical context, it is no surprise that Ripple’s executive chair Chris Larsen, among others, paid $5 million to launch a Greenpeace USA campaign attacking Bitcoin’s energy use. And Ripple is not just another altcoin, it is launching its own CDBC pilot project. CBDCs and Bitcoin represent fundamentally-competing visions for our digital currency future.
Nor should we be surprised that seemingly no mainstream journalist has publicly questioned either Larsen or Greenpeace about an evident conflict of interest.
But despite the money, the compassionate pass from mainstream media and a well-trained in-house media team that did its best to neuro-associate Bitcoin with stock video footage of climate catastrophe, Greenpeace USA’s campaign did not go well.
The “Change The Code” campaign actually energized and galvanized strong environmentalist voices within the Bitcoin community including Troy Cross, Margot Paez, Adam Wright and others.
It motivated podcasters such as Bitcoin Archive, Pomp and Crypto Birb who had not previously examined the environmental benefits of Bitcoin to start doing so.
It was also the catalytic moment that took me from being a read-only Twitter user, to becoming one more outspoken voice for the environmental merits of Bitcoin.
Greenpeace USA had the opportunity for a strategic retreat, but it did not take it.
On Greenpeace USA’s Twitter feed, a horde of Bitcoiners weighed in with data and fact, mercilessly counter-attacking Greenpeace’s campaign for what they perceived as its misinformation, ignorance, questionable ethics, lack of science, use of psyop-style messaging and inability to see how thoroughly it had been played by central bankers.
Remarkably few of Greenpeace USA’s own 218,000 followers, nor any other branches of Greenpeace internationally came to its aid. And Greenpeace USA wasn’t just repeatedly ratioed. It was honey badgered. Lyn Alden’s commentary on Troy Cross’ reply to a Greenpeace USA tweet captures the extent of the backfire:
Source: Twitter
No other branch of Greenpeace seems to have retweeted any of the “Change The Code” campaign since September.
Organizers set up a Change The Code Twitter handle which spent many months limping to 1,300 twitter followers — 80% of whom seem to be Bitcoiners based on their profile descriptions.
With the clockwork relentlessness of an oil pumpjack, the account continues to grind out near-daily anti-Bitcoin sound bites, only to see nearly every tweet ratioed by about 20:1 by the community.
It has proven a valuable resource for Bitcoiners. Not only is it very useful to see all the misinformation cataloged in one place but, more importantly, each time a tweet is ratioed, it allows Bitcoiners to educate themselves and others in the community about how to counter Bitcoin misinformation.
Far from turning more people against Bitcoin, the campaign has served only to draw attention to Greenpeace USA’s departure from grassroots funding while providing a forum for Bitcoiners to demonstrate the weakness of the anti-Bitcoin case once mainstream media was no longer there to insulate the attacker from a horde of highly-informed Bitcoiners.
Willy Woo calculated the campaign lost for Greenpeace at a minimum of $7.1 million in subscriptions worldwide. The brand and reputational damage will likely have been much more, and take much longer to recover from.
While outwardly Greenpeace USA will shrug shoulders and say “Well, you always lose some supporters on direct action campaigns, and Bitcoiners are vocal on Twitter,” behind closed doors its executive management will be asking “What went wrong?” in what has been an unprecedented social media catastrophe.
So, Why Did The ‘Change The Code’ Campaign Perform Badly?
The first foreboding signs came one year earlier. In the only level playing-field debate on if Bitcoin is a threat to the environment — a predominantly anti-Bitcoin general audience swung 17.9% to become predominantly pro-Bitcoin after just one hour of hearing for the first time not just a central banker’s narrative, but a Bitcoiner’s right of reply, according to a calculation of voters from the user forum on the video itself.
Plus 17.9% is a swing of gargantuan proportions.
The second alarm bell for Greenpeace USA was much closer to home. Greenpeace’s base is 18 to 34 year olds: This age group is twice as likely to think climate change poses a serious threat. What Greenpeace USA seemed not to realize until it was too late was that 18 to 34 year olds are also almost twice as likely to hold bitcoin as the rest of the general population.
The third alarm bell should have been that these 18 to 34 year olds are the least likely to trust mainstream media. Meaning: Greenpeace USA’s base was the least likely to have believed the highly-skewed narrative about Bitcoin propagated through mainstream news channels.
Greenpeace USA completely miscalculated what would happen in forums where the “Bitcoin can be good for the environment” case could not be censored the way it had been throughout mainstream media outlets.
Greenpeace’s direct action campaigns typically target large corporations with something to hide. Greenpeace USA also miscalculated what would happen when it took on a grassroots movement founded on the values of consensus and transparency, which had nothing to hide, and an untold story to tell.
It miscalculated how Bitcoiners would unite together to defend an attack from an environmental goliath that they perceived to have compromised its integrity by taking private money from a conflicted billionaire to fund their campaign.
But it also perhaps miscalculated how unsympathetic its 18-to-34-year-old base would be to its anti-Bitcoin narrative. For when the ratios came thick and fast on Twitter, its base did not defend it.
That vacuum allowed Bitcoin Twitter to do the job that mainstream media once did: hold an organization to account for taking funding from an apparently conflicted source.
What positives can Greenpeace USA take away from this campaign? Well if its intention was to…
Galvanize the Bitcoin environmental movement and create new leaders within it
Provide a forum where Bitcoiners can educate and inform its base about the environmental benefits of Bitcoin
Highlight a tactical error from its executive management team to its supporters
…then its campaign has been a resounding success.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Even before the extra $1 million from Ripple was paid to amplify Greenpeace USA’s message directly after the Ethereum merge, Cross warned the Bitcoin community in July that more pressure would come on Bitcoin post-merge.
It seemed the antagonists of Bitcoin were expecting this to be the turning of the tide, where they triumphantly cried, “Ethereum has proven it can do the right thing for the environment, now it’s Bitcoin’s turn” to a choir of cheerleaders.
They did not expect the reply: “Bitcoin is now the only major cryptocurrency that can become an emission negative network.” Nor did they expect the supporting data, showing that 7 megawatts (MW) of vented-methane-based mining per month is all it takes to make the whole Bitcoin network emission negative by December 2024, a monthly rate already surpassed using flared methane power.
Compiled by the author
As for Bitcioners, we can celebrate this moment. It is not the final battle. Not even close. The opponents of Bitcoin will re-gather stronger. We can expect new missiles of misinformation, new angles of attack vectors through the curatable channels of mainstream media and political influence that have worked for them to date.
But they have also learned that in an open forum where the right of reply cannot be censored, the truth will shine: social media is one stadium where they cannot win.
If Greenpeace USA introspects deeply, it will realize that we are on the same team: Bitcoin is a reflection of its own core values, not just a financial sovereignty movement, but a human rights movement and an environmental movement. It is a movement built on Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision of peer-to-peer solidarity, returning power to the people algorithmically through the proof-of-work consensus mechanism, while disintermediating the unelected financial elites who, by virtue of wealth or position, can make decisions that are bad for the people and widen wealth inequality.
Bitcoin cannot fix the environment. Only people can do that. But Bitcoin was created to help the people, and that spirit of its founder lives on in everyone who is behind it.
The environmentalists within the Bitcoin community are growing rapidly, in number and in valor. Just like that coastal community of the ’70s, each attack on what we hold dear serves only to energize and galvanize us, creating new leaders who will go on to become irrepressible voices for humanitarian and climate justice.
This is a guest post by Daniel Batten. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
