May 13, 2021: The Good, the Bad, and the Rugly 🤠🌵
Vitalik + Elon peddle fine rugs for supposedly good causes
May 12th will go down in the history books as an epic day for rug merchants and popcorn vendors alike.
Vitalik and Elon made market-shattering moves, under the auspices of doing good of humanity, though bad for crypto maxis and ugly for the markets.
Dog Day Afternoon
With Bob Barker no longer on the airwaves hectoring us to spay and neuter our dogs, the local dog population exploded of late.
It could only end two ways. Either the streets would be overrun with dogs, or dogs would have to die out en masse. Enter Vitalik.
In a bid for legitimacy, these token creators had gifted Vitalik large doggie bags, half their stack. Per $SHIB’s so called woofpaper: “as long as VB doesn’t rug us, then SHIBA will grow and survive.”
“When a dog bites a man that is not news, but when a man bites a dog that is news”
—Various
Yesterday we saw the horrific sight of Vitalik slaughtering dogs with utter indifference.
The butchery was bawdlerized under the veneer of charity.
Though mass dogslaughter is a horrendous sight, the lesson may in fact have been that it was insufficiently harsh. The #SHIBArmy spun this as a positive.
The $SHIB coin has fallen out of the top ten, but still remains in the top 25 on CoinMarketCap, meaning further mass slaughters may be necessary to keep the population in check.
You Musk Be New Here
This all would have amounted to a fairly ordinary day of turbulence, but Elon got impatient being out of the headlines for a news cycle. He peddled a gorgeous rug of his own.
Generally speaking, the best approach to a character who thrives on attention is to ignore them. We’d seldom written about him throughout his short dalliance into the crypto space, despite the fact that our sole article idly speculating on his intentions brought us record traffic.
Remember that nobody, especially not the teeming masses on Twitter, has any actual insight into his context.
That said, we again presume his decisions remain calculated and rational. If you’ve read Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power, you’ll immediately note Musk’s behavior regarding crypto is fully compatible with, at minimum, laws number 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 15, 17, 20, 22, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 37, 39, 44, 45, and 48 — a clear majority of the laws.
Bitcoin thrives on decentralization, so why on earth would you willingly give one operator such undue power?
As tempting as it would be to bid him goodbye forever, an honest parsing of his actions indicates he sadly ain’t dead yet. His only announced action was to stop selling cars for coin. History has shown that’s always a dead-end. Nobody’s sells Bitcoin for anything, except increasingly for Ethereum. Every merchant who ever tried accepting a currency stashed by HODL-ers inevitably gave it up.
He made clear that Tesla is still holding onto their $1.5B bag, which they can now use to dump, hedge, or just look at wistfully. He can still generate another big news cycle if he chooses to cash out, especially if the community continues to award him such narrative power.
Also note the role siphoning money from taxpayers plays in all of Elon’s hustles.
It’s easy to think of several trillion reasons why he’d stand to gain by moving into alignment with a government that’s printed itself into absolute control of the money supply, despises cryptocurrency, and supports green energy in posture if not practice. Stellar timing to shiv Bitcoiners, get headlines, and give up absolutely nothing of value.
The Aftermath
As you might expect, markets took the opportunity to dump.
Of course, Bitcoin is demonstrably antifragile. It’s survived far worse, and will survive far worse in the future. To some surprise, Ethereum dumped harder.
Perhaps ETH’s recent run was overly leveraged? Or because gas spiked above 600 gwei? At any rate, ETH stayed within the .07 - .08 BTC range all the while, so there were no real movement this cycle. Nonetheless, the smartest people alive reiterate the writing is on the wall for the Proof of Work coin.
Of course, the only coin to emerge from the fracas even stronger? The almighty $CRV.
A major difference between the long winter after the 2017 crash and today is DeFi. Back then all you could do was post spicy memes. Nowadays, whether you hold BTC, ETH or fiat, a long winter will still earn you stunning yield as you cycle your bags among various DeFi offerings.
$CRV remains the backbone of DeFi. Grab the keys to the citadel while you can.
For more info, check our live market data at https://curvemarketcap.com/ or our subscribe to our daily newsletter at https://curve.substack.com/. Nothing in our newsletter can be construed as financial advice. Author is a $CRV maximalist, owns some BTC, ETH, no dogcoin but DOGE, and has never owned $TSLA, $sTSLA, $mTSLA or any other such synthetic.