The second week of August was a good one for the crypto markets. Social media was immediately full of people calling it ‘officially a bull market’, although we think it’s still a bit too soon to say that.

But after a long, frustrating period of inaction, Bitcoin has managed to firmly rise above the $45,000 price tag for most of the week (even clipping above R 700,000 for a while). That’s a solid 13% gain over the week before, and there are hopes and expectations of more to come. 

Nearly all coins had a good week but Ethereum in particular is showing its true class and pedigree. Not only did the value of Ether climb by 16.75% at the time of writing, but it executed a vital hard fork on the Ethereum protocol that experts are speaking of as a ‘game-changer’. 

Author: Jeremy Daniel

A hard fork is an unchangeable permanent modification on the blockchain, which is a backward-incompatible upgrade, meaning that miners have to download the London Hard Fork if they want to continue using the Ethereum network. 

CNBC explains that ‘If you think of Ethereum like a highway, London is adding a few lanes to tamp down traffic and is standardising toll prices.’ 

The takeaway from the London upgrade for casual viewers is that it is fixed to the blockchain that involves destroying or “burning” ether coins. Many assumed that the name London must be associated with the famous bridge of the same name that ‘is burning down’. In fact, all the hard fork names come from the cities where the Ethereum Devcon international developer’s conference has most recently been held. Next up will be Shanghai hardfork. . 

Nevertheless, the burning of ether is a significant change and is meant to provide a deflationary mechanism that will provide price stability. 

From this point on the transaction fees will be determined automatically according to supply and demand trends, in the hope that this will lessen the volatility in the current system.

“What will happen is that the base fee will be burned. Since this fee is paid in “ETH, more ETH will be burned as transactions occur. It is good news for ETH holders as this fee burn could lead to ETH inflation. But this doesn’t mean ETH will go deflationary. It is just a new theoretically deflationary mechanism, something Ethereum has lacked till date,” says Hitesh Malviya, the founder of itsblockchain.com.

SENATE HEARINGS ON CRYPTO

In the first real acknowledgement from US authorities that cryptocurrencies are not just a fad that will disappear sometime soon, the Senate held a fiery date over the first set of legislative ideas that seek to ensure a structure for government taxation of crypto assets in the United States. 

It was part of the larger bi-partisan Infrastructure bill that recently passed the senate, although that particular crypto amendment was blocked for obscure Senate procedural reasons that involved $50 billion in unrelated military spending someone else was trying to add to the bill. 

But it was the first real attempt at defining what is set to be a long relationship between the crypto community and the United States government. 

The New York Times brilliant columnist Ezra Klein wrote a long, thought-provoking article on the events of the past week and he had some insightful comments around what the future of cryptocurrency is starting to look like. He believes that crypto has moved beyond currency and into the kind of infrastructure that could potentially be the next digital economy: Web 3.0, as some are calling it. 

“Once you have crypto networks up and running, with currencies pulling in users, you can build all kinds of things on top of them. So the second phase of crypto has followed from the first: Now that there really is digital money, where anyone can verify the transactions, shouldn’t there be truly digital financial services, built around contracts anyone can write, enforced by code rather than banks or law?”, Klein writes. 

This would be a game changer for content creators, who have been failed time and again by an internet that rewards access to entertainment without rewarding the creator. It’s been simply too easy to lift, copy and enjoy original work without paying for it. WEB 3.0 changes that. 

“If the original internet lets you easily copy information, the next internet will let you easily trade ownership of digital goods. Crypto lets you make digital goods scarce, which increases their value; it lets you prove ownership, which allows you to buy and sell them; and it makes digital identities verifiable, as that’s merely information you own. Together, they unlock the potential for a true economy for digital goods, where creators actually get rewarded for what they make.”

Just one more reminder that we are all still very early to the crypto space and that this could be one of the biggest investment opportunities of the future for those who could see what was coming.

Author: Jeremy Daniel

Understanding the core value of Bitcoin requires us to take a step back and examine two concepts of society: Leadership and Authority.

What is the difference between authority and leadership and what is their correlation? 

Authority is the state of having charge over a community, with the power, the means and the might to enact decisions over this community regardless of the choices, opinions, beliefs, feelings, or thoughts of the community.

Leadership, on the other hand, is explicitly representative of the community. Leadership exists because the people in the community have raised a hero from it, that represents them. A leader is a person who influences and inspires through truth, integrity, and transparency. A true leader serves the people, and finds meaning through service. 

So what happens when you have people in authority who are not leaders but are instead simply after power? You have a dictatorship. This more and more is what we have collectively witnessed worsen over the past year as government representatives have clamoured for power at the expense of our freedoms. We have seen our jobs ripped away from us by enforced lockdowns. We have seen our livelihoods destroyed by lockdowns accompanied by the trite phrase “lives over livelihoods” as if the two are somehow magically separated. We have seen people lose all their income and deplenish their hard earned savings. People have become destitute. People are dying from suicide, hunger, and crime, because the government lockdowns have wrecked the free market economy. Government lockdowns were certainly not the will of the people who have lost their jobs.

Authority without leadership is a dictatorship.This is the core of the problem, and this is where Bitcoin comes in.

Bitcoin is the anti-dictator defence device of critical thinking, forward-looking people. It looks to the Future and sees the trajectory of the loss of freedoms that have been gradually surrounding all of us as we have been gradually coerced into surrendering more and more of our privacy, more and more of our freedoms and control over our time and money.

Bitcoin is an attempt to reclaim some of those lost freedoms. It is a means of managing our own time and money. 

Money equals time. In essence, if you don’t have money you need to sacrifice your time in life in order to work to get money to survive. If you have money you don’t need to work and you can instead spend that money on activities in life that you enjoy and that fulfil you. 

Now up until this point in history money has been tightly controlled by the bankers, lenders, and the governments. it’s been tightly controlled, tightly regulated, and the circulating amount of money has been inflated or deflated at will. What bitcoin aims to do is give you back your time and freedom because Bitcoin is a means of escaping the hyper-inflation that the governments have been levying on us and burdening us with for decades. 

Most people haven’t had the time to fully grasp what inflation actually is – inflation is the act of printing money, unbacked by any security, and adding it into the existing money pot. Now some traditional financial people might try and tell you there’s much more to monetary policy than that and to a small degree there is, but the fundamental, the 99% of it is that if you print more money, the value of the existing money in circulation decreases.

Here is some simple logic: You had R20 spending power to buy a bag of apples. The government decides to print more money. Shops put up their prices to cover this inflation, and all of a sudden the price of apples is now R22. But you haven’t been given any of this newly printed money have you? You still have R20, but now your spending power of your hard won R20, is worth less than it was. It’s less than the bag of apples. Thanks to the decision to print more money, you can no longer afford the bag of apples.

Let’s look at it another way, whenever the government decides to print money, it is essentially comparable to them removing money directly out of your bank account. Because the spending power of the money in your bank account is now worth less – you are able to buy less things. This means you get poorer and poorer everytime money is printed.

This is the bane of inflation. Of course in a capitalist world a bit of inflation can be good, it can stimulate buying – we don’t want to live in a world with the opposite of inflation – ie deflation where it stimulates saving your money instead of spending (because it is worth more tomorrow than today, so better to hold off buying those apples because they will be R18 tomorrow) because that sends the markets grinding to a halt as people are reluctant to part with their money today because money is worth more tomorrow than it is today. 

So while inflation itself is not a terrible idea, the problem is that decisions taken by government decision makers have the power to dilute the market whenever they see fit. Now through all the global lockdowns throughout the world as so many loans and stimulus packages are being invented and more money is printed to pay for them, what they are doing, and you need to recognise this, what they are doing is they are systematically lowering everybody’s net worth. 

Unless you hold Bitcoin your net worth has been lowered every time money, or a new stimulus package is printed. 

OK so what’s the answer to all of this? 

Is it simply to sell everything and put everything into Bitcoin? No of course nothing in life is that extreme, but what is looking more and more likely is that there will come into being a parallel system through which we will have both centralised and decentralised money, because to the governments that we nominate, elect, and fund to to maintain the roads, sewage, and other public works like parks and recreation we will continue to pay tax towards – and these entities need to be centralised and they need to be controlled and centralised from centralised powers of public accountability. This is ok, this is good, this is reasonable – we as a community put somebody in charge of things that we as the whole community have decided that we want, we all want sanitation, we all want roads so we are content to pay some taxes towards that, but this vast, draconian scope that the global government’s have amassed,  this whole power grab of controlling money and freedoms this needs to end and this is why Bitcoin was created – it was created to defend against inflation and protect individual fiscal freedom. 

Do you remember the 2008 collapse – the ‘global financial crisis’ that’s what it was called. Global financial crisis. That was 12 years ago, this was the genesis of Bitcoin because governments decided to print money to bail out failing companies and they up-ended our free market. This goes far beyond their mandate as public servants.

Bitcoin is the defender against that, it is the public defender against hyper-inflation. This is why it’s imperative that you own it and this is why the price keeps going up, because of the printing of more and more money. Can you see the same thing is happening now? What happened in 2008 is a stark warning to what is happening today. 

So buy Bitcoin and hold it, but of course we all still need to work and play in society. Cape Crypto is a centralised entity because we recognise the value in banks and centralisation, we don’t dislike fiat money we don’t dislike local currency, but we do dislike government decision makers with too much power having the whimful power to print money whenever they see fit, to the detriment of us, the people, without the people’s consent. We dislike dictatorial governments, but we love leaders. 

This is the fundamental problem that Bitcoin is solving. This is why Bitcoin.