What is this weird feeling?

For the first time in over half a decade I actually have access to more cash and credit now than at any other time. My credit score is higher than it's ever been, especially now that I've capitulated and paid off the debt I was using to leverage the market for a potential summer run.

• The summer run was a bust and is now over.
• I've made several bad investments and outright gambles over the last few months.

And still I find myself in a not that terrible position for the future.

Obviously we're not out the the woods yet and the economy could implode at pretty much any moment for a variety of reasons, but for the time being I feel like I'm standing on fairly stable ground.

Selling Hive at sub 30 cents is cringe.

This is the only sticking point that really bothers me. 100% of my income is derived from Hive, so at times like this it feels like a burden to the network to be selling anything at all. To be fair to myself if you look at the Hive I've earned vs the Hive I've purchased... I'm in the green by a huge margin, but still. I'd like to feel as if I'm bringing more value to the network than I take away at all times, and this is a very difficult thing to if I didn't take enough gains off the table during the upside of the market cycle (a thing I never seem to accomplish).

There's really very little excuse for this.

Other than greed and delusion of course. I like to hold myself to a high standard and keep myself in check or else the chance of flying off the rails seems to increase exponentially. We all know when it's a bull market and when it's a bear market. It's obvious. It's even been on a very clear-cut 4 year cycle this entire time. Of course we are in the weird middle era of the 4-year cycle so it's not super obvious at the moment (year of the maximalist) but I think 2024 will change that (year of the new narrative).

• Year of the bull.
• Year of the bear.
• Year of the maxi.
• Year of the narrative.

Rinse and repeat.

If I'm being honest I'm actually kind of surprised we are still on this market cycle, and I have to wonder if there are more events than just the halving event keeping it in play. After all, the halving year is also an election year in USA. Presidents and other career politicians alike almost always scramble to build their resume during an election year. This includes boosts to the economy, even if purposefully designed to only give a temporary boost (like 'money printing' or forgiving student loans or whatever).

April 2024

I don't know if you guys remember the halving event in May 2020, but this one seemingly has a lot more hype than the last one. I'm on record as saying that the hype is misplaced, and each event should mathematically have half of the effect of the previous one. It's also just short term bearish to pay one's security team half their usual wage to do their job. We'll see how that goes I'll be paying attention closely.

Interestingly enough even though Bitcoin launched in January (2009) and halving events are supposed to be around 4-years, the date keeps getting pushed backwards in time by the success of Bitcoin. As hashrate goes up on average this means that blocktimes are also slightly less than 10 minutes on average, which keeps pushing back the date due to time slippage. In 2020 the halving was in May and now we are firmly in April. I wonder if we'll ever roll it back the full year back into January. This is probably bound to happen if Bitcoin does what we think it should do, but I guess we'll see. 1 BTC would have to be millions of dollars at that point per coin in order to incentivize a hashrate that large.

Is it possible that Bitcoin falls off the map after it gets adopted by Wall Street? Sure, it's possible, but something better than Bitcoin needs to replace it. Somehow I doubt that will happen considering all the research I've done and the current direction of the other networks out there. Something tells me it might take decades for that to happen, although BTC getting flipped and falling off the top of the charts is much more likely than a complete crash or flatline.

Speaking of flatline...

What if BTC just happened to massively reduce its volatility and just slowly went up 10%-20% per year? Then it could actually be used for what people said it could be used for initially: storing value and hedging vs inflation. Of course I'm not sure how such a thing could ever happen considering its deflationary economics and the psychology of hoarding that goes along with that, but it's fun to speculate. People would complain about 20%. It's not "high enough". The greed of humanity is limitless. Never forget it.

Conclusion

Slow and boring market is slow and boring. The crabwalk continues as everyone makes a big deal about every 2% move. Wake me up when 30% swings are what people are talking about.

I'm in a good hunkered down position to weather the storm until the end of the year. It's a rare feeling, and I should chase it more often. However, it leaves me thinking about that age-old adage: build during the bear market. I keep telling myself I need to get back to the grind and increase my coding skills but that never seems to happen.

Soon™