The Flarnchain Newsletter | Flarnchain - Newsletter #145

Welcome back to the Flarnchain newsletter! Brought to you each and every week, like an atomic clock. I'm going to stop wasting everyone's time talking about my ideas for the delivery format for this newsletter, and I'm also going to spend a lot less time thinking too hard about it. Right now, paragraph.xyz appears to be working, so I'm just gonna keep using it.

Some housekeeping

If you have been receiving these newsletters on days other than wednesday, please let me know, as I'm curious to know how long of a lag it is between me publishing the newsletter and it hitting your inbox.

Some other housekeeping

Now that we are seeing at least a small resurgence in crypto hype, I'm curious to know how I can expand the reach of this newsletter. For all of you long time readers, you'll know that this newsletter is more than just a newsletter, it's an important part of the Flarnchain ecosystem, which will have the Flarnchain blockchain as the cornerstone of that ecosystem.

The Flarnchain ecosystem will employ a whole bunch of different mechanisms, but one of the most fundamental will be the "proof of subscription to newsletter" which basically means that if you are subscribed to the newsletter, you will be eligible to receive Flarncoins once the blockchain is live. We are 11 weeks away from the "implementation" phase of the Flarnmap, so in 11 weeks I will have exactly 3 years to deploy the Flarnchain blockchain.

Markets

Now that those two items are out of the way, let's dive right into the crypto markets. Last time I checked (which was about 2 minutes ago), the markets were up, and up big! There's been a whole lot of news about the Bitcoin ETF that is looming on the horizon. The SEC has been dragging their feet regarding a decision to allow a Bitcoin ETF, and just today they delayed their decision again. That said, it's generated a lot of chatter because if people are able to easily allocate say... 1% of their 401k to Bitcoin via an ETF, then that's a huge increase in buying pressure. As we all know, whenever there is an increase in buying (without an equal increase in selling), then number goes up. Should be interesting to see how it plays out.

I'm beginning to kind of hate the layout of this chart. It doesn't really give me what I think I need. I really liked the old one where it was just a hand drawn chart of the price of bitcoin over time. After this year is up (in 11 weeks) I'm going to recreate that chart but programmatically instead of on MS Paint.

Looks like things continue to look good for Bitcoin, up another 2.61% this week. The big winner this week (at least for the three crypto-assets that I have been tracking intently since this newsletter began) is $ATOM, up 13.10% on the week. Compared to many other cryptoassets in the Cosmos Network, like $KUJI (up 20% just today, and almost 30% on the week), $ATOM has been a bit of a laggard, but $ATOM is also the highest market cap so it takes a lot more money to have those explosive moves.

Likewise, many have argued that the price of $ATOM is impacted substantially by it's current security model, where the staking rewards (paid out to delegators who lock up their ATOM) is capped at around 20%. These staking rewards are inflation of the monetary supply. Increase in supply means a decrease in price if all other things are held equal, so that inflation could be contributing to price suppression. Currently there's a governance proposal for the Cosmos Hub (ATOM's blockchain) where people can vote to reduce the inflation from a maximum of ~20% to a maximum of ~10%. There's a hefty debate on the merits or lack of merit for this idea over at the Cosmos Hub governance forum. You might find some of the discussion interesting -> Cosmos Hub Forum.

Market Animal

It should be obvious what this week's market animal is going to be... of course, it's a bull 🐂🐂🐂🐂🐂. That's 5 bull weeks in a row, which sets the record since I started tracking this on my newsletters spreadsheet back at Flarnchain #59 on Wednesday August 10, 2022. Pretty cool! I think during the peak of the 2021 bull market at one point there happened to be 6 or 7 bulls in a row, but we might still get there! It's early yet. I think we will see some healthy pullback/corrections in the coming weeks.

Can't go up-only forever now can we? Or maybe we can? I think once the bull starts having lasers come out of it's eyes it's a good idea to exercise at least a tad bit of caution. Really one should always exercise caution with crypto, because the music could possibly stop and any moment and all of this magical internet money could go to zero. I don't think that's gonna happen, I think it's here to stay, but it's not outside the realm of possibility.

5 bull weeks in a row. bull 5 has red, glowing eyes now. wait til you see bulls 6 and 7, it gets crazier. I think this is a good litmus test for me to identify like... maybe it's time to take profits?

Thankfully I don't need to start thinking like that yet, since all of my holdings were down so bad that these big gains really aren't doing a whole lot for my portfolio. If we see a few more big runs like this and establish support levels far above where we sit today, then I'll be talking about what a profit taking strategy might look like...

Alright that's really all I had stamina for tonight. I've been making significant progress on the Open Source Society University (OSSU). I'm currently in the 5th class in the curriculum and I'm learning about the ancient programming language Standard ML. I also learned a tiny bit more about front-end development, and wrote some interesting vanilla Javascript to create this cool little webpage background: