as i've grown older, i've felt that i've experienced an increasing amount of time dilation--not exactly in the definition that underpins the theory of relativity, but in the context of how time (as a distance) separates myself and friends that i see at more and more distant intervals.
i travel a lot for work and last year it was so atrocious that i was in new york for maybe 2 weeks at a time then gone for 3-4 weeks. i'd do my best to spend time with my new york based friends and when i returned, i felt that no time at all had passed. but to them, i was someone who was more and more infrequently a part of their lives (this kills me and something i aim to fix this year).
they were stationary observers (by nature of staying in new york) and moved only moved on one dimension (time). but myself--constantly in a new city, a new country, then returning to new york--i felt that no time had passed and i had only moved through space. to return and find that a couple whose wedding i was a bridesmaid no longer considered me a close friend but to me nothing had changed (when i enter the space that is new york, the clockpiece starts again)...brutal.
anyways, this set me down a rabbit hole because i thought a lot about how development of time keeping pieces has really only accelerated in the past century and how that has impacted our collective understanding of the markets. terence @ hyperplex (an actual genius, one of the smartest guys i've met in my lifetime) inspired this piece because he talked about how monad's one second block times actually lead to more efficient markets (given the unnecessary friction in battling over micro and milli seconds).
have you ever really sat down and thought about 1) what time is and 2) how our understanding and measurement of time controls our individual mental state (i'll start on monday) and financial system (fiscal year)? why do we measure months on four sets of seven day intervals? gregorian calendar system aside, our ability to agree on a system and measure time precisely has so much impact on financial instruments (trade execution and settlement, algo trading but more broadly stuff like insurance and futures). when i worked out in rural thailand, no one had a timekeeping piece on them--friends would tell me to meet by the road 'a little after lunch' and what that translated to was maybe one hour, maybe two hours, maybe we'll do it tomorrow. i loved watching old folks just sit by the road and plastic chairs talking to each other or playing chess for hours, not an anxious care for what time it was in their hearts. in places like that, time drips by like molasses.
five moments from the history of timekeeping
3500 BC: egyptian obelisks used to cast a shadow to indicate time
1000s: hourglasses for a greater precision in time measurement used at sea (you can imagine how soulless it must be to drift in open ocean for months losing all sense of time) and large town clocks begin to appear (communal agreement of time)
1884: adoption of the greenwich mean time, global standardization of timekeeping
1949: first atomic clock is created and measures time using ammonia molecule vibrations
1999: the cesium fountain clock uses laser cooling techniques to slow cesium atoms, which allows for a longer observation time
ok so what does this have to do with the efficient market hypothesis (EMH)? EMH states that asset prices reflect all public and private information so consistent alpha generation is impossible, hence investors must take on outsized risk in order to outperform the overall market.
this is obviously not true ubiquitously, and especially so in tech. folks that are acclimated to value investing in traditional finance simply do not stand a chance in traditional tech (where narrative bubbles occur but much more slowly than they do in crypto) and especially so in crypto, where an outsized amount of token demand comes from an extremely fickle and easily fascinated pool of capital.
what i find most fascinating about crypto is you can actually see the market learning and adjusting to information in real time and the collective hivemind slowly inches forward. commerce, markets, our global interconnected financial system depend so much on these critical moments (consensus on timekeeping systems, adoption of double entry bookkeeping) for facilitation of the dissemination of information.
i think EMH will always fail to apply to crypto because there is no single town timekeeping device much less a greenwhich mean time that we all agree on (ive met the china cabal, the SE Asia cabal, the europe cabal, middle eastern cabal, american cabal, and the nyc cabal which is different from american cabal). cabals maintain their own timekeeping systems. repricing of assets occurs largely because of social signals that fit some broadly accepted narrative. there are some crypto investors that describe themselves as fundamentals based investors but i largely think this is marketing for exit liquidity (everything is marketing) and their frameworks on how to appropriately value ethereum and solana are relics of their time slavishly building discounted cash flows in tradfi.
anyways, here's a little takeaway. its important to stay situationally aware of trad tech developments but even more so in crypto. some folks last year swore to me their [good narrative predatory] coins would hit top ten market cap but pump.fun and daos.fun completely changed the game (for better, in my opinion).
the current town i reside in is me and the boys are gonna make [good products people actually use] flip [shit that no one uses] this cycle. top 100 market cap crypto coins will no longer embarrass me to outsiders looking in, wondering why a ghost asset is worth x billions of dollars.
