From what I gather, there was a rather large football game in the states yesterday. Considering I'm IN the states, that should mean something to me.

Sorry, but among the things that politics ruins... when sports are used to take down nation states, I find it a little less entertaining, but that's just me.

Super Bowl commercials are a big thing, and I may take a few work breaks today and see what they actually were.

In particular, people hate Coinbase but they liked their commercial. They had massive numbers of hits to the site as a result. So, all that is coolio and I hope advertising works, not just with hits, but somewhere like Coinbase's capacity to validate, sign up and not cause individuals problems with their bank accounts like so many of us experienced over the years. If that does in fact lead to a lot of new cryptonians in the world, that's great!

But, when does it start to actually affect the market in a positive way? I have a few thoughts of my own.

Let's say 1 million people went to the Coinbase site, and 1000 of them started signing up. Monday, they make the calls to their bank, lets say 500 of them get through the sign-up process. 200 of them link their account and by the end of the week they start buying Bitcoin.

The other 300 get set up a week from Monday and they took the week learning about NFTs and alts. Now, I would guess the flow of interest was probably in the millions plural, and over the next month signups will continues in several thousand new signups, but I want to start with small realistic numbers.

We know the market is already growing, we know governments are speeding to organize themselves and figure out how to entrap the new financial markets before they eat into any more of the fiat sector. We know that a small percentage, lets say maybe 10% of people who get seriously interested in crypto get bit badly by the bug and realize they need to start cashing out of fiat into real crypto long term hodling.

One piece of math that is simply true regardless of how many coins are your favorites, which projects you think SHOULD take off, and that is that it takes serious money for NGU (number go up), and it takes more serious cash to make it stay there, and even more serious cash, super serious cash, to make it go up again. 

Things happen in waves in markets because of the human thinking and economic power behind things. Even if we had a single asset that never had any liquidations, options, futures, massive leverage, and everybody wanted it and zero people sold, I mean really not a single sell order, there would be times of straight up parabolic spikes, there would be a cool off that looked like reaching the curve of a mountain, and there would be flat plains barely moving upward. These would be the emotions of the buyers.

If you divide this kind of activity into two assets instead of one, pretend the entire market is split between BTC and ETH equally, you would have half the spike of parabolic FOMO'ing in for both assets. If a billion dollars of new buyers leaped into crypto this Friday because that was the fastest they could get new money from their bank (and a few stragglers that used a credit card to start faster), and there was one big asset for all of that to go into, we would see $1B of lets say for simplicity, market buy orders on Bitcoin divided by however much total $ is sitting on the books in sell orders at whatever prices.

The price would spike throughout the buying trend but it would drop and plateau constantly on the way up, because there are tens of thousands of people making short term trades on BTC and someone has bought in at every single price and someone is looking to sell at every price that is at least 0.5% above current market value.

That $1B of new money won't go far to change the price and once the price is there, a lot of the money that sold for profit will come back in somewhere in that day's valley, and some of it will leave the exchange to sit in private wallets, storing the profit safely away.

There really is no such thing, yet, in one massive wave of buyers coming in that does more than a small pump, but a steady new wave can cause a prolonged, constant rise in the price.

At the end of 2017 into Dec 2018, the first massive move towards $20K in Bitcoin happened. Some believe it was the FOMO of the CME listing. The majority of that movement for weeks, was the same people who were already into crypto, FOMO'ing with everything they've got. That same thing cannot happen the same today. Back then, there was 1/10th the amount of daily volume, so it took very little comparative money to continuously move the market, and the more it went up, we were ALL believers in crypto- very few wanted to sell! But, with that example, lets divide it again between BTC and ETH, we have 1/2 of the same 'up' in both assets, and you have to consider the majority of that new money is going to sit in them for quite some time, so maybe they are putting in sell orders for something really high, but most of them will probably start just by "owning" it- letting it sit in Coinbase wallets, not real custody imo. That only had the impact that it had for the initial surge, now it sits, like all the rest of us.

But now, let's take Doge, Shib, and NFTs. We're now dividing $1B evenly across lets say 30 markets that people choose when they come in. Either you have a 30X wave of new people to impact the market, or you have 1/30th of the amount entering each one, which will barely get noticed in price action if at all. So, welcome to the game, newcomers, we're happy to help you get adjusted to the asylum!

The thing is, people inside crypto have huge expectations and huge loyalty, but without understanding the impact on revolving money, market makers, and how pumps actually take place, they're never going to understand just how difficult and expensive it is for the N to GU.

This is the reason that people really should be thinking about the difference in truly scarce assets, and good tokens with good stuff happening, that people take an interest in and give their loyalty to, but without a really good reason to think they're going to go up much.

Now, I will bring back in the regular 'ole pump.

Regardless of new money, old money, the best coins to pump are the ones that have very little activity. It needs to be relatively easy for a wave of people to push a coin upward without a ton of sell pressure on the way up. This is the reason that pump groups carefully select coins that are pretty dormant, but not so scammy that they're likely to go under before the pump is on.

For weeks, the pump leaders will buy at market tiny little amounts, so nothing appears strange at market. Then, they announce the pump is coming. They build up the energy. They create fake shill news for everyone to paste into their social media accounts, discord and TG.

There's the countdown, and then BAM the first 1/2 second is where the most money is made, but it goes up for anywhere between 3 seconds and 2 minutes in 2 waves of buy-ins. The pump leaders are smashing the market buy button with automation as well, but remember for the most part, they already bought for weeks dirt cheap, as they are the only ones who know the coin they picked. They have their sell orders already sitting on the books and everyone that just piled in is going to trigger their sells. No one in the group knows how much money is set to sell. It isn't like there's any time to research it- you have 1 second to get rich or get stuck at the top of a total crap coin.

Everything I just described is bad investing, but it is how people 'get rich' quickly in crypto, and yeah that is scammy. Maybe fun gambling, but scammy.

The same kind of thing is nearly impossible with Bitcoin, which is why small coin projects believe that you are thinking wrong if you hold on to larger coins for smaller profits. The thing is, if you've watched what happened in crypto in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, you know that as long as Bitcoin is even 25% of the market, ETH will be 20% of the market, and every single other coin is a revolving door, where somewhere Litecoin will be between 1/3 and 1/30th of another slot. That gap in between is never, ever, ever the same coins. Sometimes it's all the dogs, at least 1-2 times/week it is whatever new poopcoin Binance just listed for the pump, sometimes its XRP back in the top 10, etc.

You see where I'm going with this?

Everything new, better, with all of the potential, is averaging out hundreds of millions of dollars and you can look at the volume in the market and see that there simply is not enough new money coming in, to spread across 300 coins that everyone is certain about.

If you have $1B new money for BTC, same for ETH, same for HEX, same for XRP, same for Link, ADA, NFTs, Doge, Shib, bebe doggies and on and on, you are going to see tens of thousands filling up in sell orders and very little economic pressure for things to go up.

And then there's the real scams of the industry; derivatives and ETFs.

These are fine- whatever, but you are gambling on the price action without owning the value of the underlying asset or owning the asset at all.

Someone is buying the real asset with those funds, but it isn't you; it's the exchanges and the fund managers. It is technically possible for half of the actual crypto market to have their money in parallel gambling that does not change the price of the asset at all. This is to say, if people gamble perpetual leveraged derivatives, they are experiencing something very similar to trading Bitcoin, but they are not changing the price action of Bitcoin at all, because they are not buying or selling Bitcoin, they are gambling on the price of it. Futures takes a solid 20% of the economic energy out of the large coins almost instantaneously, because it is a guessing game on a volatile asset, and 1/2 people will guess right, but if not within the range needed, they can still get liquidated or have to fund the account to stay liquid. Those who guess wrong get liquidated. Unless they are all millionaires, many of them will never return to crypto with any real money. Sadly, most of them also never learned a lesson or a single thing about the technology or value in escaping fiat.

There's a lot more to say here, but this qualifies as one of my "too long but enjoyed it surprisingly anyway here's a tip" articles- lol.

So, on that note, the tippety tappety typing fingers of a Crypto Gordon Freeman superhero emeritus, for now... out.