What a strange time for me to be fascinated by Crypto. I've owned Bitcoin for around 10 years, but I sold most of it much too early in order to buy a computer and then again later to buy a used pickup truck that only lasted a couple of years. Just a few Satoshi crumbs remained on the floor of my Coinbase account from when I sold off most of my remaining BTC in the late summer of 2017. When BTC started climbing to new all-time highs in early 2021, I logged into my Coinbase account for the first time in more than a year and discovered that those crumbs had grown into something worth my attention.
About that same time I got interested in NFTs. I've been a cartoonist for far longer than I've been a podcaster, and I've been a podcaster since 2006. I make money as a cartoonist, but it's in the form of billing a client by the hour for my services. I'd love to have my artwork create passive income for me, and when I learned about the smart contract aspect of NFTs that would allow an artist to receive a portion of the sale price on secondary and subsequent sales of the NFT, that's what really made me want to get into it.
I investigated using Ethereum to make NFTs, but I was put off by the high fees. I didn't have any confidence that I would sell even a single NFT for enough to recoup the price of minting it. Then a C-Realm Podcast listener contacted me via Patreon to tell me about Cardano. The low cost of minting NFTs with Cardano attracted me to the project. Then I got in touch with John Huthmaker of Atelier NFT Sales. I sent him some samples of my artwork, and he volunteered to mint NFTs for me at no cost and to create a gallery page for my artwork on his NFT sales site. He tried to generate buzz around my first drop, but when the time came, not many tokens sold, and I didn't bother to send him any more artwork.
Another thing that dampened my enthusiasm for pursuing NFT art was the fact that, unlike Ethereum, smart contracts had not yet been incorporated into Cardano. The thing that most drew me to the NFT game didn't work on Cardano. Not YET anyway.
But now I knew about Cardano, and I started watching Charles Hoskinson's YouTube videos. I found his calm demeanor and rock solid conviction in the correctness of his vision appealing. I learned about how Cardano already has real world applications active in Africa, for example being put to use by the Ethiopian Ministry of Education, and I started to drink the Cardano Kool-aid. I went from being excited about how Cardano might work for me in generating an NFT income stream from my artwork to being excited about The Mission to free people all over the world from the control of oppressive financial systems. I wanted to invest as much in Cardano as I could, and my conviction that its price would climb was inseparable from my conviction that its cause was just. I wanted to participate. I wanted to play some role in bringing the vision to reality.
I say that I started to drink the Kool-aid, and invoking Kool-aid implies that Cardano is a death cult. While there are certainly cult-like aspects to the fervor of some Cardano maximalists, I don't necessarily think that's such a bad thing. While rabid enthusiasm can blind a person to dangers which the more dispassionate can detect, it's certainly a more helpful state of mind and a better way to live than to be ruled by fear or reflexive cynicism. Wallowing in fear is a cardinal sin in my book. Fear makes you stupid, and letting yourself become habituated to it and to defaulting to it pollutes the psychic atmosphere. Fear makes people reactive and easy to manipulate, and so powerful people and institutions run an on-going, coordinated and lavishly funded campaign to instill fear in the populace. When I was a kid growing up in the 70s and 80s, it was fear of the Soviets. After 9/11 is was fear of terrorism. In the Obama and Trump years, the campaigners of fear encouraged us to hate people whose politics and cultural shibboleths differed from our own. We were to hate the opposing cultural tribe and live in fear of what would happen if their political priorities dominated the institutions of governance.
In the last couple of months, the apparatus of fear dissemination has turned to crypto currency. This summer was supposed to be the Summer of Crypto with Ethereum getting its EIP-1599 upgrade and Cardano rolling out smart contract functionality on its mainnet. Bitcoin's dominance of the crypto space was starting to diminish slightly as other networks and tokens started to come into their own. The scene was set to flourish. Instead, we got a Bitcoin crash fuelled by strategic fear-mongering by the corporate media, and now, even though Bitcoin's price is stable in the high $30K range, retail investors remain fearful while whales and institutional players gobble up the discounted BTC.
Worse, the fear seems to have reversed the gains of the alt.coin ecosystem. Cardano, Polkadot, and Chainlink have seen sharp declines in recent days even as Bitcoin trades sideways. I'll take advantage of the opportunity to pick them up on the cheap, but I hate to see the excitement and general atmosphere of enthusiasm around decentralized finance and real world functionality of blockchain projects fizzle and give way to a miasma of trepidation.
Always looking for the bright side of any gloomy vision, I'll note that we don't have to worry about "irrational exuberance" just now or the growth of token prices climbing unsustainably. Too hot has its own downsides, but we don't have to worry about them in what has turned out to be an unseasonably cool Crypto Summer.
