Tick Tick ... Boom!
How do you measure anything? It depends on what you value.
Tick, Tick … Boom!
I spoke to someone this week who said the tech and crypto community care about two things - data and money. They don’t care about the causes, the reasons, the context, or the means—just the end result, especially if that end result is more money. And if a lot of money is made, the means are irrelevant.
However, the causes, reasons, and context allow us to analyse the data and decide whether the means were a price we were willing to pay for the end result. Most supermarkets sell household staples such as milk because they know that many people who ‘pop into the shops for a pint of milk’ will usually find two pouches of peanut butter pretzel M&Ms mysteriously appear in their basket (I admit nothing). The extra (very much necessary items) balance out the lower-priced staple that lured you into the store in the first place.
When the US elected a new president last year, many communities celebrated, no more so than the groups heavily involved in cryptocurrencies. No matter your personal politics, one unifying viewpoint – especially if you spend time on what is still called ‘crypto Twitter’ - is a hatred of former chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission Gary Gensler. He did not offer a welcoming environment to the nascent digital currency (or is it a security, a commodity, an investment asset?), to put it mildly
After years of petitioning for guidance and regulator clarity and celebrating the promise the new administration offered crypto businesses in the US, the first week gifted the world two new meme coins (or shitcoins as others call it) a digital money representation of Trump and his Slovenian-born wife Melania. The Financial Times explains it like this:
“But what exactly is it? Not an investment, says the small print — more an “expression of support”. Put another way, for all the hype, $TRUMP is just a new spin on presidential collectibles, like a red Maga cap or a bobble-headed dashboard doll, only with less utility and much more volatile price.”
Is that what all the lawsuits, lobbying, and campaign donations from reputable crypto firms were about? To legitimise digital bobble-headed dashboard dolls? It makes the industry sound less like the future of money and financial services and more like a former minion of Tony Soprano claiming that they’re just ‘legitimate businessmen’.
But it is the rationalisation, the ignoring of causes, context, and means that led to the election of a new leader for the most powerful economy in the world, which makes me the angriest. I saw someone write on LinkedIn that “all revolutions have casualties”. I can only assume that it was a clumsy attempt to justify the positives for the crypto community with the acknowledgment that not all actions by the current US government will be positive for everyone.
I am going to be as blunt as possible. Stop.
Do not say or write bullshit like that anywhere.
Unless you are willing to be the casualty or offer up the people you love – your spouse, your child – as the casualty, you are not part of any ‘revolution’. A coward offers up the ‘other’ as the sacrifice to the lions in the Colosseum. That doesn’t change no matter how much money is made or tickets sold.
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Interactions I had this week: I was a guest on the One Vision Podcast with my good friend Theo Lau. I will share the link when it is out, but let’s just say that Theo and I should run the world. :-)
Kathryn E. Strachan also caused a stir with a LinkedIn post talking about things she had “come to realise that no amount of money is worth:
✅ My physical & mental health
✅ My daughter’s childhood
✅ My marriage”
I agree, Kathryn; after all, no one is surrounded by their money and data on their deathbed. (BTW, I will record a guest spot on Kathryn’s podcast Marketers Unleashed this Friday. Will share links when out!)
I also caught up with the queen of all payments, Erin McCune, to talk about wholesale payments, the US election, and why women are needed in organisations and businesses more than ever. Basically, Erin should run the world. :-)
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This week’s musical finale is from the musical Rent. I saw this in London’s West End in the late 90s with my Aunt. It is very 90s. (It was parodied in the puppet sex movie Team America with the song Everyone Has AIDS. Cosmic)
Rent's original New York cast features people like Anthony Rapp and Idina Menzel. It is almost as famous for the death of its composer and playwright, Jonathan Larson, the night before its off-Broadway debut in 1996. The recent movie Tick Tick … Boom!, with Andrew Garfield playing Larson as he examines the twin choices of security and creativity, takes its name from the idea of two ticking clocks representing the presumed countdown of his and his best friend’s life.
Please forgive me, but when observing the current state of crypto and digital assets and the new American regulatory environment, my mind went to the idea of two choices: security and the unknown, ethical and unethical, life and death.
Tick, Tick … Boom? Or Tick, Tick … BOOM!
However, back to the music. I don’t remember many songs from Rent. But I find myself humming this more often than I admit. How do you measure … anything? You measure it in love.