November 18th, 2023
Crypto in 2023/2024
It has been a great year for Bitcoin and most alt-coins going into 2024’s halving in April. Bitcoin bottomed and pumped back up, so January of this year was the bottom. Slowly over the past 11 months of 2023, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies have gone up in a major way. I still watch CryptosRUs’s show daily and follow Bitcoin every pump, sharing thoughts along the way on City-data and Boxden. In January Bitcoin was as low as $16k per coin, but all through 2023, Bitcoin went up to now almost $38k per coin. So, a big win for most of the people who have been through a halving cycle before. I was looked at as wild crazy for being bullish this January, but now Blackrock and Fidelity want a Spot ETF.
I missed out on most alt-coin wins because I just went heavy into Bitcoin & Ethereum. Now I own a few alt-coins on Coinbase because I just wanted some but a small amount. They are staked on Coinbase too, so it should snowball with a payout every 5 days. I stopped typing up blogs about cryptocurrencies like I was before but felt like a blog now would be right. The local news did a crypto segment back months ago when Bitcoin was hovering around $27k, Bitcoin is now hovering around $36k per whole coin.
I ended up finishing the Crypto Assets book my sister got me for Christmas last year, it was filled with a bunch of history and overall stuff I knew. Why Bitcoin? What is the urge for new money? I could type why the Federal Reserve sucks and how Bitcoin is better all day, but it boils down to the scarcity of satoshis. There is a limited supply of Bitcoin, satoshis are what you call the individual units of Bitcoin. Some weirdos think since Bitcoin is a limited supply then it can’t be used as legal tender and trust me; that’s where we are headed! A single satoshi can be a whole dollar if need be, Bitcoin can scale and is flexible. Most web3 people I know have a moderate piece of their money in Bitcoin, but some literally keep everything in Bitcoin. It all depends on how much money you want to change, up or down; that is the risk part. People who follow crypto will say “Bitcoin is going over $100K”, or “It’s going over a million per coin”, that’ll probably happen if you hold it for a long time.
As many halving cycles go on, the price of a satoshi will go up. Just as a can of Coke was once 5 cents years ago, and now costs $2. Imagine being able to buy cans of soda for a nickel and sell them for $2 each in 2023. I won’t make any price predictions for Bitcoin, but the facts are Bitcoin was at $16k starting this year and it’s now gone up to $37k for each coin. There are ETFs that are coming out for trillions of dollars to flood into crypto and that is getting priced into Bitcoin recently. There is a halving in 2024, the Fed will hold rates or cut in 2024, plus the ETFs in 2024; holding some Bitcoin wouldn’t hurt. The thing with crypto is you can sell back for cash at any time, Bitcoin isn’t an NFT, where you need to find a buyer. Overall, 2023 was a wild great pump for crypto, people made lots of money holding and most of the Bitcoin supply didn’t move. People are just accumulating as much crypto as they can, and it’s shown over the past year.
Before buying Bitcoin be realistic about the outcome and make a strategy to take profit, because after the 2024 ETF & halving pump; Bitcoin will drop major again probably in 2025. Putting $1000 into Ethereum or Bitcoin, think to yourself, “I’ll sell once it hits this price and my amount is worth this much”, or you’ll lose. Watching it go all the way back down in 2025/2026 will make you hate crypto. To win at crypto, take some profits, sell half, and hold half. It comes down to something like stocks, you want more than you started with, right? So, take profits when you get some, even if it’s a quarter of your total amount. Holding forever can work too if you don’t mind it going down major after the halving. The major drop or dump that comes after this 2024 pump will still be higher than the previous halving pump in 2021. Bitcoin only dropped to $16k, people I know online were wishing it’d drop under $10k per Bitcoin because you’re just buying money, for cheap.
China & Learning Chinese
I have been learning Chinese on Duolingo, it’s a website and phone app that teaches languages. It has leagues where you compete with others learning whatever language they are learning. You get points for learning, and you compete with others each week. It’s a lot of repetitive sayings and numbers so far, but I have been going strong. I went through a Chinese politics course over the past two weeks, it’s a course by Princeton University online and I learned a lot about China. I then started that Chinese politics course over again to do it a second time. China has limits on how old you can be to be in their congress, but the United States doesn’t.
The course started out with some history of China, and they have been around so much longer than America. China has what they call the Politburo Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and that is where the elite of elite in Chinese politics. The professor of the course predicted how in 2022 Xi Jinping, the president of China, would end term limits for presidents and stay in power. That happened and it looks like Xi Jinping is going to be their leader for a while. I don’t really have any plans to go to China anytime soon so learning the language will be a challenge to keep it fresh in my brain. I might sign up for some Chinese chat websites after I get pretty good. The Duolingo website keeps track of how many days you have been learning with a streak, so far 46 days straight learning sayings and basic Chinese.
China has a problem right now where its people are majority older now since they have had that one-child law in place for so many years. They also want Taiwan to belong back in control of the Chinese government. And everything within the 9-dash line of the South China Sea, and part of me agrees with China. It is called the South “China” Sea for a reason; it has its name in the title. Taiwan belongs to China, imagine if China tried to say America doesn’t own Puerto Rico and China said they would defend Puerto Rico if the United States was going to invade them. It is silly, there are bigger things America can worry about than what China does in its own backyard.
YouTube Shorts
I have been uploading short video clips to YouTube in my “shorts” section on my channel. The max for them is 60 seconds but I was just doing 7-9 second clips and I was getting a couple thousand views on them. Most are between a thousand and two thousand views on them but that is way more than what I get with my normal vlog videos. It has been around 22,000 views in the last 28-day period, but YouTube gives all the analytics about the videos and most people watch a YouTube “short” more than one time. I have plans to do what I do for my TikTok but just 15 seconds on YouTube Shorts now. Just need to go to different places for video clips, because if anyone is paying attention, I haven’t been uploading as many vlogs this year in 2023. I have probably one more planned for 2023 but that’ll be it. A lot of my clips in the vlogs are of the same areas around here in Salem and it’s just different seasons. I had plans to drive into Hartford for clips but haven’t yet. Right now the goal is to just uploading as many shorts as possible, one every day if that’s what it takes to grow my channel.
Iowa Hawkeyes in 2023
It’s been awesome watching the games on Saturdays, and Iowa hasn’t been that bad overall this year. Cooper DeJean is out for the season now, their quarterback got hurt early in the season too which sucks. Other people were out also, but that fill-in quarterback Deacon Hill has done pretty well for being backup. Iowa is 8-2 heading into today’s game against Illinois, ranked number 16 and just overall a good season. I have been using YouTube TV for most games but those ones only on Peacock streaming I bought the one-time stream and cancelled the subscription after the game. I don’t watch any NFL games really or any other college teams, just the Hawkeyes on Saturday. I don’t even have any favorite team like I did as a kid, I used to like the 49ers with Steve Young & Jerry Rice. I don’t bet on the games but would have done well if I did since Iowa is 8-2. I watch the games on my bedroom computer setup, and it’s wild how nice streaming has become over the years. It’s just like cable, remember buffering? No digital blur or buffering, it’s just a clean stream now in 2023.
Brian Ferentz’s last season now, which is crappy because they have done well overall this year. He is the offensive coordinator and sure Iowa’s offense at times was bad, but they all made up with that in defense to win games. They wanted Iowa to average 25 points per game but that’s not going to happen. I just feel like he has done well considering the injuries, what will the next person do better? I think Iowa has had a great season and it’ll be fun watching the rest of the games this season.
Be a nice human.
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