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Table of Contents
There are No Trees in England
Crypto Risks This Market Cycle
Tron
Tether
STX Exploit?
Crypto Macro
Price Action
Valuing an NFT
Ethena
Conclusion
Internal References
1. There are No Trees in England
The modern bugman takes the world around him for granted. Society did not emerge on its own. The natural state of man is wilderness. The natural state of man is owning little more than the rough-shorn tools he has scrapped together as he hunts and forages for what little his environment can offer. From dust we came, to dust we shall return.
Looking around the world today, you might think that civilization is a worldwide phenomenon. But civilization is a small and unique phenomenon that exists in small pockets around the globe. The bugman is blithely unaware of how rare civilization is, because to create civilization is the heart of the male calling. To presume society is ubiquitous is to absolve the bugman of his duty to generate civilization.
What are we doing here, right now? We are creating civilization in what is very much a financial frontier. We are chopping down the thousand year overgrowth of untamed APY; fashioning entire log cabins from a single tree, within a forest of giants.
To understand what I’m saying, I’m going to have to Putinsplain a bit of history to you. Before the New World was discovered, Europe was literally running out of trees, England in particular. You see, England ruled the waves through it’s Royal Navy. During the Age of Sail, Europe converted much of it’s old growth forest into massive naval fighting ships.
The scale of these ships is hard to truly grasp, so I’m going to just describe one of them. The HMS Victory (Englands most famous warship) required 6,000 oak trees to construct. It’s masts were over 200 feet tall and each hewn from a single tree. Much of the timber used for the wooden planking and siding was over 2 feet thick. The trees used to build this ship were all over 400 years old at least, and at least 3,500 hectare’s of forest were needed to grow it all.
This was just for 1 ship, the Royal Navy maintained about 300 of these. Of course, HMS Victory was the biggest one, the average line ship only required 4,000 old growth oak trees to construct. England, France, Spain, Portugal, and other countries to a lesser extent all blew their metaphorical loads constructing these navies in an attempt to vie for power. If you look at a map of England today there are practically zero forests except for a few artificial forests and a handful of remaining crownland forests.
There are no old-growth forests remaining in England. Take a look at it on google maps, I’ve circled the few areas of forests on England today, and this is far better than it was in the 1600’s. Ireland is even worse.
When you zoom in on these “forests” in England you discover that they are pitiful. You’ll find small scraggly trees planted in neat little rows. Think of what it would be like to be born in such a place with such growth being cemented in your mind as representative of the term “forest” and “trees.” Then think further and remind yourself that it was far worse than this in the 1600’s.
One of the reasons for the adoption of coal was because the British had literally run out of firewood. Yes, a coal steam engine had been invented long before the British started using coal in earnest. The Romans used coal to heat their baths while occupying England in the 1st century. The British had a disdain for coal and believed it to be an elemental outpouring from hell itself. While wood was natural and of this Earth. They didn’t start using coal until they had chopped through much of the crown forest. There may very well have been not a single tree left in all of England by 1640.
Have you imagined yourself in such a place yet? Picture it, pretend you’re an average citizen. You’ve scarcely ever seen a tree. Wood is a precious commodity. You know it can burn, but to do so for heat is the height of luxury. Most nights you wrap up in as much fur, wool, and cloth as you can afford and huddle in a single bed with your 7 siblings for warmth. Maybe you don’t even have a bed.
One day, you sign up to be a deckhand on a ship heading to the New World. You don’t know what you’ll find there, the captain of your ship isn’t even sure if you’ll make it over there as he scarcely ever hears word from people who have gone and returned. But you take a risk and go anyways.
You spend months on a cramped ship with little to eat, working every waking hour as the ship is ravaged by storms because your country does not yet have a working concept of Hurricane Season. You’re sick, anemic even, because the citrus your ship picked up in Portugal only lasted for the first 10 days.
A cry from above “Land!”
Everyone who hasn’t died and isn’t too sick comes to the top deck to peer at the horizon, the first thing you see can scarcely even be understood by you.
It’s trees, as far as the eye can see, not only that but they’re massive. The wealth of timber in the New World was utterly astonishing to the average Englishman that arrived. For those who live in the US, we have a concept of this in regards to the Redwood Forest on the West Coast. This is what a true Old Growth Forest looks like.
The Redwood Forest only exists because westerners didn’t really get to California en-masse until ~1850. Logging was unrestricted for ~70 years until an effort was made to conserve the remaining Old Growth forest. Many people in the US today have a misconception that the trees in the Redwood Forest are a special type of tree that just get really tall. While yes, Sequioa Trees do grow taller than oak and pine and other common types, this is just how big trees get when you leave them alone for a couple hundred years.
All of America looked like this at one point. The leading export back to England from many of it’s American colonies in the 1600’s and 1700’s was lumber. The opportunity to cut these trees down and fashion civilization out of them was a gold mine for the early colonists. They may have arrived to the New World in a state of nature, but very quickly fashioned it into the civilization it is today.
We sit in a similar situation within crypto. In western finance, much of the tall trees have been cut down. Your bank has a high-yield savings account offering 3-4% APY, your employer offers a 5% match on your 401k. You might read an investment guide about how you can “save your way to a million in 20 years with compounding interest.” They don’t tell you that a million dollars in 20 years might barely buy you a certified pre-owned 2049 Toyota Corolla.
The pitiful forests of traditional finance. These are the concepts that the average westerner associates with financial literacy. You have no concept of how tall trees can grow.
The last ~2 years in this space may have been your Atlantic Voyage. Times have been lean, and opportunities that arise have been meager. Most of the focus has been on US Treasury yields, and liquidity being sucked out of risk markets. The opportunity for yield in crypto was non-existent.
This is no longer the case, every week dozens of protocols launch offering 3-4% a day, and an endless string of degenerate restaking opportunities is launching. Genuine DeFi is arriving to Bitcoin, and airdrops are all over the place for users that are involved. You are about to find yourself standing before an 800 year old pine tree if you have not found yourself there already. Month old Jpeg’s are selling for over 6 figures.
You don’t owe anything to the next generation. They’ll have their own frontiers to civilize, their own battles to fight, and they’re own men (and women) to become. You’re only obligation is to gain a piece of the pie for yourself. Within a hundred years colonial America went from a frontier to a stoltified established society that offered no real opportunity to anyone besides those that headed West. That’s how quickly you, and I can bring civilization to this frontier. These opportunities will not be here forever, they’re only here for as long as it takes for us to cut these forests down and harvest the yield.
I won’t lend you my axe, but I’ll show you how to swing one.
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