What Twitter and Bitcoin have in common
Twitter and bitcoin share an important similarity in that their success while it lasted was nothing but hubris. Realize that both companies were born from a virtual medium capable of making money off crap if there is detectable demand for it. Cardi B’s megahit single Wet Ass Pussy was proof of this. Twitter offered nonsense in the form of censorship only for members who delighted in skimming the Bill of Rights, especially the First Amendment. But it took Elon Musk, with unlimited amounts of damn money, to put a number on Twitter: $44 billion. Unfortunately for him, almost all of that “good will” seems to have disappeared. Nor is he likely to be comforted when it is discovered that the dark secret of Twitter’s overzealous ex-employees is that they can start their own Twitter with just a few million, a bunch of servers and a dozen high school dropouts working from home , paid $20/hour to code.
Cute little bird
So what are the notoriously spoiled workers so unhappy about? Leave it to an apparent millennial sympathizer reporting for The Wall Street Journal to excuse them with a high-minded quote uttered by no one in particular: “Employees said Mr. Musk pushed people to work well over 40 hours a week, but said they did the. I don’t feel like there was a compelling vision that justified it.” A compelling vision? Yes, sure. And exactly what exalted end did they see themselves serving under Jack Dorsey, Orwell’s darkest nightmare masquerading as a little blue birdie? Stay tuned on the blogosphere for more coverage of this and other topics of little interest to people living in the real world. What should please the company’s apparent workforce anyway is that Musk set an intergalactic record for overpayment. If Twitter had changed hands for, say, a still vastly overvalued $40 million, no one would have given a rat’s ass what his plans are for the company.
Which brings us to bitcoin, another rocket of hubris fueled by insane excesses of speculative money and greed. Its sensational rise was based on a sexy story invented by, for all we know, a Hollywood flack: Bitcoin entered the space-time continuum via an algorithm written by a mysterious nerd-cum-rock star known as ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’. His secret sauce was scarcity: there will never be more than 21 million bitcoins in circulation. An irony is that satoshi coins inspired more than 2,000 cryptocurrencies, almost all of which were rendered worthless by bitcoin’s nearly 80% drop.
Teenage millionaires
When bitcoin mania broke into gallop in 2021 spurred on by the happy tales of teenage millionaires, it was on course to become this era’s Tulip-o-mania, albeit on a global scale. The Murphy men who run our banking system cautiously signed on (though Warren Buffett suspiciously didn’t), warming up the press and the rabble with luncheon speeches that gave bitcoin a veneer of respectability. No one seems to have noticed or cared that the banks themselves had little or no skin in the game. Their huckstering was meant to get bitcoin off the launch pad and firmly established in the firmament of Ponzis and shingle-and-side chains. Then the supposedly smart money would meet up with the crypto mothership they had helped create.
Unfortunately, bitcoin’s pitch men have to start almost from scratch now that the second largest bitcoin exchange, FTX, has been embroiled in a scandal that is sure to widen. Its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, has gone from patron saint and second-biggest Democrat donor to ice skating in less than two weeks. You can bet he’ll reappear in a few years, claiming to have solved the nation’s energy problems with cold fusion. By then, bitcoin will have bounced down to zero, where all speculative manias will finally calm down.
