In Episode 317 of The Block Runner Podcast, hosts William and I-man unpack why this Bitcoin cycle felt like a failed rocket launch, how unrealistic expectations soured market sentiment, and what Bitcoin's diminishing returns mean for miners and the long-term security budget.
They then dive into the real world asset wave sweeping crypto: graded sports cards and Pokemon moving on-chain, Meteora and OpenSea entering the RWA arena, and what past collectible bubbles, from tulips to trading cards, teach us about speculative media.
Finally, they share NAT.fun updates: the second rocket launch, a move toward systemic periodic launches, fame-score based caps, and ten thousand dollars up for grabs for creators.
Disclosure: The hosts are founders of NAT.fun and hold positions in assets discussed. Nothing in this episode is financial advice.
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We've been discussing Non Fungible Tokens lately in our search to predict the next asset class to be the next speculative craze. NFT's in short seem to be slowly growing over time in volume. We look into the assets on Opensea to discuss the viability of these assets, why they become valuable and why they may become the catalyst to mass speculation. We also break down the differences in the current NFT standards for Ethereum for ERC721, ERC1155, and ERC998. Each created for a specific purpose to satisfy a particular game mechanic or style. NBA player, Spender Dinwiddie tokenized his NBA contract to receive funds up and pay his investors a 5% bonus on their investment. We discuss how this might be a common occurrence in the future. Finally, we discuss an idea we've been tossing around that could help bring a larger audience to Decentraland and at the same time create a valuable resource to the NFT economy.
We return with the first recording in 2020 and we discuss why Bitcoin might be pumping and speculate whether the conflict between the US and Iran has anything to do with it. We discovered that the origin address for the HEX project has exfiltrated almost all the ETH in several transactions at 1,337 ETH per transaction. 1,337 is LEET speak and a calling sign for trolling. We speculate that the exit scam has already begun. We follow up with John McAfee's bet on Bitcoin and how he decided to back out of the bet. Andrew Yang is the only candidate that is aware and has a policy on cryptocurrencies. He is undergoing an attack by mainstream media and omitting him from all mentions. Finally, we go over the winners of the latest Decentraland Game Jam competition.
In our next installment of our Mythical Creature series we are joined by Andreas Antonopoulos! In our discussion we dive into the events necessary to cause mass adoption of cryptocurrencies. With the adoption of permissionless currency, how will governments of the world cope with a censorship resistant monetary system? We also discuss how cryptocurrency could change the power dynamic of the currency world reserve currency - the US dollar. We keep hearing the economy is at an all time high, but is there a possibility we might be at a tipping point for the world economy? We’re fast approaching the Bitcoin halvening which will render the inflation rate smaller than that of the US dollar. We find out how this might affect the US dollar and Bitcoin itself. One of Andreas’ presentation included the concept of one network multi-chain solution that will help tie many of the technologies together in a cohesive network. Finally, we ask Andreas’ thoughts on NFT’s and the application of it in the gaming industry such as Decentraland.
The feeling of despair can sometimes be confused with a pattern on a chart. We show real examples of despair by the sentiment of cryptocurrencies from different locations of the internet. The feeling is very real and is being felt by many, this is why many of the predictions of the bottom have some weight. The recent crypto purge just illustrates an example of why the crypto community advocates for censorship resistant technology. We look into what might have caused such a coordinated attack and then we look into how we can mitigate another attack using LBRY which is a peer to peer network where you can find content. Finally, we take a look at the performance of the S&P 500 as well as NASDAQ over the past decade.
Today we go a little deeper in the NFT universe to bring on Joel Hubert and Mark Le, cofounders of Metalith.io. They are bringing the S&P 500 for the NFT space. Their first NFT on their platform is on the topic we tend to talk about a lot - Decentraland. We cover what aspects create value on land and how Metalith will help users understand how well the space is performing. We also discuss possible business models they could use and how the NFT space stretches to cover many aspects from collectibles to playable pieces that can traverse from game to game.