No… this “defacement” (if that it even was) is… permanent. End, updated portion.
First, just as a matter of factual, financially-literate reporting (from one of our other properties) -- this week's continued swoon in Bitcoin spot prices, while the US economy recorded an over six per cent core inflation rate in the last month, should kill off the notion that Bitcoin is a hedge against US inflation. Here's Coindesk (a booster outlet, even) on it:
. . .[B]itcoin has been on a nearly two-year bull run. The simple mathematics of reversion to the mean and/or the emotional gravity of profit taking made a pullback inevitable. That’s especially true because bitcoin is still quite clearly a speculative asset -- its current total valuation of nearly $1 trillion (wow) is based not on current adoption, but on scenarios of future growth. Any speculative asset is particularly vulnerable to uncertainty: Tesla stock, which is now largely a bet on Elon Musk inventing general artificial intelligence, is off roughly as much as bitcoin over the last 30 days.
That points to anxiety over the strength of the real economy, most of it focused outside the U.S. China in particular is beginning to show signs of a looming unwind, which would have serious impacts around the globe. But debt and other forms of leverage (even excluding leverage buried in stock prices) are at record levels basically everywhere. . . .
That is exactly right -- and Riot ought to be thinking about how it can manage to survive in a world in 2022 with a sub-$37,000 Bitcoin, and hash-rates now back above where they were BEFORE the China clamp-down. That means it is likely in 2022 to be more difficult to mine each coin, but each coin will only be spot-priced at about HALF of what it was just back on November 8, 2021.
In sum, Riot's model. . . can't work in that environment. Riot's capital expense foot-print is now four times what it was in March of 2020 -- the last nadir of crypto-winter. Even if it raises another $600 million in stock issuances (somehow on the NASDAQ), it will never break into profitability on an operating basis, then. F U G L Y.
But I've told you all that before, here. So -- on to my "more of that. . . WTH?!" story, then (for which the top right graphic above was baked).
I won't repeat the racial slur here, but to launch the limited time McRib return, McD's offered an NFT (to drive online engagement and likely track spending patterns by repeat, loyal households. . . i.e., not me). Kinda' like the toy in the Happy Meal box, but an NFT.
It seems a contractor hired to create it -- early on, long before launch, hard coded a racist slur involving the McRib sandwich into the blockchain addresses supporting that new NFT. It cannot be erased, and short of throwing the whole thing out, and starting over -- McD's cannot mute the racists' message.
Word to the wise -- "normie" brands need to do more diligence on the people they hire from crypto-world. . . as many are more like Ross Ulrich (and Craig Wright and Elon Musk, even -- as the less malignant version), and apparently very few are like. . . Dave Kleiman. . . or the real Satoshi. [Ask -- or search our archives if those names are unknown to you.] I will resist for now saying that most of the crypto-world has a alt-right/racist problem -- but there is evidence that a lot of it. . . does.
Cheers. Out into the sunshine -- windy here. . . but we are thinking of all those displaced and/or the families of the lost and dead, from the tornadoes to the south and east of us. . . awaiting good word, on those dear to us there -- smiling. . . .
नमस्ते
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