Weekend Reading #106

This is the hundred-and-sixth weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 20th February 2021.

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What we're doing.

Never mind Bitcoin (which hit 1 trillion dollars in market capitalisation this week) but has anyone been watching the copper price? It surged this week through $4 a pound for the first time since September 2011. What does this tell us? Reflation? Inflation? Or both at this point in time? The performance of mining stocks has been breathtaking, especially the pure-play copper producers of which there are not many. With investment in new supply having dwindled since the peak of the previous cycle in 2011, the tailwinds for prices seems to be there. How long does it last? We don’t know but we will enjoy it while it lasts.

Our tech development continued apace this week with the development of the mobile version of our EMS. This is a feature we have had lots of interest in and set about building following a number of requests we received after our initial outreach.

If you are interested in trading markets from your hot tub or the golf course, give us a call!

What we're thinking.

With much of our development team out in snowy Athens, we regularly find ourselves using the phrase, “It’s all Greek to me”. However, this week we stumbled across an article explaining many of the common phrases we use today were indeed coined by William Shakespeare through his plays. Interestingly, this phrase originates from the play ‘Julius Caesar’ in Act I Scene II as Casca exclaims, “those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads; but, for mine own part, it was Greek to me”. Likely much the way we can feel at times reading through our Tech channel on Slack.

We wrote last week about Beeple, the preeminent NFT artist whose digital pieces have brought the scene to life. This week Christies announced their first ever sale of a pure digital NFT token and it came as no surprise to see Beeple as the artist featured in the sale. The piece is a collage of 5,000 of his “everyday” works. The auction is expected to set a record for a piece of NFT art and a real statement that NFT art needs to be taken seriously in the “real” world. On top of this, we came across this superb origin article on Beeple himself, AKA Mike Winkelmann, in Esquire magazine. Thank you to Chris Leone for the link.

While on the subject of pictures - we were sent this meme from our friend, Murat Namli, in Istanbul. It shows former Turkish finance minister (and President Erdogan’s son in law), Berat Albayrak, appearing on Mars in a photo taken by the recently arrived Perseverance Rover. We had a good chuckle, given that since his obscure weekend resignation all those months ago, Albayrak hasn’t been seen or heard from. This has led to all sorts of rumours surrounding his whereabouts. The fact he has appeared on Mars is comforting.

And finally many of you will have read our whitepaper written over a year ago now entitled, “The Theory of Nachas”. In this paper we explored the nature of a utility token and what the implications are for a new type of incentive instrument. We gave a case study involving Binance coin (BNB), which is the native token for the Binance ecosystem. One of the many applications of BNB is as payment for transactions executed on Binance Chain, its native smart contract platform. In recent weeks, activity on Binance Chain has exploded as the cost of transacting on Ethereum has skyrocketed. This has led to a dramatic rally in BNB’s price from around $40 per coin to over $300 at the time of writing. BNB is now the third most valuable coin behind Bitcoin and Ethereum. Whether Binance Chain stands the test of time remains to be seen but right now one cannot deny the appeal.

What we're reading.
This week we continued to establish our dominion over Chenarus in the game DayZ as we finally moved to explore the game’s faction system. Accompanying each of the quarterly updates is a full server wipe giving everyone a blank canvas to secure what loot they can and prepare for war. The wipe took place this week following a frantic hurry of users at the trader to cash in on their soon to be gone supplies. As the new season kicks off, alliances are forged, and bases fortified. There was a sense of renewal and opportunity to make it big as this time, our once small faction has expanded rapidly. Flying the symbolic red colour of our Three Body logo, we look forward to continuing our fight.

What we're reading.

Extra, extra, hear all about it – unless you get your news from Facebook and you’re based in Australia (or want to read content from Australian news sources). Facebook’s snub of impending Australian regulation aiming to make them pay for the news content featured on its site by calling their bluff has been decried all over the world as an affront to a free internet. Yet from this incident, two salient points about the nature of the internet emerge. The first, as has been brilliantly articulated by Wired magazine, is that the internet probably was never “free” to start with, and that what Facebook has chosen to do has revealed that true nature: an internet built and shaped by the goals of Facebook and Google’s advertising businesses (remember “Senator, we run ads.”?)

The second revelation is how dependent the news agencies are on Google and Facebook for distribution of content that they produce. For sure, world famous publications like the New York Times, the Financial Times or National Geographic will always carry the brand equity they’ve built over the decades along with a loyal following of subscribers. Yet over time, if the articles they put out don’t feature on search results, then who will be the paper boy calling out at the street corners in an era of digital media? If a fantastic article is written which no one reads, was it written at all in the first place?
We often talk in this newsletter about the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. Our reading habits are varied, and we often have both on the go. But one of our favourite genres is that rare beauty of a book that manages to blend the two. By this we mean non-fiction that’s so good, so gripping, that it reads like fiction.

We finished one such masterful work this week when we raced through Ben McIntyre’s, The Spy and the Traitor, which is advertised as “The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War”. Well, we’re no experts, but it’s hard to disagree with that assessment.

The book tells the true story of Oleg Gordievsky who was the most significant British agent of the Cold War. For 11 years, with astonishing success, Gordievsky spied for MI6 on the USSR. Even more astounding was that in 1985, after Gordievsky was hastily recalled from London to Moscow by his suspicious bosses, British intelligence officers helped him to escape. It was the only time that the spooks managed to exfiltrate an agent from the USSR.
The book tells this almost-unbelievable tale in gripping detail. It was one of Bill Gates' Top 5 books of 2020 but the highest praise we can give it is not to review it ourselves but to allow (in our opinion) the greatest thriller writer of them all to give his short assessment. As Le Carre said of this book, it’s “the best true spy story I have ever read.” He should know and it’s hard not to agree with him.

Our straight-up fiction fix this week came from The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2020. It is a remarkable read that’s set in Jim Crow-era Florida in the 1960s. It tells the tale of two boys, Elwood and Turner, who find themselves incarcerated at a hellish reform school with no way out and no future to be talked of. It is a hard-hitting book, memorable for many of the wrong reasons, but a vital and oftentimes comic read, speaking of a dark time in American history that feels so distant but is, in fact, only a generation or two past.

The book was a follow up to Whitehead’s brilliant The Underground Railroad, another Pulitzer winner, and equally impactful. Neither are comfortable reads, but both should be essential.

What we're watching.

This week we finished Ted Lasso, on Apple TV. It is a wonderful series – full of fun and deeply poignant at the same time. It tells the tale of an American football coach hired by a struggling Premier League Football club as manager despite knowing almost nothing about football (soccer). We really enjoyed this more than anything we’ve watched in a long time. Simply fantastic.

Also this week we had the pleasure of re-watching one of our favourite documentaries of all time. Man on Wire chronicles the audacious tale of Philippe Petit whose life ambition was to high wire walk between the Twin Towers of New York's World Trade Center, a feat he somehow managed to accomplish in 1974.

The film is beautifully shot with spellbinding cinematography and music throughout. Petit is the undoubted star of the show, and his charisma and lust for adventure make anything (even walking on a 1-inch-thick tightrope between the tallest buildings on earth) seem eminently possible, if not simple and enjoyable. His joie de vivre is intoxicating and, even if you’re not into high wire walking, his energy and zest for life can't help but make you get excited about any goal you might be seeking to accomplish, however big or small.

It is all the more poignant as much of the film takes place at the summit of the World Trade Centre, a magical place amongst the clouds that, sadly, no longer exists. Petit’s film is both testament to his spirit and a wonderful portrait of one of history’s most iconic buildings.

Talking of favourite things ever, this week we were stumbling through YouTube when we hit upon what must be one of our favourite Oscar acceptance speeches of all time. Yes, it’s a niche category, but if you’ve never seen Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, or Russell Crowe, or Cuba Gooding Jnr. winning Oscars and giving their heartfelt, full-blown Hollywood words of thanks, then treat yourself to half an hour of movie magic this weekend and dive into the footage.

We’ve been talking about him in this newsletter quite a bit of late, but in 2014 when Matthew McConaughey won the Oscar for Best Actor for his performance in "Dallas Buyers Club”, you’d have thought he’d have left his best performance on film. Well, the show he puts on up on stage when collecting the 13-inch, 24-carat gold statuette is something pretty special, too.

What we're listening to.

This Uncommon Core conversation with Matti and Fiskantes at Zee Prime Capital touches on a subject that we’ve been intrigued with for quite some time now – memes. In this podcast, they discuss how memes have become a core part of crypto twitter, driving and reflecting – often reflexively – the sentiment and emotions in the market. Do memes create or diminish nuance in messaging? What emotions do the elicit? And most importantly, at an aggregate level, what actions happen as a result of exposure to a meme?

The conversation on memes inadvertently took us back decades to what was probably the FIRST appearance of memes in internet history: “All your base are belong to us.” At a time when short videos came in the form of GIFs and Flash animations (and a full-blown DJ mix), it is equally fascinating that this went viral no thanks to a forum, inside jokes and sharing that went out of control (the archived version of the article in Time magazine that covered the meme back in 2001 tells the story here). Sounds familiar?

Yet none of this is something exclusive to “crypto twitter”, although one could argue that it is most pronounced there. As Stratechery’s Ben Thompson writes, the impact of memes is real, from meme stocks (like Gamestop) to a meme president, to the master of memes himself, Elon Musk who, when asked during his appearance on Clubhouse a couple of weeks ago, gave this reply to a question he was asked:

Question: It is safe to say that you might be the master of the memes, and in fact you had a quote that “Who controls the memes controls the universe.” Can you just explain what you meant by that?

EM: It’s a play on words from Dune, “Who controls the spice controls the universe”, and if memes are spice then it’s memes. I mean there’s a little bit of truth to it in that what is it that influences the zeitgeist? How do things become interesting to people? Memes are actually kind of a complex form of communication. Like a picture says a thousand words, and maybe a meme says ten thousand words. It’s a complex picture with a bunch of meaning in it and it can be aspirationally funny. I don’t know, I love memes, I think they can be very insightful, and you know throughout history, symbolism in general has powerfully affected people.

Seems like in the end, all our brain are belong to meme. And in this market, LOL nothing matters.

Edward PlayfairFebruary 22, 2021