Messari Daily Brief Jan. 19, 2021 - Have Fun Staying Political

U.S. politics has been more or less all-consuming for the past year. We’ve never quite had a national psychosis around a single individual - on both sides of the aisle - quite like we’ve had around Trump. That will finally end tomorrow for a short time, at least.

Don't get me wrong: I’m not blind to reality. There are people who profit from anger, misinformation, and fear-mongering, so it's unlikely polarization in global politics will disappear overnight.

But for the first time, we have legitimate technologies that facilitate partial exit from the chaos. Social media allows us to partially exit the two-party extreme conversations of the mainstream media. Cryptocurrency allows us partially exit the unsustainable fiat realm. I’m bullish on tech-driven emigration as well. Miami’s Francis Suarez has provided the case study of how states and cities will begin to compete for domestic resources. New ideas like “technological democracy” will automate that process and fork the American experiment to new global jurisdictions.

I’m relieved and excited to have a new “boring” President who will at least start out on a more centrist footing than we’ve had in a while. But I’m still long structural chaos, short Western bureaucracy, and by necessity, long novel experiments in tech-enabled exit. Tech leaders may be fallible, but tech itself still offers us the best chance at a much brighter and more stable future.

Long BTC. Long ETH. Long DeFi. Long Web3. And long American as an idea.

Headlines that matter:

• INTEL: Binance unlocks $733mm BNB tokens to team, burns; Chainlink, Nucypher, Bitcoin Core software release notes
• Lyn Alden on why the Dollar System is broken (NLW)
• Bitcoin as a clean energy stimulant? (Stone Ridge pp 7-8)
• Tether FUD (stupid) vs. Tether FUD (interesting)
• CoinShares launching ETP on Swiss SIX (Decrypt)
• Gary Gensler confirmed as Biden’s SEC pick (CoinDesk)
• Blackouts hit Iran; government blames bitcoin mining (WaPo)
• Bahrain crypto exchange Rain Financial raises $6mm (CoinDesk)
• Alamed/CMS back $50mm round for maps.me (The Block)
• Daily Shade: "Money is just an information system for labor allocation; whichever has least error and latency will win.” -Elon