We live in a digital age
Even with all the databases and algorithms and AI and everything else, there is still exponentially more data than we know what to do with. That's because raw data can be theoretically organized in an infinite number of ways and we can arrive at an infinite number of conclusions based on that data.
In the capitalistic system we live in today, most data and even more organizations of that data are rendered completely useless. That's because a capitalist system needs to not only find value in this infinite swath of ones and zeros, but more importantly, it needs to capture that value and funnel it into the pockets of the developers. That's a very small subset of the sum total of data we have access to.
An example of this would be a social media website tracking our interests and then feeding us targeted advertising where we are much more likely to take the bait and buy the thing. There are so many other things they could be looking at, but the focus is where the profit can be made.
Would it be smart to perhaps track the bullies and flag threatening behavior? That's a highly secondary motive that's not going to get any attention unless the blowback becomes a problem. And in that case once again the only reason to do it is to mitigate the financial losses of that blowback, not because it's good for society.
The ultimate example of our system doing us dirty is almost certainly the medical industry. Anything in medicine that can't generate a profit is labeled scientific quackery and given no funding. Specifically: that means plants don't get studied very often because plants can't be patented (unless they are GMO lab-created).
Just look at how we 'cure' cancer.
We juice up the patient with poison and we hope that the poison kills the cancer before killing the patient. And the worst part is everyone just accepts that this is the best option, even though there is obviously a better option out there that we aren't even looking for because it's not as profitable. Very sad and downright disappointing.
Crypto fixes this.
Crypto allows society to be rebuilt with new incentives. When a community (or even a corporation) can gain direct access and control of a currency, the entire game changes. All of a sudden ALL value that gets created is immediately captured by the underlying currency. Developers no longer have to worry about capturing value given certain scenarios:
- The community subsidizes their work (@hive.fund does this).
- The developer has a big enough stake in the currency to make it more than worth building value and only gaining a small fraction of that value for themselves.
- The developer will gain a huge amount of reputation from building value which will in turn act as an investment that will pay off in the long run.
- The developer doesn't really care about making money because the underlying network has already made them fabulously wealthy or it is simply a passion project (basically altruism).
Can't rely on altruism.
While it's a nice thought that everyone will give what they can and only take what they need, that's simply just not how the world operates. To be fair, many good things have been done with charity and people rising up and giving without taking anything in return, but to rely on this would be a fatal mistake. Any platform that relies on altruism is destined to fail and will always be taken advantage of by the viruses, parasites, and takers of this world.
Rather, incentives must align in such a way that crypto pays citizens for doing the things society wants them to do. With access to smart/programmable money, the tool-chest is greatly expanded and many more ways of accomplishing this goal are opened up.
Misinterpreting the data
To be honest, this post was supposed to be about crypto price data aggregation, and HBD specifically. When something like coinmarketcap or coingecko tell us that HBD is worth $1.05 or $0.95... this guess from the data aggregation sites has been incorrect for a long long time now (maybe over a year), but yet I still see people looking at this number like it means something. The blind trust of centralized websites is alarming.
How do crypto aggregation sites work?
- They take an average of all the data available.
- The average price of all liquidity pools is output.
- Usually this works out just fine.
- With HBD it's always wrong.
- Why?
Because they aren't accessing the correct data.
The only liquidity pools the aggregators are using for HBD are Upbit and Bittrex, and Bittrex has been broken for months, while Upbit isn't even accessible unless located in South Korea (and even then the gap between buyers and sellers is 7%, which is wholly unacceptable for a stable coin). The real liquidity for HBD exists on the internal market and the wrapped pool on Polygon. This means that the listed price of HBD on data aggregation sites is always wrong unless it just happens to be correct on accident.
And still I see people on Discord being like, "HBD is 95 cents".
Interesting theory.
Go try to buy some at that price.
See what happens.
There are infinite ways to get it wrong.
That's the thing about organizing data. There are a million ways to get it wrong and only a handful of ways to thread the needle and extract useful information from the raw dataset.
Conclusion
Certainly there's a lot more to be said about this issue, but I seem to be tapped out at the moment. I suppose the main point to be made here is that data capture, organization, and profitization, is largely a thing that just happens in the background that most people don't even give a second thought. This is a very strange happenstance considering how important these things are in a digital age. Just like we don't think about our next heartbeat or our next breath we're going to take or the food we are about to digest, so too must most things in our world go ignored or we will be overwhelmed with a massive dataset that our brains have no way to organize in any kind of helpful manner. The data overload is real.
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