Pundits who ‘know’ crypto are donkeys and asses
Today was the first time in my so-called career as a writer that one of my many editors has called me a donkey.
That’s not because of my hee-hawing or hanging tendencies, but because I failed to file my copy on Christmas Eve. When you’re busy making plans etc.
Since then I’ve been waiting for publication, annoyed at my editor and his elongated Christmas hiatus, when all along I might as well have been braying at the moon; I had forgotten to press send. Yes, that is still such a thing.
Once I’d realised my mistake, I had intended to update my two-week-old piece, something I thought would take me a few minutes and I could go back to making those plans.
Obviously, a fortnight is a long time in crypto and none of what I had then written makes sense anymore. In the prospective column I had decided to make a prediction myself about the price of cryptos in 2021 – a contrarian opinion because I hate crypto predictions… but I’m a Modernist and that type of thing turns me on.
I cited the more-than-irritating-than-my-editor medium of, er, Medium and that channel’s daily newsletter. Wherever I looked and sometimes it really was complex and Oedipal, I could not help being drawn in.
With a vested interest in DeFi and concomitant crypto stories that I had selected when I first set up my daily Medium advent, I made a great mistake in doing so. But it’s full of nutters who can’t get published anywhere reputable and I’ve now consigned it to death – the promotions section of my Gmail.
Outlandish as possible
It’s always full of predictions, usually the most outlandish as possible with FUD and HODL vying in a dance of death that says $144,000 or zero for Bitcoin. Haters and lovers locked in, trying to out-predict everybody.
It’s not just on Medium, it’s all across the socials. Wherever you look, polarities and it’s not intellectual debate about what could be transformational for the world, it’s just weird crackpot theories that would be better suited for the likes of Breitbart and self-published Carrot and Cabbage News.
But it niggles my mind because of that vested interest I have – I have skin in this game. I know that crypto journalism is improving, so I do click when I see an outrageous prediction, it seems like determinism is alive and well. I’m just a dupe, like all of us.
City PM should be commended for supporting Crypto AM. I know several newspaper publishers who are trying to replicate its model including one in particular that takes Forbes’ contributors model as their inspiration. Now there’s independent journalism for you…
Decrypt is another crypto outlet that has hugely improved in 2021. CoinDesk, The Block and even Coin Telegraph are consequently raising their game.
There aren’t as many donkey-writers in crypto as there used to be apart from those on the aforesaid Medium – a brand that should have nothing to do with analytical writing and more to with seances and crystal balls.
And I mean crystal balls figuratively (I think that’s the word) when it comes to Bitcoin predictions on Medium. It’s actually worse than FUD or HODL, it’s much worse than that. End of the world stuff or change the world stuff with crypto and decentralisation.
Clickbait all of it. Huge figures, low figures, so-and-so-said that.
So, my initial pre-Christmas article was going to make its own prediction and that was crypto was going to take a dive again in 2022 and that would probably happen in March 2022 after a slow rise in Q1.
Regulation ready to be signed off in different territories, tax authorities finally realising they need a slice of New Profits, interest rates on the rise (not only inflation) and a pre-Christmas dip that would produce a bounce in January.
Well… how’s the donkey now?
It’s coming to the end of the first week in January and earlier today Crypto AM reported that Google searches for ‘Sell Ethereum’ were up 1,000% over the last 24 hours. The market is now in firmly bull territory and, of course, my predictions were bunk as well as bull.
I’m pleased to put the record straight even though I didn’t get to publish before Christmas. I know nothing, I’m no better than a Medium ‘writer’ with 12 followers, I cannot play with my balls to tell the future and I should never have gone down that road.
Once upon a time there was an Arsenal defender called Tony Adams who, before he rose from the ashes of alcoholism with the best example of somebody defending himself, he was often asked why he had the nickname of ‘donkey’.
They ‘aw, they ‘aw, they always call me that, he would softly whinny and so, I also softly whinny and neigh.
I’m a donkey, and my editor was right. What was I thinking? He should have ‘aw, ‘aw, ‘aw’, always called me that.
Monty
Monty Munford is a tech journalist and advisor to the Sienna Network project.
He is a keynote speaker/emcee/moderator/interviewer at prestigious events around the world and has spoken at more than 200 global events interviewing figures such as the late John McAfee, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Steve Wozniak (twice in Beirut and Vienna), Kim Kardashian (once in Armenia), Ghostface Killah, ZZ Top, Guns N’ Roses and many others.
He was previously a weekly tech columnist for Forbes in New York, the Telegraph in the UK and continues to write regularly for the BBC, The Economist, The FT and… City PM.