This episode is sponsored by Nexo.io.This time on “Speaking of Bitcoin,” correspondent George Frankly shares another surprising look at glitches in hu
This episode is sponsored by Nexo.io.
This time on “Speaking of Bitcoin,” correspondent George Frankly shares another surprising look at glitches in human behavior and what we can learn from them.
In this episode we explore the endowment effect, the phenomenon of collectible cryptocurrency wallets and more.
Credits
This episode was written, edited and performed by George Frankly with additional production assistance from Adam B. Levine. Music for this episode was provided by Gurty Beats and Jared Rubens. Art for this episode was created by Adam B. Levine/Pixelmind.ai
Transcript
Hello there – I’m George Frankly and I’m going to take a look at how even the best and brightest people can make truly stupid decisions and terrible predictions- and what we can learn from them. This is “Dare to be Stupid.”
This time on “Dare to be Stupid”: The Impossible Self-Appraisal, or “From Hemnes to Hodl”
A little while back, radio pundit and hobbyist Twitter self-owner Jesse Kelly bemoaned the softness of modern men. “Can’t believe there are men out there who don’t know how to work with their hands!” he tweeted. “I woke up this morning and built a shed for the backyard.”
A firm stand for principles of traditional masculinity or whatever. At least, as firm and masculine as a phonebooth-sized plastic snap-together Rubbermaid storage bin could be. Before he quietly deleted the tweet and photo and shuffled away, multiple commenters were happy to point out that his 6-square-foot Suncast-brand plastic tool shed was available for a cool two hundo at Home Depot and boasts “easy assembly in minutes.”
But let’s not chuckle too smugly at one person’s performative manliness because there but for the grace of God go all of us. Every human being shares the delusions of inflated self-appraisals of value and utility … though perhaps some of us more than others. When we do something with our OWN HANDS, as this paragon of testosterone did, we will almost always value the results a bit too highly.
Assessing value is vital to not just trade or business, but to every kind of decision-making. Whether we’re putting old furniture on Craigslist or deciding between two life-changing job opportunities, we’re appraising values and weighing them against others. It won’t surprise anybody to hear that the average person can’t perform flawless mental risk assessment, but it may surprise you how reliably we all sabotage our appraisals in the same ways. From our secondhand IKEA furniture to our long-game crypto wallets, the mental meter of worth and importance is tied to some universal human malfunctions.
Even money, no matter how far we distill it to a pure, perfectly fungible exchange medium, sprouts human traits when it passes through human hands. You don’t have to be a meticulous numismatist to notice that old and misprinted coins become more than just their fiat value. Even when money sheds its corporeal form and ascends to the spirit world of cryptocurrency, traces of unfungibility still remain. A bitcoin is a bitcoin is a bitcoin, but the movements of values create differences. Even when crypto coins are unserialized and stripped of individual delineation, their destinations have become more than the sum of their parts.
Wallet addresses are commoditized beyond their explicit asset value. Mintings of casascius coins, or physical bitcoins, featured public addresses on the forefront and private keys embedded under a tamper seal. The disclosure of all of the public addresses means that anyone can track the contents of all physical coin wallets freely, but so long as the coin is untampered it can be a hand-swappable unit of cryptocurrency – literally trading an entire wallet with the cash inside it. Those physical coins are now collectibles in two completely different contexts: the untampered coins with their crypto value and collectible markup, and then the wide secondary market of tampered coins as curios. They are literally compromised wallets – the private key is known by any previous holders. It’s a hollow coin with no safe utility but they are still numbered and limited pieces of crypto history and retain an inexplicable collectible value.
Context will always be key- that context could be the universal baggage of unmoved coins under scrutiny or the personal curiosity of keys to an empty kingdom. The nature of crypto is to preserve the ledger, the history of every movement, and I can’t think of a better way to define “history” than “context and baggage.”
Let’s back up and talk about that IKEA furniture. At this very moment I am blessed with a new house and burdened with an IKEA Hemnes Secretary Desk With Matching Hutch. There’s no spot for the latter within the former. It’s time to put it up for sale. The thing is tall. It is heavy. Other people are asking about $200 for similar pieces. But ours is in great shape. I installed extra shelves, some coat hooks along the top and made cutouts…
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