You Can become a Trillionaire with Bitcoin, but Not too Soon.
jk, just practicing my headlines ;)
Thank you, Lord, for this day. May it be used for your glory!
Good morning everyone and welcome to another edition of Inspiration Friday! Edition #27! I hope y’all have had a glorious week!
This week I have 2 articles about writing and 2 articles about some crypto news! Let’s jump on in!
Introducing Smart Services: Bringing Millions of Web2 Developers Into Web3 by Re-Imagining Smart Contracts
https://www.deso.org/blog/smart-services
Ok, so I won’t lie, this article is pretty technical, so I’ll do my best to summarize why this is so interesting.
First up, smart contracts. What are they and why do they need to be “re-imagined?”
Smart contracts are the web3 version of programs. It’s as simple as that. I mean, it’s more complicated than that, but it’s also as simple as that.
If you are lost on web3 and web2, let me clear things up a bit. Web3 is just a trendy way of talking about this new innovative idea for the internet.
Web1 was the beginning of the internet and was purely reading articles that big publishers could put out there.
Web2 was the innovation of social media. Now anyone in the world could put information out there, connect with others, and change the world.
Web3 is about ownership.
With web2, anything you post on social media or a blog or even your own website is actually owned by Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. They can shut you down and choose who will see your content.
Web3 wants to take the power away from the companies and give it to the people.
Ok, that was a tangent, but necessary to understand smart contracts and smart services.
There is an issue with web3, though.
To utilize this new web3 technology, you have to write software. That’s not new; you had to write software to build Facebook and Twitter too, but for web3 you have to write special software.
The difference is that now you have to write these smart contracts. This kind of software can be tricky because it’s written in Rust or Solidity (two languages not a huge number of developers know and can be tricky to learn) and you have to be careful how you write them because it costs money every time you run them.
That’s why DeSo, the decentralized social blockchain, which Diamondapp (the Twitter-like app I’ve been using), is introducing smart services.
This is a more centralized approach to creating decentralized apps without having to make new smart contracts.
Sounds complicated, right?
If you take nothing else, take this: smart services will allow pure web developers to create web3 applications without having to learn a new language or create smart contracts.
This will open up web3 to an entirely new ecosystem and hopefully get some more really talented people in there.
There are definitely some tradeoffs with smart services, but it will be interesting to see how it goes. I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this soon!
There’s A New Form Of Clickbait I’m Seeing That’s Highly Effective
This article was written by another popular online writer I admire named Tom.
Tom discovered a new trend and then wrote about this new trend, which probably made it even trendier.
The trend is “new” but definitely not a new concept. It reminds me of all the infomercials that right when you think they’re over add in the famous line, “but wait, there’s more!”
The trend is all about headlines.
In fact, Tom and many other successful online writers would argue that headlines are a huge part of online success.
How can you get someone to click your article over the thousands of others out there? The answer is headlines (or titles).
Headlines are very very important.
The new trend in headlines is to essentially give a little and withhold a little. The example Tom gives is this:
“Omicron variant cases soar around world, but still there’s a catch”
They give a little information about the article, but then reveal that there is more to learn. It makes you want to learn what that “catch” is, right?
Definitely an interesting strategy. I may have to try it and see what happens.
Bitcoin crash: Why are cryptocurrency prices falling in New Year?
https://www.financialexpress.com/market/bitcoin-crash-2022-cryptocurrency-price-fall-reason/2399732/
This is a good question, right? What happened to the $100K bitcoin target by the New Year? Now it’s floating back at $40K…which by the way is still 18% higher than it was this time a year ago. But still a long way off from 100K.
This article gives a few reasons as to why. I will summarize everything I’ve learned about the situation and some of the responses we’ve seen already.
So, I don’t know much about complicated trading, but apparently, the whole leveraged trading with bitcoin is a big thing. And it hurts all the normal investors.
The idea is that when bitcoin was on its way to hitting $100K, a bunch of overconfident investors took loans out against their own bitcoin in order to buy more bitcoin.
How does that work? I don’t know. What I do know is that if the price of bitcoin drops below when they took the loan out, then that bitcoin gets liquidated to cover the cost.
When bitcoin gets liquidated, that often affects the price in a downward trajectory.
So if you mix a ton of leveraged traders with a slight dip in price, it can create a massive domino effect where the price in bitcoin plummets because everyone’s leveraged bitcoin gets liquidated.
So the first reason for this bear market is that that happened.
The second reason is actually Omicron. When the new variant came out, all the markets dropped a little. Omicron creates more uncertainty in the world; will stores close again, will schools close again, etc. With uncertainty comes a drop in the markets.
Including crypto.
This article goes on to explain that they think we are in a transitional period with bitcoin adoption. We are going from normal retail investors to large institutional investors.
Once we see that adoption, the price will inevitably go up. Only time will tell when that happens, though.
The result of all of this, however, is that we’ve seen some major players buying a ton of bitcoin right now in this dip. And they will most likely make a ton of money. So that’s good for them, I guess. Maybe they can share?
The Writing Trends That Will Define 2022 (Get Fired Up)
https://writingcooperative.com/the-writing-trends-that-will-define-2022-get-fired-up-10b6d36b586c
This was a super encouraging article written by Tim Denning. It is an article about a lot of trends he’s predicting we will see in online writing during 2022.
Why was it encouraging?
It was encouraging because I feel like I’m doing several of these things already. It is also encouraging because he believes 2022 will be an amazing year to write online!
With the evolution of web3, he believes there will be more ways than ever for writers to be seen and get paid online.
In web2, you had to play to the algorithm. Medium, Twitter, or wherever you posted, you were a slave to the algorithm. If the algorithm said you could get views, then you did. If they said no, then you got 0 views. It didn’t matter how many followers you had.
That’s why he presses so hard on an email list over followers. Twitter followers mean nothing; 50,000 Twitter followers might not see your Tweet. However, 50,000 email subscribers, will 100% receive your email.
Whether they read it is a different question.
It is for this reason, Tim loves Substack! The platform is relatively new to the scene and growing fast. They are releasing some new features this year to help increase the views of people’s newsletters, and so it’s very exciting I already use Substack!
He also believes NFTs for writers will be a big thing in the future, which I 100% agree with and am already working on figuring out!
All that to say, I’m very excited to see how 2022 goes. Hopefully, it will be a great year for writers everywhere.
It’s also a great time to start writing online if that’s ever been a dream of yours!
Ok, that’s it for the week! Hope y’all have a wonderful weekend, and I’ll talk to y’all next week!