The Cryptocalypse Chronicles, Vol. 1: A Timeline of the Coinerian Jihad
The struggle against the theology of avarice is commenced when Terra crashes into Luna.
Chroniclers of The Privatized Public Square1 (sometimes called “Twitter”) have assemble a timeline of the goings on of the past three long weeks of Our Year Of The Coin 13 (2022 C.E.).
MAY 9th - The Terraclysm
JUNE 12th - The Closening of The Celsius (Start of The Cefi Wars)
JUNE 14th - The Utterance of Zhu Su
June 16th - The Near Closening of the Finblox
June 17th - The Fall of the Tower of Babel Finance
JUNE 18th - Solend and the Whale (Start of The DeFi Wars)
June 19th - Horton Closes A Hoo.com (The Closening’s 1st CEX2)
June 20th - AEX and the Billion Dollar Bank Run (The Closening’s 2nd CEX)
June 21st - The Impermanence of Bancor’s Impermanent Loss Protection
JUNE 21st - The Battle of BlockFi: GodEmperorSBF and the Gamble of Gold
June 22nd - The Crippling of the Good Ship Voyager
June 22nd - The Otter and the Bank (Epic of Otter, Act I)
June 22nd - The Closening of the Hodlnaut
JUNE 23rd - The Closening of the CoinFLEX (The War of the Whales)
June 28th - Nexo Banks Back (Epic of Otter, Act II)
June 29th - The Light of an Otter Everlasting (Epic of Otter, Act III)
JULY 1st - The Rapture of the Voyager
DepositorsCreditorsJuly 4th - The Closening of the Vauld
Indentation indicates that the scribes currently believe the event to will turn out to have been less of a pivotal moment in future histories of The Cryptocalypse.
Similarly bold events are currently believed more important than non bold ones.
DREAD PIRATE KWON AND THE MESMERIC ANCHOR PROTOCOL
The value of TerraUSD, an algorithmic stablecoin3 that had for over 3 years been kept strapped to the dollar by the irrational belief that A) one could create an infinite number of a different coin called LUNA and B) there would always be someone who wanted to buy them, predictably collapses to $0. The value of LUNA, once traded for as much as $91 a coin, follows shortly thereafter. While it’s hard to get a precise number, the collapse of Terra/Luna evaporates somewhere between $18 and $40 billion dollars of the savings of hundreds of thousands of people in less than 72 hours. A Dread Pirate named Kwon was to blame.
By the time of his triumphant return to the nation state of Disneyland4, Dread Pirate Kwon’s long pilgrimage to the twin kingdoms of Palo and Alto had taught him both the psionic powers and the high profit margins involved in hypnotizing a citizenry with psalms of bar charts and hymns of blockchain. Given that he was very interested in those profit margins, Kwon started to make good use of those powers.
As the years progressed Kwon’s incantations progressed beyond bar charts and blockchains to include data frames, BI tools5, and eventually a super weapon he called The Anchor Protocol. With the aid of a multimillion dollar advertising budget provided in part by the brothren known as Three Arrows Capital and a cannibalistic troll named Coinbase Ventures Kwon carpet bombed Anchor’s mesmeric risk-free6 20% interest rate on savings accounts across the social media landscape. Kwon also learned to amplify Anchor’s hypnotizing influence by mastering the dark art of FOMO, which he summoned by chanting “have fun staying poor” on social media at anyone who doubted him.
The combined psionic power of the marketing budget, the FOMO, and The Anchor Protocol’s idolatrous 20% interest rates was too much for many members of the citizenry. Dread Pirate Kwon was able to hypnotize hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians into believing that his mastery of Coding Magic had made him the equal - nay, the superior! - of the wizards schooled in an arcane school of sorcery called The Mathematics7.
“If those wizards are so powerful”, the plebs reasoned, “why is Jim Simons the only one of them who was able to make a machine that prints money?”
After all, Dread Pirate Kwon’s machine seemed to print even more money than Jim’s. And Kwon was only 30.
Unfortunately for buyers of Terra and Luna, eventually the Dread Pirate Kwon himself fell under the spell of The Anchor Protocol. Every night as he slept its hissing, snakelike voice whispered in his ear fairytales of a future in which he, the Dread Pirate Kwon, would fly to a land called Burning Man, pass through The Innermost Circle of Dubstep, and emerge as the 2nd coming of The Elon. The Anchor Protocol so convinced the Dread Pirate Kwon of his Elonic status that Kwon did not heed warnings about the occasional rise of a terrible fire breathing behemoth called The Black Swan. Dread Pirate Kwon believed himself superior even to the Mathematicians. And when warnings had been sent to him by a group of lesser magi who called themselves Financial Engineers, Kwon, not realizing that Mathematicians generally don’t think that much about being poor, responded to their warnings with rage:
But these lower magi were persistent. They tried to warn Do Kwon that The Black Swan could not be defeated or even slowed down with by mere Coding Magic, as Coding Magic inevitably relies on assuming certain realities about the market continuing to hold steady even in the presence of The Black Swan’s reality distortion field. But Dread Pirate Kwon refused to even believe that The Black Swan existed. Not that it would have mattered, because Kwon also refused to believe that he wasn’t one of the smartest and richest men to have ever walked the earth. Being just 30 years old, Do had been a teenager the last time The Black Swan had raged across the land, fatally wounding a Leviathan called The Lehman Brothers with a single blow and smashing markets for legitimate securities like commercial paper just by glancing in their direction. Given that he was the kind of bro who believed neither in his own fallibility nor in forces outside of his own control, he had nothing to fear from The Black Swan.
MAY 9-13th: THE TERRACLYSM
In the end Do Kwon was in some sense correct: The Black Swan never woke from its eternal slumber in Our Year of the Coin 13. But on May 10th it did roll over and fart in his direction, and that was the end of Dread Pirate Kwon and his algorithms (and everyone’s money).
To be continued…
Coming soon: The Cefi Wars: Celsius Network And The Closening Of Time
Sometimes called “Twitter”.
“CEX” is short for “Centralized Exchange” AKA “a cryptocurrency market” AKA “a place where one buys and sells Bitcoins other cryptocurrencies. It’s different from a “DEX” (decentralized exchange) but one the amazing things about the world of crypto is that you can be immersed in for a very long time and still not fully understand a large percentage of the nonsense acronyms that pop up in vast numbers absolutely everywhere.
Algorithmic stablecoins are neither stable nor coins.
Talking about the Disneyland with the death penalty. And yes I know he lived in Korea but I don’t have any clever citations about Korea that don’t involve this video.
“Business intelligence”
Pronounced “high risk”.
The names of the subgroups of these wizards are unintelligible to commoners. The names of their orders can even be dangerous to say aloud lest you accidentally summon one. When forced to speak of them, commoners avoid calling them by names like Algebraic Geometer and Number Theorist. When forced to speak of, the common folk sometimes call it “Full Tenure”.
That was some funny chit, well. done..Had a Very Bright Buddy get knee-capped by the Luna spell..
& .'Preciate the your efforts & assistance to C-I unraveling & spyglassing that Kinesis Stellar chain....... it's all an ocean of x/o 's to aging mortals such as myself.