Hey! So, remember last week I was talking about lots of people potentially losing jobs because their employers are blind with crypto-fever and too stupid to make sure their businesses aren’t affected by volatile prices? Well, would you look at what just happened:
My main man Anton Merkurov of satoshi.fm was as genuinely stunned by this as I was. How could anyone working with crypto really rely on it as a store of value? Merkulov described this approach as something that can roughly be translated to ‘a very shitty way of doing business’. I couldn’t agree more.
Ned Scott, Steemit’s CEO released a video of himself and his puppy eyes talking about how the cryptocurrency market bottomed out ‘in a big way’ and ‘far further than we expected’. What he says next is outrageous:
‘While we were building up our team over the last many months, we have been relying on projections of basically a higher bottom of the market… Since that no longer the case we’ve been forced to lay off more than 70% of our organization’.
So, bear in mind, if you’ll ever get a job offer from a cryptocurrency-related company, this is the kind of people who you’re going to be working for. They had projections which they relied on. That means over 70% of their staff were fired because of an incorrect projection. And honestly, I don’t think anyone from the top tier of Steemit management was affected by this, and it was them who relied on a projection of a notoriously volatile and unpredictable market to sustain their business. And as always, it is the ordinary workers who ended up with no money, one month before Christmas.
It’s been exactly two weeks since the fall from $6,500 levels started, we’ve only scraped the under $4,000 levels twice and only briefly. And that was enough for them to lay off almost everyone. The irony is a cruel mistress, so on the exact same day, Ned Scott posted that video the market seemingly started recovering. On the same day when Steemit laid off over 70% of their staff, STEEM performed like this:
STEEM even outperformed bitcoin, which is by no means a common sight in this bear market. Steemit’s token is doing well, the market will recover soon AND they don’t have to pay salaries to a lot of people anymore. But once that market recovers and their FOMO kicks in, they’re going to start hiring new people to fill in those same positions. And that will happen in every organization that’s been firing people because of a two-week ‘crisis’.
I realize that in the last few weeks all I did in this blog was ranting about big money, big companies, irresponsible policies and ordinary people losing their jobs and money because of that. And since that’s become a recurring theme here, I’m going to continue on that path by discussing Amazon’s new Managed Blockchains platform. I saw a lot of people getting excited about this, but they really shouldn’t be. Amazon came into the blockchain space and it’s going to push everyone else out of it, as it always does.
Here’s the deal with Amazon: this behemoth of a company routinely kills small and medium businesses in every single market it comes into and unlike those small businesses, Amazon is always ready to lose money to gain market share. They either buy and acquire their competition or they slash their price to a point when it bleeds the competitors and small stores dry and then Bezos swoop in and buys whatever is left.
Amazon is creeping into every market and if it isn’t dominating it yet, it’s probably somewhere in the top 3. It has over half of the entire e-commerce market in the U.S. under its control, and eBay is trailing second with just 6.6%. Amazon is on the third place when it comes to things like digital ads, music, and video streaming. Netflix is on the second place in video streaming, but guess who owns Netflix’s servers? Yeah, that’s right, it’s Amazon.
More specifically, it’s AWS – Amazon Web Services. Their Managed Blockchains platform is part of AWS, which is basically a suite that provides all the online infrastructure a business might need. Server space, cyber security and now blockchain solutions. And make no mistake, Amazon dominates that market with a 51.8% share as of 2017. They host Netflix, Pinterest, Adobe, Airbnb, Reddit, and the CIA.
And now they’re entering the blockchain market, which is projected to be worth over $28 billion by the year 2025. That’s the entire market. Amazon itself is worth around a trillion dollars. And yet, they treat their employees like crap – you’ve probably read about warehouse workers having to piss in bottles because they just have no time for a bathroom break? Amazon recently started paying a minimum wage of $15 dollars an hour to its American workers. Sounds good, right? They’ve canceled all bonuses and awards to balance their books.
So I guess what I’m getting at here is that Amazon is a horrible company that kills other businesses and treats people like crap. In my eyes, the cryptocurrency and blockchain markets were trying to be different for a long while, but it seems that everyone has caved now. I guess every wide-eyed startup turns into a fire-breathing corporation at some point. It just makes me sad.
Not only that, but the market has been crashing for two weeks, the regulators are tightening their grip around the market’s neck, we just can’t catch a break lately, can we? Well, don’t worry, there’s a genius out there that will save us all along with the market. His name is Artur Lipatov, I have no idea who he is, but his hopeful post titled ‘How to save the cryptocurrency market? DECISION’ magically popped up in my Facebook feed.
In that post, he tells us about the ‘Pulizer prize’ and the ‘newspaper boys’ who back in the 19th century sold newspapers earning 3 cents a day. He also tells us a story of how they weren’t able to sell the unsold papers back to the publisher. And at some point, the publisher increased the prices at which ‘newspaper boys’ bought the newspapers and they went on strike. According to Artur, it wasn’t actually successful, the price remained the same, but the publisher agreed to buy back unsold papers from them.
So, to me, this doesn’t sound like an inspiring story about class struggle, strikes and sticking it to the man. It’s more about the man and corporations giving the lower class a bare minimum just so they keep quiet. What was the point of the story you may ask? He says it is a story about unification and that it should inspire us all to STOP SELLING BITCOIN FOR TWO WEEKS and then we’ll all be fine. In all seriousness, he’s like a mad preacher on a street corner. Here’s my favorite comment:
To the very few who are still reading. Most likely this was the last blog I’ve written for this platform, and if you’ve read this one and the one before carefully you’ll know exactly why. It’s been a very fun ride. Stay patient and HODL everyone.