Sup, nerds!

Here’s what you’re getting in today’s edition:

• 💅 This is cool: If Nvidia and AWS had a Web3 baby...

• 🔎 This seems important: The largest market sell-off of '24

• 🤝 Partner: Pssst…got that dog in you? Let ‘em know.​

• 🔪 Let's dissect this: When is the BTC halving really going to happen?

Terms used in this edition (click for an explanation, or ask Web(GPT)3!):
Decentralized, Blockchain, Bull Cycle.

💅 This is cool:

If Nvidia and AWS Had a Web3 Baby...

In one sentence: A new decentralized marketplace for GPU power is being built, giving users access to 20-30x more GPU compute power compared to existing solutions.

This is like if Nvidia and Amazon Web Services (AWS) had a baby on the blockchain…

Confused? Same.

Let’s break things down, starting here:

You know how Nvidia started the year off at a whopping 1 trillion dollar valuation…then by March, it was worth a cool $2.2T??

You know why that happened? Cause folks want GPUs to run all sorts of AI models, games, crypto mining rigs, etc. — and Nvidia makes GPUs.

But that extra $1T in extra market value isn’t a sign of a healthy business as much as it is a resource constrained industry. Cause right now, all the GPU producers in the world cannot make enough chips to meet demand.

To get around the resource bottleneck — some businesses rent their compute power from the likes of AWS, which is an awesome service, but highly centralized and also suffers from the same resource constraints.

Which is why this new partnership between Aethir and Theta EdgeCloud caught our eye…

They’re essentially taking the Uber approach of ‘You have [constrained resource]? Join our network and earn money by sharing it.’

In Ubers case, it was spare seats in cars. In Aethir and Theta EdgeCloud’s case, it’s GPU power.

Not only will this new marketplace use blockchain to process payments and delegate GPU access, but it will also provide developers and enterprises with — get this:

Access to 20-30x more GPU compute power compared to existing solutions.

For new technology to really take hold — it can’t simply be ‘just as good’ as existing solutions — it needs to be way better.

And it looks like this new GPU marketplace may just tick those boxes.

🥇 Want the news before anyone else?

🔎 This seems important:

Babe, Wake Up! The Largest Market Sell-off of 2024 Just Hit.

In one sentence: The crypto markets took a nose dive over the weekend, BTC went from $71k to $61k, ETH went from ~$3.5k to ~$2.8k, and SOL went from ~$175 to ~$120.

We’re going to start this one by quoting ourselves from early December, because it’s eerily relevant…

ICYMI: the crypto markets took a nose dive over the weekend.

Bitcoin went from $71k to $61k, Ethereum went from ~$3.5k to ~$2.8k, and Solana went from ~$175 to ~$120.

So why’d this all happen?

We’ll start by reminding you that we’re not financial experts…

Instead, what we do here is:

Put our personal lives on the line, by pushing our daily screen time up to levels that multiple therapists have called “wildly unsustainable, and deeply unhealthy” — boiling the news down, so you don’t have to!

So, with that…

Here’re the top three factors cited by most big-brain pundits:

1. Inflation isn’t lowering as expected (which is bad for risk assets like crypto)

2. Pre-halving sell offs like this have happened like clockwork in each previous bull cycle

3. The Bitcoin ETFs had a rough end to the week, and were likely selling Bitcoin over the weekend

Oh and, we don’t know if this is correlation or causation, but:

The real market dive started around the same time news broke that Iran had launched a drone attack on Israel, sparking hyperbolic chatter about WW3 starting…it was all very “Russia/Ukraine Feb 2022.”

(See header image for chart reaction).

🤝 Partner:

Pssst…got that dog in you? Let ‘em know.

We got bored over the weekend, so we made this.

Benefits include:

• Deep unseriousness

• A dog, wif (but not limited to) a hat

• All sales support the newsletter (kinda like Patreon, but you actually get something in return).

Enjoy.

🔪 Let's dissect this:

When is The BTC Halving Really Going to Happen?

In one sentence: Because the average block time is not precisely known, companies are estimating the BTC halving to happen at different times.

Ever wondered why no one can agree on the exact time the BTC halving is going to happen?

As of this writing, we’re still yet to see the exact same countdown on any two sources (see header pic 👆).

So what’s going on?

Turns out, there are three elements to this:

1. The block (aka group of ~2000 transactions) at which the next halving occurs

2. The current block height (aka total amount of blocks processed to date)

3. And the average block time (aka how long it takes for a group of transactions to be processed on average)

Since the block at which the next halving occurs is a constant, that can’t be it…

While the block height may vary, it’s always known so the calculations should be consistent; so that ain’t it either…

The uniquely disputed one is the average block time (which sounds kind of boring, but gets more interesting as you dig deeper into it).

By design, the time to mine a block should be an even 10 minutes.

But the amount of computers mining Bitcoin changes constantly, meaning that sometimes that can be more than 10 mins, sometimes less.

What most halving calculators seem to be doing is taking the rolling average block time over some arbitrary period of time (e.g. the past 100, 90 or 30 days).

As a result, we get estimates that range all over the place - and the truth is no one will really knows exactly when the halving will occur, until the very last block is being mined.

Alright, now you know. Happy Monday!

The BTC Halving Explained