Sup, nerds!

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

• 💅 This is cool: Social platforms aren't going to like this...

• 🔎 This seems important: Bad news continues…but crypto rebounds?

• 🤝 Partner: Save big on turnover costs with Express Employment Professionals​​

• 🔪 Let's dissect this: Another indicator that BTC may soon rise

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

💅 This is cool:

Would You Sell Your Social Data To AI Companies? (You’ll Soon Be Able To)

In one sentence: Masa, a decentralized AI network, is launching a ‘contribute-data-to-earn’ model — where you download an app, share your social data, and earn token rewards in return.

So, you’re probably familiar with the concept of decentralized compute power…

You let folks access your computer’s processing capabilities → you earn crypto in return.

The concept has gained a lot momentum ever since the AI boom started — cause Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT require a whooole bunch of compute power to run.

(Enough to make crowd sourced compute power make sense).

The other side of the AI equation — the side that’s talked about most, but rarely paid for — is the data used to train these models. Right now, most LLMs are being trained for free on the internet’s collective content archive.

Masa, a decentralized AI compute network, is launching a ‘contribute-data-to-earn’ model — where you:

• Download an app

• ‘Contribute data in one click’

• And earn token rewards in exchange

Which is very cool! But also brings two big questions to mind:

1. If AI companies can already get this data for free, why would they all of a sudden start paying for them?

2. What data are folks incentivized to contribute (and what makes it so valuable)?

Well, the Masa app isn’t live yet — but we do have a press release that sheds some light on the concept, and helps answer those questions.

First, what we’ve stitched together from the press release:

There’s a huge amount of online data that is walled off, and those walls are getting higher every day…

Now that these LLMs (and the training data that powers them) are becoming so darn valuable, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, etc. are incentivized to block AI companies from scraping their data, and instead use it to build their own LLMs (e.g. Facebook’s Llama, and X’s Grok).

Masa finds a side door into these walled gardens, by incentivizing users to grant access to their social accounts (X, Discord, YouTube, TikTok, etc.), and — if they choose to — profit by selling this access to third parties.

Second, a wild guess at the future:

The internet is a mess of information, which contributes to AI ‘hallucinations’ (aka making stuff up), like this.

At some point, someone’s going to make a marketplace for vetted data on a range of topics, so that reliable use-case-specific AI models can be spun up.

This could be a first run at such a concept.

Our takeaway:

Being able to profit from our personal data, instead of just giving it away for free?

That’s a nice option to have.

🥇 Want the news before anyone else?

🔎 This seems important:

The Bad News Continues…but Crypto Rebounds?

In one sentence: Yesterday morning, the German gov. offloaded another 3,100 BTC (~$178M), and have a tidy 26,000 BTC (~$1.5B) left to go…but somehow, the crypto markets went up during trading hours.

You know your older cousin’s childhood friend, Kaylen?

The one who would constantly put his body on the line to perform daring stunts, all in hopes of a quick laugh — and would somehow walk away scratch free, every time?

No? That’s a highly specific anecdote which is clearly based on our own lived experiences?

Well, even so — you know the ‘Kaylen’ archetype.

Right now, Bitcoin and most of the other major crypto projects are giving ‘Kaylen energy.’

Cause the major narrative driving the most recent market sell off — the German government’s fire sale of seized BTC (which we covered Tuesday)?

It got worse.

Yesterday morning, they offloaded another 3,100 BTC (~$178M), and have a tidy 26,000 BTC (~$1.5B) left to go.

…but somehow, the crypto markets went up during trading hours.

(Kaylen energy).

This could be short lived — but for now, it indicates that there’re enough interested buyers that are happy to ignore this bearish narrative, and not only absorb the selling pressure, but outpace it enough to push prices up.

Now, lets all join hands and pray it holds up.

🤝 Partner:

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🔪 Let's dissect this:

Another Indicator That BTC May Soon Rise

In one sentence: Typically when the Bitcoin hash rate bottoms out, so does the price of BTC - and right now, it looks like the Bitcoin hash rate has bottomed out.

There’s tea leaves, there’s astrology, and then there’s the Bitcoin hash rate.

None of them are a perfect indicator of the future, but some believe they’re pretty close.

We don’t know too much about tea leaves or astrology, but here’s what the Bitcoin hash rate is:

The hash rate is a measure of the total computational power used by Bitcoin miners to process transactions and secure the network.

(Which by extension indicates how easy or difficult it is to mine BTC).

Right now, Bitcoin’s total hash rate has declined to 556 exahashes per second (EH/s), down from 658 EH/s in late May.

As a result, the Bitcoin network has automatically adjusted its block-mining difficulty down by 7.8%.

What does this all mean?

In short, typically when the Bitcoin hash rate bottoms out, so does the price of BTC.

Long story longer: if the price of BTC increases, transaction fees will also increase. As transaction fees increase, mining becomes more profitable, motivating miners to contribute more computational power, increasing the Bitcoin hash rate.

Is a bottomed out hash rate a perfect indicator that the price of BTC is about to rise?

Absolutely not!

But we sure hope things bounce back up.

Bitcoin Hashrate Explained