On November 9, the very day on which what has come to be known as Bitcoin put in its all-time closing high, we wrote that “we would not be too surprised to see the cup-and-handle formation Bitcoin has formed over recent months, because of the way it has formed, fail and turn against it badly.” At the time, six-figure price targets for Bitcoin were widely circulating, so we were certainly going against the predominant sentiment.
Since that day and as of this writing, the predominant so-called “cryptocurrency” has lost more than 36 percent of its USD-“value”. Our assessment at the time that Bitcoin is logically worthless was met with complete disinterest on the part of the Bitcoin community. Reading through utterances of all sorts and formats emanating from this community in recent months and weeks, which can essentially be reduced to the utterly unquestionable resolution to “buy the dip” no matter what, made it perfectly clear that we had to be right and the Bitcoiners had to be wrong. Which, if we conceded ourselves emotions in logical matters, we would find sad, as the freedom-craving impetus of the “Bitcoiners” is something that the logician can only have sincere sympathy for. So why was it obvious that the Bitcoiners must necessarily be wrong?
As we have outlined here, you are actual logic (just as any human being). As shown, the logical structure that is you is the identity of identity and non-identity – a (necessary) contradiction in it- or rather yourself. This structure contains, thus, the activity of distancing oneself from oneself (moving towards the aspect of non-identity). Followed, of course, by regaining the identity with oneself, a two-sided process constantly repeating itself in any mentally and physically sane human being, on all levels and in all respects, as we intend to comprehensively discuss on these pages over time. The two aspects are present not only in animated creatures, but in each and every structure of the universe. Solar systems self-constructing from protoplanetary disks and the structure – or rather the process – that is the atom immediately come to mind as illustrations.
Any endeavour of truth-seeking thus necessarily contains both aspects, identity and non-identity. With an emphasis on, or a predominance of, the aspect of identity, as, remember, “identity” appears twice in “identity of identity and non-identity”. The structure that is you is therefore asymmetric. Yet the self-distancing from oneself, which as an ability can count as a measure of what is commonly perceived as intelligence, cannot be absent in the truth-seeking process. Distancing oneself from a current conviction in order to challenge and reconsider it is what we call doubt.
It should therefore come as no surprise that one of the greatest logicians of all time, Dante, in Canto IV of the “Paradiso” of his Comedia, writes:
“Io veggio ben che già mai non si sazia
nostro intelletto, se ‘l ver non lo illustra
di fuor dal qual nessun vero si spazia.
Posasi in esso, come fera in lustra,
tosto che giunto l’ha; e giugner puollo:
se non, ciascun disio sarebbe frustra.
Nasce per quello, a guisa di rampollo,
a piè del vero il dubbio; ed è natura
ch’al sommo pinge noi di collo in collo.”
Of which a possible yet necessarily wanting English translation might be:
“I well see that our intellect is never satisfied,
If the true does not illustrate it
outside of which no truth ranges.
In it it rests, like a beast on its lair,
As soon as it has reached it; and reach it it can:
If not, every desire would be vain.
For that, in the guise of a scion, is born,
At the foot of truth the doubt; and it is [this] nature
Which t’ward the summit pushes us from crest to crest.”
The Bitcoiners had stopped to doubt their convictions about the phenomenon “Bitcoin”. They had even adopted a new expression which perfectly expresses this doubt-free attitude: “to hodl”, an originally inadvertent, then intentional-turning misspelling of the verb “to hold”, spelled out as “holding on for dear life”, signifying that selling for any reason be out of the question. Where doubt is shoved aside, truth is unattainable. We, for our part, are at no point one hundred percent certain about what we believe to be true in real-world matters. We question and welcome questions with regard to what we believe to be probably true at all times. Because logic dictates it. So whenever there are two sides, one being closed to doubt and one being open to it, you may wish to consider carefully which side to “put your money on”.
For what it’s worth: The psycho-logical state prevailing in the market for Bitcoin at the time of this writing, always presuming that it is indeed a market to speak of, would, according to the “rules of the craft”, yell out something like 20,000 USD as the next price target, a steep fall from the current 44,000, to be reached in fairly short order. Are we certain of this assessment? Not nearly one hundred percent. We consider it probable, and more “highly” than not. That’s all.
