This article on Bitcoin caught my attention...

A $1,800 Drop in Minutes: Bitcoin Volatility on Full Display    [Yahoo Finance]

Bitcoin soared as much as 39% this week to $13,852, the highest since January 2018. But it hit a brick wall around 4:30 p.m. New York time Wednesday, plunging more than $1,800 within about 10 minutes. Moments later, prominent cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Inc. reported an outage on its consumer site, which was resolved in under an hour.

Swings continued Thursday, with the coin anywhere from down 15% to up 4.8%. It was down 15% to $11,111 as of 12:23 p.m. in New York. Volatility in Bitcoin is near the highest levels since early 2018, when the bubble was bursting.

Analysts said this was likely a sign of things to come.

Sorry, just couldn’t help myself when I grabbed this photo of the Cyclone rollercoaster. Had to isolate these two gents, not to diss but out of respect. This is authentic joy, in a world where that can be mighty hard to come by.

Hey, I’m Big Lou … I’m just like you. Except rollercoasters make me too dizzy to ride these days.

The rollercoaster nature of Bitcoin is a feature, not a bug.

It is not to be wished away or adulterated. It is to be celebrated. It is an integral and authentically joyful part of the experiential or performance art that IS Bitcoin (BITCOMP).

People always think I’m trolling or dissing when I call bitcoin a work of art, but they couldn’t be more wrong. It is my highest praise. The creation of good art is – in my opinion – what we are put on this earth to do. It is our highest calling.

I’m totally serious about that, btw.

There is lasting value in good art, because it is a very scarce thing and it never gets used up. The notion that Bitcoin would ever “go to zero” is ludicrous. Good art is always worth something.

But how do we measure that something … how do we put a price on the value of good art at this particular moment in time? It’s a REALLY tough question.

Why? Because we don’t have a toolkit for it.

We have plenty of toolkits for measuring cash flows, both current and prospective. We have plenty of toolkits for measuring the “fundamentals” of this thing or that thing that we want to buy or sell. We can argue about whether the price we ask for this collection of fundamental metrics is too high, or whether the price we bid for this collection of fundamental metrics is too low, but there IS a shared conception – a common knowledge – for the process of pricing the value of “fundamentals”.

But there are no cash flows to art. There are no fundamentals to art. There is no common knowledge – what everyone knows that everyone knows – on valuation metrics for art.

There is only story. There is only narrative. There is only how story and narrative make us FEEL.

Again, I don’t say this as a put-down. I say this in awe.

The price of Bitcoin, like the price of any great work of experiential or performance art, is entirely based on narratives.

The price of Bitcoin is entirely based on how these narratives make us FEEL.

Gold, too.

Over the past few months, we’ve developed a new toolkit for measuring stories and narratives, for moving beyond conditioning attributes like sentiment and identifying structural attributes like attention and cohesion.

It’s a major advance in what we call the Narrative Machine.

We first wrote about this new toolkit here, with an application to stock market sectors.

And most recently here, with the results of our test of that application.

We’re now ready to turn this toolkit on Bitcoin and gold, to see what the Narrative Machine can tell us about the price of both.