📔 Weekly Journal: Fiat vs Porsche NFTs 🏆🏁🏎
[6 min read] Your guide to getting ahead on the digital frontier (& the weekend!). Today, the usual market news as well as Fiat's NFT release success and why it was so much better than Porsche's.
Welcome to this week’s Weekly Journal 📔, your guide to the latest news & innovation in emerging technology, digital assets, and our exciting path to the Metaverse. This is week 53 of the 520 weeks of newsletters I have committed to, a decade of documenting our physical and digital lives converge.
New subscribers are encouraged to check out the history & purpose of this newsletter as well as the archive.
Enjoy your weekend! 😎
Ryan
Here’s what you’re getting today:
📈 Market update: Everything up, bringing El Salvadors 2,700+ BTC investment into profit 🍾
🗞️ Interesting news: FIAT unveiled the "FIAT Pass," an open mint strategy, attracting 55,000. We explore the stark contrast to Porsche’s January NFT launch. Also, Harvard’s new Quantum computer breaks record.
👓 Read of the week: Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin’s new philosophy of techno-optimism.
🎥 Video of the week: How to use an AI-powered synthetic creative director to design a campaign for Ikea.
🤖 AI: Google DeepMind has unveiled Gemini, its new family of AI chatbots to rival OpenAI’s GPT series.
✅ Weekly poll: Help choose the emerging tech topic for Wednesday’s showcase.
🤑 DCA with me: Follow my regular $50 weekly investing in an emerging asset class.
Market Update
In September 2021, El Salvador made history by becoming the world's first country to acknowledge Bitcoin as an official legal tender. Since then, the nation has engaged in bitcoin investments, currently possessing more than 2,700 BTC in its treasury. With the recent increase in Bitcoin price, this investment flipped into profit! Congrats President Bukele 🍾
🔥🗺️ 7-day heatmap below. Green much? 😏
🎭 Crypto Fear and Greed Index is based on volatility, social media sentiments, surveys, market momentum, and a few other bits and pieces. Still in the Greed zone as expected with this pump.
Interesting news from this week🗞️
👍🏻 In November, FIAT unveiled the "FIAT Pass," an open mint strategy, attracting 55,000 customers. Emphasizing Web3 as a loyalty and sales channel, FIAT's approach is inclusive, offering free, dynamic, and soulbound membership NFTs. Accessible via email and credit card, it fosters a community invested in brand loyalty.
👎🏻 In contrast, Porsche's January Web3 entry targeted a select community, demanding Web3 wallet connections and offering limited, higher-priced NFT drops. The release itself was botched with the website crashing any poor communication. The comparison underscores FIAT's inclusive, dynamic loyalty model versus Porsche's exclusive, static approach in the evolving Web3 landscape.
An excellent case study here:
✈ This week El Salvador introduced 'Freedom VISA,' targeting bitcoin and crypto millionaires. The program grants residency to 1,000 individuals annually investing into El Salvador with at least $1 million in bitcoin or tether stablecoins. Applicants pay a $999 non-refundable fee in BTC or USDT, handled by Tether Global. El Salvador, the first to adopt bitcoin as legal tender, aims to attract foreign investment, potentially receiving over $1 billion yearly. The initiative aligns with President Nayib Bukele's strategy to diversify income sources and reduce reliance on the U.S. dollar.
🍾 In September 2021, El Salvador made history by becoming the world's first country to acknowledge bitcoin as an official legal tender. Since then, the nation has engaged in bitcoin investments, currently possessing more than 2,700 BTC in its treasury. With the recent increase in Bitcoin price, this investment flipped into profit
⚛ Harvard and QuEra researchers have developed a quantum computer with a record number of logical qubits, essential for error-free calculations. Using lasers to manipulate rubidium atoms, the team created 48 logical qubits simultaneously, more than ten times the previous record. This achievement represents a significant stride towards practical and error-tolerant quantum computing.
👓Read of the Week
Last week, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin published a lengthy blogpost outlining a new philosophy of techno-optimism called d/acc, where 'd' stands for decentralisation, defensive, and/or differential, and "/acc" is a trendy shorthand for "acceleration." Buterin's philosophy advocates a deliberate and balanced approach to technological development, prioritising defence, decentralisation, and human flourishing. In response to Marc Andreessen's "Techno-Optimist Manifesto," Buterin distinguishes his position by acknowledging potential negative impacts of technology, such as privacy erosion and authoritarianism. Both agree on technology's role in human progress but differ in their emphasis on collaboration and intentional steering.
Read it all here: “My techno-optimism” by Vitalik Buterin
🎥 Watch of the week
The video illustrates how to leverage OpenAI's new Assistant capabilities to build a synthetic creative director. Using Cannes Lions case studies, it is employed to design a campaign for Ikea, highlighting the potential of AI assistance in the creative process.
AI 🎨🤖🎵✍🏼
Google DeepMind has unveiled Gemini, its new family of AI chatbots to rival OpenAI’s GPT series. Gemini Ultra, the largest model, surpasses OpenAI’s GPT-4 in various tasks, with availability through the Bard Advanced AI chat feature next year. Gemini Pro is now accessible through Google’s Bard chat, and Gemini Nano is designed for Google’s Pixel 8 Pro smartphone. The models handle text, images, audio, and video, with integration into Google's products. Developers gain access to Gemini Pro via API from Dec. 13, challenging competitors like OpenAI and Meta. Google aims to assert dominance in the AI chatbot landscape.
Google DeepMind has led several key AI breakthroughs, mastering Go with AlphaGo, creating the transformer architecture for chatbots, and solving protein folding through AlphaFold, marking significant contributions to AI.
Weekly Poll ✅
Help choose what you would like to learn about on Wednesday for my weekly emerging tech showcase:
That’s all for the free version this week! If you have any organisations in mind that could benefit from learning about emerging technology, be sure to reach out. Educational workshops are one of many consulting services I offer.
DCA With Me 🤑
Dollar Cost Averaging is an investment strategy in which an investor regularly invests a fixed amount of money into a particular asset/asset class at regular intervals, regardless of its current market price. By doing so, the investor can reduce the impact of market volatility and potentially earn a better return over time. Motto = time IN the market beats trying to time the market
To experiment with this, I invest $50 NZD into a Digital Asset every week. Each week I will choose an asset that seems underpriced in the short term and has positive long-term potential. My timeframe is 3-5 years. I don’t give financial advice but if you want to follow along with me you can use my easycrypto.co.nz referral link to support this newsletter. Let’s dive into this week’s pick:
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