First thing's first: presents.

Glorious glorious presents; the only reason Christmas exists.

Presents... don't you see, Kyle? Presents.

I watched that video in 8th grade after downloading it for god-knows how long on a 56k baud modem.

Back when if the download got cut off you had to start all over again.
Pioneer!

IIRC we learned about the video from one of our teachers.
Which is obviously very lawls.

So what did I get?

This year was a doozy!

Gift #1:

Ah, looks like someone understood the assignment.

Can't go wrong with that.

Gift #2:

For those discerning crypto enthusiasts who can never look away from the price, I give you this!

My very own crypto ticker.

The story behind the ticker.

My girlfriend was acting smug for a couple days before giving me this gift, even going so far as to claim that she knew about a crypto thing that I didn't know about. Yeah yeah, whatever. I'll believe it when I see it.

Whelp, I'm now seeing it with my own eyes.

No, I did not know these tickers existed.
In fact, she bought me the "worst" one.

https://cryptocoindisplay.com/

And of course by "worst" I mean cheapest and least offensively distracting one.

Which is of course the one I would have likely chosen myself anyway.

SETUP

Getting these things up and running was slightly complicated and only a crypto enthusiast would put up with this kind of user experience (so it unironically works out).

First of all, the device broadcasts a WIFI hotspot and creates its own network and then the instructions demand that you connect to this network using a device with access to WIFI. Chills were immediately sent down my spine. Is this fucking thing trying to steal my crypto or some shit? I was ready to chuck it in the garbage right then and there.

However, after reading some reviews on it there didn't seem to be any funny business. These are very basic devices created by a small company and they need you to connect to them so you can program them to act accordingly.

• So you connect to the WIFI hotspot "CryptoDisplay"
  • Your device will lose access to the Internet via WIFI and gain access to the hotspot's INTRAnet... which is just a webpage asking for data.
• After you connect, a popup is supposed to appear, but this didn't work for me (the tutorial shows an iPhone and I have android). I had to manually open a web browser (Chrome) and connect to 192.168.4.1.
  • Told you the user experience was something only crypto enthusiasts would tolerate.
• Once you give it the username and password to your own WIFI and tell it which coins you want to track, hit 'save' and it should start working.

Again, this was very cringe for me personally, because this thing now not only knows the password to my personal WIFI network, but it can also broadcast its own WIFI signal, and I would have no idea it was doing that, and it even has a good idea of which coins I own (BNB, RUNE, HIVE, ETC).

However, in the end, this thing is just too cool to not use, and my crypto is locked down pretty good so I'm not that worried. The chance of a hacker somehow cracking into my desktop and hacking Hive Keychain has got to be pretty slim. And the chance of hacking a hardware wallet is basically impossible.

I was really thinking this thing should just USB into my computer and get the information it needs that way. It wouldn't need WIFI or the ability to Hotspot. But then I realized that the programming involved in making it interoperable across Windows and IOS and everything else would probably be a nightmare. So are far as small businesses are concerned I think this path was actually a pretty clever way to do it. With this solution you don't even need a PC to get the ticker up and running, just a phone and WIFI and a power source. And once you have it set up it stays set up until the WIFI network disappears.

It also has a reset button on the bottom that you have to click repetitively if you want to change the tokens being tracked or switch WIFI networks or the underlying currency being used to price the assets. It's also somewhat unclear as to what API this thing is using. I was thinking it might be using CoinGecko.com API because most of the prices given were identical, but wrapped LEO was off so I'm not really sure how it fetches the prices. Whatever though, who cares? Cool gift is cool.

_{Although I'm thinking about removing all tokens but Hive.
Get that constant feed rather than a cycling one.}

Songs

My girlfriend does not like a lot of the classic Christmas songs out there. She found a new album in 2018 that she's been rocking every year since. In fact, I thought the songs were so ubiquitous that I assumed the album was much older than 2018 and she had just been listening to them forever. Here's my favorite one:

JD McPherson eh?

Yeah just in case anyone was looking for Christmas songs that aren't a thousand years old. Of course it's bit late now to be talking about such things.

I find the socks song particularly amusing because I can definitely relate to being very disappointed by getting clothes as gifts in my youth, but now that I'm older I'm kinda like, "Nice, these socks are awesome." Weird how that works out.

I got this bad boy as a gift for my "nephew" (girlfriend's sister's kid). He's like this 8-year old prodigy that's been making music since he was four. Pretty wild. He's definitely one of those idiot-savant kids that need a lot of support, but if they get the support they need they go on to do some awesome stuff. I tried to babysit him for like an hour one time and he started losing his shit pretty bad, lol. But now he's like my biggest fan because I started playing Minecraft at his request and quickly got better at the game than he is (which blew his mind and terrified him a bit).

Funny story, I was making a left turn and all of a sudden this firetruck starts blaring sirens and I kinda panic-merged onto the curb so the emergency vehicle could get by. This made my nephew quite nervous as he exclaimed:

ARE WE CRIMINALS NOW?!?!?!11111

Hahahaha, yes, can't make that shit up.
He'll never live that one down.
Gonna be a story for the record books.
He seems to understand "guilty by association" quite well. kek.
He was legitimately worried about all of us getting hauled off to jail.
Silly buddy! We're white! (Nobody said this but I thought it.)
Then I started singing Bon Jovi.

On a steel horse I ride!
And I'm wanted (wanted) dead or alive!

Hive analysis

Could a more perfect parabola be emerging right before a double-airdrop on Hive is about to come into play? Also, look at what happened between the 7 day moving average and the 25 day MA. We just got a Golden cross, albeit a small one because the MA(7) and the MA(25) are pretty volatile and cross fairly frequently. Still, we see what happened the last time this happened. We went from 90 cents to $3.40. What will happen this time around? Looks like we have about a week to find out based on the extrapolations.

It's also important to point out that the MA(99) is just continuing to climb every day that we trade significantly above it. $1.15 is currently the absolute floor right now in terms of rebuying any kind of potential flash crash. However, by the time the double airdrop gets here the MA(99) will go up another 10 cents and the floor will be around $1.25. Good stuff.

Hive: the gift that keeps on giving.

It's also significant that the value of HBD is going up as well. Rather than trade a cent or two below the peg on exchanges, we see that it is trading a few cents higher than the peg recently. Why? Because the value of HBD is about to increase a whole lot as more and more applications get built on top of it. In particular, if Ragnarok is even a moderate success this is going to take a lot of HBD out of circulation and into the blackhole of savings account yield farming.

As we have already seen happen during our last hardfork (HF25), when HBD goes higher than $1.05 Hive will start getting burned and converted for HBD to maintain the peg. I think January is going to see HBD prices spike to $1.25 as the network scrambles to create more 'debt' (which isn't debt because it's not owed back to anyone and there is no borrower or interest rate).

I think it's pretty obvious that after the double airdrop on Jan 6th there should be a significant dump, but at the same time that dump is going to get eaten alive by more HBD being minted, the 3SPEAK service infrastructure protocol, and just straight up outside money pouring in as we attract more buyers/investors. Hive is still largely an unseen gem within the ecosystem, even with Vitalik mentioning us like a half a dozen times. Pretty wild turn of events.

Conclusion

All around a pretty solid Christmas, even my cat did pretty well on the road trip we took. Sure, Bitcoin didn't moon, but that's a good thing. If Bitcoin doesn't bubble then there will be no bust and we can continue on this super-cycle for quite some time. Don't forget, we've been in a super cycle since November 2020 when we diverged from the doubling curve. We've been trading 50%-200% higher than the curve for over a year. This is highly significant. Let the good times roll.