What's up Steemians

I wanted to supplement this vlog with a blog entry. When doing my vlogs I pretty much go off the cuff. Given the state of things right now I feel that it helps to direct my thoughts down on paper sort of speak.

The three topics that I'm covering are loosely tied together. If there is one major theme for this week it is chaos and confusion.

ORDO AB CHAO (Order Out Of Chaos)

There is nothing new under the sun. This has been the tactic used by those in power time and time again. It comes from the school of thought that in order to "speed up the process" you need to shake things up.

The easiest way to implement your agenda is to cause as much confusion as possible. People are more acceptable of a "solution" because they want things to go back to "normal"

Spectre/Meltdown

alt
Companies have been scrambling to patch a flaw that allows an attacker to gain access to the most sensitive data on a person machine without obtaining permission. The attempt to patch this flaw has been nothing but problematic.

These two vulnerabilities are separate but essentially target the same thing.

Meltdown got its name because it "melts" security boundaries normally enforced by hardware. By exploiting Meltdown, an attacker can use a program running on a machine to gain access to data from all over that machine that the program shouldn't normally be able to see, including data belonging to other programs and data that only administrators should have access to

By exploiting the Spectre variants, an attacker can make a program reveal some of its own data that should have been kept secret. It requires more intimate knowledge of the victim program's inner workings, and doesn't allow access to other programs' data, but will also work on just about any computer chip out there.

This 20 year old "flaw" was discovered by three separate researchers around the same time. I find this extremely weird!!!

If I've learned anything since Snowen leaked the NSA's program is that they had a backdoor into almost everything. If they didn't put this flaw in place they knew about it a long time ago and decided not to tell that they found it. This affects EVERYTHING!!!

If you want to learn more about it check out this article that breaks it down.

Crypto Meltdown

Pretty much all of the crypto's in the top 100 are down 18% or more!!!
alt

In a high risk, high reward environment days like today are almost inevitable. The market shed over $100 billion dollars in value in the past couple of days.

A lot of new people that have gotten into this market are probably pulling their hair out at the moment. As bad as it seems I want to show you a pic that I found on twitter that put is a bit into perspective.

This might be part of a natural cycle forming in crypto or it might be that around the beginning of the year a lot of negative things happen that send cryptocurrency markets in a tailspin. For new investors coming into this space they might be feeling whiplash at this point.

A lot of people are trying to keep their money in crypto to avoid taxable events and that is probably adding to the pain. All I can say is try to make good decision and don't trade on emotion because 9 times out of 10 your judgement will be a bit cloudy on the up and down side of a trade.

Government Shutdown

alt

If the leaders of the U.S don't get their act together by this friday the government will go into a shut down. How much will this cost not only the government but the U.S economy? Well last time it was $24 billion dollars a day.

If you think the crypto markets losing $100 billion is bad you ain't' seen nothing yet. This just adds to the chaos that we have already been experiencing in Washington. I think it is pretty much a certainty that there will be no agreement reached by this Friday. Now it's a game of chicken and each side is trying to call the others bluff. I feel like both parties will suffer from this. The people are pretty tired of this mess.

What's Next

It's hard to say at this point. If you have noticed chaos is pretty much the theme for this week. Be very leary of any solutions that are going to be presented to "fix" our problems.

As far as crypto goes please understand the risks when investing into these projects. Most of these projects are just ideas with no viable product. Especially the plethora of ERC20 tokens. I would say try to figure out what your endgame is and execute it. Don't be greedy and manage your fear.