I wanted to share this post of mine that I wrote on February 13 2020 after I attended a Go tournament in Helsinki with a fellow player from Lahti. It contains pictures taken at the new main library of Helsinki and a recount of a conversation about Bitcoin with some pretty smart non-coiners. Interestingly, this conversation was had less than a month before the Covid-19 outbreak in Europe and the severe stock market and crypto crash of March 12. Since then, both markets have recovered and Bitcoin seems to be on track toward new heights as predicted by the stock-to-flow model after its third mining reward halving. The stock market is completely divorced from reality as it has fully recovered from the crash while economies around the world are in serious trouble.
I miss going to the tournaments. They're on a break as they should. Right now is would be a bad time to hold one because the second wave of Covid-19 is coming. Even if no vaccine is developed, the virus will most likely mutate into more contagious less harmful variants that render the infected immune to all of them. That would be the usual progression of an infectious disease. It's the initial stages after jumping from one species to another when most infectious diseases are at their most dangerous. But I'm a layman so I'm just guessing.
I attended a go tournament in Helsinki last weekend. It was somewhat bigger than casual tournaments like it usually are these days because it was the first memorial tournament organized to honor the memory of the late wife of a long-time chairman of the Finnish go federation. She died of cancer last June.
69 people participated. Foreign players came from Sweden, the UK, Russia, Latvia, Germany and the Netherlands. On Saturday evening, people shared memories and anecdotes about the deceased one at the tournament sauna. She was well-liked and an old friend of many who had turned up. I first got to know the couple a little shy of 28 years ago. I stayed at their home for the night.
I'm about to begin my game. I'm playing the fellow in the blue hoodie in this game. There were six rounds. The names of the opponents were literally drawn from hats each time. Fighting tooth and nail to win wasn't the idea this time.
Another Lahti player and I visited the new Helsinki central library, Oodi, after the games on Saturday afternoon. I didn't feel like using my tripod because even though it was dark enough for the pictures not to turn out great with a hand held camera it was not really dark enough to absolutely require a tripod. Also, my friend was very hungry, which is why I settled for taking a few pictures with my phone camera. The iPhone 7 has a pretty good camera. My friend's flagship model iPhone has an astonishingly good camera. The image processing is so good that he has taken pictures in near darkness and had them look like long-exposure images taken with a real camera. The fantastic quality is based on error correction using dozens of frames and a shitload of processing.
Anyway, here's the library:
This was taken at the main entrance.
On our way to the restaurant. That's one of the cafeterias.
We ordered cheeseburgers, which were of high quality. We got
salad for free because there was some left over from lunch. Lunch time had ended about half an hour before we came. It was very clear from how the chef talked about the food that she loved her work. That was an amazing salad.
The burger was great, too. It was held together with stick in the middle. A large thick patty and tasty garnishes. I'd call it a gourmet burger. The price was €10, which is pretty much the maximum you have to pay for a lunch or for the main course in casual dining places in Helsinki. The average quality of the food in restaurants is superior to the rest of country. I suppose it's because of the higher population density resulting in fresher ingredients, stiffer competition and greater overall efficiency in the industry. Large cities simply have higher-quality service industries than smaller localities.
The main entrance. We headed for the third floor where most of the books were.
A cafeteria on the third floor
A space on the second floor
Printers
The staircase
The building on the right is the parliament.
At the sauna, I mentioned Bitcoin and got the opportunity to hear what a few smart normos had to say about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. It wasn't a very fruitful conversation.
Basically they think it's a purely speculative investment vehicle without any intrinsic value whatsoever. One guy said the smart ones have cashed out already and that there should be a Pigovian tax on it just like there is on alcohol or tobacco in many countries because no good can come of it. Another said the authorities (the US and the EU) will bring down the hammer on the space and put an end to it, mentioning the fact that AML/KYC is required of banks and that anonymous payment channels cannot be tolerated. A third one chimed in saying that no one transfers Bitcoin and that it only changes hands virtually on exchanges.
I could've launched into a talk about how the history of fiat currency is a history of failure and that we're in a debt crisis that is forcing central banks to continually ramp up quantitative easing, which will eventually cause everyone to lose trust in fiat currencies because pumping more money into the system will only exacerbate the debt problems. At the time, I hadn't read about how regulators are now forcing derivatives traders to use "high quality" assets as collateral including sovereign bonds, including those of countries heavily in debt, which results in artificially low interest rates on said bonds allowing governments to keep sinking into even more debt. When the gigantic house of cards that the derivatives market is comes tumbling down, it won't end well for governments. (More information, see @maneco64's post for more information.)
But I saved my breath. It's no use trying to teach old dogs new tricks. The political left in particular is hostile to or sceptical of crypto as that side of the spectrum has always relied on centralized authority fulfill their goals. There's plenty of information out there and those who want it will find it.
There is no sign of governments in the developed world making moves to quash the entire crypto space. It looks like they are taking steps to regulate it better, which should foster more growth by enabling institutional money to enter the market to a much greater extent. Also, I don't think the regulators and bankers are stupid. They know what a time bomb our financial system is despite everyone pretending it is not. Blockchain tech could help the world recover after the current system blows up in our faces once again.