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Welcome to The Water Cooler for April 20th, 2022. It’s raining today in Spain. WTF.
What is the WC?
It’s a random mix of stuff that could make you smarter, or at least help you sound smarter down at the pub. Anything useful / interesting / notable that’s on my mind will get pumped into your inbox every Wednesday.
Let’s go!
My biggest miss of the year. And then my second biggest miss of the year.
If you’re into NFTs even a little bit, you’ve probably heard of Moonbirds – the 10k PFP from Kevin Rose’s Proof collective.
Here’s an explainer if not.
What’s are MoonBirds and why is your twitter feed filled with fomo and/or cope about them?
— Cryptolocity (@Cryptolocity) April 17, 2022
Hopefully this thread can give you some more insight about this record breaking NFT project @moonbirds_xyz and their parent project @proof_xyz
1/🧵
I started listening to Kevin’s podcasts last summer and could see immediately that he knew what he was talking about and had his finger on the pulse of the defi and NFT spaces.
When he launched Proof, I booked time in my calendar to buy in at launch, but then I got caught up bathing the kids or something and missed the window by a few minutes.
That 1 ETH investment would have netted me well over 100x. That’s a $300k miss.
I’ve been so bitter about missing out originally that I figured I was too late on the project and didn’t go for the Moonbirds lottery. The mint price there was 2.5ETH. The floor is now 20ETH. That’s a $50k miss. 🤦
What’s the lesson here?
Don’t have kids? Or maybe don’t let mistakes cloud your judgment for the future.
Netflix chills
For the first time in over a decade, Netflix lost subscribers. There were 200k fewer netflixers at the end of Q1 than there were at the beginning.
Analysts predicted they’d gain 2.7m new subscribers, so that’s a pretty big miss. The company’s shares are down 25% overnight, and CEOs get nervous when their company’s stock craters like this.
Why do you care? Because if you use Netflix, there’s a roughly 31% chance that you’re “borrowing” login details from someone else.
And the easiest way for Netflix CEO Reed Hastings to boost subscribers to to crack down on the 100m (yes, one hundred million) people sharing accounts.
Enjoy the free streaming while you can….it’s probably not going to last.
Do you hate money? Want to go to prison? I’ve got the thing for you.
Remember Jordan Belfort? The guy from Wolf of Wall Street? The guy who went to prison for securities fraud and money laundering? The guy who said Bitcoin is “frickin’ insanity” and “mass delusion?”
Well now you can sign up for his two-day crypto mastermind course for the low-low fee of only $40k.
You can get a head start learning how to make toilet wine here.
But can it down a sake bomb?
Sake, the two-thousand-year-old Japanese rice wine, isn’t known for innovation.
But time and tide wait for no man, and now one of the world’s oldest sake producers has started using a modified roomba to weed its rice paddies.
Named for a breed of duck, the Aigamo Robot roams around the rice paddy plucking up unwanted weeds and aerates the water with little (and surely adorable) robotic feet.
Practice your Japanese and watch it float around.
The unstoppable F1 juggernaut
Everyone is getting on the F1 bandwagon, even me.
Stefan wrote about it a couple of weeks ago, and so did I.
I’m still trying to figure out if F1 is here to stay, or if it’s just riding the wave of Netflix’s Drive to Survive series. For now at least, there’s no sign of it slowing down.
Formula 1 fully sold out the first three races of the season with over 420,000 people turning of for the Melbourne event. Television ratings are up 54% year over year, which is unprecedented in modern sports.
If you’re bullish on the sport, there are lots of opportunities to pick up cards for the sport’s two stars – Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen.
If not, you can just enjoy the top ten crashes of the 2020 season.
That’s all for this week, folks.
Fun fact, last night Stefan and I met for the first time (we founded Alts two years ago, and I live in Spain and Stefan lives in Australia). Here we are hard at work, writing for you guys.
Cheers, Wyatt
