first things first...

Yep, another year, another Nov 14th.

Last year I promised that the market would spike on my birthday, and while it didn't exactly spike on the day... the market did not disappoint. Yeah, go check out the post. Bitcoin was trading at $16k and I was running my basic-bitch technical analysis as-per-usual. Draw a straight line and call it support. Number go up. Easy peasy.

Now ONE YEAR later and Bitcoin is trading at all time highs at $65k and already people are bored. You apes lack any kind of discipline. It's embarrassing, but then again if everyone had discipline I'd be pretty screwed, eh? Market competition continues.

BEAVER MOON NOVEMBER 17th

Goddess Moon is about to bless us with another upward run. Looks like I was way off base in predicting that full moons were bearish now. Unless I was totally right and we are just days away from a bear market starting :D. I highly doubt that though. Bear markets don't start in November after a month of sideways consolidation.

That being said BTC volume is DANGEROUSLY low, which would be highly concerning if we weren't constantly proving that there's a supply shock in play. Number just keeps going up on low volume. We got a few buyers and very little sellers. Looking good.

Treat yo self?

So how have I treated myself today?
Buying way too many of these Punks off the market.
I've spent an embarrassing amount thus far.
Too bad! TREAT YO SELF!

No Ragrets

Because the punks were selling so fast I actually aped in quite a bit more during the minting process. I started out with 13 punks, but then I bought 30 more during the last few hours after I saw how fast they were moving. Surprisingly, I didn't get any rarer than the one I initially got, but honestly the rarity doesn't matter that much in a lot of contexts. I mean, hell, just look at Ethereum. The cheapest punks there are still six figures. Truly mind blowing.

This one might be my favorite so far.

Sad secretary smoking a ciggy wearing a frog hoodie... lol
Hang in there, Clay.
I'd be sad too if I was a Secretary.

With an ID of 9535, I obviously picked this one up right at the end as I was panicking about how they were about to run out. How lucky is it that I randomed orange hair on a Volcanologist? This is exactly the kind of thing that the rarity algorithm can't account for. This punk is way more rare than is given credit. The shades are a nice touch.

Oh Gary... Gary Gary Gary

Could I have randomed a more LGBTQ+ coded Punk? I don't think so. From the pink hair to the rainbow goggles right on to the porn stash, I certainly won't be selling this one until there's a stronger queer community on Hive.

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Hold on, did I just mint Flava Flav?

Badass...
Again the rarity algorithm does not understand the significance.

His name is Jesus Shepherd...

And he's a fisherman...
Get it?
Am I reaching?
Nah.
Another example of how the algorithm doesn't really get it.

A music therapist wearing a VR headset.
That makes sense... right?

I mean honestly a lot of these punk make zero sense. It's all random in the end. It's weird seeing someone with a medical (red + sign) cap on who's a farmer :D

Also there are a LOT of bald women out there, which obviously are going to be not too sought after. I've already been told by a few people to dump the female punks I have due to a lack of demand, but who knows maybe one day an airdrop goes out to punk holders, amirite?

I also gotta admit that the black guys with facial hair and glasses just always look cool AF.

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Blood Banker though?

My Wife
_{(Borat accent applicable)}

Yeah in my last post I was talking about how this isn't decentralized, running my mouth about stuff I had no concept of. Marky came into the comments to explain that these Punks are enforced by HiveEngine consensus and even point to the pictures themselves on IPFS, which is pretty cool. More and more I feel like even I could build something off of this that allows Punks to battle each other like Pokemon or some shit. With Hive NFTs are a bit more limitless than elsewhere due to the zero fees situation we have going.

Judging by how popular HivePunks are I'm guessing they'll continue being a great success as long as development continues. The marketplace still needs a lot of work. Currently it only sorts by algorithmic rarity, but it would be much more useful at this point to be able to sort by price. Once that's complete it would be very helpful to be able to search for certain attributes people are looking for (like female with pink hair and whatnot).

Final Countdown.

• I ended up minting 43 punks total.
• I currently own 56.
• So I guess I bought 13 off the market today.

All the ones I bought were around 50 Hive. Just doin my part to buy up the cheap ones that I like to push up the floor price.

Speaking of prices...

I'm not sure what kind of crack you guys are smoking, but you're punk priced at 50k Hive isn't going to sell... lol. This is why we need price filters to get rid of all this garbage on the market feed.

In addition to filters it would also be nice to add a way to underbid on punks that are overpriced (just like ethereum). That way the owner can choose to accept or decline the offer. Also it would be pretty clutch of legitimate auctions could be created with time limits, bidding wars, and buyout prices. All in good time I suppose.

Too many bald women, lol.

Men like to catfish as women in gaming, and I assume the same is true for NFTs. However, when you make half of the women bald and ridiculous-looking, it creates quite a few bottom-of-the-barrel NFTs that no one wants. Give it a few weeks and I bet some people will start offloading the rejects for less than they cost to mint. It is a bit annoying that the random number generator doesn't work that well for the female characters, but whatever. They can't all be winners.

Exchange fees

It costs a 10% fee to sell punks on the marketplace. This is pretty high as I'm more used to a 5% fee for auction houses. Still 10% isn't THAT terrible (Tithe) and it gives a lot of incentive for Marky / Blockhead-Games to continue working on this project after the initial hype dies down a bit.

This is a bit of a hold situation for me.

NFTs have very bad liquidity and take a while to appreciate in value. If we continue building on HivePunks (which it seems like will happen) and there are even airdrops that come with it we should see a lot more success in the future. Airdrops would be a good idea too because looking at the money that went to @punksonhive we can see that a huge percentage of the Hive population participated in this event.

That being said I was a bit annoyed to see Marky himself minting NFTs for free at the end, but what are you gonna do... he wants to airdrop himself with NFTs... that's cool I guess. At least he didn't try to hide it. That being said this is why I have talked about sending Hive to @null in order to ensure that NFTs have unhackable value. However, in the case of HivePunks this matters less because of the promise that there will only ever be 10k HivePunks issued in this way. The artificial scarcity is built into the system so doesn't matter too much that Marky had the chance to mint some for free while the rest of us plebs had to pay him to participate.

Conclusion.

It's Q4 2021. Don't forget it. The market is likely going to go wild over the next couple weeks. Full moon in three days; get ready for it.

Last year's prediction:

What is the price now?

$16k... which could easily be signaling the times of change are upon us. I guess we'll find out soon. Personally I think the price of Bitcoin next November is going to be somewhere around $70k-$160k (10x the numbers we see today).

When Hive is $10 a coin I'll look back at this moment and be like: "Holy shit I spent so much money on those HivePunks." Then again it's all relative. There's also a chance I make back all the money with a single well-timed sale. NFTs are weird like that. Totally subjective.

It's quite save to say that users on Hive are always looking for projects to support, and this HivePunks NFT craze is a primary example of that. This is one of the great things about Hive and crypto in general: the community supports each other. This will allow us to expand at a very fast pace once the tipping point is reached. Exciting times.