The word "speculation" usually has negative connotations, especially in the world of finance. That's why you'll hear people deride "condo speculators" and talk about things like crypto as being rat poison. Buying something with the sole hope that someone will pay more for it later is viewed as a negative act.

But is this a fair characterization?

Speculation is fundamental to how markets work. It happens when people bet on some unknowable future rather than on present fundamentals. This is an important feature because it's how new technologies and new business models get funded. Without it, we'd only ever fund what is knowable and what already exists.

This doesn't mean that speculation won't lead to failures — by definition it has to. It's uncharted territory. But consider what speculation has advanced along the way: railway networks, utility infrastructure, the internet, crypto, and AI, among many other things. And in the case of condo speculators, the result was that more, rather than less, housing got built.

That's a good thing.

So I think there's an argument to be made that we actually need more speculation in Canada. We need more risk taking and we need people betting on the future, even in the face of uncertainty. Because when you do that, eventually you end up creating it.

Some of you may remember that about a year ago I moved this blog onchain from WordPress to a platform called Paragraph. I've been happy with the move, though I know that my daily emails have been ending up in many of your junk boxes since then. Sorry. Hopefully that gets better over time. Given my enthusiasm for crypto, it just made sense to make the switch. I'm trying to move as much as I can onchain.

This blog is now also featured on Paragraph's homepage:

At the same time, things still feel very early. Paragraph, for example, has been experimenting with ways for writers to monetize their work. I don't care about that for this blog, but I am interested in seeing how the business models may evolve.

Up until recently, the way to make money on Paragraph was to have readers collect your posts: Writer publishes something, readers mint it as an NFT, and then writer receives small payments in their crypto wallet. I've had a few people collect my posts over the past year, but it has not been anything of significance.

Now Paragraph is testing something new called writer coins. Instead of collecting individual posts, readers can now buy a writer's coin and support them more broadly. I just set this up on my publication and so there is now a brand-new coin in existence called $BRANDON.

One of the interesting things that I was able to do was automatically distribute this new coin to anyone who has collected one of my posts in the past and who is subscribed to my blog (with a connected wallet). If you are one of these people, you should have received something.

In theory, $BRANDON coin should increase in value as this blog develops incredible international notoriety, but in practice, who the hell knows? These experimentations are all part of the journey onchain. Some stuff will work, but many other things won't. Already though, I think you can feel product-market fit for things like stablecoins. Maybe one day the same will be true of $BRANDON.

If you'd like to try out this new feature and support the blog, click here.