https://www.notboring.co/p/decentralization?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Welcome to the 2,810 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since last Monday! If you haven’t subscribed, join 170,734 smart, curious folks by subscribing here:
(I will try my best to record an audio version; I was editing down to the wire and I’m fried!)
Today’s Not Boring is brought to you by… Masterworks
You may have missed a big financial story earlier this month (Not FTX). On the same day that the Dow fell over 600 points, and Bitcoin plunged to its lowest level since 2020; the art market soared.
With the sale of Microsoft Co-founder Paul Allen's art collection, buyers purchased a record $1.6 billion worth of art in less than 24 hours. The super-wealthy see art as a safe investment amid a tumultuous and uncertain global economy, per BBC.
Three things to know about the asset class: 1) fine art can help protect purchasing power when inflation is high (Goldman), (2) fine art has a -0.34 correlation to equities (Citi), and 3) contemporary art has appreciated 13.8% annually on average for the last 26 years.
So why am I telling you this if only the .01% wealthiest people can capitalize on this asset class? Well, now you can too, with Masterworks.com, the fractional art investment platform.
All offerings are SEC qualified (see offering circulars on the site), and their track record is solid so far…their last three offerings handed members 17.8%, 21.5%, and 33.1% annual net returns, respectively.1
Now there are 12 paintings in the Not Boring collection. Want to see what's currently available? You can get priority access right here.
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Monday! This is an essay I’ve been thinking about and working on for a little while – I quote myself a lot because I’ve been unintentionally writing about the theme since the beginning of Not Boring – and I’m really excited to share it with you. It’s as close to a Theory of Everything as I can come up with to understand the world in 2022.
Once I started thinking about the world this way, I’ve seen it pop up everywhere, from politics to energy to AI. Maybe it’s Baader-Meinhof, maybe it’s real.
And as I’ve tried to explain it to people, I’ve realized that I just need to write down as coherent a thesis with as much evidence as I can, and open it up to get feedback and pushback. If nothing else, I hope it can be an interesting conversation starter at Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday.
The idea is this: the world oscillates between centralization and decentralization, with progress sloping upward through the turns. We’re approaching an era of decentralization.
An important note on how you should set expectations going into this piece: