Anthony Pompliano on CNN:

We have very deep conviction on a long-term basis. And if you look at the fundamentals, the 24-hour transaction volume on the Bitcoin network is about $4.6 billion as of lately, and the market cap is $74 billion. So that’s about a 16-times multiple of transaction volume for market cap. That’s very similar to Mastercard which does about $11 billion worth of transactions and is valued at about $180 billion. So from a value perspective, it’s right there on par with Mastercard.

I’m generally bullish on Bitcoin, but I just don’t understand the “fundamentals” behind this market cap multiplier comparison between Bitcoin and MasterCard. Bitcoin’s market cap is calculated by multiplying its circulating supply by its last traded price on off-chain exchanges — a completely speculative figure that can be easily distorted or manipulated. MasterCard’s market cap is based on real revenue statistics. After tweeting at Pomp asking about this comparison, he responded saying “they are both transaction networks.” To me, this seems like a nonanswer, but then again, I’m not a Bitcoin maximalist.

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I can’t believe this happened just two months ago. Long story short, ThatViolaKid showed up in Tokyo and decided he wanted to become a rapper in addition to being a world-class violist. Two weeks later, we released this video — shot on a Panasonic GH5. Good times.

TVK was here in Tokyo a few months ago, and we spent a lot of time shooting around the city. I love how the XF 56mm f/1.2 renders bokeh. Beautiful.

Shirakawa-go (白川郷) is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Gifu Prefecture. I’d love to come back in the winter someday.

A lantern festival in Gujo, Japan.

After a recent update to my About page, I saw that Japanese characters were being rendered as question marks. Since Japanese characters were immediately changed to question marks after hitting the “Update” button in the WordPress editor, I quickly ruled out a font-related bug as the cause of the issue. After some Googling and subsequent database exploration, I discovered that my web host’s default database character set is latin1 (ISO-8859-1), which doesn’t support Japanese characters.

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I’ve visited Japan nearly 20 times in the past two years, but never during autumn. Now that I live here, I finally got a chance to witness the changing of the seasons at Aoyama-itchome (青山一丁目).

This shot gives me some serious Pokémon vibes.

Intersections in Shibuya always look something like this. Men, women, and children hit the pause button on their lives to wait for the traffic light to turn green. In those thirty seconds, you have the opportunity to witness multiple lifetimes worth of stories just across the street. Something to think about.

Two things came to mind as I watched Tim Cook unveil the 2018 Mac mini.

• Wow.
• Should I move back to New York?

Prior to moving to Tokyo, I worked as an electronic music designer in New York and Las Vegas, where my job involved building keyboard racks and designing sounds for keyboard players on Broadway shows. More often than not, the racks I built were powered by Mac minis running MainStage.

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