Scrabble’s Two Letter Words – Ut, We, Wo & Xi
Ut
Ut — An alternative to the eighth note, do, in the solfège system. See also: Do.
We
We — I and others, which may or may not include you. See also: Us.
Wo
Wo — A falconry cry, telling the bird to return. I’m having difficulties proving this Wikitionary definition. The truth seems to be that a number of falconers don’t have complicated vocal commands for their birds, since the birds don’t respond to commands the way that a dog or a horse might. Ultimately, many falconers don’t control their birds so much as they have a mutual agreement with them. The falconer points the bird in a direction and hopes the bird catches the prey the falconer intended. If the falcon would prefer to go after a different target, they will do that. Then they return.
Wo — An archaic spelling the word ‘woe’.
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia lamented her love’s condition by saying “Oh, woe is me! T’have seen what I have seen, see what I see!” Nowadays ‘woe is me’ is more likely to be uttered sardonically, as Bugs Bunny did in the cartoon ‘Roman Legion-Hare’. When Yosemite Sam sees Bugs Bunny at the other side of a pit filled with lions, he thinks he has Bugs trapped. Bugs feigns defeat with, “Oh, it looks like you’ve outsmarted me. Oh, woe is me.” Yosemite begins to cross the pit with a pair of stilts, but bugs throws some axes down to the lions, who whittle down Yosemite’s stilts. Woe is Yosemite.
The archaic nature of the word ‘woe’ makes some of the absolute worst mental states sound a trifle silly. If you walk into a therapist’s office and tell them you are enduring woe, they will double check the coat rack for your ulster coat, pince-nez, and stovepipe hat. ‘Woe’ drips with a melodramatic sorrow rife for wallowing.
But woe is a serious condition. It’s the result of a self-fulfilling depression spiral where every bad thought that enters the mind reinforces all other bad thoughts, until the brain is a stockade of anguish. The tragedy is that we are well fitted to become our own jailers. If we expect inescapable imprisonment, there are no means of escape. If you find yourself in this cycle, you must work hard to make yourself feel better. You need to exercise your mind and challenge your negative thoughts. Therapistaid.com provides a nice worksheet here. It’s just a few basic questions to help reexamine whatever thoughts are causing you so much pain, such as “Is there evidence contrary to my thought?” and “Will this matter a year from now?” If you can think yourself into a spiral of negativity, you can think your way out too. You have an amazing, elastic, multi-faceted brain. Because of that, I have faith in you.
Xi
Xi — The 14th letter of the Greek alphabet, printed as uppercase Ξ or lowercase ξ, and pronounced like ‘ksi’. It originates from the Phoenician letter sāmek, printed as 𐤎, and which translates as ‘fish’. Note: xi is not the Greek alphabet’s equivalent to the letter ‘X’. That honor goes to chi (Χ, χ). When the Romans cribbed from the Greeks to make their own alphabet, they stole the letter X and the sound of xi (ks) and merged them. So… xi isn’t X, but X often sounds like xi in English. That is, when it doesn’t sound like ‘z’, or ‘eks’. Is this making sense?
Xi — One quintillion wei, or one ether. Ξ is the building block of the Ethereum cryptocurrency, which is second in market capitalization only to Bitcoin. When the beta version of Ethereum rolled out, the directors established a 25,000 ether bounty for anyone who reported a bug. That was back in 2013. Today, one ether is worth $1,163. If you found a bug in the code nine years ago and sat on your ether, you could cash in today for $2.9 billion dollars.
Cryptocurrency is decentralized banking. It makes transactions safe because no one person holds all the information about your account. It’s a little like the ‘two-man rule’ you see in movies when a nuke is about to launch. You hold one key, I hold another key, and when both keys are put into the blockchain and turned, we launch a nuke/buy an ice cream cone. That’s a horrible simplification, but the important idea is that no banker middlemans the exchange, yet the transaction is secure. The blockchain isn’t even in one organization’s basement. It’s operated via peer to peer network and is running on numerous computers around the world. The Bitcoin operation, for example, may be running on 70,000 computers. Since it’s decentralized, it’s difficult to tell. Which computer is online and part of the network at any point and time is in constant flux.
Cryptocurrency is a scam. But so isn’t the concept of money in general, so there’s good precedent. Back in the 1890s, every United States dollar was backed by the existence of a fraction of the gold reserve somewhere in some bank or fort. In theory, (with heavy, heavy italics, since it wasn’t practical to always expect it) your paper money could be exchanged for that gold. That’s what gave the dollar its value. During the Great Depression, however, Congress enacted a joint resolution nullifying the ability to demand gold instead of cash. They did this because as the value of a dollar continued to drop, the Treasury Department was concerned people would wise up and ask for a physical limited resource in lieu of a promissory note, potentially dropping the value of paper money into a runaway crash. But if they weren’t forced to trade gold for cash, then banks no longer needed to keep piles of shiny metal in their vaults. So they didn’t. And… money still worked. Because you can talk about how money has no value all you like, but a Big Mac still costs $5.93, and the person behind the counter isn’t particularly interested in your rants on economic theory. They want the green paper. Money is like Santa Claus: disbelief in the jolly elf doesn’t preclude presents.
The problem with crypto and decentralized banking is that in order for this particular artificial scarcity to work, someone needs to believe in its potential. That means it needs investors, or people whose goal is to profit from it. Nobody is backing a multi-billion dollar industry simply for the sake of humanitarian goodwill. But for there to be financial winners, there must be losers. In order for crypto to exist, it must be parasitic.
In an article for Wired Magazine, Gilad Edelman says that, “In 2008, the backing reserve was basically houses. In cryptocurrency, I’m quite serious about this, the backing reserve is gullibility.” Since there is nothing officially backing the growth of crypto, the only thing that can reasonably fuel the growth is speculation. It’s the presumption that there is money to be made and that you too can strike it rich, or at least pay off your kids college loans, by getting in on the ground floor of a fantastic opportunity.
Which could be true if the opportunity was not old news. But by the time Reader’s Digest is making regular guides about how to invest in cryptocurrency, that moment has passed. Crypto is no longer a money tree. You can’t seed a little wei and expect a yield a bounty of ripe xi. It isn’t quite at the point of beanie babies and variant comic book covers from the 90s yet. That’s because there are still investors coming in the door, hoping to gain their fortune. But there’s simply a limit to the amount of people in the world willing to invest, and when that limit is hit, crypto will crash.
There’s a possible silver lining to a crypto crash. It’s not anything proponents of a decentralized banking system are eager to hear, I’m sure. Because when major market crashes ruin people’s lives, the follow up answer is often regulation. As it is, Ponzi schemes are supposed to be illegal, at least under United States federal law. And most current crypto is a Ponzi scheme. When Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and CEO of FTX admits it, then what’s the point in denying it? Sometimes a money making pyramid is too small to notice, or too big to touch. But when a Ponzi scheme bursts so hard that it affects the wallets of every voter on Earth, governments have a tendency to step in and set boundaries.
Regulation, in itself, doesn’t need to be a bad thing. Regulation can give confidence to a currency with a price point that tends to bounce around. This can help incentivize transactions since prices don’t need to constantly reflect the whims of the market, something crypto is notoriously bad at (In part because crypto modeled after Bitcoin find it difficult to make multiple swift transactions through the block chain. But the lack of a stable market value does not help.) With more transactions, crypto will gain more value, which should lead to an increased overall value. The real task is to find a way to regulate while maintaining decentralization. If they want these economies to flourish, governments will need to learn to protect investors and protect the neutrality of the network that maintains crypto. Only time will tell how smooth a transition this will be.
