Basic Attention

Proverbs 4:20 “My son, be attentive to my words; incline your ear to my sayings.” Later today I’ll be giving a talk on crypto for YPO and one of the early questions that came in asked about why cryptocurrencies are so volatile. I still haven’t totally formulated my answer, but I feel like it has something to do with attention. Sleepy penny stocks hardly move because no one pays attention to them. Gamestop moved tremendously when Reddit drew attention to hedge funds that had shorted the stock. As we move into an information rich world, the constrained resource is not time, nor is it money. It is attention, and attention moves markets. Crypto allows early adopters to monetize their precious attention by earning tokens for engagement. If every early Facebook user earned stock in the company for each post, like and share, it would have grown even faster than it did. That is what is happening with crypto platforms today. There is even a cryptocurrency called the Basic Attention Token. You earn it by using a browser called Brave, which is 3x faster than Chrome. We all know that Chrome monetizes our attention by effectively selling our data to advertisers. Brave takes any monetization and pays you 70% of that in their token. They pay you for your attention. Genius. God calls you to love Him with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. That does mean stewarding his resources well. It does mean carving out time for Him. But we’ve all experienced sitting down and going through the motions of QT without real engagement. I can spend an hour at date lunch with my wife, but if I’m on my phone the whole time it doesn’t count for a whole lot. I feel like today God is calling me to remember that loving Him, honoring Him, really prioritizing him in his proper place means paying real attention. Lord, as time goes on more and more distractions arise. Please help me get back to the basics. I give you all the glory. I give you all my praise. I give you all my attention today. In Jesus’ name, Amen.