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Bitcoin has doubled its value and soared to mind-boggling highs in the last year, but the king of cryptocurrency stumbled a bit in late August. The digital coin dipped to a 30-day low around $108,000 on Friday, down from a record high of $124,457 mid-month. A few factors are likely at work in the coins dip. Why is Bitcoin dipping? Cryptocurrency traders have observed activity this week from a Bitcoin whale someone holding a huge position in a given coin that on its own might be enough to move markets. When a whale moves their assets around, the size of the trade can send a coin up or down and spook onlookers, who might be inclined to follow suit. Earlier this week, one whale sold 24,000 Bitcoin worth $2.7 billion in a single day. Another trader with a massive position in Bitcoin was just spotted buying up Ethereum, the cryptocurrency with the second highest market capitalization. When large positions flow out from Bitcoin and into Ethereum, it can send the former down and the latter up particularly if the broader crypto market chases the big movers. Beyond big trades and whale moves, cryptocurrency is affected by broader macroeconomic factors just like everything else. President Trumps reelection sent Bitcoin on a tear late last year, but high interest rates still temper interest in digital coins. If the Fed lowers interest rates and borrowing cash gets cheaper, money is likely to flow into riskier investments like Bitcoin. In a highly anticipated speech late last week, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell signaled that rate cuts could be on the way next month. Powell pointed to slowing economic growth in the first half of the year, but remains cautious over the effects of Trumps tariffs on the Feds quest to quell inflation. All of these factors influence traditional stocks and their chaotic counterpart, the cryptocurrency market. If Bitcoins late-summer slump seems foreboding, a glance at a price chart on a longer timeline should dispel any concerns: A year ago, BTC was trading for less than $60,000.
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E-Commerce
On Labor Day, hundreds of thousands of protesters are planning to demonstrate against the Trump administration and billionaires “taking over the U.S. government” in more than 1,000 nationwide rallies and events, according to May Day Strong, an advocacy organization organizing the protests. The day of action is scheduled to take place in all 50 states, including cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Houston, New York City, and Columbus, Ohio. What protest is happening on Labor Day 2025? The Workers Over Billionaires protests are scheduled for Monday, September 1, in collaboration with a number of labor unions, community organizations, women’s rights groups, and concerned citizens, under the umbrella group May Day Strong. Some of those organizers include MoveOn, Women’s March, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the Communications Workers of America, Indivisible, 50501, the National Union of Healthcare Workers, and Public Citizen. What is the Labor Day protest about? Building on the momentum of previous protests this yearincluding May Day, Good Trouble Lives On, and No Kingsthe Labor Day action is aimed at stopping the current administration’s “billionaire agenda,” which organizers say increasingly favors the ultrarich at the cost of working people and their families. “Billionaires are stealing from working families, destroying our democracy, and building private armies to attack our towns and cities,” according to the May Day Strong website. “Just like any bad boss, the way we stop the takeover is with collective action . . . working people rising up to stop the billionaire takeovernot just through the ballot box or the courts, but through building a bigger and stronger movement.” How many events are scheduled? More than 1,000 events are scheduled to take place across the United States, stretching from Alaska and Maine to Florida and Guam. An interactive map operated by the AFL-CIO includes a list of specific locations and other details. What’s next? May Day Strong said it plans to continue the movement that it launched on May 1, known as International Workers Day around the globe, when tens of thousands of people in all 50 states took part in protests against President Trump’s tariffs, Social Security and Medicare cuts, DOGE layoffs, and nationwide attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
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E-Commerce
By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internets impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machines. Looking back, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugmans 1998 statement sounds like a failure of imagination. But at the time, his skepticism represented a familiar story: Bold, visionary ideas are met with resistance and fear from industries entrenched in conventional wisdom. Yet, time and again, we’ve seen how disruptors use technology and sheer conviction to rewrite the rules and yield transformative outcomes. In the last decade alone, this played out across industries like transportation, aerospace, and defensefrom electric vehicles challenging Detroit to reusable rockets shattering the assumption of expendable space travel. Are we lacking that same boldness in the pharmaceutical industry? Instead of a resounding call to action, we too often hear the careful footsteps of an industry tiptoeing through a minefield. Transformative science gives way to calculated discussions about payers and pharmacy benefit managers, sacrificing a compelling vision for cautious incrementalism. Capture the imagination The antidote to this paralysis isn’t less ambition, but morea renewed focus on the first-principles mindset that defines truly transformative companies and has the potential to reduce our industrys abysmal 90% failure rate. The reality is no other industry has more profound potential to radically improve lives. Today, the convergence of AI and automation with biology and chemistry is a multitrillion-dollar opportunity to fundamentally reinvent the way we make new medicines. The potential impact is extraordinary for everyone who eventually becomes a patient. Why, then, do todays leaders temper their remarks for the future? To me, this tone reflects a larger, more systemic issueone where the pressure to deliver short-term, incremental progress can come at the cost of world-changing ideas. This isn’t to say that incrementalism is without value. Many businesses with conventional, risk-averse strategies can be successful. The manufacturing industry, for example, relies on gradual improvements to drive small, consistent gains. Yet these incremental changes are built on the back of world-changing inventions like Fords moving assembly line, which reduced the Model Ts production time by nearly 90%. In my world of discovering new medicines, we see this parallel in hundreds of biotech companies that maintain a traditional, program-by-program strategy. This work is incredibly important for science and for patientswe need these companies. But this is a crucial distinction. The incremental approach is fundamentally different from the kind of moonshot thinking that changes an entire field. Of course, this call for boldness is not a call for recklessness. When human lives are at stake, there is a fine line between conviction and hubris. The cautionary tale of Theranos reminds us that boldness must be grounded in an unwavering commitment to science, ethics, and truth. But a fear of overpromising should not paralyze us into underdelivering. How game-changers are made Sometimes real change requires a deep belief in a seemingly impossible pathone that may be deemed too risky but, if successful, could create a step-function change for the better. This is the first-principles mindset that defines truly transformative companiesthe kind that don’t just innovate, but build or reinvent entire industries, like cloud computing and space travel. The creation of Amazon Web Services (AWS) required billions of dollars of investment in a new business line with no guarantee of success. The market saw it as an irrational capital expenditure, but it was a long-term bet on the idea that cloud computing would become the essential infrastructure for modern business. That high-risk bet is now the dominant force in its industry: AWS generated more than $100 billion in revenue in 2024 and controls the highest market share among cloud providers. Similarly, when SpaceX set out to make spaceflight more affordable and reliable, the goal wasn’t just to make a better rocket; it was to create reusable rockets. The company prioritized a first-principles mindsetasking what the most basic, fundamental truths are about rocket scienceand rebuilt the entire process from the ground up. This path had a higher chance of failure, but it significantly reduced the cost of space travel and led to a satellite network capable of providing internet to every corner of the globe. This high-risk, high-reward strategy is not for everyone. The pressure to abandon it is constant, especially in an environment where shareholders demand near-term milestones and predictable returns. But my conviction is born from the understanding that to solve the world’s most complex problems, we must be guided by a different playbook. This was our mindset when we founded Recursion. Our purpose is to decode biology to radically improve lives, and our commitment is to building a new kind of platform that can discover many medicines at scale, rather than just finding a single drug. The cost of playing it safe The most profound failures in history are not those that bet big and lost, but those that failed to bet at all. Incremental advances will never cure Alzheimer’s disease or reverse climate change. To achieve those kinds of step-function changes, we need to embrace the ambitious, the seemingly impossible, and the inevitably uncomfortable. We must not be afraid of a healthy dose of “hype.” We must defend it as the kind of conviction necessary for world-changing innovation. Very few companies are responsible for changing industries and the worldbut they are almost always the kind of companies that bet everything on the big idea. Chris Gibson is the cofounder and CEO of Recursion.
Category:
E-Commerce
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