Can astrology make sense of cryptocurrency? Altman and 1,000,000 TikTok followers assume so | The Hyperlink

Maren Altman is not a huge TikTok fan.

“I’m a really serious person,” she said. She rarely scrolls through her feed. Most of it she can’t stand. “I’m not into trends or jokes.”

She has more than a million followers anyway.

On the other hand, theirs is not your typical TikTok site. No cute dogs here. No dancing.

Instead, the 22-year-old is posting astrology videos of all stripes, including those focusing on politics and celebrities (she predicted a major relationship change for Kanye West and Kim Kardashian). She has achieved one-name status in the astrology community, like Sting or Bono.

Her most intriguing videos apply astrology to one particularly intimidating area: cryptocurrency. Anything with a verifiable date of birth or birth date has a birth chart that astrologers believe can be read and used for predictive information. That means there is astrology for relationships, pets, political movements and, yes, bitcoin. Skeptics aren’t on board, of course, and cynics might see it as a perfect match: two things that feel like foreign languages ​​to most people. Finding a head start in the crypto market is already a fuzzy art. Is trying to use celestial bodies that far away?

Maren’s notoriety is part of a mainstreaming of astrology and its micro-genres that is being driven by apps and social media.

“People can learn about astrology in small, easily digestible ways via Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and Twitter,” said financial astrologer Robert Weinstein. “Social media is that amplifier for everything in general. And astrology is just one of the things that I think you really benefit from. “

Maren was initially fascinated by astrology in a much more analogous way. As a child, she took the family newspaper and went straight to the daily horoscopes.

In her teenage years, which she said was “on the fringes of society,” she began studying astrology seriously and making a few dollars at parties where she “read to drunk kids.”

She saved that money and invested it in crypto. Then she brought her astrology skills to TikTok.

In a typical crypto astrology video, Maren reads the natal chart of a particular currency and thinks about its immediate future. She often films herself in front of a brick wall adorned with a red neon sign that reads “amor fati,” Latin for “love of fate,” and her language can get pretty colorful at times, which matches her punk vibe.

At the beginning of January, Maren read the Bitcoin chart with its creation date, January 3, 2009. “New moon in Capricorn, January 13, looks great for Bitcoin,” says Maren in the video. “Shortly before that … Saturn will join Bitcoin-Mercury to the exact degree on January 11th, which looks like some corrections with Mercury and Saturn. It could be news about something that is causing a short-term waste. But with this new moon, solar moon Pluto, directly above Bitcoin Jupiter, this is like a new beginning on the atomic level. “

In other words, the position of Saturn and Mercury could indicate a loss in value, but Jupiter and Pluto signaled that the price of Bitcoin would recover from any correction and continue to rise.

“It looks like a bull run,” she adds.

In fact, the price fell on January 11th and rose again two days later, more or less continuing to rise until April, at which point its value had almost doubled.

Although Maren claims in the video that she does not offer financial advice, many of the comments on the post suggest that some see it that way. “Looks like it’s invested by o’clock,” wrote one user. “Ik, this is not financial advice, but you can do some financial tips because I trust you and want to invest,” it says in another comment.

On the other hand, in another TikTok, she suggested that May would be volatile, but the currency could hit an all-time high. Instead, the value of Bitcoin largely collapsed.

Financial astrology has been around in a variety of forms for decades. Weinstein was one of the first to focus on cryptocurrency – especially Bitcoin – in 2017. He shares his findings on his website, The Astro Crypto Report, and through his Twitter handle @AstroCryptoGuru, along with other predictions such as a 2019 tweet thread predicting “possible black swan unexpected events” in 2020 .

He remained one of the loudest voices in cryptocurrency astrology until Maren “stormed onto the stage,” as he put it.

But even with their videos being led by their followers, the astrological world can be difficult to understand.

“In astrology, we look at the correlation between certain planetary alignments and world events,” said Maren, adding, “It looks to the past to predict the future.”

She said a misconception by many is that astrologers believe that the planets cause these events. It’s more like they believe that the heavenly positions give us a taste of what might happen. As Maren put it, “We’re not postulating that Jupiter … sends out rays to make us spend more money … It’s like the clock on the wall doesn’t make three in the evening, but it could make us say it’s three o’clock “

Still, it’s probably no surprise that many financial planners view this as a lot of hooey. Fredrick Standfield, the founder of Lifewater Wealth Management in Atlanta, said that people tend to get emotional about cryptocurrencies, often because they “see how much money people are supposed to make” but “don’t see how much money.” some people lose at the same time ”. don’t quite understand how it works.

When “people start getting into it and don’t really understand or really get what it is, then I think they start borrowing and opening up to things like astrology, financial pseudoscience, things that are real when, “If you think about it, to me they are not completely compatible with any scientific methodology,” Standfield said.

He added that when things work, like the Maren forecast mentioned above, it creates a sense of confirmation bias. “People tend to interpret information in a way that confirms what they already believe and ignore anything to the contrary, especially when it comes to social media.”

Maren isn’t too worried about converting naysayers. She is just happy when they “keep my name in their mouth”.

“Astrology has always been more of an esoteric type of privy, secret knowledge,” said Weinstein. “It really was never for the masses.”

Maren also has larger fish to fry. She became a controversial figure after being accused of plagiarizing some of her readings, which she vehemently denies, and came under fire for comparing eating animals to the Holocaust, for which she later apologized. She said that the negative attention it increased as it became known to the point of physical threats.

“I was scared for my life and got through the wrestler and it’s absurd,” she said. But enduring that fear can make her feel invincible. “I’m bulletproof in this strange, immortal way now.”

For now, she plans to continue creating astrology TikToks and teaching courses on the subject through her website. But that’s just her short-term plan.

“I don’t want to be just that. I create TikTok videos and my view count confirms me, ”she said. “But I want a Wikipedia page that says, ‘She founded this company and is on the board of this company.’ ”

“I want to create really, really permanent structures in decentralized finance and in AI,” she said. “As much as I have fun and passion for astrology in my own life, daily horoscopes are not going to change the world.”

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