Why Birthdays Matter

Surviving 1 year is more than just a milestone…

Imagine you are walking through a desert. There’s nothing but sand. After a few minutes in the perilous heat, you come across a cactus. A genie appears and tells you that you can drink the cactus' succulent milk if you can estimate at what point in its life you’ve come across it.

So, how much of the cactus' life has passed?

At first, it might seem the best you can do is guess. But, guessing is not ideal: Mathematically, your best answer is to go with 50% (and the milk is yours).

Given no other information, you have to assume that something will continue to live for as long as it’s been around.

This observation has second-order consequences as well. The longer that something survives—whether that is a business, building, or book—the longer you can expect it to continue surviving. This also applies to human life expectancy: When you are born, your life expectancy might be 75. If you make it to 20, it increases to 77. When you turn 40, you’re expected to live until 81, and so on (these values are examples).

Broadly, this concept is called the Lindy effect, named after Lindy’s delicatessen in New York City, where the concept was informally theorised by comedians.

The Lindy effect (also known as Lindy’s Law[1]) is a theorized phenomenon by which the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age. Thus, the Lindy effect proposes the longer a period something has survived to exist or be used in the present, it is also likely to have a longer remaining life expectancy

Surely now you’re starting to see why it matters that Lithium has survived a year.

Most startups fail — this is the brutal reality of the industry we operate in. Crypto is, for the most part, unproven. Every day that crypto survives and thrives and every day that people continue to use the Lithium ecosystem increases, the probability increases that Lithium will survive another day. Surviving another day means that we will be able to continue to build, add value, and, ultimately, reach mass adoption.

So here’s to another year, and another one after that. Here’s to achieving relevancy and to becoming a household name. Here’s to becoming too big to fail.

WAGMI

Tom,

Team Lithium x