We’re approaching a point where being passed over for “culture fit” is a compliment. Hopefully the embarrassment is enough to expand the founder vetting checkboxes.
1. VCs provide a ton of money, to incentivise token issuers.
2. The issuers pump out a pile of tokens that would constitute unregistered penny stocks. The VCs buy in.
3. If the SEC doesn't bust the issuers, the VCs make a bundle, and much quicker than they could funding a productive company.
4. If the SEC does bust the issuers, the poor widdle investors are protected from the evil issuers, who have to refund investors - the VCs don't lose.
It's the gig economy of penny stock scams, with the legal risk being borne by the issuers.
You can talk to the people who built their models and they have lots of fun things to say about the ordeal.
The main problem with capitalism in one handy sentence.
I was honestly believing that the web3 bullsh.t were just some young people who didn't know any better or some scam-artists (or both), I didn't actually think for a second that a "serious" VC like YC would put money into something like that. Looks like I was wrong.
Once a phrase gains mainstream adoption and starts to rapidly lose meaning, I find that people who care dearly about that thing start calling it something else.
That said -- I really struggle to find the people who are really all in on crypto in a technical sense. Where are the people building cool things and trying to push the boundaries with crypto? Surely it's still happening but just hard to find it in all the debris/trash.
Shares in a company are typically "forfeit" when the company you invested in goes bust.
While its a nice virtue signalling headline - giving up something worth 0 (only not worth a large negative number as shares are limited in liability) is not at all noble.
Banning watering gardens is exactly as dumb as banning proof of work. The vast majority of water wastage occurs irrigating farms supporting crops that are unsuitable for that area.
A solar panel connected to a coin miner is only doing good in the world. Where is the negative? You sure it's the mining that is the bad thing and not the dirty energy?
Even if your figures seem out of date, your argument against UST also holds for USDT (which underpins much of the crypto price bubble):
There is 7B USD in circulation and the market cap of US(D)T is 74 BILLION USD
All this perceived wealth is going to melt into air soon, and yes a bear market has already arrived.
For one, you are wasting a solar panel that could be offsetting more positive energy usage. And building both the solar panel and the miner is far from emission-free.
Bitfinex, for example is being prosecuted. The SEC have cases against a few of the mid-level people, but the founder is hiding out somewhere in Asia, and will never see the inside of a US courtroom.
Also, it's very easy to con someone, but it's almost impossible to convince someone who has been conned that they've been cheated. If you do your due diligence, and disclose your findings, the marks will ignore you, the con artists will smear you in the press, start lawsuits against you, and everyone uninvolved will shrug their shoulders and 'both sides' your feud.
I appreciate the candor -- I still hold out hope, thinking maybe PoS (with equally bought-in parties) could work, but at that point you might as well have regular old paper and pencil coordination/contracts...
The tech is novel, but the applications just don't seem to be falling into place at all... I even consider the ability for it to function as cool points (not NFTs but just a way to make and check exclusive tokens) is OK because it gives community builders a way to pull forward revenue. If I think of it like a self-hosted app for managing exclusive tokens then I can kind of see a use -- if before people didn't have an on-ramp to enforcing their own manufactured exclusivity then maybe it has some positive effects...
Unfortunately right now it looks like the ecosystem is just a backdoor to unregulated securities. Some of the automated exchange stuff (uniswap and co) seemed cool too though I haven't looked too deeply at them.
Building a solar panel and a gpu (say) is not emission free? Because they require energy to refine and manufacture. So we are still back to the fact the issue is with the energy generation. Right?
In 2022, is there any money to be made there, other than:
1. Money that comes from 'less lucky' entrants in the various zero sum schemes?
2. Money that comes from selling shovels to the con artists running #1?
As a bystander, I'm not seeing any other ways that 'web3' is making money - and I'd argue that if it's just those two, then that's a pretty bad use case. I mean, it's good for the participants who are making money, but all that money comes from impoverishing others.
We are mobilizing all these resources and manufacturing capacity to do what? Run infinite loops on a useless program?
Meanwhile at my lab that works on bio simulations they could not find gpus to do their research.
Are gamers just running useless programs too?
We mobilise resources for whatever people want to pay for… “why” they want to spend their money on that has never been an issue.
Is Gucci wasting leather that could otherwise be used to make school shoes? Ban Gucci!
* and also dumping them all together overnight
Which is precisely why you see dApp usage numbers crater. Check out OpenSea's daily volume on Dune.xyz as an example - down to $30M/day from consistent $150M/day even a month ago.
Like buying a monthly subscription for a tool like, say, Icy.tools, is so much faster when you can pay directly with metamask. No accounts, no logins, no credit card screens.
The catch, of course, is that for the tech to get adopted by the mainstream, you will need way more regulations and safeguards. Maybe KYC on wallets (which means creating accounts/logins), maybe the ability to reverse transactions to reduce fraud.
All of these regulations might introduce enough friction that the final experience doesn't differ much from current legacy systems.
But a built-in browser wallet that makes payments (including micropayments) easier is really needed. It's the only antidote to our current advertising dependent model of the web.
And by "making money", we really mean transferring money from gullible and/or desperate fools to unscrupulous insiders.
first a cryptic puzzle as a recruiting tool for analysts: https://twitter.com/Galois_Capital/status/148693793605468979...
followed by months of warnings like this: https://twitter.com/Galois_Capital/status/151217543903232819...
and threads pushing the systemic risk angle: https://twitter.com/Galois_Capital/status/150461116699529216...
> Here is how an algorithmic stablecoin works. You invent two tokens, call them Dollarcoin and Sharecoin. ... The process is sometimes compared to algorithmic central banking, where the central bank maintains the value of the currency (Dollarcoin) by adjusting its supply.
> On first principles this is insane.
And then the CEO guy basically says that their old school finance may consider it a Ponzi but it’s the future of finance and they’re just gonna end up suffering from FOMO.
You can get rich in a gold rush selling shovels. And it doesnt really matter if there's no gold, or not enough for all the miners to make a living. And why would a shovel salesman focus on the negative like that?
The number of developers became a key metric for coins to project legitimacy and there are certainly SWEs who are bad actors and/or knowingly contributing
Scaling also doesn’t seem to be in the interest of miners who essentially provide the network security…
No sign-up flow, no emails, no commitment. You just tap login and you have an account. One more tap and you've paid.
Plus other benefits like effectively free micro-transactions as small as thousands of a penny at a transaction rate in tens of milliseconds, for some chains (e.g. Solana w/Phantom or SolFlare browser extension).
All this adds up to being able to try, pay, assess, and "logout" of any completely novel (to you) service/site faster than a WSJ article page can load.
The effortless of the user experience doesn't translate well to words. Getting use to this frictionless use of compatable web apps is an experience qualitatively similar to browsing the web with an ad blocker. You can't go back. Going back feels broken, messy, slow, and outright aggravating.
What this says about the original purpose of Bitcoin is left to the reader.
why the founders didn't flinch... who knows? maybe they decided that 3ac being invested is their security.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/10/early-theranos-investor-tim-...
Terra is a proof-of-stake blockchain
> But is this any more likely to happen than, say, the global thermonuclear war that is held at bay by the principle of MAD? I feel like we are surrounded by doomsday scenarios; economic and existential. Who would pull the pin on this one? Or is the problem blind faith in an algo? - https://twitter.com/thestephoflife/status/151220218743844864...
I personally have lots of misgivings about various crypto but I really don't have enough expertise to argue against someone telling me that I just don't understand and everything is fine.
Even when it does go wrong, there still might not be a crime any more serious than being an idiot, obviously would be different if the company misrepresents itself for gain, which would be fraud.
I suspect that many of these people genuinely believe their own hype, which is how they convince others to buy into it.
It’s unclear if they have jurisdiction. The likes of Coinbase’s Armstrong have certainly been lobbying hard to constrain it. In any case, it’s hard to be sympathetic when escaping regulation is the rallying cry of so many crypto enthusiasts.
Where is the line between an outright scam and just people believing their own bullshit.
Which is why I said that the tech really needs a lot of improvements. But the core idea of a browser wallet that takes care of logins and payments is really powerful and might just be crypto’s killer app
I'm curious why you call the first one cryptic though? It seems the opposite to me: it refers to all the elements by their actual, real-cryptocurrency-world names. To me, "cryptic" would mean that it abstracted away from all the actual terminology used, and just describes it in terms of pure mathematical finance, which would be cryptic since you'd be left wondering, "uh, what is this referring to? Is this an actual thing?"
I also don't see how it works as a recruiting tool. This is a space that involves exploiting domain knowledge, and it's trying to bring in expert outsiders who just haven't yet used their analytical expertise in this domain. But tweets heavily depend on you already knowing how all these protocols work (e.g. what staking/minting/gauge weight mean). Such a person, if an expert analyst as well, would already be working in the field or exploiting that knowledge themselves, and you wouldn't be plucking such diamonds out of the Twitter rough.
https://twitter.com/galois_capital/status/148693794923729715...
Whether it comes back or not will depend, imo, on Bitcoin adhering to the 4 year cycle. So far, Bitcoin has gone up after every halving. Bitcoin leads and the market follows on the “inevitability” of Bitcoin going up after a halving.
But Bitcoin has also only existed in a relaxed regulatory regime and a monetary policy of low rates and cheap money. Now cheap money is off the table and the market has become too big to go unregulated.
If Bitcoin doesn’t go up in the next cycle, it might just break faith in the market and then who knows?
I’d check back in mid-late 2023 if I were you. You might also want to learn some solidity development. All the decent devs I know who were active from 2019 onwards made 8 figures this run
Surely the onus is on those promoting such schemes to convincingly explain their workings; if you can get 20% a year the explanation had better be good...
This is just the last resort of a scoundrel who knows they can’t explain their scam.
The real money was in services (brothels, gambling, baths) and consumables (food, booze).