With Bitcoin's rising price I get many people asking me my opinion about it: Here are nine tips

1) Don't take advice about Bitcoin from those with a vested interest in seeing its price rise. That's like listening to CDO dealer in 2006. When prices go up, critical thought go down

2) Bitcoin is fascinating from a tech perspective, but don't fall for the rhetoric of monetary revolution. I was among the early users of Bitcoin & actually tried to use it as 'money', but it's not a monetary system. It's a system of cyber-collectibles, priced in dollars
3) By all means pass your money to a seller of these collectibles, but don't do so under the illusion that you're engaging in rebellion, or that you're doing prudent investment. You're doing what you're doing, which is buying a collectible from someone who is taking your money
4) Unlike many other collectibles, Bitcoin has no actual features, other than the fact that it can be moved around. It has a highly innovative issuance & movement mechanism, but that's somewhat meaningless if the thing being issued and moved is featureless
5) In fact, its only feature is its logo and the language that surrounds it. Without that the tokens are basically just blank digital objects, the digital equivalent of passing around fragments of limited edition clear glass beads
6) It's precisely this featurelessness that leads to the volatile price swings. The token is essentially hollow, which means there's no real-world tethering. Even CDOs were eventually 'anchored' to the real economy, but Bitcoin is largely driven by media-induced network effects
7) The rising price of Bitcoin does not signal its 'success'. It just means that another cycle of media-driven speculation has kicked in. The US dollar doesn't notice Bitcoin any more than it notices any other object priced in dollars, whether that be motorbikes or lipstick
8) The key difference with motorbikes or lipstick, however, is that we have intuitive ways of working out if their price is reasonable or not, by comparison to the prices of other goods. Given the Bitcoin is a featureless object, it escapes this same scrutiny
9) Ten years ago Bitcoin was highly important in spurring creativity, but now it's largely settled for being a means to make speculative investors rich, which is fine, but not deeply profound. If you're interested in crypto as a way to change the world, look beyond Bitcoin

More from Crypto

So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.
1/ Welcome to #DeFi Wednesday.

Let's talk about how interest-bearing cash on a blockchain is going to revolutionise boring corporate treasury management that concerns every company is is a larger business than all crypto trading in the world.

Enter the thread

👇👇👇


2/ Blockchain community is often seen as toxic maxis and redditors who shill other their weekly favourite shitcoin in the hope of getting Lambo.

Sometimes we also do things that progress humanity towards the better future and interest-bearing cash is one of those things.


3/ Less chad and more things that actually matter:

My incomplete theory of interest-bearing cash is also available also as a blog post:

https://t.co/uiG0fZiVyu

It is 15 pages. Pick your slow poison or die fast by continue reading here.

4/ First time in the history we have an ability to create interest-bearing cash-like instruments.

Interest-bearing cash ticks up dollar (euro) balance real-time in your wallet.

Here is a demonstration using @aaveaave aDAI, based on @makerdao DAI, and @TrustWalletApp


5/ Interest-bearing cash is not like your bank's saving account. Your money in a bank is not yours, but bank's. There are some flaws in the current banking system causing a headache for Chief Financial Officers (CFOs)
I've just read one of the most lucid, wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary critiques of cryptocurrency and blockchain I've yet to encounter. 1/


It comes from David "DSHR" Rosenthal, a distinguished technologist whose past achievements including helping to develop X11 and the core technologies for Nvidia.

https://t.co/tkAMShno4k 2/

Rosenthal's critique is a transcript of a lecture he gave to Stanford's EE380 class, adapted from a December 2021 talk for an investor conference. 3/

It is a bang-up-to-date synthesis of many of the critical writings on the subject, glued together with Rosenthal's own deep technical expertise. He calls it "Can We Mitigate Cryptocurrencies' Externalities?"

The presence of "externalities" in Rosenthal's title is key. 4/

Rosenthal identifies blockchainism's core ideology as emerging from "the libertarian culture of Silicon Valley and the cypherpunks," and states that "libertarianism's attraction is based on ignoring externalities."

This is an important critique of libertarianism. 5/

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