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.

Some people really benefit from hearing advice that everyone knows, for the same reason we keep schools open despite every subject in them having been taught before.

In that spirit, here's some quick Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have Told You Already.

Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. You think you are an exception; you are not. You should not insist on an NDA to talk about it; nobody serious will engage in contract review over an idea, and this will mark you as clueless.

Technologists tend to severely underestimate the difficulty and expense of creating software, especially at companies which do not have fully staffed industry leading engineering teams ("because software is so easy there, amirite guys?")

Charge more. Charge more still. Go on.

The press is a lossy and biased compression of events in the actual world, and is singularly consumed with its own rituals, status games, and incentives. The news necessarily fails to capture almost everything which happened yesterday. What it says is important usually isn't.

Companies find it incredibly hard to reliably staff positions with hard-working generalists who operate autonomously and have high risk tolerances. This is not the modal employee, including at places which are justifiably proud of the skill/diligence/etc of their employees.

Torn between "I think losing $100 million when someone beats you at security research is pretty much exactly what you signed up for doing yield farming" and "Maaaaaaaybe not the future of finance you were expecting, huh."

How to put this in regular finance terms...

Suppose hypothetically you have an account at a brokerage with some valuable asset in it. You take a margin loan against that asset to fund your normal spending, or pay a tax bill, or maybe buy something at another brokerage.

For reasons known only to the brokerage, they don't denominate your loan in dollars. They denominate it in shares of a money market fund, which are worth $1 +/- epsilon and basically never deviate from that.

And you think "Hmm, I have a large equity cushion against this loan."

One day, a computer system at the brokerage reports, sorta-kinda erroneously, that the value of the money market fund is actually $1.30 per share. The equity cushion is gone. Your valuable asset is sold, at timing you didn't choose, at wrong price, to pay an inflated phantom debt

And your recourse is... probably tweeting at patio11 saying he finds too much joy in this.

Which I don't; I just feel like this is why you don't trust a CPU built out of redstone to build reliable financial infrastructure on top of.

The payments wars in Japan are heating up and one of the battlegrounds is convenience store coffee.

“Coffee? What does that have to do with payments?” I’m glad you asked.

Convenience stores are low net margin businesses, which sell some high gross margin goods/services but a lot of low ones, and have high fixed costs and a low ticket size. The typical transaction is under 500 yen ($5) and many are about $1.

They need repeat custom.

A few years ago, all of the chains had a good idea for increasing frequency of use: make a minor capital investment in automatic coffee machines. Sell access to them for the price of a cup / ice; customers self-serve with the machine.

The price point is $1 to about $2.

Coffee quickly became one of the most frequently repurchased items at convenience stores, in no small part because it’s the one thing they can sell which is phameceutically habit forming but totally unregulated. (Just telling it like it is.)

But the coffee is not very defensible

The problem, such that it is, is that competing chains are everywhere and *all* of them serve Thoroughly Adequate Coffee at similar prices, so you’re back into the brutal economics of “Who is 3 meters closer to 40 customers at 1 office?”

Enter payment apps.

One of the big promises of software is composability. You can build rich, powerful experiences out of basic building blocks.

APIs add new things to the toolbox. For example: Treasury, which lets an app/platform store, move, and track a business’

I've been a small business owner and can talk at length about SMB banking, and will later, but let's put on the software developer hat right now.

Lots of software talks about money, keeps records about money, does calculations about money, but can't *touch* money.

This is extremely frustrating when you're building SaaS apps for businesses, because you have total control over your UX right until your app needs to touch money... at which point all data about it lives in a silo you can't access.

So you generally push work to the operator.

For example, suppose you’re writing a business-in-a-box system for electricians, including an invoicing feature.

You need to be able to read bank transactions to reconcile. You probably can't. The owner can. So you ask the owner to do mind-numbing work a computer does better.

It sure would be great if your business customers had bank accounts you could actually introspect and operate on their behalves! You could just get the list of incoming payments and match against the invoices.

There is some software to write but it is not rocket science.

Most software founders, particularly in B2B, need to get radically better at sales. @Steli , who is the best person for explaining the scrappy stages in the beginning and then building out a team with scripts and processes, wrote a guide to:

For technical founders it is irrationally, obscenely hard to reverse years of programming (ba dum bum) that sales is a value-destroying activity. Sales is CLEARLY a value-creating activity, contingent on you have a value-creating product.

The world will not drop what they are doing to adopt your work. This is particularly true in B2B, where simply building a better mousetrap won't overcome the activation energy required to get people with additional non-mice problems to prioritize changing mousetraps today.

This is very non-obvious for founders because founders are not often people who *want* to be sold to. We often come from a background where trying out tools is a bit of a fun hobby. We like looking at all the options, making charts, and ripping out partially complete tests.

"This week I unsuccessfully trialed four software options for automating that thing that has been killing us. Our actual production process remains the same as last week. Don't worry; this was a great use of time." is not a thing you want to write in a progress report to manager.

Options used to be close to irrelevant for bitcoin's price.

Until now.

At current price levels, hedging large option notionals has a major impact on price.

Here's a quick thread on options 👇

Let's start with the meaning of delta.

Delta is the rate of change of an option's price relative to a change in the price of its underlying.

For example, the price of a 50 delta option will move 50% as much as the underlying.

For practical purposes, think of it as how much of the underlying you have:

- if long 50 delta call on 1 BTC => long 0.5 BTC
- if long 50 delta put on 1 BTC => short 0.5 BTC
- if short 50 delta call on 1 BTC => short 0.5 BTC
- if short 50 delta put on 1 BTC => long 0.5 BTC

An option where the option's strike (i.e. exercise price) is equal to current spot price is known as an at-the-money option (ATM). ATM options have a delta of 50, while deep in the money options have a delta of close to 100.

Can also think of delta as probability. A 50 delta option has a 50% chance of expiring in the money.

For a call, the higher price goes => the more in the money the call => the higher the delta.

Once delta gets close to 100, odds are ~100% the option will expire in the money.

I am going to be using #bitcoin & borrowing from myself to buy my first rental property.

Want to know how?

Time for a thread...👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻

At the beginning of 2020 I set a goal for myself to accumulate as much #bitcoin as possible.

Now this thread isn’t really about whether or not you believe in bitcoin, but more about how to use leverage and other peoples money (OPM) to buy yourself more assets.

Let me explain...

Step 1 - I took all of 2020 to accumulate #btc and put it on an exchange (Blockfi) that pays me interest on my bitcoin.

Not only have I acquired multiple coins this year, but I’ve created a $100+ gain per month in interest as well (another source of cashflow).

I can now utilize this platform to take loans out against my position (which is in the mid 5 figures.)

Double winning:

I can take a $ amount loan out against my bitcoin and use that to pay the 15% down required on a rental property and allow the bank to pay other 85%.

How I am winning #1:

I am borrowing from myself and a bank to acquire another asset.

That real estate 🏡 will be paid for by someone else and produces more cash flow for me.

I will use that cashflow to immediately pay off the loan I took against my bitcoin.

# 💹 The effect of Currency Exposure on Shareholders Equity 💹#

When we invest, one important aspect to consider is our portfolio exposure to currencies. It is not important where the company is trading, but where and how is making business ‼️

Keypoints 🗝️:

- In which currency is the company getting paid?

- In which currency is the company paying their costs?

- Are they hedging?

- In which currency is their cash, investments & deposits?

I specially look at them in companies with business in LATAM, Africa or Asia. 🌎

One of the checks you make is looking at the "Other comprehensive income".

I remember that I was very confused the first time I look into a company from a developing country (Pakistan). 🇵🇰

It was a software company (Really good ones in Pakistan) and they seemed to be doing pretty well (Positive Income) but the equity was just decreasing. WTF?

Reason: They were very exposed to Pakistan Rupee!

⬇️Here you go ⬇️

They were collecting most of their cash in Ruppes...

[BIG THREAD] BitChute is a video-sharing site growing in size after an exodus of upset conservatives from YouTube. Like similar “anti-censorship” platforms, it also is riddled with a disturbing amount of hateful content and blatant disinformation.

Around the time of the Capitol riot, interest in BitChute skyrocketed. It continued to rise as Donald Trump’s channel had videos removed, was suspended, and then finally banned. Although he has yet to arrive on BitChute himself, his followers have moved on from YouTube.

BitChute founder Ray Vahey has called the platform “pro-free expression”, accusing sites that censor their content as building echo chambers that serve only to exacerbate problems. What he fails to recognize is that his own creation has become one itself.

wo massive trends on BitChute are anti-Covid vaccine and pro-Nazi/anti-Semitic propaganda. Both break the site’s Community Guidelines. Below are examples of easily accessible and highly-viewed videos. Bear in mind the medical advice is harmful and the Nazi content is disturbing.

First, the anti-vax disinformation. “Timmy Learns About COVID Vaccines”. Safety precautions are called “enslavement” and “extortion”. Over 5k views.