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.

FAQ: “How do I get better at writing?”
Me: Write a million words.
Follow up: “Hah but seriously.”
Me: Start with 20,000 words. Everyone gets to that 50 times in their first million.
Follow up: “No seriously.”
Me: Nobody expects 10 Quick Tips To Play Violin At Carnegie Hall.

The Internet is so much better at teaching writing than the traditional educational system principally because it removes an artificial and limiting constraint on output imposed by ability of gatekeepers’ limited time to evaluate output.

(Interestingly in fields where we actually care about performance we’re good at encouraging students to practice when no one is watching but for writing we basically assume all the value is created by the teacher-minute of attention. Teacher-minutes are scarce and rationed.)

If you ever want to be deeply, deeply disillusioned about the state of the world, compare what we do where we care about output quality and what we do where we don’t, and which domains sort into which column by revealed preference.

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.

My friends @robwalling and @einarvollset just launched TinySeed, an accelerator for software companies where a successful outcome is a healthy, sustainable business rather than attempting to ride the rocketship trajectory. https://t.co/LSHqZNcVid

I have some thoughts:

As somebody who bootstrapped ~4 companies, I feel like I had to make some clearly suboptimal decisions early in them for lack of what is, in hindsight, not all that much money. But there's a huge gap in the product space for investment options.

It's weird: you can get $25k from Amex trivially, and angels are very willing to write a check for that much, but you have to make representations about your goals/ambitions/market/etc which don't really apply to everyone.

And so you see the traditional angel/VC ecosystem fund companies where honestly the returns are probably not there, and this is knowable pretty early, but the chase of them will wreck what could have been a perfectly happy business.

(To make the math work for traditional VCs the company has to at least have a market-appropriate shot of $100 million a year. There are a lot more $10 million a year companies than $100 million a year companies. That is *not* a bad terminal outcome for founders/employees.)

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.

Will start this thread with a disclaimer. I have never invested a rupee in cryptos 😀

But I have studied bull and bear cycles and financial bubbles extensively. Saw 1992, 2000, 2008 with own eyes. The first one as a novice, the next two when I knew to analyze

The amount of chatter I am seeing in friends, family and social media about cryptos has gone through the roof. For everyone, it's a dream to make 100x or even 1000x easily. Basically, become stinking rich easily
( it never happens )

In any financial bubble, the top is made in extreme speed and violence. The distribution happens on the way down. Unless one saw the rates of 65k on bitcoin, one wouldn't buy at 30-35k or 20k. That 65k is an anchor point which leads to greed

During the tulipmania, a single piece of tulip reached a price of $750,000 in today's money. When we see that history, we think "what idiots". But consider this, as of now meme coins generated by someone in their garage are being traded at absurd prices

Then there is this joke called NFT. A piece of "digital art" basically made by someone on their computer ( who is not even a known artist) are being sold for millions of dollars

I usually stay away from price predictions, but this time I couldn't help it. Just published "10 reasons why bitcoin will hit $100.000 in 2021".

Share it with a normie friend, maybe he/she will understand the value proposition of

Reason no. 1: during its 12 year-old existence, Bitcoin has performed a lot better as a store of value than gold.

Reason no. 2: Bitcoin is easier and less expensive to transfer than gold. This one is pretty self-explanatory, as gold is heavy and expensive to secure.

However, I believe that we should look up to gold a lot more often & look down to USD less

Reason no. 3: Bitcoins can be carried across borders a lot easier than gold and cash.

It's simple, really. With only a general-purpose electronic device (phone, laptop), piece of paper, or even 12 words that you memorize, you can move your wealth in a different country.

Reason no. 4: Bitcoin transactions cannot be censored.

In a world where PayPal and Visa can dictate your policy as a business and can shut you up from expressing political opinions, Bitcoin has a lot of value.