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.

This lunch is 500 yen ($4.80) at Sukiya, a Japanese fast food restaurant which belongs to a category with about three big competitors.

I love the aesthetics of this category and they’re under remarked upon.

I think people underestimate QSRs in terms of social utility, but Sukiya et al describe themselves as mission-oriented enterprises. I believe this is largely sincere, and goes back to the 60s and 70s, when the clientele was primarily manual laborers who had migrated to work.

Japan was not a rich nation at the time, and day laborers in particular were both unlikely to be able to cook for themselves and unlikely to have much of a food budget, and so the chains sprung up offering an honest-to-goodness cooked meal delivered in under a minute for cheap.

This heritage continued over the years, even after Japan became a much more wealthy nation, and these chains function as social support and dignity for folks in diminished circumstances.

They also are a wee bit of a cartel, and I appreciate the aesthetics of the cartel:

Back when I was first in Japan, in the mid 2000s, there was an increase in the price of beef.

And the heads of the three chains got together, and decided that the price of the basic beef bowl needed to increase, but given the economic circumstances how could they hold the line.

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.

It’s underremarked upon that stablecoins accomplish basically all of the original design goals for Bitcoin qua a transactional mechanism (instant free value transfer anywhere), but that nobody cares about this because nobody ever cared about that part of the pitch.

“Why do people care about stablecoins then?”

A mix of “they encourage dollar-denominated liquidity in the cryptocurrency ecosystem and discourage withdrawal of the same” and “they’re good for money laundering.”

“But they make value transfer between exchanges much faster!”

This was a solved problem in traditional finance, too, mostly through the extension of credit. (It doesn’t matter how long settlement takes if there is sufficient trust to enable credit.)

The Bitcoin ecosystem is *positively allergic* to credit, so you have to call it a coin for them to accept it. And after you call it a coin they ignore everything the world has learned about credit, like risk management.

“Stablecoins aren’t credit!”

They’re pretty much exactly credit? A tether is a zero-coupon Bitfinex bond with a non-functioning call option. I

1/29 #Bitcoin thread, updated version

We’ve doubled since the last time I updated this thread, so I thought it would be of some value to update it. Feeling insecure about price action? Too enthusiastic/scared? Maybe this helps a bit, go check it out!

TLDR at 27-29
Let’s go!🔥

2/ 2 Year MA Multiplier
This indicator uses the 2Y MA. Green line is the 2Y MA, red is the same MA x5

2ya MA multiplier is rising and at ~48k rn. Price goes parabolic. I would personally love to get a decent correction, would give more space for growth long term imho.

3/ Relative Unrealized P/L
Paper p/l in $Btc. Use it to track investor sentiment.
Market is overheating, everybody is in paper profits, but as you can see “we” as a whole take too less profit. We can stay around greed for a whole year, but a correction at this point makes sense

4/ 200 Week MA Heatmap
#Bitcoin likes to bottom out near the 200W MA
Colors are attached to % increase of MA
Blue/purple = Buying opportunity
Orange/red = TP opportunity
The bigger the distraction, the more parabolic price goes, simply said
First green coming(?) Room for growth

5/ MVRV Z-score.
To identify periods when $Btc is extremely under/overvalued.

Green= MV unusually far below RV, buying opp
Red=MV unusually high above RV, TP opp.

Now: heating up. Correction first to cool it off plz :)
Nice uptick in realized value.

1/22 Why XRP will beat Bitcoin.

(Video version @ https://t.co/VIHEoHLYpN)

A thread. 👇

2/22 Despite last night's major Bitcoin correction, it still sits at $33k, well above the last bull run's all time high. With XRP currently at $0.28, it may seem rather ridiculous to think XRP will ever become #1.

3/22 However, it's important to compare Bitcoin and XRP not in terms of price, but market cap. That's because there are 100 billion XRP (and will never be more) and 19 million circulating Bitcoin (21 million max). So comparing the price of individual tokens doesn't work.

4/22 XRP's market cap is $12.6 billion. Bitcoin's is $623 (roughly 50x more, 55x if you factor in the 2 million Bitcoin not yet mined). That's a huge lead, but not as big as the 119,000x lead if you compare token price!

5/22 Bitcoin's primary advantage is its early adoption. It caught on earlier and became the front runner of crypto. Don't underestimate the power of being first. It gives a massive advantage. But it doesn't GUARANTEE being the winner long-term.

We’ve been around CT for a few years, and while the road still appears curvy, we believe the pieces are moving into place and the destination becomes more clear with each passing day. The following people are all pioneers, when they speak you should listen.

Going to lay out who we think some of the most fascinating thinkers are and some of our favorite podcasts. While these people still differ on some of their viewpoints, they are either the thought leaders of the world we are moving towards or contributing towards building it.

1) Nick Szabo (@NickSzabo4) - Truly one of the pioneers of our space and one of the first podcasts we ever listened to. Still the pod we send to people wanting to dip their toes in the space. Funny listening to nick, @naval, and @tferriss 4 years

2) Naval (@naval) - Clearly a thought leader in the traditional world, but he understands and is dedicating time to bring the future to the present. When this guy speaks the whole world seems to listen. Once again @tferriss does a phenomenal

3) Vitalik Buterin (@VitalikButerin) - The father of Ethereum and when Vitalik speaks we all should listen. He thinks differently than almost every human in this world. Yes...he’s a