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.

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.)

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.

A thread on HN about bad code in legacy projects both makes me think how little we've learned as a discipline over the years and, honestly, how little credit we give ourselves for some pretty major

Fun going down this list and thinking: "Hmm, plausible at a well-run modern software shop", "Hmm, possible, but requires implausible tradeoffs", "Literally disallowed by languages", and "If you were to attempt doing that our test suite wouldn't let you merge."

I think we as an industry celebrate (not quite the right word) failure too much and don't celebrate success nearly enough. There is no DailyWTF for competent execution, word of which generally stays pretty local to the source while incompetence passes into legend.

Alrighty let me try to thread the needle on being the change I want to see in the world while not giving away anything that will get me in trouble:

Ruby has wonderful developer ergonomics. Typed languages are easier for machines to guarantee the correctness of. We built a type checker for Ruby (and I believe it is slated for OSS release sometime).

c.f.

Tesla just announced that it had bought 1.5 billion dollars of bitcoin and could in the future sell cars in bitcoins. Since this morning both Bitcoin and Tesla are going up in the market. Maybe there is afterall something in the saying that“Bitcoin is Tesla without the cars”1/ 20

Musk is seen as a genius, a true Midas, by many investors and millennials. For them he can never go wrong. He became recently the richest man in the world dur to Tesla stock valuation (+353% yoy). He moves markets and today´s announcement is “kind of legitimise “ bitcoin 2/

Tesla shares attained $870 which represents a Price/ Earnings ratio of 1.747 (!) on the basis of last year´s profits. Apple is at 37 and the S&P firms average is 23 (against a historical average ≈16). Future profits would have to increase a lot to justify a more normal ratio 3/

Tesla has a good product but the question is if it will sell enough cars to get such profits in face of coming fierce competition. However, this is not the question I want to comment upon. It is also not about what may interest the SEC and market conduct…4/

It was not disclosed when Tesla had made this investment. In December, Musk said that Tesla could buy bitcoin, and this was followed by many statements that he supported bitcoin. Bitcoin kept going up & Tesla investment has appreciated. The SEC will look into this 5/

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

1/20 #Bitcoin $BTC I created my own risk management calculator some time ago, 10 entries 10 take profits, avg to position sizes. + many advanced things.

11 signs $ETH is going to blow past its all-time high 👇🏼

#1: Ethereum continues to dwarf the entire crypto space in terms of fees paid ($7.25m daily avg) -- proving it's the most useful network in the world.

#2: The number of large $ETH transactions (>$100k) is 7x smaller than during its 2018 ATHs -- a sign that whales and institutions still haven't entered the game.

#3: Hash Rate is at an all-time high (313.12 TH/s) -- a sign that miners have never been more confident.

#4: Ethereum has nearly 550k daily active addresses (90-day MA) -- a figure that has doubled YTD and now sits comfortably at ATHs too.