THE 2020 YEAR IN #BITCOIN

Ah yes, New Year's Eve. A time to reflect, look forward, celebrate, and throwback Long Reads Sunday style with the BEST BITCOIN TWEETS OF 2020.

Strap TF in, it's time for a thread!

👇👇👇👇

2) Let's start by going back to February.

Even before the full impact of COVID-19 kicked in, bitcoiners were thinking big about the epoch shifts we were in the midst of.

https://t.co/rK3gIvUg0e
3) When the markets DID start to finally react, bitcoiners were quick off the draw to point out that, whatever the risk the virus posed, the economic threat was significantly predetermined by fragility borne of decades of decisions.

https://t.co/SGBsl3FE1Q
4) Focus quickly shifted to a global dollar shortage and what it might mean across industries - The "Dollar Wrecking Ball" as @RaoulGMI put it.

https://t.co/eFCkcd1qRJ
5) As every market (including BTC) crashed on the infamous March "Black Thursday," Coinbase buying told a story that would be persistent throughout the year - the bitcoin community scooping underpriced corn as others fled to safety.

https://t.co/TR8HLQWpCF
6) @scottmelker had easily one of the most prophetic tweets of the year, presaging the massive institution demand that would start flowing in just a few short months.

https://t.co/emZ8pqZRss
7) @prestonpysh meanwhile explained how the veneer of market independence was crumbling around us, and why we're careening toward a very different market model.

https://t.co/cSWMxALAYx

More from Crypto

You may be wondering why @bristoliver rather cryptically RT’d a chart that I posted last night. The answer is not just that he loves quadratic fits on log axes, but that this chart may –and I stress may– hint at a vaccine effect amongst the over 80s THREAD


WARNING: this is a long thread, and it’s a bit of a roller-coaster. We find some apparently strong patterns in the data, and then start to unpick them a bit. So if you start getting excited half way through you might find you’re less excited at the end. But we’ll see…

First we first have to go back a bit. @bristoliver posted a thread a few days ago explaining why, with a constant vaccination rate, a log plot of cases should show a quadratic form. In other words, it should fit an equation like: a + b.x + c.x^2

I meant to link in the model thread there - here it is


the quadratic coefficient – the ‘c’ in that equation – gives an estimate of the % of the population who are being newly protected by the vaccine each day. Please note ‘protected by the vaccine’, not ‘vaccinated’ – as we don't expect 100% protection after the first dose

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I’m torn on how to approach the idea of luck. I’m the first to admit that I am one of the luckiest people on the planet. To be born into a prosperous American family in 1960 with smart parents is to start life on third base. The odds against my very existence are astronomical.


I’ve always felt that the luckiest people I know had a talent for recognizing circumstances, not of their own making, that were conducive to a favorable outcome and their ability to quickly take advantage of them.

In other words, dumb luck was just that, it required no awareness on the person’s part, whereas “smart” luck involved awareness followed by action before the circumstances changed.

So, was I “lucky” to be born when I was—nothing I had any control over—and that I came of age just as huge databases and computers were advancing to the point where I could use those tools to write “What Works on Wall Street?” Absolutely.

Was I lucky to start my stock market investments near the peak of interest rates which allowed me to spend the majority of my adult life in a falling rate environment? Yup.
1/“What would need to be true for you to….X”

Why is this the most powerful question you can ask when attempting to reach an agreement with another human being or organization?

A thread, co-written by @deanmbrody:


2/ First, “X” could be lots of things. Examples: What would need to be true for you to

- “Feel it's in our best interest for me to be CMO"
- “Feel that we’re in a good place as a company”
- “Feel that we’re on the same page”
- “Feel that we both got what we wanted from this deal

3/ Normally, we aren’t that direct. Example from startup/VC land:

Founders leave VC meetings thinking that every VC will invest, but they rarely do.

Worse over, the founders don’t know what they need to do in order to be fundable.

4/ So why should you ask the magic Q?

To get clarity.

You want to know where you stand, and what it takes to get what you want in a way that also gets them what they want.

It also holds them (mentally) accountable once the thing they need becomes true.

5/ Staying in the context of soliciting investors, the question is “what would need to be true for you to want to invest (or partner with us on this journey, etc)?”

Multiple responses to this question are likely to deliver a positive result.