The Nakamoto Collective is almost the only forward looking thing I can think of. 11 years ago, I was unable to get our Prime Broker to take seriously that a small Hedge Fund wanted to speculate on some new concept. It was so cumbersome that I gave up and wrote an essay instead...

$BTC & $USDT & the criminal cartels that pump the prices of BTC while laundering out real fiat profits through their exchange partners. While tax evasion & general financial malfeasance is problematic enough, one has to wonder what else is occurring with the laundered funds ..1/

Despite the romantic, libertarian view of Bitcoin subverting the oppression of the centralized fiat economy, in reality, the backers were also engaging in drug smuggling, assassination markets & human trafficking. 2/

While some of Bitcoin’s ideology of civil disobedience & the hope of building a shining new economy upon the distributed ledger was exciting for a time, the Bitcoin Civil War side-tracked the project heavily. 3/

Once Dread Pirate Roberts and The Silk Road was closed down, nastier websites emerged, and so too did some of the shadiest venture capitalists in the world — necessitating the split of the Bitcoin protocol away from the BTC economy in 2017. But this requires some context. 4/

Unfortunately, in the era spanning 2014-2016, venture capitalists created media entities such as CoinDesk & Cointelegraph, development groups such as Blockstream & MIT Digital Currency Initiative, exchanges like Coinbase & Bitfinex, 5/

While my time investing in crypto and previously playing poker has gotten me used to experiencing large daily personal net worth volatility, it's never a pleasant experience

Short thread (by my standards...) with some ramblings that help me get through it 👇

1/10 Imo, some DeFi projects represent 10-1000x upside opportunities

Obviously, like all of crypto, it is extremely risky and can go to 0. That said, given the magnitude of potential outcomes, it just doesn't have to succeed that often to make it a massively +EV bet

2/10 As with all early stage tech, realising these outcomes will require 4-8 year holds

Unlike early stage tech, crypto investors will have liquidity, i.e. the possibility, and thus the temptation, to sell

This is both a blessing and a curse

3/10 A look at any of the best performing public stocks will show you that you cannot have 10-1000x upside potential without volatiliy and occasional large drawdowns

Crypto, as early stage tech, is much riskier than established public companies and thus even higher vol too

4/10 Obviously, one should take advantage of this liquidity as it allows for rebalancing. Most importantly, it also makes outcomes less binary and thus less volatile than traditional VC

However, one should not let the liquidity take advantage of us

We're in the phase of the market where there's a lot of retail inbounds but not enough education about the Ethereum ecosystem and DeFi.

So, let's break down the basics of some of the top protocols.

First on deck: Aave (@AaveAave), an Ethereum-based money market protocol.

A 🧵

TL;DR: Aave is a protocol through which any user anywhere in the world can take decentralized loans by collateralizing their assets.

Aave also allows those will idle assets to earn a relatively safe return on capital from lenders, whose rates are determined by a curve.

1/ For years, most crypto assets had no indirect or direct utility.

Users would hold BTC, ETH, and other assets (including many ERC-20 tokens) with no expectation of a native yield or dividends.

ETH, for instance, was long just an asset for transaction fees, as was Bitcoin.

2/ If users wanted to borrow against their assets, they were relegated to centralized platforms—which were few and far between years ago.

3/ Aave, formerly ETHLend, is a protocol allowing users the ability to lend and borrow on-chain, without KYC and untransparent fees.

Users can deposit a variety of assets as collateral, then use that collateral as ammo to borrow other assets to be used in DeFi or beyond.