1/ We often misunderstand new technologies because they don’t neatly fit into to our world…yet

They enable us to do things we previously couldn't.
They change our behaviour.

#Bitcoin is one such example.

And looking at how it’s currently used gives us a peek into our future.

2/ INFLATION HEDGE:

"Bitcoin’s ultra-orthodox monetary policy of targeting a fixed money supply, is the ideal hedge for fiat money printing."
- @pierre_rochard

3/ MONETIZATION OF STRANDED ENERGY:

“If your local energy cost is effectively zero but you cannot sell your energy anywhere, the existence of a global buyer for energy is a godsend.”
- @nic__carter

4/ UNCORRELATED ALPHA:

"One reason the interest in #bitcoin from Wall St as well as pensions and endowments is this is uncorrelated alpha, this is the holy grail of investing.”
- @Sonnenshein

5/ MICROPAYMENTS:

"Bitcoin uniquely has a native unit of account called a "sat" that currently represents 1/100 of a cent (while BTC is $10k). The brand of "sats" ...could already be the most recognizable global unit of account to represent value <1cent."
- @cuysheffield

1/ Crypto’s biggest potential impact to society is in sustainably distributing wealth, capital & ownership to a larger % of the world.

This is also its biggest risk: crypto can exacerbate inequality if it is not made accessible to everyone—especially those who need it most.

2/ Inequality is growing to unsustainable levels comparable to that in the early 1900s prior to WWI & the 1700s prior to the French Revolution & sweeping changes throughout Europe.

The top 1% (~80M people) now owns the same amount of capital as the remaining 99% (~7.9B people).

3/ Historically, there are only two solutions to extreme levels of inequality:

1. Revolution: Violence or war that leads to wealth redistribution to those who fought & won

2. Intervention: Political change that raises taxes on the rich & increases benefits to the poor

4/ But is there another way? One that doesn’t require war or heavy government oversight?

Is another option even possible when the system, power, rules, governance, capital, tech, etc. are centralized among the 1%, as they have been for millennia?

Historically, the answer is no.

5/ Today’s society also faces something new that no other generation has: global technologies that have further centralized power and wealth, as well as automated work and reduced demand for labor, particularly among the middle class.

Tech is accelerating inequality.

1/9 In 2019 I checked out Craig Wrights claim that in 2008 he had installed a fibre link between his rural property (ranch) in Bagnoo/Byabarra to the local exchange.

This claim was proven false
A few days ago I revisited this claim and dug much deeper - the story is still false

2/9 Craig claimed that due to his initiative he opened up a rural town to high speed internet and approx 50,000 people benefited 🙃

The Byabarra exchange is tiny and in 2009 didn't service many properties, maybe a hundred or so

Craig must think we are clowns 🤡

3/9 Craig also said he had racks of PC's set up in his shed at his ranch to support the Bitcoin network in the early stages of 2009. The high speed Fibre internet link was an integral part of this.

Why on earth would you need all that to support the Bitcoin network 2009? 👎

4/9 I found photos of his shed online as the property was being sold at one point, just looked like a normal shed with lots of tools. It was a metal shed, no insulation, no cooling, so not a great place to host PC's mining Bitcoins

Aussie sun + metal shed = very hot PC's 🔥

5/9 So I checked the facts and found the claim about having fibre to the home was total nonsense.

I did this by phoning a local business, also the NBN co, Optus, Telstra and I spoke to real estate agents and 2 key people in the local area.

Nope, no fibre then, no fibre now

I cannot believe this content is free.

My notes from @Arthur_0x and @zhusu's podcast. Great catch up on everything going on in DeFi.

PS - This is extremely niche so please feel free to skip if you're not interested in

TLDR:

1. Build for UI/UX; not solely for technology/economics. They’re more important than you’d expect. See Balancer.

2. Involve community. They’ll do more than you’d expect. See Sushi.

3. Creative governance solutions & long term orientation will win. See SNX

Part 1: Decentralized Exchanges

$UNI (Uniswap)

$SUSHI (Sushiswap)

$ZRX (0x)

1) Hello friends, how are you? My feed is a bullish sea. It's a festive time of year. Crypto has entered a bull market and people are making money left and right.

But what I'm writing about is not pleasant.

2) For every success story, there are ten failures. We don't always hear about them, nor do we want to. All too often are they swept under the rug.

I write about something disappointing and sad that has happened to one of my friends.

3) In an unregulated industry, standards govern - but it's the individuals's duty to keep himself safe out there. This is a story of starving humans who ate each other and then the dog. It is my hope that this thread will offer a word of caution to any who may need it.

4) A little more than two months ago, two anon friends of mine, sabotagebeats and Quantadelic - longtime friends with each other - started a #DeFi project by the name of Food Pyramid. Striking and bold,

5) FOOD began as an honest pyramid scheme - if there ever was one. 300 $ETH was raised in 10 minutes, stunningly. The founders were elated. Quantadelic could finally pay his rent and get a decent meal. They went out for pizza. It was the perfect success story.

$DEBASE - A Composable/Modular Algorithmic Stable Coin Protocol

https://t.co/v3383S9VsP
https://t.co/mAul2JSyWE

A guest post, written by the Debase community.

2/

Algorithmic stable coin protocols & in particular elastic supply tokens (e.g. AMPL, Base) have emerged as contenders for decentralized price-stable assets. The premise of such tokens is to convert price-volatility into supply-volatility, in search of a price peg (e.g. 1 USD)

3/

The idea is that at sufficiently large market capitalisations supply-volatility will taper off and you are left with a price-stable asset. So far this has not been the case

4/

Projects like Ampleforth continue to experience sustained price and supply volatility even as market capitalisation has ballooned. Subsequent iterations have tried to improve on this model by modifying one or more of the static parameters; BASE, RMPL etc., come to mind

5/

While the subsequent iterations modified a fixed set of ‘flexible’ parameters, the fundamental mechanism of elastic supply tokens remains static. Debase is the first elastic supply token to introduce completely dynamic parameters (16+).

1. Congrats to the @opyn_ team for launching V2 - very exciting! I’m happy that the new V2 dashboard has a clean layout with greeks and implied vols for each respective option. It’s also a pleasant surprise to see the prices are closely in line with @DeribitExchange's options.

2. Many folks in this space use options to make directional bets on the underlying price of an asset ie: if we’re bullish or bearish we can buy a call or put respectively. Things get interesting when we move beyond simply trading the direction of where BTC or ETH is going...

3. Unlike futures, with options we can make bets on the underlying volatility of an asset. This style of trading is commonly referred to as “vol trading” which is a slightly more advanced strategy used by sophisticated retail traders and institutions such as @ledger_prime.

4. Below are a few key terms we need to understand as vol traders:
- Realized Volatility
- Implied Volatility
- Delta

5. Realized volatility (a): the historical volatility of the underlying asset throughout the life of the option. This volatility is measured during a given time period - ie: volatility over a 30 day period. Below is a plot of realized ETH vol from @GenesisVol data.

Today a new bitcoiner was born.

How and which information triggered his change of mind?

...... A super small thread. 👇👇👇

A family member who bought a bit in the end 2017, right in the top and saw its portfolio basically dissolve rather quickly than slowly.

He basically dismissed the idea that bitcoin had value, and believed that every #bitcoin -er was in a cult.

I asked him to give it a chance

Just listen to these two podcasts:

1. Bitcoin is Hope
with @johnkvallis and @michael_saylor

2. Bitcoin in a Deflationary World
with @PrestonPysh and @JeffBooth

And finally read this little article:
"Why the Yuppie Elite Dismiss Bitcoin"
by @Croesus_BTC

As a context, he had an inclination to socialism as he is not from a wealthy family and did his Masters Program in an Ivy League university.. so he is fully indebted.

He gave it a chance, and I wake up to an SMS.

"Ok, I bought bitcoin, wont ever make fun of that again."

I asked him: "What changed your mind?"

He said:
"I am convinced. I must accept that part of me wants to trust that the currently monetary system won't fail. It is not easy to accept that the USD will devaluate to oblivion."

"I loved @PrestonPysh's pod, I will cont. learning"

On Dec 18th, FinCEN announced a proposed rule that will require collection of personal information for transactions of >$3,000 sent to self-hosted wallets.
https://t.co/h1GT64oOqo

We are very concerned about this proposal @OKCoin.

Key takeaways below:

1/ The results seem to be pre-determined.

Transparency and full public participation is needed for sound policy making on complex topics like this. However, with a shortened 15d window (holiday included) vs standard 60d, we are not getting a genuine opportunity to participate.

2/ Cyber-crime is not unique to crypto. An FBI report in June said that daily digital crime has risen 75% since March.

No evidence indicates that illicit crypto activity has risen disproportionally to threaten national security that warrants such a rush.

3/ A unique nature of #bitcoin is to transmit value without intermediary.

This is revolutionary in human history and will greatly promote financial inclusion and freedom. It would also lead to innovations and paradigm shifts that we cannot imagine today.

4/ This is the “responsible innovation” that sound policy making is supposed to protect.

It is also very nascent that needs very careful and thoughtful policy-making.

1/3

No one has called the entire crypto market cap hitting an all-time high, I think it is time to call it.

Total crypto market cap is now over $750B. In 2018 market cap briefly eclipsed $800B, but BTC dominance was below 35%, the market was illiquid garbage.

2/4

On January 7th 20118 - the proclaimed market cap ATH, Bitconnect had a market cap of $2.3B and Dentacoin $1.8B (and was up 930% on the week, lol). Coins like Ardor had market caps of $1.8B with $5M in daily volume. Bitcoin Gold was at $5B mcap

These assets were not liquid

3/4

I mean look at this garbage, New York Coin at $125M market cap on $4M volume and Electra $176M market cap on $45K volume.

4/4

Today Bitcoin's market cap dominance is sitting around 70% on tens of billions in daily trading volume, and total crypto market cap is at $750B. While garbage remains, much has been wiped out and the market is starting to mature.

This is the new all-time high for crypto.

"At the start of 2020, the dollar’s run had endured 100 years. That would have been reason to question how much longer it could continue." This crude instance of the gambler's fallacy is one of many reasons why I find Ruchir Sharma's FT piece unconvincing:

Another is his suggestion that, although "When the pandemic hit, the US dollar was as mighty as ever," the pandemic has changed that. To paraphrase Mark Twain, rumors of the end of the dollar's "exorbitant privilege" are much exaggerated.

In fact the demand for dollars rose to exceptional levels early in the crisis; if it has declined somewhat since, it is only from that unusual peak:

Then there is this glaring non-sequitur: "US officials were thus confident that...they could print the dollar in limitless quantities without undermining its reserve currency status. ...But a new class of contenders is emerging: cryptocurrencies."

But? The rise of cryptos has practical no bearing on how many dollars the Fed can create without undermining the dollar's int'l appeal or otherwise resulting in its "debasement." Sure, many Bitcoin fans _think_ the dollar is going to crash. But that hardly means it will!

What will it actually take for BSV to succeed?

One big thing, or many small things.

No other 'cryptocurrency' is scaling in a way that will actually work. They're adding friction, barriers to entry, and narratives and narratives and narratives.

As a result, they *can't* compete when BSV achieves higher usage than they can support.

This is a two sided issue.

First, BSV must be able to scale. So far, it looks like the software can handle scale pretty nicely, and folks are working on further improving it.

Second, people must actually use BSV. Adoption. This also drives miners to scale, too.

So, what will it take for BSV to succeed?

One big thing, or many small things... Using BSV to work.

See, if we get one large volume business sustainably using BSV, or many small volume businesses doing so, BSV wins.

The dynamics of mining shift entirely in BSV's favor as soon as this happens.

The "costly revenue" will arise on BSV, so only miners who work will earn it, while the "cheap revenue" will remain on BTC/BCH.

BSV miners will earn both cheap and costly revenue.

A personal update: Monday was my last day at Business Standard and I can truly count the past 3 years as the golden phase of my career, where I got the opportunity to not only report but also break some of the biggest news stories during this period.

From January, I will be writing for the @BloombergQuint.

Even though I will miss the adrenaline rush of finding my byline in the paper every morning, I am really excited about starting a new journey with a digital platform.

In this thread, I am sharing some of the work that I did at @bsindia, which is close to my heart.

I wrote a series of stories with @dilasha on how the cryptocurrency players in India are surviving in a hostile regulatory

In Feb 2018, I exposed how the government secretly commissioned a survey to two independent economists, giving them unauthorised access to private data of citizens only to establish ‘robust’ job

🔸FUD
🔸FOMO
🔸HODL
🔸BUIDL
🔸SAFU
🔸ROI
🔸ATH
🔸ATL
🔸DYOR
🔸DD
🔸AML
🔸KYC

Ever seen one of these abbreviations and wondered what it

I've concluded that the real problem is that bitcoiners don't understand basic microeconomics. So here's a bit of a primer. 1/

Scarcity is a function of demand, and it affects price. For any good, if demand exceeds supply, it is scarce. That is true regardless of the absolute number of units of the good available for purchase. 2/

Imagine there are 5m Steinway grand pianos in the world, of which 1m are available for purchase. The world's population is about 8bn. So if everyone in the world wanted a Steinway grand piano, they would by any reasonable definition be extremely scarce. 3/

And because of their scarcity, competition for them would drive up their price. Steinway grand pianos would be very expensive things (as indeed they really are) 4/

Bitcoiners will no doubt have followed this so far, because this is their scarcity economics: there can only be 21m bitcoins, therefore only a tiny fraction of the world population can own bitcoin, therefore bitcoin will be very, very expensive. 5/