You shouldn't expect a 150 mio investment in a startup to 8X in 10 years. At this kind of stage (C round), those returns don't exist anymore I think. The risk of it going to zero is also not that high.
In the Farcaster case, it's probably shitcoinery where crypto VCs give 150 M and get tokens. The money probably won't even be spent.
Over-engineering for robustness leads to reduced purchases. Think Mercedes 300.
Together with programmed OS obsolescence and bloat, it's all so tou get a new phone every 2 years
Listened to Michael Saylor on the nostr:npub1r8l06leee9kjlam0slmky7h8j9zme9ca32erypgqtyu6t2gnhshs3jx5dk podcast. It's 3 months old, but sheds some light on the ARK funding story.
TL;DW: Saylor strongly believes in *OSSIFICATION NOW*. From that POV, protocol development is a liability.
Some quotes (and thoughts)👇
"You only get to play God once. And Satoshi played God. And you can say 'well Satoshi got to do it, why can't I?' Well the answer is Satoshi did it, the reason we're talking about Satoshi is 'cause the other 100,000 would-be Satoshis failed. If you read the history of the world, work your way through 10,000 pages of Western history, there will be thousands and thousands and thousands of episodes of 'alpha male thinks he was put on this earth, you know, to change everything', full of hubris [...] he's gotta do more, change more, etcetera.'" (53:34) "Bitcoin Core developers, or protocol developers, they want to fix something, or they want to make a contribution, because it's in their DNA, but developers are just the lawyers of cyberspace. When a lawyer shows up at the capital, they gotta make a law to save you from yourself, and the more laws they make, the more they cripple the economy, until eventually there's so many laws that the entire civilization collapses under its own weight." (58:06) "The world is full of people that need something to do. I would say, the real key to wisdom, channel your energy constructively. If you're gonna do something, improve Lightning, build an application, persuade someone to adopt Bitcoin as a reserve asset, educate someone… these are all constructive things. Destructive, dilutive, distractive things are: fight with random people 'cause they want to fight with you, attack the core network and make it confusing and introduce anxiety, and confusion and fear, uncertainty and doubt into the base layer. Right? And then attempt to imprint your ego, you know, on the base protocol, you know? Like, 'I gotta introduce this so my name will go down in history forever'." (2:38:55) My view: it's understandable to want Bitcoin to behave like the granite under Manhattan (his analogy); a solid bedrock that never changes. Especially if you truly believe Bitcoin will take over the world as SoV-only and "there is no second best". But IMO this is wishful thinking. While I agree it's near-impossible for an alt to overtake Bitcoin, I do think adoption could stall.
Luckily, Bitcoin isn't really a natural element. It's spontaneous order, more like language. Hard to change and no one can dictate changes, but if market wants it to change, it can.
Furthermore, despite Stephan asking a few questions in that direction, Saylor mostly failed to distinguish between protocol upgrades and general software maintenance.
Arguing against any hard/soft forks is one thing, but Bitcoin Core 26.0 can obviously not last for centuries...
Having said that, Saylor is of course free to not upgrade anymore and stick to Bitcoin Core 26.0 for as long as he lives.
Thanks for the transcript. Cyber hornets heading Saylor's way in 3...2...1
Interesting. One UX hurdle is the lightning fee incurred when joining and leaving mints. If my sats are spread over too many corporate mints, i am held captive. Atomic swaps with no-fees should be possible between mint operators if they operate on a bitcoin standard
This is up there with some of the best technical analysis I've ever seen.
Bitcoin derives its value from decentralisation. Design space to keep the network decentralised is super narrow, in a very counter-intuitive way. Even if there was no custodial layer 2 possible, we (the nodes) would still not accept changes that reduce decentralisation.
I think not.
Birth rate in humans is not related to fertility. Humans get hundreds or thousand chances to reproduce over their lifetime. Sperm counts number in the millions even if they are less viable. The chances that fertilisation happen and a successful pregnancy follows are super super high anywhere.
The way I see it: Richer people have better access to contraception, higher child survival rate, higher costs of education and have children at an older age. So they have fewer kids and fovus more resources per kid.
The trend is the same as poor countries turn into developed countries everywhere on earth.
The better predictor for number of kids per woman is whether the woman attended primary school. It shapes how she views family and contraception.
The wealthy and the suits will self-custody after some of them get rugged.
Have you contacted the Engagement department of Nostr? Maybe they can help
People shouldn't come to Nostr. Nostr should come to people.
Either you mine solo or join a pool that follows the rules you like. If miners and by extension pools cannot select the transactions to include or not, the incentive structure falls apart. Including the moral component.
Obviously, I favor censorship resistant protocol changes or stratum v2 changes. But that's not the point
Miners are free to chose which transactions to include in blocks. Anyone can run a mining node to ensure they don't get censored. Freedom ain't free.
“Responsibly all-in.”
“I like the orange coin. A lot.”
My research and audience straddles the macro finance world and the bitcoin world. And so humorously, I get heat from both sides.
“Lyn, I love your macro work but you’re too obsessed with bitcoin; I wish you would focus less on that stuff.” -hedge fund reader.
Vs
“Lyn, since you’re a fellow bitcoiner, why do you only have a 5-10% allocation to bitcoin in your public model portfolios!? Shouldn’t you sell all your stocks and buy more?” -fellow pleb.
I talk to many institutions, as well as high net worth individuals, and medium net worth individuals like engineers and doctors. This is where individual situations come into play. I had been watching bitcoin for a while, publicly wrote about it near the top of the cycle in 2017 and (correctly) passed on it from that point, but then kept watching it during the bear market and then hardcore jumped into it during the March/April 2020 crash starting at $6,900/coin as a long-term bull, and haven’t wavered since.
For example, 2.5 years later as Bitcoin crashed amid the FTX fallout in November 2022 from 69k to sub-16k, I was at Pacific Bitcoin laughing about it. I was not uncertain.
In those initial months of 2020, I put every dollar of my liquid capital into bitcoin. I didn’t sell my existing stocks and trigger capital gains tax, didn’t withdraw from my IRA or 401(k), but otherwise most of my existing liquid cash and all of my incoming earned cash went into bitcoin. I threw like a quarter of my net worth into it. And it paid off. For me as a conservative investor, that was my version of “all-in”. I wasn’t fucking around. I never go all-in like that, but I did it for bitcoin.
I grew up poor, and then worked for 12 years in engineering and engineering management. There is no world where I would invest in such a way that there was even a 1% chance that I could be wrong and lose my entire net worth and the past 12 years of my work at that point. I would never be 100% invested unless I consider it to be risk-free, and I consider nothing to be risk-free, and so I diversify by default. I am conservative as a baseline, but opportunistic when appropriate. I put at most 5% into any one stock, but I threw 25% into bitcoin as an anomaly due to how bullish I was. My husband was like, “what are we doing?” and I was like, “trust me, here’s why”.
And then, there are eight family members and associates who, if I were to go broke, would have to radically diminish and change their lifestyles. Their housing support and their everyday income comes significantly from my earnings. It’s like running a small business. So, when I see people on social media be like, “wHy DoN’t YoU gO aLl iN?” I’m thinking like, “Bitch, I’ve gone about as all-in on this new distributed ledger as I can while still sustaining a reasonable level of lower volatility equity and other assets for tangible income and fallback support for eight people”. And then I realize the anon who wrote that is probably a single dude in his parents’ basement, and my response is unwarranted. Don’t let anons on social media affect you.
For example, our extended family ran into a liquidity issue and had to change households this year, and we got a good real estate deal but it was based on me having six figures in liquidity to just throw around at short notice, which meant having maintained adequate diversification for that possibility, which I was anticipating.
In my model portfolios, I began to recommend a 5% bitcoin allocation in early 2020, and then I took some chips off the table in 2021 near the highs after a 3x and 5x gain as Musk was pumping Dogecoin, to rebalance back down to that 5% target. Why? Because not everybody has put a thousand hours of research into it and can realistically put a quarter of their liquid net worth into it. My point was, “your portfolio has zero bitcoin, you should probably have at least 5% bitcoin, and better yet, you should buy bitcoin non-custodially at whatever size is appropriate for you. As it soars, rebalance. As it falls, buy back in.” That rebalancing worked well for my public portfolio. I warned of exuberance, leaned into fear, despite not trying to predict any short-term price action.
And during 2022, amid the bear market, I joined the formation of Ego Death Capital, a bitcoin-only VC firm, as a founding advisor. And more recently, I’m leaning more into that role, and some announcements regarding that are incoming in terms of my deeper involvement. In other words, while bitcoin price action was in a period of weakness, I was happily ready to lean in to it with my capital, my time, and my reputation, to fund bitcoin companies that were developing cool stuff. https://egodeath.capital/portfolio
And then there was my husband’s wisdom. He edits all of my research reports, among other work that he does. And he has better wisdom than me overall. One day in early 2023 amid the bear market out of the blue after hardly ever talking about bitcoin he was like, “How many bitcoins do we have?” I said the number X but also explained that I am buying more lately. He said, “Alright, good, let’s get to Y soon. I know you are super cautious, and I love that, but don’t mess around on this. Buy more. Push harder. I know you have extra pockets of liquidity above the baseline. Use them.” By Y, I mean he gave me an aggressive number that was a bit above what I would have otherwise done in that timeframe.
I was like, “Okay I’ll try. But I mean, we need certain liquidity.” And he said, “I’ve edited your research reports for years. I’ve never seen you more convicted on something. Don’t fuck around on this. Lean into it. We will figure out liquidity if need be. You said to trust you in early 2020 when you initially bought it. Trust me here in 2023 when I say to buy extra vs whatever you’re buying. I can read you better than you can read yourself, and the answer is to buy. You’re being too conservative.” I followed his advice, at like sub-$20k and sub-$25k.
And then later this year, within the past few months, we indeed balanced it very tightly; I had bought as many bitcoin for us as we could early in the year and I barely hit the target he set since I was being cautious, and then we ran into a surprise liquidity requirement (changing households in Egypt) and needed to throw capital at a new place as a down payment for our family for seven people, and I was like, “This is why I maintained so much liquidity, btw. We have it because I saw this type of thing coming!” And he was like, “But we have it, right?” I and I was like, “Yes, barely at such short notice!” And he was like, “So we have the exact amount then, fucking nailed it!” The yin-and-yang worked well.
The point is, I’m as all-in on bitcoin as I get with any asset. Which means to say, I am ready to survive its failure or repression in long bear markets without selling any, but I am also highly engaged and invested in its success. I never go all-in on anything, but I’ve never leaned into any asset as thoroughly as I have done on bitcoin since April 2020. It’s the maximum I lean into any asset while still maintaining financial prudence. When it falls 80%, it doesn’t affect my lifestyle or force me to sell. When it soars, I am cautious, and focus on how to best improve the success of the network.
Good evening. Let's accelerate.
The incentives designed in the solution created by Satoshi have this surreal property. They make you feel like you are making the rational amd morally just choice. In an inescapable kind of way.
How could you possibly know what the objectives of Hamas or Tsahal are ????
Nope.
1. Your DNA and your parents' or grand-parents' are similar to a very high level but not identical. This is because of the mutations accumulated at each replication. So more like +0.499999 with your parenta for example.
2. Also, the 'liveliness' of your DNA would have to take into account epigenetic changes across generations.
3. Your grand-parents DNA exist in multiple copies in people of your generation (admixture). Your cousins for example. So more than 0.25 for sure.
But the beauty of genetics lies in these small rare changes that have tremendous effect in who we are and how we adapt to nature.