12 ms·

Crypto Theses for 2022 [pdf]

39 points by dustingetz 5y ago

KarlKemp 5y ago
"The alpha in this report is free, and many have gleaned insights from past reports that helped them make money, but nothing herein is investment advice. Be an adult." I don't know why but just the choice of words here made me nauseous.
- space_rock 5y ago
  You can tell this promotion is about making money selling tokens.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
timdaub 5y ago
- Read 3 pages and Balaji was mentioned 6 times - Top 10 crypto people to watch is mostly VCs, ok - Links to some big claims are direct links to tweets - "It’s inaccurate to call Tether a fraud." - TIL: Balaji backed Worldcoin (Worldcoin is the retina-scaning dystopia Sam Altman crypto startup) - They call OHM an unpegged stablecoin, but it's actually a ponzi: "However, judging by the number of forks it has spawned, OlympusDAO may be the year’s most important new project, and non-pegged stablecoins may be the best bet this industry has when it comes to de-pegging from the US dollar." Wow, let's see how that statement will age... - Have I mentioned that Balaji is cool? Actually, it's pretty entertaining to read.
- batman-farts 5y ago
  I already feel sorry for the future historians who are going to have to parse thousands of broken Twitter threads when they study this stuff.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  For reference, Balaji is the guy who promised a massive project to put bitcoin miners in all of your household appliances so they could get bitcoins to make microtransactions with. This was somehow pitched as both desirable and possible, two things which is most certainly wasn't. Having raised large amounts of money for this, he then proceeded to deliver absolutely nothing except an outdated mining chip duct-taped to a Raspberry Pi, and then pivoted to... paying people to answer surveys? Everyone in the cryptocurrency sphere thinks he is a genius and visionary.
  - timdaub 5y ago
    Can confirm. But hey Peter Thiel then recommended him to Trump for like some government positions.
  - space_rock 5y ago
    Everybody's origin story in crypto is criminality
    - 0x64 5y ago
      My origin story was being a nerdy kid interested in how I could turn compute power into magic internet money. Hardly criminal, wouldn't you say?
      - space_rock 5y ago
        I was generally refering to the people running the projects and selling tokens
      - user-the-name 5y ago
        Were you paying for the energy you used?
  - ChainOfFools 5y ago
    oh yeah, amazing how quickly everyone forgot about 21.com and the vaporware kleptocurrency-mining toasters Balaji Bullshitivasan somehow (claimed to) raise $100MM+ to develop and market. Even roped in Qualcomm, though what their role was, nobody seemed to know or care. Where did all that vaporized money go and why aren't there a dozen lawsuits on his back from angry, defrauded investors?
cryptown 5y ago
> Whether you’re here as a missionary or a mercenary, you’ll find that one of the primary unifying forces behind this movement is the belief that decentralized technologies with embedded financial incentives (a good shorthand for Web3) offer a compelling, often lucrative, alternative to our decaying legacy institutions The only reason people are interested in these "lucrative" alternatives is because our "decaying legacy institutions" have incentivised wealth. I've yet to read a compelling argument as to why making a bunch of nerds (like myself) rich is not just a continuation of capitalism. An alternative to capitalism is something that removes financial incentives from life.
- timdaub 5y ago
  > I've yet to read a compelling argument as to why making a bunch of nerds (like myself) rich is not just a continuation of capitalism. Yes, crypto is a continuation of capitalism.
  - screye 5y ago
    If anything, crypto is about explicitly enabling and exploiting the best of what capitalism has to offer. Open access and competition at every step is when capitalism is at its best. It tries to structurally avoid the emergent problem of institutional capture that we're all too familiar with in the US. Finance is probably the best example of institutional capture. So, I see the value of an alternate system. It reminds me of the development of ML. ML has allowed statisticians, supply chain folks and industrial engineers to market themselves as AI people and implement much needed solutions that existed before the AI boom, but never had the clout or funding needed to push ot through. Crypto is the Trojan horse. Inside are important traditional solutions whose only shortcoming was lack of a cool factor. So they've hopped on the crypto bandwagon to attract talent and resources needed to make these academic solutions a reality.
    - cryptown 5y ago
      but is "capitalism at its best" the same as "humanity at its best" or even "humanity at its pretty goodest"? Does the average person without capital want capital, or do they want... to live a happy, stress-free life? right now, obtaining capital is a way to achieve that _because_ capital is so unevenly distributed, but it's not the end game of humanity. caveat: I'm not an academic so I could be missing a very obvious piece of nuance in what "capitalism" means in the context of this discussion.
xenocratus 5y ago
While I understand that it's the title of the document and the hip way to read it, I would've preferred the "crypto" in the title to be expanded to "cryptocurrency". I read it and got excited that it might be about cryptography... :[
whoisninja 5y ago
web3 is BS everything runs on centralized servers, where are the peers in these p2p networks?
- whoisninja 5y ago
  yes, because this is buzzword marketing using VC dollars so that they can pump and dump some stupid tokens on retail around the world without any oversight from regulatory authorities there's nothing p2p in these networks, for instance 75% nodes in Ethereum are running on hosting service https://www.ethernodes.org/network-types https://www.ethernodes.org/network-types Solana requires 128GB min. of RAM to run a validator node lolol Messari is a retarded company, look at this pdf: v2s, v3s, defi, cedefi - i mean it's like they're trolling everyone a16z got a goldmine ponzi in their hands, they gonna milk it as long as they can
- wegwerfbenutzer 5y ago
  one is running next to me (geth + lighthouse)
- diveanon 5y ago
  Pretty bold claim with 0 evidence.
  - space_rock 5y ago
    0 evidence? I think you mean endlessly endlessly evidence for fake decentralisation https://twitter.com/dydxprotocol/status/1468293558360805381 https://twitter.com/dydxprotocol/status/1468293558360805381 Here is a "decentralised" exchange going down with aws
    - 0x64 5y ago
      dYdX is a layer-2 zk-rollup-based exchange that is definitely not decentralized in the sense that e.g. Uniswap is on layer-1. It still, however, inherits the security guarantees of L1 despite not being directly intractable with from L1.
vingt_six 5y ago
woaw i don't know what is this and i don't understand anything
clpm4j 5y ago
This sentence summed it up for me: "Today there is still no scalable, decentralized, widely integrated protocol that moves value and data between blockchains without relying on trusted third parties." There is absolutely nothing technical or interesting from an engineering perspective in this pdf, but if you want a summary of the crypto-VC-twitterVerse then you might find it entertaining.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- udbhavs 5y ago
  I think Vite (https://www.vite.org/ https://www.vite.org/) aims to do something like this
Tangokat 5y ago
I think the report is pretty good. It has an obvious bias towards crypto/web3 being great but when you put so much money into it I suppose it kinda has to be that way. As someone who sorta accepts some parts of the crypto narrative and use it on a daily basis the chapter about NFTs just does not make sense to me. All these people high on play-to-earn games and buying non existant land in a game/virtual place that doesn't really yet exist. The world just isn't there yet, this is a classic overhype situation and will have to go through years of winter before maybe actually working. Could you see virtual land being worth something in a world where the Ready Player One Oasis exists? Yes sure.. but we're so far from that and I think a lot of these finance guys don't understand the gaming/technical challenges to get there.
- diveanon 5y ago
  I agree that play-to-earn is still very early, but there are several projects in the space making significant progress towards making it a reality. I view investing in these projects no differently than my TSLA positions. Over hyped for sure, but the potential upside is massive and I am unwilling to sit on the sidelines. Right now I am active in a few communities and it’s been a lot of fun watching these games evolve on a near weekly basis. I relate it to Kickstarter but you actually own a part of the company.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
ElonMuskrat 5y ago
This reads like a high school student council wrote a financial research booklet and then took themselves seriously.
- whoisninja 5y ago
  Touche lol

39 points by dustingetz 5y ago

"The alpha in this report is free, and many have gleaned insights from past reports that helped them make money, but nothing herein is investment advice. Be an adult." I don't know why but just the choice of words here made me nauseous.

space_rock 5y ago
You can tell this promotion is about making money selling tokens.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

timdaub 5y ago

- Read 3 pages and Balaji was mentioned 6 times - Top 10 crypto people to watch is mostly VCs, ok - Links to some big claims are direct links to tweets - "It’s inaccurate to call Tether a fraud." - TIL: Balaji backed Worldcoin (Worldcoin is the retina-scaning dystopia Sam Altman crypto startup) - They call OHM an unpegged stablecoin, but it's actually a ponzi: "However, judging by the number of forks it has spawned, OlympusDAO may be the year’s most important new project, and non-pegged stablecoins may be the best bet this industry has when it comes to de-pegging from the US dollar." Wow, let's see how that statement will age... - Have I mentioned that Balaji is cool? Actually, it's pretty entertaining to read.

batman-farts 5y ago
I already feel sorry for the future historians who are going to have to parse thousands of broken Twitter threads when they study this stuff.
user-the-name 5y ago
For reference, Balaji is the guy who promised a massive project to put bitcoin miners in all of your household appliances so they could get bitcoins to make microtransactions with. This was somehow pitched as both desirable and possible, two things which is most certainly wasn't. Having raised large amounts of money for this, he then proceeded to deliver absolutely nothing except an outdated mining chip duct-taped to a Raspberry Pi, and then pivoted to... paying people to answer surveys? Everyone in the cryptocurrency sphere thinks he is a genius and visionary.
- timdaub 5y ago
  Can confirm. But hey Peter Thiel then recommended him to Trump for like some government positions.
- space_rock 5y ago
  Everybody's origin story in crypto is criminality
  - 0x64 5y ago
    My origin story was being a nerdy kid interested in how I could turn compute power into magic internet money. Hardly criminal, wouldn't you say?
    - space_rock 5y ago
      I was generally refering to the people running the projects and selling tokens
    - user-the-name 5y ago
      Were you paying for the energy you used?
- ChainOfFools 5y ago
  oh yeah, amazing how quickly everyone forgot about 21.com and the vaporware kleptocurrency-mining toasters Balaji Bullshitivasan somehow (claimed to) raise $100MM+ to develop and market. Even roped in Qualcomm, though what their role was, nobody seemed to know or care. Where did all that vaporized money go and why aren't there a dozen lawsuits on his back from angry, defrauded investors?

cryptown 5y ago

> Whether you’re here as a missionary or a mercenary, you’ll find that one of the primary unifying forces behind this movement is the belief that decentralized technologies with embedded financial incentives (a good shorthand for Web3) offer a compelling, often lucrative, alternative to our decaying legacy institutions The only reason people are interested in these "lucrative" alternatives is because our "decaying legacy institutions" have incentivised wealth. I've yet to read a compelling argument as to why making a bunch of nerds (like myself) rich is not just a continuation of capitalism. An alternative to capitalism is something that removes financial incentives from life.

timdaub 5y ago
> I've yet to read a compelling argument as to why making a bunch of nerds (like myself) rich is not just a continuation of capitalism. Yes, crypto is a continuation of capitalism.
- screye 5y ago
  If anything, crypto is about explicitly enabling and exploiting the best of what capitalism has to offer. Open access and competition at every step is when capitalism is at its best. It tries to structurally avoid the emergent problem of institutional capture that we're all too familiar with in the US. Finance is probably the best example of institutional capture. So, I see the value of an alternate system. It reminds me of the development of ML. ML has allowed statisticians, supply chain folks and industrial engineers to market themselves as AI people and implement much needed solutions that existed before the AI boom, but never had the clout or funding needed to push ot through. Crypto is the Trojan horse. Inside are important traditional solutions whose only shortcoming was lack of a cool factor. So they've hopped on the crypto bandwagon to attract talent and resources needed to make these academic solutions a reality.
  - cryptown 5y ago
    but is "capitalism at its best" the same as "humanity at its best" or even "humanity at its pretty goodest"? Does the average person without capital want capital, or do they want... to live a happy, stress-free life? right now, obtaining capital is a way to achieve that _because_ capital is so unevenly distributed, but it's not the end game of humanity. caveat: I'm not an academic so I could be missing a very obvious piece of nuance in what "capitalism" means in the context of this discussion.

xenocratus 5y ago

While I understand that it's the title of the document and the hip way to read it, I would've preferred the "crypto" in the title to be expanded to "cryptocurrency". I read it and got excited that it might be about cryptography... :[

whoisninja 5y ago

web3 is BS everything runs on centralized servers, where are the peers in these p2p networks?

whoisninja 5y ago
yes, because this is buzzword marketing using VC dollars so that they can pump and dump some stupid tokens on retail around the world without any oversight from regulatory authorities there's nothing p2p in these networks, for instance 75% nodes in Ethereum are running on hosting service https://www.ethernodes.org/network-types https://www.ethernodes.org/network-types Solana requires 128GB min. of RAM to run a validator node lolol Messari is a retarded company, look at this pdf: v2s, v3s, defi, cedefi - i mean it's like they're trolling everyone a16z got a goldmine ponzi in their hands, they gonna milk it as long as they can
wegwerfbenutzer 5y ago
one is running next to me (geth + lighthouse)
diveanon 5y ago
Pretty bold claim with 0 evidence.
- space_rock 5y ago
  0 evidence? I think you mean endlessly endlessly evidence for fake decentralisation https://twitter.com/dydxprotocol/status/1468293558360805381 https://twitter.com/dydxprotocol/status/1468293558360805381 Here is a "decentralised" exchange going down with aws
  - 0x64 5y ago
    dYdX is a layer-2 zk-rollup-based exchange that is definitely not decentralized in the sense that e.g. Uniswap is on layer-1. It still, however, inherits the security guarantees of L1 despite not being directly intractable with from L1.

vingt_six 5y ago

woaw i don't know what is this and i don't understand anything

clpm4j 5y ago

This sentence summed it up for me: "Today there is still no scalable, decentralized, widely integrated protocol that moves value and data between blockchains without relying on trusted third parties." There is absolutely nothing technical or interesting from an engineering perspective in this pdf, but if you want a summary of the crypto-VC-twitterVerse then you might find it entertaining.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
udbhavs 5y ago
I think Vite (https://www.vite.org/ https://www.vite.org/) aims to do something like this

Tangokat 5y ago

I think the report is pretty good. It has an obvious bias towards crypto/web3 being great but when you put so much money into it I suppose it kinda has to be that way. As someone who sorta accepts some parts of the crypto narrative and use it on a daily basis the chapter about NFTs just does not make sense to me. All these people high on play-to-earn games and buying non existant land in a game/virtual place that doesn't really yet exist. The world just isn't there yet, this is a classic overhype situation and will have to go through years of winter before maybe actually working. Could you see virtual land being worth something in a world where the Ready Player One Oasis exists? Yes sure.. but we're so far from that and I think a lot of these finance guys don't understand the gaming/technical challenges to get there.

diveanon 5y ago
I agree that play-to-earn is still very early, but there are several projects in the space making significant progress towards making it a reality. I view investing in these projects no differently than my TSLA positions. Over hyped for sure, but the potential upside is massive and I am unwilling to sit on the sidelines. Right now I am active in a few communities and it’s been a lot of fun watching these games evolve on a near weekly basis. I relate it to Kickstarter but you actually own a part of the company.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

ElonMuskrat 5y ago

This reads like a high school student council wrote a financial research booklet and then took themselves seriously.

whoisninja 5y ago
Touche lol