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Narrative over Numbers: Andreessen Horowitz's State of Crypto Report
- PaulHoule 3y agoOne odd things is that blockheads have been going ahead with the blockhead things they do even though normies have lost interest. What it is going to take to turn a generation permanently away from crypto is a serious drop in prices and that hasn’t really happened yet. I mean, Bitcoin has fluctuated, not in any particular direction. Bored Apes are down from the peak but it hasn’t been a bloodbath. So blockheads are starting to spam the Bitcoin blockchain with shitcoins and Pepecoin is getting talked up (how is it we didn’t have Pepecoin three years ago?) but now most people just don’t care. In my pod we are taking bets on if Pepecoin or BRC-20 are going to get mentioned at all in Bloomberg Businessweek at all.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dilyevsky 3y agoWe printed an enormous amount of money that mostly went into insane asset bubble which includes shitcoins among other things. It’s going to take time for it to percolate back into real economy (assuming they keep interest rate where it is for that long)
- Robotbeat 3y agoI’d say much more of it went into inflating house prices.
- nluken 3y agoYes, it went into all asset classes, even normally depreciating assets like cars. That said, the massive influx of cash into an asset with no underlying value seems like an especially egregious symptom of this trend.
- dilyevsky 3y agoThe difference here is houses are actually useful for something
- Robotbeat 3y agoBut you HAVE to have housing, so inflating that price is bad (and actually helps cause homelessness) whereas buying cryptocurrency is totally optional.
- ChainOfFools 3y agoThere was a Pepe coin, and I guess technically there still is, started five or six years ago. but it was issued on a different Bitcoin based colored coin protocol called mastercoin. edit: I just remember the token was actually called Pepe cash, and was pretty much a complete, functional implementation of what would eventually be called an NFT a couple years before the term even existed. Mastercoin IIRC was further tweaked into something called Counterparty, on top of which ERC-20 -like tokens can be created that exist on the Bitcoin blockchain. I'm pretty sure there are special wallets that still trade them floating around somewhere, because it's not on its own separate blockchain. That said it was like all crypto spaces, a sock puppet filled ghost town as there are vanishingly few people who are interested in collecting obnoxious self-centered tech libertarian brolet memes. I mean everything has been done before in crypto, often multiple times, with no success that lasts, because the people in charge are almost universally incapable of cooperating with one another in the public's best interest. The same public they want to lure into their little feudal utopian experiment.
- spir 3y agoWe'll never turn permanently away from crypto because the underlying technology and networks are a revolutionary improvement.
- jb12 3y agoImprovement over what exactly?
- napierzaza 3y ago[dead]
- detrites 3y agoSeveral decades old centralised technology batch processing ALL CAPS messages in COBOL with a transaction time measured in days or weeks, a 10-15% transaction failure rate, no finality and exorbitant costs?
- daveguy 3y agoSource?
- detrites 3y agoAge and technology used: https://www.efinancialcareers.com/news/2021/05/cobol-jobs-banks https://www.efinancialcareers.com/news/2021/05/cobol-jobs-ba... Failure rates: https://www.swift.com/news-events/news/settlement-fails-getting-root-problem https://www.swift.com/news-events/news/settlement-fails-gett... Finality: https://www.swift.com/our-solutions/swift-gpi/stop-and-recall https://www.swift.com/our-solutions/swift-gpi/stop-and-recal... High fees and days/weeks wait times for international wire transfers are common knowledge - check at almost any bank. The above links partly explain why this situation exists in a world where all money is basically already "digital". It's kind of not. And the only system making radical inroads to actually improving the status quo (which has been deeply entrenched for decades) is crypto, which right now offers real solutions adopted by consumers and institutions. Doesn't mean its perfect or that there's no dark side, just as with everything. But the media - and HN largely, on this topic - loves to play up such things, so good luck finding much accurate information there, or here.
- mr_woozy 3y ago[dead]
- rvz 3y ago> One odd things is that blockheads have been going ahead with the blockhead things they do even though normies have lost interest. Yeah, and Worldcoin is still scanning eye-balls for proof-of-personhood [0] whilst AI bros here are AI generating everything in front of your screen all for the sake of this 'AGI' nonsense. None of it can be stopped and there is nothing to trust since it can be easily faked with AI. > What it is going to take to turn a generation permanently away from crypto is a serious drop in prices and that hasn’t really happened yet. Believing that there is something to 'turn a generation permanently away from crypto' is just as delusional and naïve as believing that there is something out there to stop the influx of deepfakes and faked AI generated content. In both cases, and especially public blockchains and AI projects, the cat is out of the bag and it cannot be stopped and both will continue to be used. [0] https://worldcoin.org/blog/engineering/humanness-in-the-age-of-ai https://worldcoin.org/blog/engineering/humanness-in-the-age-...
- dS0rrow 3y agoI still cant believe people voluntarily scanned their fucking eyeballs!
- csomar 3y agoIt was a bloodbath especially for NFT (90%+ of value lost). Of course, there will be always a floor price. You can't have a $0 Bitcoin in crypto, since it'll enable you to buy it all of the available supply. The market has moved from speculative to mature. The prices will always fluctuate but it'll remain a 1-3 Trillion market for the time being and for the use cases that it enables.
- rchaud 3y agoFor the generation to turn away from get-rich-quick schemes pumped by millionnaires (incl crypto), there has to be a reasonable standard of living that's achievable by the majority of society. Anything short of that will simply lead to crypto being replaced by some other craze: meme stock, MLM products, forex derivatives and what have you.
- PaulHoule 3y agoYou can make the case it is the other way around, bubbles tend to inflate when the business cycle is on the upswing and there is money to steal.
- rchaud 3y agoIt is not retail investors that are directly inflating asset bubbles. The fallout of their bad decision-making is limited because they have to pay market rates for loans. There are no such limits for venture capital and private equity or state-backed wealth funds. That's why Softbank and Saudi Arabia can flood SV startups with money, even as the companies themselves use that money to somehow deepen their losses further.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago“a16z cut off the data at roughly May 2021, despite claiming on that slide that the data was as of December 31, 2021” I hope she gets her whistleblower reward. This is the sort of trivial yet concrete lying regulators love.
- ChainOfFools 3y agoAgreed, although since she's not an insider I'm not sure if she counts as a whistleblower? But the asymmetry of bullshit is so staggering in crypto that it's a real risk to one's mental and financial security to go all in on being the Cassandra. There is just no upside to it financially, and it's an incredibly expensive and draining role to take on.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> since she's not an insider I'm not sure if she counts as a whistleblower Unsure. Statute doesn’t seem to require being an insider, just providing “the Commission with information in writing that relates to a possible violation of the federal securities laws” [1]. (This may not count as independent knowledge, i.e. “factual information in [her] possession that is not derived from publicly available sources” [2].) [1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-17/chapter-II/part-240/subject-group-ECFR821bdfb7bc8017f/section-240.21F-2 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-17/chapter-II/part-240/su... [2] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-17/chapter-II/part-240/subject-group-ECFR821bdfb7bc8017f/section-240.21F-4 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-17/chapter-II/part-240/su...
- strangattractor 3y agoVC fee structure %2 and %20. %2 of $4.5 billion is $90,000,000. Nice work if you can scam it or get it rather.
- krunck 3y agoMeanwhile... people doing things with their money that you wouldn't do with your money continue to do those things.
- ChainOfFools 3y agoNice try spinderella, but you left out the part that these people want to turn our money into their money. They can go pound sand, or even better get publicly mocked and despised as accomplices to a thinly disguised confidence game aiming to enrich themselves at everyone else's expense. Anyone pushing back on this is doing the lord's work.
- spir 3y agoCriticize crypto however you like. Much or all of it is justified. But, don't make the mistake of believing that crypto is a nothingburger. Crypto tech, including stablecoins and NFTs, will eat the economic world.
- recursive 3y agoI've heard that a lot of times. I don't think it's getting any more true. Regardless the details of the math, there seems to be a problem interfacing with the real world. If you want to use any of this for any practical purpose, e.g. buy a banana, at some point, part of the transaction is going to be off-chain. I've never heard of a way of synchronizing this without defeating the whole value proposition of the crypto stuff.
- rideontime 3y agoYou may want to read the linked article, as it's not actually criticizing crypto itself, but rather a specific VC's attempt to spin the current state of crypto.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> Crypto tech, including stablecoins and NFTs, will eat the economic world I support people spending their lives and money validating this claim. But they shouldn’t lie. This article cites specific lies that Andreessen told to sell crypto. At the very least, that should result in fines and sanctions.
- jfb 3y agoExtraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It is much more likely that crypto will end up where most VC backed scams end up; with a stubborn and shrinking remnant of diehard fans who never realized how they were being used, and the VCs with the yachts.
- napierzaza 3y ago[dead]
- astrodust 3y agoIt's been a long, long time since 2009 and it still hasn't. Crypto is like the Segway, launched with breathless fanfare, yet in the end it won't revolutionize a thing.
- camel_gopher 3y ago“When the numbers aren’t in your favor, bang on the table really hard”
- rideontime 3y agoI can't help wondering if Marc is embarrassed to have his name on this.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> can't help wondering if Marc is embarrassed to have his name on this Assuming 1% annual management fees, Andreessen Horowitz has made over $120mm on its crypto funds [1]. It prints at least $75mm a year irrespective of performance. Marc is fine. [1] ($350mm x 5y + $515mm x 3y + $2.2bn x 2y + $4.5bn) x 1%
- rideontime 3y agoI guess "embarrassed" is the wrong word. Ashamed?
- rvz 3y agoWhy should VCs like Marc care? Because when there is an opportunity to make money out of regulatory loop holes they don't care about articles from individuals, squeaking after the fact. The worst that will happen is a slap on the wrist, give the regulators parts of the money and that is it. For decades, there is always a regulatory loop hole that is exploited by opportunists and the regulators will fix it up later. Either way, the rich players get away with it before the rules are in place or pay a small fine after netting massive returns. This is no different to the lies and the grifts already happening in AI. Both crypto and AI will have their regulatory loop holes patched up and will increasingly get harder to get away with it.
- 1bent 3y agoFootnote 7's "crypto pushers rebranding as AI influencers" is something I've noticed, not as much in specific names, as the overall tone of the sales pitch.
- p4bl0 3y agoYeah, something like fifteen to ten years ago, these same people were SEO experts.