Read this in blockworks newsletter today
I'm actually gobsmacked at the negative sentiment on Ethereum as we end the year. I never anticipated ETH would be viewed as non-consensus underdog again, yet here we are.
Long ETH 2024.
The overwhelming consensus within crypto seems to be that ETH will inevitably flippen BTC.
The recent debate on rollups makes me think that will be difficult.
A short ๐งต
WSJ on Terra: "As often happens in unregulated, untested parts of the markets, the pitch was too good to be true."
ok, fine. Now do SPACs, spec-tech, China ADRs, CDS, CDOs, oil futures ETFs ...
Every stock is fundamentally worth the present value of its future dividend payments.
Is this what gives crypto value, too?
@Uniswap
โs fee switch might help us find out ๐งต
How much did I enjoy my free review copy of
@cdixon
's Read Write Own? So much I've ordered a paid Kindle copy, too (and if you knew how cheap I am youโd know what high praise that is).
Find out why here:
Judge Torres has declared that XRP tokens are not inherently investment contracts and that is great news for crypto.
But is her opinion likely to stand? A look back at the history of state securities law suggests the powers that be may not let it.
A short ๐งต ๐
With the Nasdaq 100 having its best-ever first half of a year, things are starting to feel bubbly, which, per George Soros, might mean itโs time to โrush in and buy.โ
But how do we know weโd be buying the start of a bubble and not the end of a rally?
A short ๐งต
In case you had the misfortune of being somewhere other than Austin last week. here are some of the most quotable quotes from
@Permissionless
... a long (but quick) ๐งต ๐
I learned a lot from
@blockworksres
data on MakerDAO - all helpfully delivered in the form of pictures.
My take on the only normal valuation in crypto:
Does SBF belong on Mt. Fraudmore with Madoff, Ponzi, and Lay? Or among the lesser lights like Holmes, Shkreli, and Belfort? His place in history will be determined over the next 6 weeks, starting here:
โYour job as a DeFi person is not to give people 5% returns instead of 3% returns. Your job as a DeFi person is to make sure people donโt get negative 100% returns.โ
@VitalikButerin
Howard Schultz wanted to bring Italian coffee culture to America but we demanded Frappuccinos, so that's what we got.
Is it time for crypto to give the people what they want?
Subscribe to find out:
Their central bank can't stop printing money so Argentines are slowly adopting the US dollar.
Could that turn out to be a case of out the fire and into a frying pan?
The bull case for dollarization:
The bear case for dollars:
Do Americans have a constitutional right to dangerous money-like assets such as BTC, ETH & USDC? The US gov't deems cryptography a "munition" and many deem cryptocurrency a munition of financial self-defense so why not?
The 2nd Amendment case for crypto:
If two people in a canoe are paddling in different directions, do you tell one person to stop or tell the other person to paddle twice as hard?
The direction of the US economy may depend on the answer:
Today's note asks how much crypto can fit in a duffel bag, how watchable a crypto-version of Ozark would be, and how much financial privacy is too much.
Subscribe here:
Why own Bitcoin when the Fed has stopped printing money and started un-printing it? Because IOUs are money, too, and the Treasury is handing out more and more of them.
The Lloyd Christmas bull-case for crypto:
FOMC day is my chance to pretend to be a macro expert (a welcome break from pretending to be a crypto expert), so yesterday I explained why, in my expert opinion, โrisk-free assetsโ should be rebranded as "risk-free liabilities."
Have a short read here:
Could PayPal scramble the worlds of tech and banking? If so, crypto may be on a slippery slope to a Glass-Steagall moment.
Subscribe to hear why that would be a good thing:
In todayโs note I break new ground in the field of behavioral finance by asking whether we should take investment advice from rich people if it wasn't investing that made them rich.
Subscribe to get the answer in your inbox!
Getting quoted in an article about Kim Kardashian is definitely a career highlight. Thanks for the shout-out,
@SchreckReports
. I might declare victory and retire now.
via
@politico
Could crypto swing an election? My attempt to write about crypto and politics without making ANYONE mad at me. Have a short read on single-issue voting and the Persuadeables (TM) and let me know how I did.
Big-tech is buying its own services by investing in AI startups and the US government is creating demand for its debt by incurring debt.
Is this a new age of Mรถbius finance?
If so, crypto is ahead of the curve:
"You could almost say that in a DAO corruption is encouraged because there really is no consequence for doing it. That's, like, the definition of a DAO."
@RuneKek
on
@ReveriePod
Hamster racing, ever meme-ier memecoins, Telegram trading bots ... has crypto lost its way? Or is it all part of the grand plan?
Subscribe to find out in tonight's newsletter:
I fully expect today's note to someday be cited in a Supreme Court ruling.
Subscribe to find out why we should stop debating the Howey Test and start debating the Forman Test:
The two hottest topics in decentralized, anti-establishment crypto are centralized real-world assets and the very establishment Blackrock ETF.
Is TradFi coming to cryptoโs rescue?
Find out whether Larry Fink might be the hero we need now:
Quite impressive that the SEC seem to be doing so badly in their case against Ripple that when random newsletter hack
@bgilliam1982
wrote his newsletter today for
@blockworks
that he actually thinks *Ripple* sued the *SEC*. ๐คฆโโ๏ธ
Today's note recounts some of TradFi's greatest-ever TAMs, the magic financial metric where the only constraint is your imagination.
And then imagines an even bigger one for crypto.
Subscribe to hear the first-ever TAM that starts with a Q:
@Permissionless
preview: I spoke to
@BlockchainAssn
's
@KMSmithDC
to get a big-picture view of where we are now with crypto regulation and where weโre hoping to go - and came away more optimistic that regulated crypto will still be cypherpunk crypto:
This week's mailbag asks whether the crypto industry and/or bitcoin is going to make it, if FDV is a good metric, whether crypto is moving to Asia, and why people still use USDT.
Answer key: yes, maybe, sort of, probably, just because.
Full answers:
This week's macro note discusses whether Nvidia bulls are as early as pumpkin spice in August or as late as Halloween pumpkins in November
Subscribe and ... well, you still won't know. But you'll have some easy-on-the-eyes charts to finish your week with
Gresham's law explains why, if you pay with cash in the US, you might still get a 1966 half-dollar coin in return as change, but never a 1964 one.
Could it also explain why Tether dollars have so outnumbered Circle dollars?
Subscribe to find out:
Today's note reveals how an SAT word can improve your betting returns, with helpful examples of what not to do from SBF and Michael Egorov.
Subscribe here:
4/ But on closer inspection, itโs obvious Ethereum is far from a finished product.
Hereโs a highly informed Twitter squabble over whether rollups really do scale Ethereum or inherit its security.
Rollup debate is politicized b/c once you accept that RUs != bridges, you have to admit:
- RUs do not scale Ethereum
- Ethereum may not be ideal DA
- RUs do not "settle to" or "inherit security from" Ethereum
Ethereum may be Rollup-centric, but Rollups are not Ethereum-centric
This week's mailbag answers whether the moment DeFi is having is more Lehman or LTCM, what Defcon level we're at, and what to do when you sleepwalk into millions of dollars.
Subscribe to get my boomer take on the latest crypto crisis:
Your house is no more likely to go on-chain than it is to float away under a bunch of balloons. Does that make crypto's "real-world assets" a fake-news narrative?
Find out here:
"We shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."
William Jennings Bryan on monetary policy
Finance was more fun and maybe more effective in the 1990s - possibly for a lack of compliance. Could DeFi bring the good times back? Subscribe to hear the case for DKYC (don't know your customer) finance:
Tired: First-mover advantage.
Wired: Fast-mover advantage.
AI will make it tougher for founders to get to the S&P 500, but easier to make a quick buck.
Will crypto founders have the fastest-mover advantage?
This week's mailbag answers the big questions of how decentralized DeFi is and how valuable crypto might be.
TLDR: It's in the eye of the beholder.
(But it's really not too long, so DO read here: )
Yesterday's note ponders the consequences of being a non-profit with a known end date to donations (like Bitcoin!).
And asks whether blockspace will ever be as popular as Thin Mints.
Have a (short) read here:
โHow did you go bankrupt?โ Bill asked. โTwo ways,โ Mike said. โGradually, then suddenly.โ
Redemptions. You are going to find out how few reserves actually exist. Commercial paper? Treasuries?
#Terra
#Tether
#DAI
#Binance
#ponzi
Is profligate government spending a BEAR case for Bitcoin? If the Fed offsets it with higher real rates, it may be. Why "R-star" is the new metric bitcoiners should be watching:
In today's note I disagree with yesterday's note by making the case that the crypto industry's best attribute may be it inefficiency.
I like to think the same about myself:
This week's mailbag discusses baseball cards, the financialization of people, how to list yourself on Uniswap, and what we'd trade without Binance and Tether (our friends, of course).
Wall Streetโs vision of "tokenization" buoyed cryptoโs spirits in the depths of winter, but now that crypto has thawed and tokenization is getting real, itโs time to agree on what the word actually means.
@blockworksDAS
London 2024 preview:
One large group of people was not at all surprised that SBF ended up on trial for fraud: His original partners at Alameda. From Going Infinite, here's some of the eerily prescient red flags they were waving ๐ฉ๐ (1/10)
This week's charts are preceded by a discussion of goats: Messi, Swift, and ... the US economy?
Subscribe to end your week with some (mostly) good-news: