puranjay

That’s for you to decide. Its properties aren’t hidden. You get the rules handed to you upfront and the rules are always adhered to - BTC inflation will always be what the whitepaper describes.

Think of it like poker. People lose money playing poker too. Is poker a scam? Nope. You might call it unethical or gambling, but unless a player is cheating, its not a scam. And any participant willingly agreed to the rules before playing.

Same with BTC. If you bought BTC, you willingly agreed to the rules. If you didn’t “win”, that’s on you, not the “game” itself.

I don't understand what's the scam in this. You buy BTC because you either seek to profit from it, or you believe in the core philosophy behind it. Both of these are your own decisions.

A scam would be you buying a phone from Amazon and getting a brick. BTC is exactly what it describes, nothing more, nothing less.

If you got greedy enough to dump your BTC onto a centralized service for 3% yield, that's on you. As is the decision to buy BTC.

to be fair, all of this CeFi crap is against the core ethos of crypto.

No serious crypto person will tell you to use CeFi.

"Not your keys, not your coins" is the first rule of crypto.

Most recently, they've reportedly been exploring exit options in India [0]. Friends in my startup circle corroborate these rumors.

As an end user in this country, it definitely looks like a business that's close to capitulation.

0: https://www.news18.com/news/business/uber-explored-options-t...

It mad wild, wild money through a massive single investment: Alibaba.

Its been searching for the next Alibaba since.

Much of this seems to be a complete miscalculation of the “new normal” of the pandemic. There was a narrative that somehow all the wild growth we had seen in the pandemic years when everyone was forcibly locked at home would sustain forever.

Of course that wasn’t going to happen and should have been obvious to anyone. The pandemic is over and the “new normal” has just gone back to the “old normal” with marginal changes in work/play patterns.

This was always going to happen, with or without current rate hikes. The rate hikes just accelerated everything by 2 years.

state’s fiat powers come from its credibility, transparency and the power of taxation

Nope. State's fiat powers come from its monopoly on violence.

Completely opaque and corrupt states have fiat currencies too. Many thriving ones. The only reason people use these fiat currencies is because not doing so invites violence from the state - imprisonment and fines at best, actual physical violence at worst.

BlockFi CEO was tweeting about how they took early action when the entire 3AC fiasco unfolded and avoided much damage.

Alex Mashinsky was tweeting how Celsius hasn't blocked any withdrawals.

Crypto down so bad that the Winklevoss twins are now fronting an (awful) rock band. They don't even state their Gemini affiliations in their Twitter bios anymore.

Peter Zeihan makes an interesting observation: the 2010-2020 decade was the peak of baby boomer employment. Boomers are now entering retirement en masse.

Without a source of income, these retirees - the wealthiest generation in America and much of the world - will shift their investments to less risky assets. This, along with higher interest rates, will starve the world of cheap capital.

Wonder how much of an impact this has had. The risk profile of a 60 year old senior exec at a Fortune 500 company looks different from the risk profile of a 65 year old retiree.

man, I used to hear about XBox Series X/PS5 way back before 2020 and I've never found either to be easily available in stock. As a casual gamer, I can't be bothered to juggle through multiple websites and pay a premium.

my productivity craters in the summers because I'm forced to be indoors all day in air conditioning. No random walks around just to clear my head and break the monotony.

Its easy to run a fast website when you don't have to host any ads. You know, the thing that gives media companies their revenue.

The kind of people who make money like that are also hardwired to keep working

That actually didn't happen the waste majority of cases

That's literally the reason for practically all empires and imperial expansions.

Rome didn't conquer Spain because they liked the weather.

I work everyday too. But not having debt and enough cash cushion to do nothing for years gives you a sense of freedom and confidence that can help you make life changing decisions.

most who were active during 2018-19 before the current run 1000xed. Many lost 80% of that but are still wildly in profit.

Most of the good traders I know managed to cash out 30-90x. All within two years.

If you observed the absolute insanity that has been happening in asset prices, venture funding, equities, and crypto, there is absolutely no way you'd think that money printing doesn't lead to inflation (at best) and the complete Mickey-Mousification of the economy (at worst).

Money has started feeling like a joke. It's thrown around for anything and everything.

An ERC-20 memecoin called Shiba Inu hit a market cap of $41B. A dying video game retailer hit a market cap of nearly $30B. A taxi aggregator swallowed $33B in funding and never turned a dime in operational profit in 12 years of its existence. A house bought in 2019 doubled in price in under 2 years.

Its complete and utter insanity.

There is no real retail demand for crypto. Happens every bullrun. Retail comes in, gets a heady rush as their $5,000 becomes $20,000 (on paper) practically overnight. So they fomo in more and keep holding through the top before cashing out for less than their initial. 90% swear off crypto and never come back.

You can't have retail demand for something that's only meant to go up and do nothing else. There are no "normal" users buying NFTs because they love the art, or buying ETH because they want to use it to get overcollateralized loans on AAVE (when they can get undercollateralized loans for cheaper).

I can't understand how VCs wouldn't get something every crypto degen instinctively knows after a single bullrun.

Coinbase is being very poorly led. They haven't innovated at all and they're confused as to who their target customers are. The brief mainstream retail rush has thrown them off.

The target customers for crypto are other investors, degens, and gamblers. Most of the money in crypto is house money, i.e. money that was made from existing crypto investments. Just see the transaction volume on OpenSea (decentralized ETH house money) vs CoinBase's NFT marketplace. Retail neither cares nor has the money for shitty jpegs.

FTX understands the target market. Which is why it has focused so aggressively on futures. You can short/long practically everything on FTX with leverage. That's the investor/degen/gambler class - the bulk of money in crypto.

Binance doesn't do anything extremely well, but whatever it does, it simply works. Withdrawals work, support is clumsy but works, perps work, spot trading works, even their awful chain, as full of scams as it might be, works.

I’m personally very bearish on any consumer focused company that couldn’t turn a profit in 2020-21. You couldn’t have asked for better conditions to make money than these two years.

If your food delivery startup, for instance, couldn’t turn a profit when your entire customer base was sitting at home, your delivery partners had limited work alternatives, and your restaurant partners had limited bargaining power, how can it turn a profit now when your customers are back in the office, better jobs abound, and restaurants have dine-in customers to look forward to?

I mean despite record high job openings, the US still has higher unemployment than in 2019.

The last two years have pretty much been a washout.

I don’t know what the regulations are in India, but in the US, the Truth in Lending regulations kick in if you’re asking for repayment in five or more instalments.

That’s why BNPL companies offer four instalments so they can skirt around the regulations

Think its also Indian banking regulators aversion to leverage and individual debt. These bnpl companies have been playing very fast and loose with their lending standards. As the economy cools down, there might be defaults. RBI seems like its trying to preempt the threat, as it did with crypto.

Increasingly found that HBO is the only service worth paying for. They're the only ones capable of putting out high quality, well-produced shows. The rest are all 80% misses, 10% hits, and 10% "I got time and nothing else to do"

Off topic, but I hate, hate the Dropbox design now. It feels like an indie blog, not a place I just want to log onto and get to work. Seems like Dropbox has an identity crisis at this point.

What percentage of American inventions and scientific developments post WW2 were led or influenced by former Nazi scientists?

Yes it does, increasingly over time. I just ordered my lunch through a virtual cafeteria cashier that was literally a human until a month ago

How does it make a difference whether a tortilla was being made by a human or a machine when that automation just opens up another job somewhere else?

I've been hearing about automation and how it will eat the world for years, yet here we are in 2022 with "help wanted" ads everywhere and businesses literally throwing money to hire people.

Whereas the US, for all of its flailing around politically, is perceived by many people in many countries as a good place to move.

The lower language barrier is a massive help. Thanks to British colonizing half the world, there are over a billion people who speak and understand English.

Hollywood (and now, TV shows) help too. American culture is already familiar to most people across the world. You're less likely to get a culture shock moving from India to USA than from India to China.

You can't argue against demographics from a economic and geopolitical viewpoint.

To create a young person, you need a fixed number of years. If you want an 18 year old to hit college and take on a $100k loan (or join your army and shoot your enemies), you will have to have started in 2004. There is no way to accelerate this.

Even if you poured all your energy and resources into getting people to reproduce more starting today, you won't see an active worker or soldier or college student/scholar until 2040.

What happens in the interim 18 years?